Toni+Morrison's+The+Bluest+Eye

Summary: Grade Level / Course: Main Ideas / Issues / Teaching Points: Challenges: Assignment / Activity: Other Resources:
 * 1940s Lorain, Ohio (end of Great Depression).
 * Black society internalizing the White values.
 * A multiple narrative story divided by seasons.
 * Contrast of two main families: Cluadia MacTeer’s family (loving) and Pecola Breedlove’s family (alcoholic father, mother with a lame foot, and brother who runs away from home often).
 * The Breedlove family being described as ugly: “No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly. Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness (the result of despair dissipation, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people) was bahvaior, the rest of the family…wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them” (Morrison, 38).
 * Contrast of classmates ([]): Maureen Peel (light-skinned, wealthy, and popular amongst the school because she is “cute” (Morrison, 73)) and Pecola Breedlove (bullied at school and is picked on for her father’s faults)
 * Pecola idealizes Shirley Temple and wishes to have blue eyes so that maybe she could see the world differently.
 * Pecola’s mother, Pauline Breedlove romanticizes about the Hollywood films and is very attached to a white family she works for. She believes that she is ugly and because of this reason she is distant with her husband and children.
 * Pecola’s father, Cholly Breedlove was abandoned at birth, experienced a mentally scarring experience with two white men with long guns, and was also rejected by his father during his teens. All these events resulted to his alcoholism and eventually to his death.
 * Pecola’s brother, Sammy Breedlove escapes the family’s domestic violence by physically running away. Pecola, on the other hand, blames all the family problems onto herself: “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes” (Morrison, 46).
 * Grade 11 & 12 University Preparation Compulsory Courses
 * Studies in Literature (Grade 12 University and College)
 * The binary contrasts between seeing versus being seen, beauty and ugly, and alienation versus estrangement.
 * Racial and Social issues: there is no place for Pecola (events leading to her disintegration and craziness in the end)
 * Teaching points: Self-esteem
 * The negativity of the text: children have no rights, prostitutes, black bullying other blacks, incest rapes, cycle of abuse, swear words etc.
 * Independent Study Project and Presentation
 * Essay writing
 * Referring to the ABC article on The Clark Doll Experiment.
 * Yale University’s lecture on The Bluest Eye: []
 * Remake of The Clark Doll Experiment: ‘A Girl Like Me’ video []