The Bluest Eye

I have to say, the best part of The Bluest Eye is seeing the community being taken on by a young girl in Ohio during the early 1940’s. Cat Moses states the key components present in the literature, and without Claudia giving backgrounds of everyone in this book, it’d probably be serious, crude, and a lot less impacting.

Claudia takes everything into her own perspective. She analyzes and questions every situation to give a feel for the time period, and she depends on someone else to give her an answer. It most cases it’s effective because it’s easy to understand the lifestyle from a little girl’s view. It’s best shown through life lessons she’s learned. One of them had been: put out vs. being outdoors. Claudia states, “Being put out means there was always a place to go. Being outdoors meant there was nowhere to go.” She doesn’t know anything about being put out. She lives in a decent home, and her mother takes in people that had to deal with situations they couldn’t handle. It’s effective in the book. It kind of makes you think of Pecola. She was put out, but she was also an outcast in the community. They shoved her “outdoors” with their assumptions and prejudices. Though her mother made sure she had a physical, yet broken home to stay in. I mean, with Claudia’s simple approach you can kind of grasp how this leads up to her tragic life throughout the rest of the book.

Unlike her serious sister, Claudia also questions love. She wants to seek the nature of it in a few situations; after Pecola gets her period, when Mr. Henry touches Frieda inappropriately, seeing the prostitutes, etc. Since she’s ten, it leaves the reader to form their own perception of love in terms of the context given in the prologue. She’s helping to foreshadowing the events to come. The scene with Mr. Henry was especially memorable since he was looked highly upon. It was almost like Cholly at some point when he met Pauline; both were respectable, and somewhat nice, until they molested and permanently scarred a little girl. They remain scarred; in relation to Moses, I feel like no one in this book had a sense of empowerment. I looked at Frieda as a strong girl, until the incident that turned her into an alcoholic. Same with the prostitutes; Marie had a voice until the two girls told her their mother thought she was ruined. Her empowerment no longer there. And of course Pecola is the only acceptation. She had some sort of empowerment over her Blue Eyes, but she’s still affected by Cholly inflicting his ugliness on her.

Overall, even with the contradictions Moses points out about Claudia, you have to take in the fact that there’s somewhat a better understanding of advantages and disadvantages young black girls, broken families, and dysfunctional relationships at the time.