Hatred in the Novel The Bluest Eye
Hatred in the Novel The Bluest Eye
“Hate is a prolong matter of suicide”. Hate is a formidable word that describes the strong dislike of a person towards another. Hatred comes from within and when it is put out forward it devastates the person that it is being brought out to. Hatred not only devastates the person that it is being brought out to, but also damages the person that has the feeling itself. The novel The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison, is a novel based on odium. The novel is about an eleven-year-old, black girl named Pecola Breedlove that is rejected because of her ugliness and prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will become gorgeous and accepted by society. The Bluest Eye demonstrates the many modes of hatred.
One of the forms of hate shown in the novel The Bluest Eye is the antipathy that Claudia Mcteer, a little black girl in the novel, has for white girls. “What I felt at the time was unsullied hatred. I felt a stranger, more frightening thing that hatred for all Shirley Temples of the world”(pg19), that was how Claudia Mcteer felt inside for blond, blue eyed, white girls. Claudia loathed Rosemary, her next door neighbor, because she was white and a snitch. Every time Claudia saw Rosemary she would want to “beat her up, and make red marks on her white skin”(pg.1). Besides the white girls, Claudia detested white dolls as well. Every Christmas Claudia received a big, blue-eyed, white baby doll. The baby doll “which were suppose to bring great pleasure, succeeded in doing quite the opposite”(pg20) to Claudia. When she took them to bed “the tapered fingertips on those dimpled hands scratched”(pg20) Claudia and she would want to tear it apart. Apart from the abomination that Claudia had for white girls, in the novel there was the revulsion that Soaphead Church had for the human race and, like Junior, for animals.
“Once there was an old man who loved things, for the slightest contact with people produced him a faint but persistent nausea”(pg164). hat old man was Soaphead Church, whose real name was Elihue Micah Whitecomb. “He could not remember when his distaste began”(pg164), but throughout his whole life he had a strong...