Social Conditions and Effects on Children

Pecola's misery is so complete, so deep, that she convinces herself that her only expect for a better life rests in changing her eye color. Even more pathetically, "Each night, without fail, she prayed for lively look . . . Although any(prenominal)what discouraged, she was not without hope" (Morrison 46). Pecola was doubly sad in that she placed all her hope in something which could never really happen and, despite her earnest belief, change cipher if it did.

Morrison contrasts Pecola's homelife and zesty-eye longings with those of the narrator, Claudia. Pecola's family is "crippled and crippling" (Morrison 210): her mother is cold and distant, her father is an dipsomaniac who rapes and impregnates her when she is barely twelve years old. Although Claudia's family is neither rich nor odiously close, her parents provide for and protect her and her elder sister Frieda. Claudia finds Pecola's obsession with Shirley synagogue and blue eyes horrifying, and she herself loathes blanched girls violently: "The indifference with which I could relieve oneself axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so" (Morrison 22). Claudia, like Morrison, struggles to figure out why etiolate girls are fortunate over African-American girls--and blue eyes, therefore, favored over brown--even by African-American adults: "What do people tonus at them and say, 'Awwwww,' merely not for me" (Morrison 22)?

Ultimately, Claudia comes to terms with her hatred of white girl

Nevertheless, the very sparseness of the prose educates some of the book's statements particularly effective and poignant. The sketch of Esperanza's mother, for example, is barely a rapscallion in length, but it paints a very clear characterisation of a bright, talented woman who was robbed of a promising in store(predicate) by poverty and lack of encouragement: "Shame is a bad thing, you know. It keeps you down. You want to know why I terminate school? Because I didn't have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains" (Cisneros 91).

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. sore York: Vintage, 1991.

unsaid in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty years posterior I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her?

Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? . . . The

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Also like Claudia, Esperanza sees how others in her neighborhood are adversely affected by desperation and pennilessness. Her friend Sally, "the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke" (Cisneros 81), rebelled after years of paternal abuse and "got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married just the same" (Cisneros 101). Marriage, however, failed to make Sally's life better; although she married young in the hope of gaining freedom from her father, she became the prisoner of her husband: "She sits at home because she is hunted to go outside without his permission" (Cisneros 102).

s, though she admits that "the change was appointment without improvement" (Morrison 23). Pecola, however, is completely destroyed by her obsession with blue eyes; ultimately she is deluded into believing her eyes actually have changed color, and she goes utterly mad: "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the repulsive force at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the darkness of fulfillment" (Morrison 210).

We know from Morrison herself, therefore,
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