Mr. Henry is a boarder who rents a room in the MacTeer family household. He has a reputation for being soft-spoken and hard-working, although he has a secret, promiscuous side and a desire for young girls. He easily befriends Claudia and Frieda and earns their trust.

major conflict Pecola needs to receive love from somebody, but her parents and the other members of her community are unable to love her because they have been damaged and thwarted in their own lives.

When Pecola is finally granted her wish for blue eyes, she receives it in a perverse and darkly ironic form. She is able to obtain blue eyes only by losing her mind. Rather than granting Pecola insight into the world around her and providing a redeeming connection with other people, these eyes are a form of blindness.

Pecola has just been forced to witness a violent fight between her parents, and the only solution she can imagine to her passive suffering is to witness something different. She believes that if she had blue eyes, their beauty would inspire beautiful and kindly behavior on the part of others.

Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father, was abandoned by his parents at the age of four years and was raised by his Great Aunt Jimmy, who died while he was a teenager.

Pecola Breedlove is a young girl growing up black and poor in the early 1940s. She is repeatedly called “ugly” by nearly everyone in her life, from the mean kids at school to her own mother.

Pecola Breedlove

What traumatized Cholly in his younger days? He was humiliated by two white men during his first sexual experience.

He has experienced genuine suffering, having been abandoned in a junk heap as a baby and having suffered humiliation at the hands of white men.

We are told that their meanness to Pecola is an expression of their own self-hatred. They can taunt her for being black—“Black e mo Black e mo”—because they hate their own blackness.

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Then Aunt Jimmy gets sick. The community calls in M’Dear, the local healing woman, whose height and authority impress Cholly. She prescribes pot liquor, and Aunt Jimmy begins to improve, but then she eats a peach cobbler and dies.

Pecola’s fascination is so strong that she drinks three quarts of milk so that she can embrace the cup. Pecola’s craving to be like Shirley Temple is also shown by her choice to drink milk.

Lorain

Answer and Explanation: Although The Bluest Eye was added to university reading lists and remains a very popular work by Toni Morrison, the novel did not receive any awards in itself. Morrison’s other novels, such as Sula, Beloved, and Song of Solomon did win awards, such as the American Book Award.

4 hours and 7 minutes

At the beginning of the novel, two desires form the basis of her emotional life: first, she wants to learn how to get people to love her; second, when forced to witness her parents’ brutal fights, she simply wants to disappear.

Maureen is a snobby, uppity light-skinned girl with money who is new to the neighborhood. Maureen comes to symbolize a different kind of black family – the upwardly mobile, light-skinned African-American family that disdains darker-skinned black people.

Claudia explains that she has always hated Shirley Temple and also the blonde, blue-eyed baby doll that she was given for Christmas. She explains that her hatred of dolls turned into a hatred of little white girls and then into a false love of whiteness and cleanliness.

Claudia

Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, have learned their life lessons from their mother. They have learned how to be strong black females who can fight back and not be overwhelmed and brainwashed by standards of beauty imposed on them by white and black women.

Vampire

Winter is traditionally associated with barrenness, empitness, and death. In winter, the girls become acquainted with Maureen Peal. She serves as a reminder to them that without beauty that will bring acceptance, their lives will remain empty and barren in white society.

Why does Maureen start a conversation with Claudia? She was her sister. Maureen happens to have her school locker next to Claudia’s. Narrator says of the girls who come from places like Moblie and Aiken that they study “teacher education to instruct black children in” what?

Maureen Peal is the new girl in school, who is perky, cute, and represents what Claudia envies, but at the same time fears. Maureen is well-liked because she is attractive and light-skinned. That she is biracial and light-skinned is emphasized in the book.

In addition to Mr. MacTeer, this section introduces Maureen Peal, a light-skinned black girl who seems to personify enviable white qualities. Maureen is lauded by teachers; Pecola is ignored.