Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Eroding our Identity

My own reading of the The Bluest Eye has yielded personal eye-opening revelations pertinent to Black culture. Because of the Breedloves and their plight, I feel I am tapping into a realm of society previously unknown to me.

While I have had my eyes opened, Pecola has proved very enlightening, throughout the novel in search of herself, of a different identity. She wants to have blue eyes, she is concerned with the way she looks, of how people perceive her, and this is what affects her notions of individualization. She is taking how she thinks the world perceives her and is trying to conform to it. She wants to change herself, to erode her original identity in the face of the pressures of the outside world.

What does that say about Black culture? Or just about Pecola's culture, life, and the way we she thinks she is seen? How can we apply this in a bigger context? Of course everyone feels a pressure to be a certain person. These are larger, societal pressures imposed on us, as they do Pecola. Pecola cannot have blue eyes, but the way she is "seen" lends insight that it is something in the way she wants to be perceived which clearly affects her.

It almost seems, through much of Pecola's initiatives to have blue eyes, that she yearns to conform herself to a different ideal, not necessarily to being White, but something other than what she is now.

How did that affect my reading? I was unable to originally relate to the issues at hand - at least the ones of color and gender. Being white, I don't know how it would be for many of the characters to live the lives they do simply because I am not black.

But there is something to be said about the alienation inherit in the novel and Pecola's desire to have blue eyes. The characters in The Bluest Eye want to look different, be different. Pecola wants to have blue eyes, because she perceives that this will change her. She thinks that the way she is constructed are products of the way others construct her.

But how does this come in tension with actual characteristics and motives of a person? Is what we yearn for a production of how we think people see us, or a personal volition to individualize ourselves? If we take Pecola's example, then we can see that much of the way we identify ourselves is not a production of ourselves, but a product of other, more external factors, which is unfortunate.

Pecola feels vulnerable to the gaze and judgement of others, and there is something to be said about the affects of a person's gaze. The person who yearns for a new identity, in this example Pecola, longs to look different, to conform to an appearance which she thinks is more suitable for her. She feels that having blue eyes will help yield a sense of belonging. But these are not her choices per se, as much as they are pressures that she has imposed on herself based on her judgement from looking at other people.

Therefore we have a dual-staring occurring in The Bluest Eye. Pecola is a victim of staring, but she is also herself a perpetrator of staring at people, at searching for another identity to which she can associate. That is the dual-staring happening The Bluest Eye, telling for not only characters like Pecola, but for every human being. By conforming to how others perceive us, we are ultimately eroding our own identity.

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