The entire story focuses around the lives of these three Native American women; the three women’s lives are intertwined and portrayed from separate points of view. Rayona, the daughter of Christine is a reserved intelligent girl while her mother is more boisterous and rebellious. Rayona struggles throughout the novel with her mixed-race heritage, which creates many problems for her. Her mother is very self-conscious woman who looks for romance in the wrong places. The use of multiple narrators to tell their stories from multiple viewpoints shows just how much family members who should be close to each other can misunderstand one another.
In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys repeatedly presents the idea of minority being considered as “other” through the theme of isolation and alienation of her characters and how isolation and alienation influence on the formation of characters’ identities. In Wide Sargasso Sea, different characters experience different types of isolation and alienation but Antoinette, the main character of this book, is the one who is isolated and alienated by the most due to her identity of being a Creole. She is marginalized by both the black majority and white minority on the island, and she is further destroyed when she is isolated and alienated by her husband, Rochester. Jean Rhys reveals that madness of Antoinette is not innate, but rather is a consequence of the isolation and oppression. As Antoinette is neither a black nor a pure white, she and her family are not accepted by any group in the society.
The author showed the extreme detachment Pecola has from society, caused by racial and life hardships. She associated having blue eyes like Shirley Temple, as beautiful. She felt that by being beautiful all of her problems would be solved. Pecola witnessed her drunken father and mother fight often, “She struggled between an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a profound wish
In the novel, The Bluest Eyes, by Toni Morrison, there are a lot of different issues that arise. The one thing that stood out the most to me was the sort of racism that goes both ways, throughout the book. Toni Morrison brings out the racism from the 1950’s and shows that "It is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes" Pecola, driven to want blue eyes by her observations that is is those with blue who receive and thus "deserve" love, eventually loses her mind after she experiences repeated violence at home, at school, and on the street. These violences are all rooted in racism. Pecola begins to believe the lie of racism: that to be black is to be "ugly," undeserving, and unloved.
“Though restrained by social convention, the passions of the female characters in Jane Eyre emerge with great force.” Discuss Brontës presentation of female characters in Jane Eyre. “Restrained by social convention”, orphaned Jane begins in exile at Gateshead hall. Brontë describes her as a ‘rock standing alone in a sea of billow and spray’, suggesting the extent of her isolation due to the cruel treatment (the billow and spray) from her Aunt Reed and cousins. In the Victorian era, orphaned children were regarded as classless; the “abandoned child” was society’s scapegoat, as a person without a past, without connections, without status. Furthermore, orphans were also often treated with disdain and distrust, due to their reputation as “criminally prone” individuals, and were frequent targets of classic “Victorian contradictions”, that characterized the social conventions of Victorian society.
And though the struggles and personal backgrounds that define characters are different, the similarities between the two works lie in the oppression and hate that each experiences. Both Matthew Shepard and Pecola Breedlove share the same voice, but their languages are much different. Toni Morrison paints a picture of Pecola Breedlove, the main-character of The Bluest Eye as abused and tormented, both by her family and by her schoolmates. She is uncomfortable in her own skin and wishes she could somehow make her eyes blue because “…if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison, 46). At such a young age, Pecola is obviously a very troubled person.
SOCI 3356 Queer Identities MW 2/1/2012 Butch, according to the dictionary, means "a female homosexual with mannish or aggressive traits (The New Oxford American Dictionary)." A stone butch has been so battered by homophobia and sexism and the intractable human fear of difference overall that her emotions have turned to stone she doesn't know how to express the love she does feel, and is terrified of the love that others want to give her. A stone butch has every reason to feel the blues. From her earliest memories, Jess Goldberg knew she was painfully different from other girls. She hates wearing dresses.
The book I am the Messenger, by Marcus Zusak, is a perfect example of how empathy can help people become caring. In this book, there is a woman who constantly gets raped by her husband. The main character, Ed, dislikes this woman because she’s snobby, up until he realizes that she uses her attitude as a defense mechanism against people she meets on the street out of fear that they’ll harm her. In the book Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, the main character gets stranded on an island all alone. At first, she is very hurt that the people of her tribe left her, but then she realizes that they couldn’t have waited for her, or they would’ve missed their opportunity at a new life.
The Women of Brewster Place This novel focuses on seven women, struggling to survive in a world that has never been kind to African-Americans or women. Their environment further complicates their lives. Brewster Place is an impoverished and threatening neighborhood. Each woman, in her own way, plays an integral part in the making of Brewster Place. The relationships shown in this novel show similarities to certain poems, the “Ballad of Birmingham” and “Dream Deferred” seemed to be the two poems which stood out the most.
For over a century, women have been speaking about the double enslavement of black women and how not only are they handicapped on account of their sex, but they are mocked almost everywhere because of their race as well. In “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Deborah King illustrates how the dual discriminations of racism and sexism remain pervasive, and how class inequality compounds those oppressions. In the case of Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, this triple jeopardy of race, gender, and class ultimately leave her feeling socially powerless in society. Pecola must suffer all the burdens of prejudice of having dark skin, as well as bear the additional burden of having to cope with white and black men because of her sex. The beauty standards of white Western culture, the sexual abuse of Pecola by her father, and Pecola’s low economic status have multiplicative effects on Pecola and all aid in her progressive alienation from society as well as her fall towards insanity.