WHAT IS GOOD WRITING?
INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPHS TO ESSAYS ON TONI MORRISON'S THE
BLUEST EYE
Which is the most effective opening and why?
1) Title: The Bluest Eye
For Pecola Breedlove, life is a struggle and to help her survive because there is no love in
her house, she finds warmth and receives attention from other black women and girls in
her community. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is not content with herself, therefore she
explores her positive role models to learn from them how she thinks she should be. She
observes her negative role models but cannot find a way to remain herself and fix what is
dysfunctional. The women and girls who are either good or bad role models for her are:
her mother, Maureen Peal, and the three prostitutes. Pecola realizes through her positive
role models that she should be like them and through her negative role models she learns
that she should change from what she once was.
2) Title: Sowing Blackness, Reaping Beauty
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses growth imagery and symbolism to convey the
devastating effect of black society's acceptance of white aesthetic values. She first
presents the reader with two primary "plantings" which fail to produce a harvest: the
planting of marigold seeds by the MacTeers and the impregnation of Pecola by Cholly
Breedlove. Building on the failed development of the marigolds and the unborn baby
Morrison transforms her story into a symbolic reflection on the inability of the white
aesthetic to yield a positive perception of self-worth within the black community.
Through the use of growth symbolism, Morrison not only condemns the white aesthetic,
but also offers hope for the possibility of its replacement by a new aesthetic that nurtures
recognition of beauty within the black self.
3) Title: Of Beauty and Self-Contempt
The African-American experience is rife with images of white beauty, images of blondehaired, blue-eyed children who live in a world everyone wishes to inhabit, a world of
clean comfort and security, a world where everyone's troubles last only as long as it takes
for the movie reel to wind to a halt and the lights to go on. After centuries of absorbing
the images which popular culture sends black Americans, we have learned to hate
ourselves. Few people ever look at a woman with dark skin and tightly kinked hair and
think: "That is a beautiful woman," much less "That is someone I would like to emulate."
Black America has been taught by centuries of white racism to hate brown skin, despise
black eyes, abhor thick lips, feel repulsion for anything that signifies "Africanness."
The difficulty of growing up black in white society has inspired many narratives that
illustrate the pain and confusion of trying to come to terms with the psychic pain assigned
by our skin color. In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the main characters grapple with
issues of beauty and success based on what white society has presented as role models:
Shirley Temple, Greta Garbo -- stereotypes of white goodness and beauty which are
impossible to emulate. By using black characters from a myriad of backgrounds,
Morrison demonstrates how the dynamic of skin color, the lack of black role models,
and the pervasiveness of white beauty standards have had a negative effect on the
children of a black community.
WHAT IS GOOD WRITING?
SAMPLES OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENT WRITING
AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE
SAMPLES OF WRITING ASSIGNMENTS IN FIRST-YEAR COURSES
AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE
CONTENTS
EFFECTIVE OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS
SAMPLE FIRST-YEAR PAPER
SAMPLE ASSIGNMENTS AND PAPERS PRODUCED IN
RESPONSE