never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick. According to Morrison, Geraldine is one of those blacks who 'when they wear lipstick. Geraldine consciously removes herself from, and looks down on, black people who do not have white middle-class aspirations. Mother Geraldine, Father Louis, and son Junior epitomize the black middle class, which has become far distanced from its black roots. Geraldine, a prim and proper middle-class black woman, is obsessed with distinguishing herself and her family from lower-class blacks, which leads her to inadvertently abuse her family emotionally. The story that follows, however, is far from ideal. Miss Marie and Claudia offer alternative concepts of beauty in the novel.This section of the novel begins with an excerpt from the primer that contains a reference to the soft, cuddly orange kitten that lives with the ideal white family. While Pecola and Claudia both associate beauty with whiteness, Claudia views this association ironically and Pecola believes in it wholeheartedly. Do the three prostitutes in the novel (China, Poland, and Marie) have a different understanding of beauty than Pecola?.How are beauty and race linked in the novel? Which characters are described as beautiful, and why? Which are described as ugly, and why?.

How does the novel suggest that people learn to distinguish what is beautiful from what is not? What role do magazines and television play in notions of beauty?.

How does Pecola perceive beauty? How do Frieda and Claudia perceive it?.

Pecola's belief that blue eyes will make her beautiful shows two specific effects of racism on young African-American girls: low self-esteem and envy of whiteness.

Pecola is constantly identified by her ugliness, and she fixates on what society deems to be a symbol of beauty and purity – blue eyes. African-American girls during this time period (the 1940s) were encouraged to aspire to be white all of the female African-American characters in the novel have grown up in a society that does not find them beautiful or even worthy of being looked at. The novel constantly refers to white American icons of beauty and innocence such as Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple. In The Bluest Eye, characters associate beauty with whiteness.

The bluest eye cover