Literature has body as well as soul. It possesses qualities of sound and color, fancy and imagination. However, literature is much more than sound and color; it is a living thing of blood and fire, capable of infinite power and beauty. It is not an inanimate thing of dead words, sentences, stanzas, and paragraphs but a living force. Whoever makes and uses literature to evoke beauty of sound or color or imagination is not exploiting the gift of literature for all that it is worth; he or she is exploiting it only in those qualities that are inherent in the world but external to the mind and soul of man.
[...] While the context of Morrison's novel is set in the 1970s America, the subject remains relevant to today's society and is a commentary on today's culture. In this world where people are increasingly becoming more conscious about their physical appearance, it is not surprising that women today resort to such means as diet, exercise, pills, and surgery to improve their overall attractiveness. The novel is socially relevant to today's consumer society. The Bluest Eye suggests that exposure to body imagery in advertising, film, and other visual media not only makes individuals more conscious and aware of their own bodily state, inducing them to seek out models of physical beauty, but also more vulnerable to the allure of the consumer market. [...]
[...] In this movement, writers demarcated the effect of the Euro- American value and cultural colonization of the black community and vigorously pursued a black aesthetic. Related to race and beauty is poverty. The Breedloves are portrayed as dirt poor, and it is the extent of their poverty that strips them of their sense of human worth and leaves them more vulnerable to the cultural propaganda of the ruling class. Their house, significantly a run-down, abandoned store, reflects no stability. The family members come and go like store patrons, having no sense of family love and unity. [...]
[...] Whereas her early writings struggle with how colonization affected the African-American people and their community, her later pieces explore the decolonization of African- American history and culture. This focus on decolonization also puts together an understanding of Morrison's emergence as an important author during the Black Arts Movement (1964-1974) and the concern with the decolonization of the black psyche. The Bluest Eye is Morrison's first novel and focuses attentively on the colonizing impacts of white female beauty on an African-American girl and the Black community. [...]
[...] Beauty myths “create a standard of femininity that is impossible to attain, and women are reacting with increasingly obsessive behavior in their attempts to measure (Bryannan 1). Mass media have to do with the creation of the beauty myth in America. Specifically, Hollywood and television are the two major forces affecting American's perception on beauty. In the first half of the twentieth century, watching movies became a national pastime for Americans. Inside the dark theatre, they watched in awe the beautiful and classic actors such as Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, and Vivien Leigh. [...]
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