Introduction
The influence of popular culture on the wide masses of population in different periods of time of every society’s development has always been evident. Television and radio as the main mass media sources have created a new, distorted reality to which some people became sensitive and others ignored. It is widely known that the means of advertising, promotion, and distribution have always managed to represent innovative, non-existent images and to make them desirable, wanted, and longed to by the common public, even when people understood that artificial life differed from the everyday routine life and could never be like that.
The same situation of blind following the popular culture idols that were hand-made by the promoters and PR managers who created an ideal white culture in the USA and managed to persuade the nation in white superiority, beauty, and aesthetic propriety to the profile of the country, while black people were simply neglected and reduced in their social roles, were considered freaks who did not deserve an equal role in the American society. But what is more terrible is that the nature of that popular culture was so devilishly natural and systematic, so well-designed and over-grasping that it created such a distorted, stereotyped and discriminative vision of black and white people not only in white residents of the US but managed to convince vast groups of African Americans in their ugliness and uselessness.
People lived in the desperate wish to be like the Hollywood white stars, the girls hated themselves and knew nobody would feel pity with them, no one would hear them and they would never achieve any significant goals in their lives because they were ugly. The popular culture that propagated the beauty of light skin made even light-skinned African Americans avoid communication with dark-skinned ones, thus creating hostility and segregation even within their group. What was the most horrifying and destructive was that the people believed the idols created by the community and raised their kids with the feeling of being useless freaks who were unhappy initially to have been born with the black skin color.
Popular Culture Influence on the Minds of Heroes of The Bluest Eye
The work of Tony Morrison titled The Bluest Eye also investigates the roots of such problems that existed in the 1940s in the USA and which they witnessed when they were young girls. Their participation in the story is limited because the main character is Pecola Breedlove, the young black girl who got insane at the end of the story due to the set of events that will be described further. The girls who tell the story, Claudia and Frieda, are already adults when they recollect the events of their childhood, and finally, when many years passed, they understand the true causes of the tragedy that happened to Pecola. They analyze the whole story in great detail, following their own life and the life of the Breedlove family who crippled the poor daughter mentally and physically, making her unprotected and persecuted by the community that could not step over the prejudices they had been nurturing for centuries and to save the victim from her horror (Morrison).
They understand that the vision of the life they all had at that moment crippled their souls and influenced their lives so much that they were not able to perceive reality adequately. Such distorted reality made Pecola live in her imaginary world, made her mother Pauline who wanted to resemble the white people uglier than she was because of her ridiculous attempts, etc. Thus, at the end of the sad chain of events, Pecola became destroyed by her own family.
First of all, it is necessary to understand what kind of popular culture was created in the 1940s and what images of beauty, taste, and style were promoted. As it comes from the book, Frieda, Claudia and Pecola adore Shirley Temple who has become the true start of that period of time (Morrison). Films with her starring in the main roles were often shown, making all women want to be as beautiful as she was, and wanting blue eyes and blonde hair similar to those she had. Surely, everyone understood that it was impossible to resemble Shirley Temple fully, but the US women were ready to give everything to be even a bit similar to her.
Continuing the discussion of the role of popular culture, it is also necessary to mention that not only images of white, beautiful, and clever people were promoted on TV, but the images of black people were intentionally created in a negative form to promote segregation, destruction of self-esteem of African Americans living in the USA and the formation of their belief that they were doomed to failure in their life due to their origin. African Americans were allowed to play only minor roles of maids and servants in the white families – this way the popular culture fixed the subordinate vision of black people in the USA, both in the minds of white and black people. This intentional distortion of reality made a great negative contribution to the promotion of racial equality in the United States, making not only white people treat African Americans with arrogance and the innate feeling of dominance, but destroying and reducing the black people’s self-esteem and making them subdue to white people.
The white dreams can be seen in the passionate wish of Pecola to have blue eyes which she could not have because of her being black. Pecola was a miserable girl who lived in a dysfunctional family with a father who was a drunkard and a mother who did not attribute any attention to her children, so she created another reality that she liked more. She saw the solution to all her problems in having blue eyes because she was sure her beauty would bring her an absolutely different life. The naive idea of blue eyes solving all problems really causes sympathy and compassion because of the girl’s sacred belief in the beauty of popular movie idols who shaped the aesthetic vision of the whole nation for many years (Morrison). The ridicule and tragedy of her dream can be seen in the letter of Soaphead Church written to God when Pecola leaves:
She must have asked you for them for a very long time, and you hadn’t replied…That’s why I changed the little black girl’s eyes for her, and I didn’t touch her; not a finger did I lay on her. But I gave her those blue eyes she wanted. Not for pleasure, and not for money. I did what You did not, could not, would not do: I looked at that ugly little black girl, and I loved her. I played You. And it was a very good show…. (Morrison 143).
Speaking about the girls who are narrators of the story, they have also adopted a controversial attitude to the popular culture that shapes their lives as well. On the one hand, they like Shirley Temple who is on the mugs they have, and their dolls are made according to her image, so they have much to discuss with their favorite actress. But on the other hand, Claudia expresses real hatred towards her white dolls because of their beauty and non-resemblance to her mirror reflection, understanding that she will never become like them. For this reason, she hates her dolls, and together with loving Shirley Temple, she hates her understanding the huge gap they have and the failure their life has turned into because of their skin color.
Coming back to the Breedlove family, it is necessary to investigate the life way of Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother. When the girls recollect Pauline, they describe her passion for US television and the idols cultivated there. They tell that Pauline at once started to resemble these heroines of the US television blindly without understanding the simple fact that they were absolutely different and she could never become like them. Thus, Pauline freaked herself and became uglier and uglier because of her stupid attempts to become at least a bit similar to her white favorites. This physical ugliness separated her from her husband who started to treat her coldly after the birth of their children, and in addition, she started to become a moral freak when she became the servant in a white family (Morrison).
Pauline’s life was active and vivid in the family where she served, and she lived a full life there neglecting her family and kids for the sake of white people, the family of the Fishers, who treated her kindly but never considered her seriously. But Pauline seemed to not need anything but to be there, with them, to touch their normal white life and to obtain a feeling of being beautiful, normal, and adequate at least for a short period of time. Pauline did not understand that even living with a white family did not make her white or normal, and the problem was not in her color of skin, but in her mind and self-esteem. She treated the family of her masters more closely and kindly than her own closest people in the world – her husband and kids, and finally she allowed to destroy her daughter and did not do anything to save because the reality in which she lived was not appealing to her. Pauline was living in her dreams and was ready for everything for the sake of prosperity and welfare of the Fishers; she seemed to love the Fishers’ daughter more that she loved her own children, which was a real drama for her whole family.
Mrs. Breedlove appears a dreamer in the Bluest Eye – after losing her front tooth she refuses from all dreams about beauty and glamour she learned from the films she watched in childhood youth and falls into the dirt, chaos and despair of her ugly world in which she exists with her whole family. Pauline perceives her work as a salvation from the dirt and miserable existence and does not allow these two worlds to merge. She loves her white masters and hates her own family, passively giving up the life they have and not even trying to fix anything, to fight for some human conditions of life and raising self-esteem of her children. Pecola learns from the example of her mother and also dreams only about blue eyes as the only miracle that can change everything, without looking at the real life seriously, which finally brings her to insanity.
Cholly, Pecola’s father who raped her in the drunken state and refused to take any responsibility for his actions, was also a moral cripple who Morrison does not protect but tries to explain the roots of his miserable life, self-perception and self-esteem. Being morally destroyed by the white hunters in his youth he has become a handicapped person and affects other members of his family as well. Geraldine is the woman who becomes a moral cripple for the sake of her false vision of happiness in stability, and becomes a victim of popular culture impact and ruins her life refusing from any emotions that make life vivid (Morrison). Every family shown in the book has its own tragedy that lasts for the whole life and does not let anyone escape.
Conclusion
The novel the Bluest Eyes really depict the tragedy of black people who had to live on the verge of ugliness and nobility, who had to seem invisible because of their incompliance with the vision of beauty created by the white promoters of aesthetics and who were deprived of all privileges, even the right to respect themselves. Black people were crippled inside and as a result crippled their children by raising them with the inner feeling of self-hatred, self-humiliation and self-destruction for the sake of the white dream. The case with the moral perversion of Cholly and his further perversion over his own daughter that ruined all family’s lives shows the way the African American race was segregated, humiliated and mentally whipped.
The tragedy that had no solution and yielded more and more victims throughout the Depression Era was a real drama for many families who separated from the community because of the perception of their ugliness, who wanted to be invisible and to dive into the dreams offered by Hollywood and did not perceive the reality adequately. The popular culture distorted the reality in each separate mind, which brought about the large-scale, horrifying experience of self-destruction and self-hatred in the vast groups of African Americans without any reasons but the color of skin. The novel is really helpful in understanding the roots for discrimination and moral incompleteness from which African Americans suffered for many centuries, and is really thought-provoking about the influence of popular culture on human minds, about the real value of reality and self-esteem, and the role of the community in human destinies that is often decisive, as in case with Pecola.
Works Cited
Morrison, Tony. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.