Coming_of_Age_in_the_Bluest_Eye

Coming of age in The Bluest Eye Tony Morrison creates many events portraying coming of age, based on the situations that each of the characters go through in The Bluest Eye. In the story one should notice how every character experiences a coming of age whether it be of wrongdoing or an innocent action brought upon them by nature. In the story Pecola goes threw many experiences that lead he towards her coming of age. This also explains the reason that the book is divided by seasons. Each chapter is dividing her life into sections of how she experiences her coming of age. The novel starts off with autumn. In the chapter of autumn, Pecola, almost immediately, reaches her first stage of maturity when she starts menstruating. Frieda tells her, "It just means you can have a baby"(28). Claudia states, after getting yelled at by Mrs. Breedlove for playing naughty when trying to help Pecola’s bleeding, “She was different from us now—grown-up-like”(32). Coming of age is also represented threw rejection. In winter Pecola starts to build this relation ship with Frieda and Claudia. At one point Maureen walks home with the three girls and Pecola now becomes part of “the community” unlike before. Soon after this though, Pecola gets into a fight with Maureen. This makes Claudia and Frieda stand up for Pecola and call Maureen a "six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie"(73). Maureen’s rejection for Pecola represents the continuous rejection Pecola receives from everyone in society accept for Claudia and Frieda. Another coming of age experience is when she “had seen [her] own father naked”(71). She denies ever seeing a naked man when Maureen asks “[if she had} ever see a naked man”(71) because she knows that it was dirty and ruined of her to do so. Pecola is also introduced to a coming of age when she looses her innocents. In Spring, [Pecola] was washing dishes”(162) when Cholly had decided that he “ wanted to f*** her-tenderly”(163). Pecola is raped not once but also a “second time, when [she] was [reading] on the couch (200). Being raped, especially at such a young age, can really ruin someone’s life. Pecola is impregnated by Cholly until “the baby came too soon and die[s]”204. In Summer, after have gone to Saphead and asking him for blue eyes, and finding out about the death of her baby, she takes cover in a world of her own and grows this “split personality” with herself. Pecola is lost in a world basically stuck between childhood and adulthood unable to be anything but broken.