The Bluest Eye Women and Femininity Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. (2.4.3)

Maureen's light skin is associated with beauty and femininity.

Quote #5

1She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. (3.7.22)

Hollywood films promote certain ideas of beauty.

Quote #6

Then the screen would light up, and I'd move right on in them pictures. White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses with bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard. (3.7.23)

Pauline envies the lives of white people, as seen at the movies.