Dujon C. Smith
3 English Honors
Ms. Pierce
January 21, 2009
Nature is Life
“Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.” This quote by Osha shows nature as always being happy, cheerful, and bright. And yet in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, she uses imagery nature within her novel but the characters within the story do not experience the joy as that nature does within the quote. Morrison applies imagery nature to her writing, and by setting up her book in seasons she is able to exploit the seasons for their meaning to show the unfortunate events that occur within the characters lives. Each season has a meaning and Morrison takes that meaning and uses to makes it so that something perverted would occur, which would show how unhappy the characters are.
Autumn is the season for harvesting. A time when one reaps what he had sowed back in spring. In the novel autumn is the time when no marigolds bloom, and Pecola’s baby dies. The death of Pecola’s baby shows an unfortunate event that occurred. During spring or so when Pecola was impregnated by her father, he planted a seed within her and yet in autumn, when she was supposed to have the baby, instead of it living, it died. Claudia and Frieda tried to plant some marigold seed within the earth as a sign if they bloom and flourish in autumn then so will Pecola’s baby, but did that happen? No. They never grew. In the text it says,
“It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's...