1. Define “style”…

2. Objectives BTEOTL, SWBAT
Discuss and analyze stylistic elements that reveal Toni Morrison’s style of writing.
Interpret a text in order to discuss characterization and themes in The Bluest Eye.
Comment on African American identity and standards of beauty through the work of Toni Morrison and the video clip experiment of “The Doll Test” in order to grasp the effect of racial inequality and segregation of African Americans in the 1940s and 50s.
experiment/

3. Style…
Style is what makes something unique and personal to an individual.
What elements do we need to analyze when discussing author’s style?
DIDLS
Diction
Imagery
Detail
Language
Syntax

4. DICK AND JANE An American Story
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5. Context Used to teach kids to read
Taught readers what is right and wrong
Gave readers a context about society
Socialized young readers (influenced their ideas about society and their place in society)

6. Symbolism
The Dick and Jane series was used years ago to teach children to read. In the series, the siblings were members of a happy, loving family. They lived with both parents and an adorable dog in a beautiful house. Morrison opens the book and each chapter with a paragraph from the series.

7. Continued…
By beginning the novel this way, Morrison is setting up the house as a symbol. A symbol is something in a story that stands for or suggest another thing. In The Bluest Eye, the type and condition of a family’s home is a symbol of its social or financial status.

8. The Breedlove Home
Dick and Jane live in a beautiful house. The Breedloves, however, live in a decaying apartment. It is a symbol of their poverty. It may also hint at the declining nature of the family’s interpersonal relations.
Morrison contrasts the life of the Breedloves with the idyllic life of the white middle-class society with its economic stability and ideals of beauty and happiness by referencing the grade school primer. This was the earliest introduction of the African American child to the status quo.

9. Negative Change
The Dick-and-Jane series also symbolizes the negative change in the characters’ lives. Morrison distorts the paragraphs as the novel progresses. It becomes impossible to decipher where sentences begin and end. Like the words, Pecola’s life becomes squeezed. She is forced into maturity. She is boxed into impossible situations. Her life hardly resembles that of the young girl introduced in chapter 1.

10. Pecola’s Conflict
Bitter. Hostile. Cold. Dysfunctional. This is Pecola’s introduction to life. This is what prompts her to pray for blue eyes that would make not only her family, but the world as she knows it, accept and love her.

11. Group Work
In your groups, reread and ANNOTATE for STYLE the first section of the novel (handout).
As a group, complete the DIDLS sheet for the excerpt.

12. The Doll Test
Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted psychological experiments on African American children. In one test, The Doll Test, young children were given brown dolls and white dolls (these dolls were the same make and style – just different in color). In the experiment, the Clarks found that most of the black children viewed the black dolls negatively and the white dolls positively. This study was cited in Brown vs. Board of Education as support for the idea that damage was being done to African American children because of school segregation. Recently (2005), Kiri Davis re-conducted the Clark’s Doll Test and the results are quite similar.

13. Independent Practice Answer questions in complete sentences.
Complete the Quick Write.