book quote..?

Question

can somebody help me analyze this quote? it is from the book THE BLUEST EYES by toni morrison

"In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap....She 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." pg. 122


thank you, much appreciated.

Answer 1

Physical beauty isn't virtue; it's a happenstance of nature. By thinking that beauty equals virtue, she locked herself into one concept (stripped her mind and bound it). Now every time she looks at someone, she doesn't see that person for what he or she is, but can only think of that person as a leading man or a character actor or the comic relief. The self-contempt comes from never measuring up to the artificial beauty created by Hollywood. This is like girls looking at the models in magazines and thinking they're fat or they're ugly. Those girls look like concentration camp survivors in person and the pictures have been air brushed. You CAN'T look like that in reality, nobody does, but you (I don't mean you, of course; I mean "one") keep faulting yourself or trying to creat someone that can't exist. I love Toni Morrison.