The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, 1970

Toni Morrison!s début novel, she began the book in 1965, when she was thirty-four years old. She had ma-
jored in English at Howard University, after which she did her M.A. at Cornell. (Her thesis, which she de-
scribed as "shaky,” was about suicide as a theme in the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

The novel takes place in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison's hometown), and tells the story of a young African-Ameri-
can girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression. Set in 1941, the story is about how
she is consistently regarded as "ugly" due to her dark skin. As a result, she develops an inferiority complex,
which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she equates with "whiteness". At the same time, even her black
community treats her with scorn, so that as the story ends Pecola Breedlove is left to wander the streets in
madness.

Although Morrison!s book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black
girls at the center of the story, the book's controversial topics of racism, incest, and child molestation have
led to numerous attempts to ban the novel from schools and libraries in the United States.

PLOT
Like all the principal characters in "The Bluest Eye,” Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison was born
in 1931. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. The nine-year-old
Claudia MacTeer and her ten-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, a tenant named Mr. Henry, and
Pecola Breedlove ,is hosted as a foster child because her house was burned down by her unstable, alcoho-
lic, and sexually abusive father. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl who grows up with little money and
whose parents are constantly ghting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually reminded of what
an "ugly" girl she is by members of her neighborhood and school community. In an attempt to beautify her-
self, Pecola wishes for blue eyes. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her class-
mates heap on her is to dream. And the dream is this: that someone—God, perhaps—will grant her the gift
of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind
of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary
Janes. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free—
free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could
look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. Not that she ever looks in a mirror. She
knows what she!d nd there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has
distorted the re ection of her face. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes.
But in those harrowing nal images, Claudia MacTeer, Morrison!s spirited nine-year-old narrator, sees what
Pecola cannot, what her madness, the result of all that rejection, looks like to the rest of the indifferent and
mean town: "Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.”
Pecola is abandoned to loneliness.

The novel, through ashbacks, explores the younger years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline,
and their struggles as African Americans in a largely WASP - White Anglo-Saxon Protestant community.
Pauline now works as a servant for a wealthier white family. One day in the novel's present time, while Pe-
cola is doing dishes, drunk Cholly rapes her. His motives are largely confusing, seemingly a combination of
both love and hate. After raping her a second time, he ees, leaving her pregnant.

Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community who hope for Pecola's child to survive in the coming
months. Consequently, they give up the money they had been saving to buy a bicycle, instead planting
marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the owers bloom, Pecola's baby will survive. The
marigolds never bloom, and Pecola's child, who is born prematurely, dies. In the aftermath, a dialogue is
presented between two sides of Pecola's deluded imagination, in which she indicates con icting feelings
about her rape by her father. In this internal conversation, Pecola speaks as though her wish for blue eyes
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has been granted, and believes that the changed behavior of those around her is due to her new eyes,
rather than the news of her rape or her increasingly strange behavior.

Claudia, at the end of the story, Pecola's insanity (she believes she had blue eyes), and laments how the
whole community, herself included, has used Pecola as a scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and
happier.

MAIN THEMES

When asked about her motivations for writing The Bluest Eye in an interview, Morrison stated that she wan-
ted to remind readers "how hurtful racism is" and that people are "apologetic about the fact that their skin
[is] so dark." Reminiscing about her own experience, she recalled: "When I was a kid, we called each other
names but we didn't think it was serious, that you could take it in." Expanding on this point of self-esteem,
Morrison elaborated that she "wanted to speak on behalf of those who didn't catch that they were beautiful
right away. She was deeply concerned about the feelings of ugliness." As seen throughout The Bluest Eye,
this idea of "ugliness" is conveyed through a variety of characters. For example, Pecola, the main charac-
ter, wishes for blue eyes as a way to escape the oppression that results from her having dark skin. Through
Pecola's characterization, Morrison seeks to demonstrate the negative impact racism can have on one's
self-con dence and worth. As she concluded in her interview, she "wanted people to understand what it
was like to be treated that way."

Morrison commented on her motivations to write the novel, saying, "I felt compelled to write this mostly be-
cause in the 1960s, black male authors published powerful, aggressive, revolutionary ction or non ction,
and they had positive racially uplifting rhetoric with them that were stimulating and I thought they would skip
over something and thought no one would remember that it wasn't always beautiful."

BLACK GIRLHOOD

Morrison's writing of the book began because she was "interested in talking about black girlhood." Dr. Jan
Furman, professor of English at the University of Michigan, notes that the book allows the reader to analyze
the "imprinting" factors that shape the identity of the self during the process of maturing in young black girls.
She references parts in the book where the main characters are taught to feel less than human, speci cally
when the shopkeeper avoids touching Pecola's hand when giving her candy.

The novel emphasizes that living in a world de ned by Euro-centric beauty standards creates a longing for
whiteness, such as Pecola's desire for blue eyes, which attacks young black girls' con dence and percei-
ved beauty: in the novel, white beauty standards are perpetuated by visual images in the media as well as
in the attitude of Pecola's family (see the references to Shirley Temple). The constant images of whiteness
in The Bluest Eye represent society's perception of beauty, which ultimately proves to have destructive
consequences for many of the characters in the novel: superiority, power, and virtue are associated with
beauty, which is inherent in whiteness.

Toni Morrison brings forth a unique and untold point of view in American historical ction by focusing in on
the realities of African-American life at the time. The Bluest Eye focuses on people whose stories are rarely
told and deliberately hidden, on the marginalized category (being black and woman). Rather than depict
strong female protagonists, Morrison created characters who are actually defeated by the racism and sexi-
sm of the historic time period: in The Bluest Eye, Pecola fails to develop an individual identity in the face of
an oppressive society, and her self-hatred and the abusive world she lives in forces her to retreat from reali-
ty completely, nding a refugee in her nal madness.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/toni-morrisons-profound-and-unrelenting-vision