Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, tells the story of a young black girl (Pecola Breedlove) who has always been told that she is ugly and that, in fact, beauty can never be attained. Writing in the midst of 1960s and 70s revolutionary black politics, and amongst black male writers asserting the revolution both powerfully and aggressively, Morrison uses The Bluest Eye to understand how racism was internalized and experienced in ways that weren’t so loud.[1] The story focuses on the emotional experiences of main character, Pecola, as she yearns for the blue eyes of Shirley Temple that she believes will finally make her beautiful. Pecola is bullied in school for being “ugly” because of the dark color of her skin, which is less desirable than the popular girl, Marleen, who is light-skinned and worshiped amongst her peers because of it. While Morrison does not want the reader to evoke a sense of sympathy, the feeling cannot be ignored when at the end of the story in an illusion, Pecola attains blue eyes and seeks desperately to be the envy of all her friends. Additionally, it is difficult to understand who the main character is throughout the story, as it is written in various narration styles and is often written in a coded language. It is not until the extended story of how Pecola’s father, Cholly Breedlove, came to desire Pecola, rape her, and become Pecola’s unborn baby’s father, that we understand Pecola to be the central figure. The lack of chronological cohesion throughout the story was a strategy used by Morrison as an attempt to communicate the many intricate layers and complexities of experiencing racism.
Throughout The Bluest Eye, Morrison considers what it means to feel like one may never be beautiful, or rather, that beauty was not made for girls like Pecola. To further understand this inability to become beautiful, Morrison introduces a useful theory of becoming, weaved throughout the text as if performing the act of becoming itself. It is not simply, that Pecola now sees herself as beautiful because she has come to realize that she is not white, it is that she makes her own beauty. It is in a fit of psychological illusion that Pecola believes to have blue eyes, introducing a false sense of becoming. However, the term contains more depth when the story of Pecola’s mother (Pauline, Polly, Ms. Breedlove) is described, as a woman who must “grow up” and take charge of the household. Morrison writes, “She was older now, with no time for dreams and movies. It was time to put all of the pieces together, make coherence where before there had been none. The children gave her this need; she herself was no longer a child. So she became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times of gratification”.[2] This passage suggests that one may have always known what beauty is, but that knowledge has been destroyed and worked against by a system of value that beautifies whiteness, and to work against those systems, is to work against a history of internalized racism.
**this is a working document and the author welcomes any comments that will lead to productive discussion**
[1] In a video interview with the Visionary Project in 2004, Morrison asserts that the rhetoric published in most writing by black male authors was both powerful and uplifting as it played to the sentiment that “black is beautiful”. Acknowledging this, Morrison wanted to address the feeling of ugliness, to validate ugliness as a legitimate feeling of internalized racism, one that should not be forgotten once all has (presumably) turned beautiful.
“Toni Morrison Talks About Her Motivation For Writing.” Interview. YouTube. National Visionary Leadership Project, 04 Dec. 2008. Web. 08 July 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Zgu2hrs2k>.
[2]Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume Book, 1994. Print. Page 126.
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