Review of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Favourite quote: “A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” (172)

Published 50 years ago, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye resonates with readers today more than ever. White beauty standards strangle eleven-year-old Pecola like a toxic weed, the strings pulled tighter by her community, who too are suffocated by white supremacy.

Morrison’s literary craftsmanship is demonstrated on the first pages, with the linguistic disintegration of the children’s story Dick and Jane. Representing the American dream, the narrative is an idealised domesticity with a white picket fence and two perfect, blue-eyed children. However, in Morrison’s version, the imagery is unrecognisable without spaces or punctuation. The reality of the dream does not exist for every citizen of America. Instead, it is juxtaposed with an African American family, Cholly, Pauline, Sam, and Pecola, surviving after the Great Depression. At the center of the story, a young, black girl, who believes the abuse she is subjected to her will cease to exist by obtaining blue eyes and white skin. Perceptions of blackness are the root of her tragedy; she yearns to rise above her socio-economic status to live a life of fulfilment and belonging.

Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, the natural, seasonal divisions of the narrative are contrasted with Pecola’s inability to cultivate an identity. The harsh realities of structural racism inhibit her from developing a sense of who she is without the predetermined assumptions of her race. Within her community she hears this stigma for the first time, women gossip from the safety of their kitchen tables, fuelling the dissemination of racialised hatred. Within her home, an abandoned storefront, her Father Cholly is abusive, tormented by the knowledge that he cannot provide for his family. His wife, Pauline, detaches herself from her daughter, wishing she was as beautiful as the children in the movies and magazines. Consumed by a dream, she pretends she is the owner of the big white house she cleans, acting in an attempt to lift herself from poverty. Pecola’s family are treated as second-class citizens, belittled, mocked, and physically abused in racialised attacks. Ultimately for Pecola, they transfer this pain onto her shoulders in an attempt to elevate some of it.

Morrison explores the intersection of blackness, femaleness, and youth, making Pecola the most vulnerable member of society. Whiteness is the epitome of beauty, even as a child Pecola understands that beauty is a social currency. She strives for blue eyes, believing it will bring her virtue, popularity, and happiness. However, the search for it is destructive, driven to insanity by her plight to conform to a white ideal of beauty. Morrison’s narrator Claudia is the voice of hope, through her eyes we see how an obsession with whiteness has a detrimental effect on the characters’ well-being. Angered by the world’s glorification of whiteness, she dismembers Pecola’s blue-eyed baby doll, repulsed by the cold, bulging eyes. The trap of white beauty is laid clear for Claudia, gifting her with the ability to avoid it.

I truly enjoy reading Toni Morrison’s lyrical voice, her style is unrivalled by any other writer that I have read. The subject matter is extremely intense, at times I’ve put the book down because of the heartbreak her words compel you to feel. However, they resonate today because whiteness continues to be the default and the desired. Morrison’s literature is a relentless force for change, dissembling the desire for blue eyes by illustrating how destructive an obsession can be.