The Bluest Eye: What is Your Symbol of Beauty?

Abigail
Nov 27, 2021
7 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2022

We are all guilty of our prejudicial hierarchy. And we are all guilty of our illusion.

Someone speaking requires someone else listening. Ironically yet truthfully, it takes more effort and discipline to listen. To keep your mouth shut. Speaking up what you think or feel is so much easier as it gives the speaker a surge of power of attention. The more you think you are knowledgeable, capable, and deserving, the harder you need to bridle resistance.

A way to ease this pain is by engaging with a speaker who possesses powerful charm and persuasiveness that you naturally lean your body towards him.

I imagine Toni Morrison as just that kind of a speaker - more accurately, a writer. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970, is written so delicately beautifully that it successfully kept my mouth shut until the very last page.

My first read was very emotional. My heart ached for Pecola Breedlove, an eleven years old black girl who is the protagonist of this book. My second read was less emotional, yet made me ponder more deeply.

This piece of literature can be considered postmodern due to the format in which the narrator moves from character to character. This structurally disjointed style of writing might put you off a bit especially if you haven’t read any novel taking this form before. Even if you are confused reading the first few chapters, I encourage you to stay on track. Each fragmented story serves as a puzzle piece that in the end, you will be able to find what Morrison wanted to show you better.

The Bluest Eye on Stage. at Arden Theatre in Philadelphia. Source: whyy.org

Is Beauty Innate or Learned?

The novel The Bluest Eye does take different narrators throughout the story, but Claudia MacTeer undoubtedly is the one who takes the microphone the most, at least symbolically. She is the one who opens up the story as well as closes it off.

Claudia, a nine-year-old black girl living with her parents and her older sister Frieda, meets Pecola first when she comes to live with her family temporarily. The youngest character in the novel and three years younger than Pecola, Claudia is the one who provides a perspective that is relatively moral, innocent, and has not been preset by societal and cultural values yet. In addition, her youngness has the prestige of cracking open what is implicitly yet precisely required from people inside her own circle. It is challenging for anyone to peer back at themselves or their own world objectively especially when they have lived in that world for a long time. When we assume the way we live is “natural”, we run the risk of becoming too blind to describe the defining features of our own culture. Her distinctive “neutralness” serves as a bridge to see aspects of black culture more attentively.

Claudia is learning what her ‘status’ as a black child in her community signifies yet still has the voice to question things and events that other people do not. She wonders why older people around her, including her own sister, equate being white with being beautiful that they praise. She decides to launch a small, harmless investigation with the doll that she received for Christmas.

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs - all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. (p.20)

But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them say, “Awwwww,” but not for me? (p.22)

Shirley Temple, a white girl with curly blond hair who was Hollywood's number one box-office draw as a child actress in the 1930s became a standard of childhood beauty. Black girls were nudged to adore her but Claudia. Claudia later realized that the standard of beauty was not something measured with an individual’s preference but something that needs to be learned and followed.

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement. (p.23)

Pecola is different. Maybe she has learned for the last two years (the age difference between Pecola and Claudia) that she is destined to be ‘lesser’ because of her physical features as a black person. When Maureen, a white girl who goes to the same school as Pecola, Claudia and Frieda left the group screaming she is cute but the other three are ugly, Claudia records that Pecola takes the hit quite deeply. To Pecola who would spend her saved money to buy candy wrapped with a picture of Mary Jane dreaming to become her, the words of Maureen who probably resembles Mary Jane are especially harsh.

Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crip her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect, and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes. (p.73-74)

In fact, Pecola firmly believes that she will be happy only if her eyes somehow turn blue. That is the only way she will be loved, be heard, and be mattered. She prays and prays: Certainly, the title of this book represents this poor innocent girl’s ‘improbable’ dream.

We All Build Our Own Ladders, Our Own Hierarchy

Let me ask you, what is discrimination? Why do we condemn discrimination very harshly? In my opinion, its evilness lies in people’s desire to create a ladder of which the top part is taken by the creator. You assert your value by pinpointing features of others that cannot be changed, implying that you are destined to be more worthy than them. Racism. Sexism. Nepotism. Cronyism. The list goes on. What should be noted is that even if you’re placed at the bottom of someone’s ladder, you can also create your own ladder and place others lower than yourself. Indeed, discrimination is fluid: it has no fixed labels.

Black people illustrated in this book are victims of the racist society of the mid 20th century (The book takes place in Lorraine, Ohio, the US of 1940-1942). This racism is absolutely nefarious. Inside the black community, people also create a ladder and find a scapegoat: Pecola. She is a perfect fit because she is black AND ugly AND is raped by her father only to lose the baby. People justify the unfair pain that Pecola goes through with her ugliness as if it is not much of a big deal for her to lose the baby. No one seems to care about the well-being of the baby but Claudia and Frieda. The sisters wholeheartedly ache for the tragedy and show empathy with Pecola.

I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead, and saw it very clearly... More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live - just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples and Maureen Peals. And Frieda must have felt the same thing. We did not think of the fact that Pecola was not married; lots of girls had babies who were not married. And we did not dwell on the fact that the baby’s father was Pecola’s father too; the process of having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to us - at least she knew her father. We thought only of this overwhelming hatred for the unborn baby. (p.190-191)

Pecola is the only person in the book who does not build any ladder to place herself on top of it. She is too innocent. Oh, poor Pecola, this girl who wants to change her eyes to blue but cannot and yearns to be loved but doesn’t be is fragile that she ultimately breaks down. As if her soul, at last, gets crushed.

If You Care, Give Me Your Ears.

When we read something that starts with a not-so-bright story, we expect the victimized character to come out stronger in the end to satisfy some justice. This book certainly doesn’t quench that thirst. For that, this book is not an easy book to read. Although all the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, we do know that it is not entirely fictional. It is a piece of reality that we tend to look away from.

Pecola is the main character of the book, but she never gets a chance to ‘talk’ about her story. I believe this is such a smart, purposeful choice Morrison made. It tells us two things: 1) Not listening to someone deliberately only worsens the problem, 2) Pecola is too broken to have her own voice.

I close my eyes and imagine Pecola standing at arm’s length. The only thing I can think of that I can do for her is just cocking my ear to her, until she finds some words, weaves them, and speaks them with her voice. Would it be of any use now that she is too broken? I do not know, but I am sure had there been one person really listening to her, she would have been different.

This is the first book of Morrison that I read and I am looking forward to reading more of her work.

Review written on April, 2021