Beauty Standards In The Bluest Eye

An insight to the beauty standards of Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye”

“The Bluest Eye” is a story, written as a Bildungsroman, set in Ohio. It is a novel about growing up as a black female in America during the years following the great depression. In the text “Out of Sight: Toni Morrison’s Revision of Beauty”, Malin LaVon Walther mentions that Morrison in “The Bluest Eye” (1970) presents a black community that has taken the white criteria and ideals for their own. This is an accurate statement since there are many fragments in the book where Toni Morrison shows how the standards of white beauty have taken the colored women’s attention. These particular beauty ideals have imprinted to the colored girls in their early days, and follow them through life. An example of this is to be read in “The Bluest Eye”, Morrison (1970): “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” (20) The black girls of the community are surrounded by impressions and influences from

LaVon Walther writes that black women look at black girls in a particular way and reject them for white girls. This statement withholds the fact that the rejection occurs the other way around as well. There are not only women who look at girls in this specific way. The girls look at themselves and at each other with the same white-beauty standards. The women have taught the girls how to judge each other. Not necessarily by learning or showing, but by doing it themselves. In “the Bluest Eye”, Claudia and Maureen experiences a moment proving how young girls look at and treat each other. Morrison writes: “You think you so cute! I swung at her and missed. (…) Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”