Internalization of Color-effect in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye The Bluest Eye is a novel Toni Morrison wrote moved by a reaction she happened to experience in her early childhood after having a conversation with a black little girl who cherished for blue eyes. It came as a shock for the writer to learn that a black girl as like as she was, being dissatisfied with her appearance was longing for blue eyes that she considered the symbol of beauty. Simply that little girl wanted to be beautiful what she believed she was not. Morrison came to realize that “beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (167). In the afterword of the novel she puts her astonishment:
Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word ‘beautiful’, I had never experienced its shock – the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one else recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it. (167)
The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s effort to explore the trauma of color-prejudice that makes a black girl desire for a “radical alteration” by possessing blue eyes. Morrison affirms in the afterword of the novel that “implicit in her desire was racial self loathing” (167). Morrison puts forward the questions: “Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale?” (167). Through these