Perception In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines sense perception as “perception by the senses as distinguished from intellectual perception”. During the early stages of life, tasting, smelling, hearing, touching, and seeing are the main methods used for understanding how the world works. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, introduces the readers to characters who mainly perceive the world through sense perception. A young girl, Pecola, haunted by other characters’ perceptions of her, aligns beauty with blue eyes. The structure of the novel leaves the readers to perceive Pecola through the eyes of other characters; rarely how Pecola perceives the world. Sense perception reduces concepts and people down to just physical details. By referencing Laura Mulvey’s

A common thread Pecola saw in people regarded as beautiful by the media and the people surrounding her were blue eyes, causing her to align the concept of beauty with visible features. Beauty, which is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit” is an abstract concept; a concept that cannot simply be grasped or seen. But in The Bluest Eye, beauty manifest into a tangible object. A young girl, Claudia, narrated “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question” (Morrison 39). Sense perception develops the need to find a reason that aligns with a visible characteristic; a reason why this is beautiful, and this is not. It permits one to justify and accept this “cloak” draped across them. People are left to seek that idealized image or to defeat themselves for not fulfilling that image. Sense perception negatively impacts the mental state of an individual, especially when that individual does not align with the perceived

Without consent, women are placed on this revolving platform for society to critique and perceive, without a voice. This relates to how Pecola was not given a point-of-view in this novel. The readers only knew Pecola through the eyes of the other characters. This is the epitome of what is means to be shaped solely by peoples’ perception; perceptions that are not grounded in character, but, instead, in sensory attributes. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, Walter Benjamin stated, “The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense for all that is the same in the world has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique” (24). Although, the portion about reproduction might not relate, the idea of stripping away the essence of an object, however in this case a person, is still revalent. By being perceived based upon sense perception, the individual is stripped of their being. The individual becomes no more than an appearance or a rumor, in the eyes of another. Sense perception robs the individual of