Self-Worth In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison, in numerous interviews, has said that her reason for writing The Bluest Eye was that she realized there was a book she wanted very much to read that had not been written yet. She set out to construct that book – one that she says was about her, or somebody like her. For until then, nobody had taken a little black girl—the most vulnerable kind of person in the world—seriously in literature; black female children have never held centre stage in anything. Thus with the arrival of the character Pecola Breedlove, a little hurt black girl is put to the centre of the story. Pecola’s quest is to acquire “Shirley Temple beauty” and blue eyes – ideals of beauty sponsored by the white world. Growing up, black children in America are constantly

The Bluest Eye illustrates the damage done to a black child when the way she is defined by white society obliterates all positive definitions of her self-worth. Gurleen Grewal reflects that “individuals collude in their own oppression by internalizing the dominant culture’s values in the face of great material contradictions” (21). Indeed, it is evident in the novel how the community at large has accepted light skin as beautiful, and thus has negated beauty in darker skin. Within this dominant culture, white colonialists are the “all-knowing master” that the narrator refers to – the people responsible for giving Pecola “a cloak of ugliness to wear”, which she had “accepted without question” (37). It is this cloak that hides the knowledge of her own true identity and self-worth which, though she “put it on”, “did not belong to [her]” (36). For her ugliness was not inherently hers – it was handed to her and imposed upon her: when the master tells her she is ugly, “[she] had looked about [herself] and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at [her] from every billboard, every movie, every glance” (37). She has entirely internalized the values of a society that strives to uphold its white supremacy by

Morrison explains that the master narrative is whatever ideological script is being imposed by the people in authority on everyone else. And in the novel it is evident how Pecola is not the only one who has internalized her ugliness; for instance, we are told that the group of boys who circled and hurled insults at her do so because of “their contempt for their own blackness” and an “exquisitely learned self-hatred”. Moreover, they were ironically bullying her for something they themselves should fully empathize with; something she “had no control [over]: the color of her skin” (63). Even within the black community Pecola finds no solace or support. They all hold whiteness to be the default beauty standard. As Paul C. Taylor declares, “the most prominent type of racialized ranking represents blackness as a condition to be despised, and most tokens of this type extend this attitude to cover the physical features that are central to the description of black identity” (16). Such attitudes are found in the words of black women themselves, when they talk about Pecola’s baby, saying that it “ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground” (188). Without any support from her community or even family, Pecola is a character who is