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The Bluest Eye Essay

1304 Words6 Pages

In Toni Morrison’s 1970 Novel The Bluest Eye, we witness a year in the life of a young African American girl by the name of Pecola who, by way of abuse and scapegoating by the black community she finds herself in, developes deep mental issues in her search for blue eyes and light skin. The story takes place in the town of Lorain, Ohio during the 1940’s, a time of pervasive racism that not only oppresses people of African descent, but corrupts cultural perceptions on what is and isn’t beautiful. These false notions of beauty and innocence alongside how it plays against the interests of the black community featured in the novel are integral to this paper. While Morrison did take a look at “why” Pecola’s community treated her they way the did, I think there is a deeper theme at work that is hinted at. There is a strong motif of contrast between what is right but rejected and what is wrong and embraced, like the beauty of …show more content…

The final part of the novel in which Claudia looks back at the past is filled with scorn for the black community and how they sacrificed Pecola on the altar of self-hatred. She sees Pecola walking between "the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world--which is what she herself was" (p. 205). These images of “waste and beauty” and the contrast between them help to cement the blame placed on both parties, both white and black, for their actions. Morrison sees life as one should: As a complex messy thing where both the beautiful and vile are mixed, must like the trash and flowers. In the case of Pecola, the beauty is hers and hers alone. All of her purity, weakness and potential; her waste is not hers, but it is the ugliness projected onto her by the black community and white standards, thereby displacing her redeemable

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These influences lead to even her parents discriminating against her calling her ugly, abusing her, and her father even raping her. Making her life filled with no love and nothing coming her way but discrimination. "But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly" (p. 126).

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Likewise, Morrison also uses symbolism for the duration of the novel to establish how people can judge a person based on their economic standing. For instance, symbolism is represented through the blue eyes that is repeatedly mentioned in the novel. The blue eyes represent the idealistic white middle class life that Pecola dreams of having since white people commonly have blue eyes. The reader can infer this suggestion because whenever Pecola is experiencing bad things she wishes to have blue eyes. Morrison writes, "If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different and Mrs. Breedlove too…Each night, without fail, she prayed for the blue eyes…

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These oppressions persist today and so do their effects on black families and even more in young black people. Because Morrison makes the issue not only beauty but also our perception of ugli-ness in general, the problem of the “ugly little girl asking for beauty” is a cultural problem. Every time a young person looks in the mirror and sees that they are not as beautiful as a movie star or not as as beautiful as the television, magazine, and billboard ads tells them they should be, they feel the fear of rejection and abandonment, and through this novel, readers have experienced the emotional pain of that which destroyed Pecola. “Suffering with Pecola, knowing that pain con-sciously, feeling it, acknowledging it openly and directly, most of

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