The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Toni MorrisonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 1993-12-28
ISBN: 0375411550
Number of pages: 215
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Bluest Eye
Book Review: Brilliant exploration of the phenomenology of oppression
Summary: 5 Stars
With The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison brings us into the world of Pecola Breedlove, a young girl whose self-concept/ego is stunted from developing, whose psyche is essentially murdered, by a combination of an internalization of negative societal images (of blacks, and of women) and a lack of a network of support. Morrison weaves narratives of people whose life spheres intersect with Pecola's, because, as she explains in the preface, Pecola's ego is too damaged to cohere its own story. In the end, the violent violation of Pecola by her very flesh (her father) is too much for her fragile, barely-formed ego to handle, and it disintegrates, leaving Pecola in a permanent state of oblivion and senility.
The Bluest Eye explodes the "Dick and Jane" ideal, in which the values of the "West" are used as a measuring stick against which all other cultures are judged. In their very essence, Western ideals are hierarchical: they rely and ground themselves in a demarcation of spheres of inferiority and superiority. In this way, Western ideals are built through processes of exclusion (and inclusion).
Morrison explores how such a culture, in which only one ideal is accepted as superior, in which a hierarchy dictates how individuals think about the worth of things, can damage the soul/ego/person of individuals who are on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy, for their gender, race, and class, and how some individuals defy this ego-death. Through the intertwining stories of two sisters who are socially and economically in the same position as Pecola, but who have additional means of coping with the oppressive environment (such as intimate relationships with each other and with their parents, for example), Morrison shows how it is possible to make meaning and develop agency in spite of oppression. Primarily, Morrison implies, such resistance is made possible through the strength and resilience of social, personal, and familial networks.
The picture Morrison paints is not ultimately one of bleakness and social death. In fact, most characters in The Bluest Eye find ways of making meaning in their lives in spite of societal conditions. Pauline, for example, affirms herself by claiming her pain in childbirth as valid, her body just as sensitive as white women's: "I hurt just like them white women.... What'd they think? That just `cause I knowed how to have a baby with no fuss that my behind wasn't pulling and aching like theirs?" (125). Claudia's mother, on the other hand, learned to cope in ways similar to whites, yellows, browns, and all others: "she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification" (126). Claudia and her sister coped within the bounds of their intimate relationship with each other, and more or less understanding that despite their mother's fits of wrath and their father's absence, essentially they were loved, provided for, and protected. They had a home, they were not `outdoors', like Pecola.
At the core of the novel is a reliance on relationships to tell the story of Pecola, as Morrison explores the web of influences within which Pecola suffers her tragic ego-death. Each relationship manifests itself as some sort or expression of love. Pecola's rape is instantiated by an urge in her father to recreate with her what he had had with Pauline long before their marriage had disintegrated into endless fighting. Cholly glances tenderly at Pecola's foot wrapped around her calf and is reminded of a time when he felt loved, and loved deeply. Soaphead's perversion also begins in love: he describes with affection his affinity for little girls. They are, essentially, the only ones around whom he feels perfectly safe, because he does not feel violated by them--their bodies don't offend him. He is not "a pervert" in that at heart, he craves the bodies of little girls. However, his instinct for love and its transformation into action has been perverted. Taking solace in the only type of body that could not possibly hurt him, he hurts back, he becomes the oppressor. Thus the colonized/oppressed becomes the colonizer/oppressor. Soaphead mimics the oppressive conditions by which he feels violated in replicating the power asserted over him into power asserted by him onto little girls.
Although oppressing conditions have the power to pervert manifestations of love, The Bluest Eye is not only a story of perversion, it is also a story of transformation. "Love is never better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe" (206). And, it should be added, good people love deeply and unselfishly. Claudia's father, for example, protects her from manly conquest, her mother nurtures her, while her sister loves her openly, honestly, and deeply. And so Claudia understands what anyone might arguably recognize as a constructive image of love: on Christmas day, for example, Claudia imagines her ideal present--sitting in mamma's kitchen, her daddy playing the violin, her senses fully engaged, enveloped in love. Pecola, who feels no such stability from her mother because Pauline's home is essentially her white employers', also receives no support from her brother, who is often missing, and is not only not protected by her father in the face of manly aggression, but is violated by him. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that she does not seem to understand love, how to `get it': Pecola constantly asks others, "How do you do that? How do you get somebody to love you?" (32).
Summary of The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.
Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:
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.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.
This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus
African American Books
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