The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
by Toni Morrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Toni MorrisonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-08
ISBN: 0307278441
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307278449
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Book Review: great and easy read
Summary: 5 Stars
The humidity rises off the dirt roads as Frieda and Claudia begin to walk home from school. Their journey home however, is interrupted once a couple of boys start bullying a girl named Pecola for being too black. With every might, the boys push her onto the ground where suddenly, Frieda and Claudia run to help her. This incident is only a spectacle of the eye-opening trials Pecola and the characters face in the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Morrison depicts the life of the young girl, Pecola who struggles with domestic violence as well as accepting and embracing her African-American descent and color rather than her desire to have blond hair and blue eyes. With the use of 1st person narrative that is not the main character and simple diction, The Bluest Eye captures the country life style of these girls in the 1960's and the importance to love your-self.
Morrison tells the novel through the character, Claudia, a young, adventurous girl who holds the objective opinion. With her perspective, Morrison shows the trauma of violence and social acceptance. When Claudia had to comfort Frieda after being molested by their neighbor, Morrison illustrated the emotions and effects that all experience during such horrible events and how that leads to the desire to be someone else. The Bluest Eye also contains extremely simple and unfinished phrases. Morrison uses this to depict the young girls' innocence and how that changes throughout the book. For example, when Claudia says "hereisthefamilythatmotherfatherdickandjanetheyliveinthegreenandwhitehousetheyareveryh", she shows how family life is not well and how she wishes otherwise.
Overall this novel contains an interesting view on life as an African-American female and female insecurities. Morrison's diction and point of view creates a heart-felt and shocking novel that would benefit all who read it.
Summary of The Bluest Eye (Vintage International)
Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison?s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.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
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