The Bluest Eye
Toni Morisson's novel The Bluest Eye is about the life of the Breedlove family who resides in Lorain, Ohio, in the late 1930s. This family consists of the mother Pauline, the father Cholly, the son Sammy, and the daughter Pecola. The novel's focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with self-hatred. Everyday she encounters racism, not just from white people, but mostly from her own race. In their eyes she is much too dark, and the darkness of her skin somehow implies that she is inferior, and according to everyone else, her skin makes her even "uglier." She feels she can overcome this battle of self-hatred by obtaining blue eyes, but not just any blue. She wants the bluest eye. Morrison is able to use her critical eye to reveal to the reader the evil that is caused by a society that is indoctrinated by the inherent goodness and beauty of whiteness and the ugliness of blackness. She uses many different writing tools to depict how "white" beliefs have dominated American and African American culture. The narrative structure of The Bluest Eye is important in revealing just how pervasive and destructive social racism is. Narration in novel comes from several sources. Much of
Morrison does not solve these problems, nor does she even try, but she does show a reflection of a world that cannot call itself right or moral. The excerpts from "Dick and Jane" that head each "chapter" are typeset without any spaces or punctuation marks. Names play an important part in The Bluest Eye because they are often symbolic of conditions in society or in the context of the story. "I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. Claudia, from her youthful innocence, is able to see and relate how the other characters, especially Pecola, idolize the "ideal" of beauty presented by white, blue-eyed movie stars like little Shirley Temple. The other flower, the dandelion, is important as a metaphor because it represents Pecola's image of herself. Claudia, looking back as an adult, says in the beginning of the novel, "there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941". There are two major metaphors in The Bluest Eye, one of marigolds and one of dandelions. So the section that describes Pecola's mother is started with an excerpt describing Dick and Jane's mother, and so on. Morrison reveals the significance of Pecola's name through the character of Maureen Peal. Morrison unpacks the metaphor throughout the book, and, through Claudia, finally explains it and broadens its scope to all African-Americans on the last page. Pecola and her family are representative of the larger African-American community, and their name, "Breedlove," is ironic because they live in a society that does not "breed love.
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Acceptance Essays
