The Bluest Eye

 

Identity, Race and Gender in Toni Morrison’s The 

Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was written during the 1960s and published in 19702 .Through several layers of voices and different narrative 

techniques, the book tells us the shocking story of a black little girl named Pecola Breedlove, who descends into madness after being emotionally and physically abused on several occasions by the entire community around her, even–and especially–by her family. Eleven-year Pecola lives with her family in Lorain, Ohio. When her father, Cholly, burns down their house, she spends some days with the MacTeer family. Claudia, the youngest MacTeer, is one of the narrators who tells us Pecola’s story. In the years covered by the narrative, 1940 and 1941, the Breedlove girl is constantly bullied and mistreated by teachers, classmates, neighbors and family. Because she thinks of herself as ugly, she attributes their mistreatment of her to her physical appearance, as she believes that no one would behave badly in front of her if she were beautiful. One of the most traumatizing events in Pecola’s life is the moment when she is raped by her father, gets pregnant and loses her sanity. By telling her story, Claudia is trying to make sense of everything that happened to the youngest Breedlove and to 

their community.

Quite frequently when talking about The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison mentions the story that served as a source of inspiration for the book. As the author explains in the Toni Morrison Remembers: BBC Imagine Documentary 2015 and in the afterword of the novel, she was starting elementary school when she was first made consciously aware of the self-loathing feelings that beauty standards could cause. Morrison and a friend had been arguing over the existence of God, and the other little girl told her that she was sure that He wasn’t real: she had been praying for blue eyes for two years. Had God existed, he would have certainly granted her wish by then. Morrison says that, at the time, she had an epiphany, because she looked at her friend and thought it would have been awful if God had given her blue eyes. Right then, Morrison realized her friend was absolutely beautiful. As she tells Alan Yentob, her interviewer in the BBC documentary, And at ten, you don’t think in those terms. Somebody is cute, or, you know, whatever, but not beauty. And that was the first time I saw it. 

She was very dark, she had these wonderful almond eyes, high cheekbones, (…) I mean, you could go on. And she wanted something other. (Morrison Remembers)The author then proceeds to explain how they got little white dolls as toys in their childhood, and those were the images black little girls were supposed to admire. In the afterword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison dwells a little more on how shocking the experience of that conversation with her friend was. According to the writer, she was flabbergasted by how no one else recognized beauty (which was what her friend possessed in her eyes), even, and especially, the girl who held it