The first novel by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 and was heralded for its sensitive treatment of African American female identity. It is the tragic story of a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove, whose loneliness and desire for love and attention is manifested in her desire to have blue eyes. The novel opens with an epigraph from a Dick and Jane primer that presents an ideal family with a house, mother, father, children, cat, dog, and friend. The story that shapes the novel is narrated through the eyes and voice of Claudia McTeer, whose narrative shifts the reader's attention to a very different world from that of the primer. Before she commits the taboo of telling the community the secret of Pecola's demise, however, she connects her own childhood desire to dismember white dolls, and her transference of that hatred to white girls, with her desire to understand why white girls were loved and African American girls were not.
Claudia then proceeds to tell not only a story of Pecola's painful childhood with an indifferent mother and an alcoholic father, and the trauma of rape by her father that results in her pregnancy and plunge into insanity, but also the story of the community's role in Pecola's tragic fate. The novel both deconstructs the image of the white community as the site of normalcy and perfection and illustrates the realities of life in a poverty-stricken African American community whose socioeconomic status is complicated by the politics of race, especially internalized racism. Pecola's mother, Pauline Breedlove, works as a domestic and escapes from her own feelings of ugliness and low self-worth in the home of her white employer. Pauline's education about female beauty comes from her avid moviegoing but ends abruptly when she loses a tooth and convinces herself she will never look like Jean Harlow. She turns to the church and religion out of resignation to her feelings of unattractiveness and contempt for her husband, Cholly. Her contempt for Cholly colors her relationship with Pecola as well. In one pivotal scene, when Pecola comes to visit her at work and accidentally spills a freshly baked blueberry pie on the floor, Pauline humiliates Pecola by slapping and scolding her while consoling the daughter of her white employer. Cholly Breedlove's attempt to construct an acceptable image of himself as a black man is complicated by memories of a racial incident that alters his ability to love his wife and daughter in appropriate ways. His drunkenness, routine fights with Pauline, and incestuous relationship with Pecola form the context out of which Pecola's own self-loathing develops. The story unravels the community's propensity to scapegoat Pecola, to measure its identity by devaluing and eventually destroying her humanity, to engage in intraracial politics by valuing the skin color and hair texture of some African American girls but not others, and to be seduced by fraudulent characters like Soaphead Church, the bootleg preacher who, out of sympathy, tricks Pecola into thinking he has given her blue eyes.
Published in the midst of the period of pride in blackness associated with the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Bluest Eye ultimately calls into question the aesthetics of beauty that, in the words of the novel, “originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” Moreover, though Morrison's first novel was surpassed in critical recognition by the acclaim given to her later novels, it nevertheless marked the beginning of what would be the most significant period of literary production of books by African American women about African American female identity.
Bibliography
- Michael Awkward, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels, 1989.
- Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, 1991
Marilyn Sanders Mobley
