FREE ESSAY ON THE BLUEST EYE

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
the narration comes from Claudia MacTeer as a nine year old child, but Morrison also
gives the reader the insight of Claudia reflecting on the story as an adult, some first
person narration from Pecola's mother, and narration by Morrison herself as an omniscient
narrator. Pecola's experiences would have less meaning coming from Pecola herself because
a total and complete victim would be an unreliable narrator, unwilling or unable to
relate the actual circumstances of 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. 
In addition to narrative structure, the structure and composition of the novel itself
help to illustrate how much and for how long white ideas of family and home have been
forced into black culture. Instead of conventional chapters and sections, The Bluest Eye
is broken up into seasons, fall, winter, spring, and summer. This type of organization
suggests that the events described in The Bluest Eye have occurred before, and will occur
again. This kind of cycle suggests that there is notion that there is no escape from the
cycle of life that Breedloves and MacTeer live in. Further, dividing the book are small
excerpts from the Dick and Jane primer that is the archetype of the white upper-middle
class lifestyle. Each excerpt has, in some way, to do with the section that follows. So
the section that describes Pecola's mother is started with an excerpt describing Dick and
Jane's mother, and so on. The excerpts from Dick and Jane that head each chapter are
typeset without any spaces or punctuation marks. The Dick and Jane snippets show just how
prevalent and important the images of white perfection are in Pecola's life; Morrison's
strange typography illustrates how irrelevant and inappropriate these images actually
are. 
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. The name of the novel, The Bluest
Eye, is meant to get the reader thinking about how much value is placed on blue-eyed
little girls. 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. In fact, it breeds hate; hate of blackness, and thus hatred of oneself.
The MacTeer girls are flattered when Mr. Henry said Hello there. You must be Greta Garbo,
and you must be Ginger Rogers, for the names ring of beauty that the girls feel they will
never reach. Soaphead Church represents, as his name suggests, the role of the church in
African-American life. I, I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her the
blue, blue, two blue eyes, Soaphead says. The implication is that the church's promise
that if you worship God and pray to Him that everything will be alright is no better than
Soaphead's promise to Pecola that she will have blue eyes. Morrison reveals the
significance of Pecola's name through the character of Maureen Peal. Maureen confuses
Pecola's name with the name of a character in the movie Imitation of Life. By this
allusion, Morrison illustrates that Pecola's life is an imitation of the real experiences
of black women. 
Morrison also uses metaphors to describe the conditions under which African-Americans in
general and Pecola in particular are forced to live. There are two major metaphors in The
Bluest Eye, one of marigolds and one of dandelions. Claudia, looking back as an adult,
says in the beginning of the novel, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. She and
her sister plant marigold seeds with the belief that if the marigolds would grow and
survive, so would Pecola's baby. 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. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to
marigolds that year. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits it will not bear .
. . The implication is that Pecola, like so many other African-Americans, never had a
chance to grow and succeed because she lived in a society (soil) that was inherently
racist, and would not nurture her. The other flower, the dandelion, is important as a
metaphor because it represents Pecola's image of herself. Pecola passes some dandelions
going into Mr. Yacobowski's store. Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She
thought they were pretty. After Mr. Yacobowski humiliates her, she again passes the
dandelions and thinks; They are ugly. They are weeds. She has transferred society's
dislike of her to the dandelions.
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tells the story of a little black girl who thinks that
if she can live up to the image of the blue-eyed Shirley Temple and Dick and Jane that
she will have the perfect life that they have. The importance of this book goes beyond
its value as a work of literature. Morrison speaks to the masses, both white and black,
showing how a racist social system wears down the minds and souls of people, how dominate
images of white heroes and heroines with blue eyes and wonderful lives show young black
children that to be white means to be successful and happy, and then they look around at
their own lives of poverty and oppression and learn to hate their black heritage for
keeping them from the Dick and Jane world. 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.