Reviews
“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a book about innocence, loss, and the corrosive power of societal standards imposed upon marginalized individuals. Morrison's debut novel is a powerful narrative bursting with vivid imagery and complex symbolism that deeply resonates with readers. Set in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1940s, the story centers on Pecola Breedlove—an eleven-year-old African American girl who desperately longs for blue eyes, believing they will make her beautiful and worthy of love.
Morrison intertwines Pecola's tragic story with the broader context of a society deeply entrenched in racism, colorism, and classism. This includes the dominant culture's standard of beauty and success, a standard that seems utterly unattainable for Pecola and her family. It underscores how media, even in its seemingly innocent forms, can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to the erasure and denigration of Black experiences.
“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.”
One of the most prominent themes in The Bluest Eye is the destructive nature of internalized racism. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes is not simply a superficial longing; it's a manifestation of her internalization of white beauty standards. She has been taught—both explicitly and implicitly—that whiteness is synonymous with beauty, goodness, and worthiness. This internalized racism leads to her self-hatred and, ultimately, her tragic downfall.
“Mrs. Breedlove handled hers as an actor does a prop: for the articulation of character, for support of a role she frequently imagined was hers—martyrdom. Sammy used his as a weapon to cause others pain. He adjusted his behavior to it, chose his companions on the basis of it: people who could be fascinated, even intimidated by it. And Pecola. She hid behind hers. Concealed, veiled, eclipsed—peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask.”
Another theme that struck me is the link between family dysfunction and poverty. The Breedloves' poverty exacerbates their vulnerability and limits their options. Their impoverished living conditions, coupled with the lack of support and resources, contribute to the sense of hopelessness that pervades their lives. Morrison illustrates how poverty and lack of access to resources can further marginalize and disenfranchise individuals, making them even more susceptible to the damaging effects of racism and societal neglect. Furthermore, the Breedlove family is deeply damaged, plagued by trauma, abuse, and a lack of love and nurturing. This dysfunctional family dynamic contributes to Pecola's sense of isolation and her inability to develop a strong sense of self-worth.
“The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year.”
Pecola, as a character, is a mosaic of different stories that slowly influence and inhibit her. She is the embodiment of the beliefs that her mother suppresses, a victim of her father's trauma, prey to the manipulative Soaphead Church, and a target of a harsh society. She is born out of a maelstrom of societal rejection, of familial dysfunction, and of internalized self-hatred—a confluence of external forces that ultimately shatter her fragile sense of self. As a reader, you will deeply empathize with her, not just for the overt injustices she suffers, but for the insidious way her own sense of worth is systematically eroded. Morrison's masterful portrayal allows us to witness the slow, agonizing dismantling of a young girl's spirit, leaving us with a profound sense of sorrow and a piercing ache for a childhood irretrievably lost.
The Bluest Eye unflinchingly confronts the social problems of its time, many of which remain relevant today. Morrison tackles the issue of media representation head-on, demonstrating how the pervasive imagery of white beauty in popular culture can negatively impact the self-esteem and identity of Black individuals. The novel also exposes the complexities of colorism within the Black community, where lighter skin is often privileged over darker skin. This is evident in the way that even other Black characters, like Maureen Peal, internalize and perpetuate these colorist biases.
“Our astonishment was short-lived, for it gave way to a curious kind of defensive shame; we were embarrassed for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally we just felt sorry for her. Our sorrow drove out all thoughts of the new bicycle. And I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it.”
For me, this book was very difficult to rate. Therefore, I've decided to leave it unrated. The Bluest Eye is a powerful and disturbing novel that forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths about race, beauty, and the lasting impact of societal prejudice. Even though I am not a fan of the sudden shifts in narration, Morrison's masterful use of language, symbolism, and narrative structure creates a deeply moving and unforgettable reading experience. The Bluest Eye is a crucial work in the American literary canon that continues to resonate with readers today and an impactful book that everyone should read in their lifetime.
Oh I ...
I want to throw up. The story was so gut wrenching, it makes me sick. Toni Morrison did so well! The characters are -almost all of them- so repelling, wow.
i have no words to describe how much i loved this
Highlights
"This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late."
"Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye."
"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved."
"A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment."
"All his life he had a fondness for things–not the acquisition of wealth or beautiful objects, but a genuine love of worn objects... It was as though his disdain of human contact had converted itself into a craving for things humans had touched. The residue of the human spirit smeared on inanimate objects was all he could withstand of humanity."
"...he believed that to name an evil was to neutralize if not annihilate it."
"Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence."
"The restraint, the holding off, the promise of sweetness that had yet to unfold, excited them more than full ripeness would have done."
"Then they had grown. Edging into life from the back door. Becoming. Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, “Do this.” White children said, “Give me that.” White men said, “Come here.” Black men said, “Lay down.” The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. But they took all of that and re-created it in their own image. They ran the houses of white people, and knew it. When white men beat their men, they cleaned up the blood and went home to receive abuse from the victim. They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees also cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom; the arms that loaded sheaves, bales, and sacks rocked babies into sleep. They patted biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence—and shrouded the dead. They plowed all day and came home to nestle like plums under the limbs of their men. The legs that straddled a mule’s back were the same ones that straddled their men’s hips. And the difference was all the difference there was.
Then they were old. Their bodies honed, their odor sour. Squatting in a cane field, stooping in a cotton field, kneeling by a river bank, they had carried a world on their heads. They had given over the lives of their own children and tendered their grandchildren. With relief they wrapped their heads in rags, and their breasts in flannel; eased their feet into felt. They were through with lust and lactation, beyond tears and terror. They alone could walk the roads of Mississippi, the lanes of Georgia, the fields of Alabama unmolested. They were old enough to be irritable when and where they chose, tired enough to look forward to death, disinterested enough to accept the idea of pain while ignoring the presence of pain. They were, in fact and at last, free. And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes—a purée of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy."
"Not until he has let go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young."
"She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the lonely roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and-white images came together, making a magnificent whole–all projected through the ray of light from above and behind.
It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate."
"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. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap."
"But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer."
"Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes."
"Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence."
"Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.
Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drops, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave."
"What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural–a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us."
"They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds–cooled–and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit."
"Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging."
"The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes."
"These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her."
"Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people."
"It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different... If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they'd say, "Why look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn't do bad things in front of those pretty eyes."
"...the rest of the family–Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove–wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them... 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 each had accepted it without question. The master had said, 'You are ugly people.' They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. "Yes," they had said. "You are right." And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it."