A Brief Discussion of “The Bluest Eye”

The Bluest Eye, the intense and profound work by the fantastical Toni Morrison, is one of the most devastating books I’ve read. The harrowing and persecuted life of young Pecola Breedlove is explored through her trials and suffering during the early 1940s in the still heavily-segregated United States. The harsh racism, sexism, colourism, oppression, and sexual assault and harassment in the book, as well as the bleak narrative of the lives of impoverished black people, turns our attentions to the stories of those whom history has silenced and opens our eyes to see the horror that slavery and the cruel racism of humans unleashes upon its victims.

One of the most interesting things about the style of the book is that of the structure of the opening few pages, which acts as a foreshadowing of the events to come. The actual text, which includes Dick and Jane-esque jargon, represents the ‘perfect’, white-picket-fence American family, where everyone is happy and everything has this illusion of perfection and empty satisfaction with life. Throughout the opening, the text repeats and loses punctuation, turning the paragraph into one long sentence that comes out in one long breath, before eventually losing all syntax, with no spaces or periods at all. This effectively transforms this illusion of perfection and happiness and beauty into this anxiety-producing, dream-like trance in which the reader is sucked into. This of course, ends up becoming the untimely fate of Pecola, who descends into madness, with her overwhelming desire for ‘beautiful’ blue eyes ringing in her head.

Morrison then transitions to her narrator Claudia MacTeer, the young black girl who becomes the foster sister of Pecola after her parents adopt her [Pecola]. We explore a bit into Claudia’s life as a child- and her intense hatred of dolls, specifically, Shirley Temple-esque dolls. She is always gifted with these “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll[s]” that the world had agreed was “what every girl child treasured” (Morrison 20). And Claudia was filled with such a burning hatred for these dolls that she literally tore them apart. She explains this loathing as a desire to see what was actually inside the doll. She wanted to see “of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me” (Morrison 20). Our dear Claudia was challenging the social constructs of beauty at the time at the ripe age of nine years old, which is more than most people had done in their entire lives. Claudia saw these expectations of beauty that were forced upon young girls and women and though she didn’t fully understand it at the time, she stood up the them and refused to conform to these standards of ‘perfection’. Much like what Clark’s doll study from years after the book was written discovered from the preferences of young black children, these kids are taught and conditioned to see white as the best and black as ‘ugly’.

Redirecting attention to those central to The Bluest Eye, the Breedlove family is extremely dysfunctional and broken, each direct victims of the malevolent violence and hatred from racism and sexism. One member in particular, Cholly Breedlove, the patriarch of the family, assumes the roles of both a victim and a perpetrator and perpetuator of these systems of oppression. Cholly’s story is quite harrowing, from being abandoned by his parents as a child and left like he was garbage in a literal trash jump to the excruciating tale of his first-ever sexual encounter. His first sexual experience was with a black woman he knew and socialized with, starting in a normal order of succession but quickly turning into something much more traumatizing when two white men appear and force them, at gunpoint, to continue, as if they were some spectacle of animals being observed in a zoo. As Cholly and Darlene continue and in the days and years after, he begins to brew a strong hatred of her; “He hated her. He almost wished he could do it-hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much” (148), “Cholly wanted to strangle her” (149), “Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene” (150), “For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence” (151). Cholly does not, as he should, direct his anger toward the white men who interrupted and humiliated them. Morrison writes that “such an emotion would have destroyed him” (150). The men were big, strong, white men and Cholly was a small, weak, insignificant, and black. He is emotionally unable to direct his fury on the actual perpetrators and instead channels horizontal hostility toward someone who was a victim to the exact same thing. Cholly in effect, uses Darlene, and subsequently other black people and specifically black women, as a scapegoat for his anger and pain at the world. Specifically, the white-washed and white-dominated world that oppressed him. White racism emasculates Cholly, and so he takes his anger out on the only thing he can- women. Other long term effects from this experience contributed to his future relationships with sex and women and well, pretty much everything. From then one, he has an extremely unhealthy perception of sex and love and associates sex and rage together. He is also shown to not be able to distinguish his emotions of love and anger, and therefore resorts to violence to express both. 

However if Cholly’s story is harrowing, Pecola’s is excruciating and downright torturous. After Cholly staggered home in drunken stupor, he sees his 11-year-old daughter washing the dishes and after a small action of scratching the back of her calf with her toe sends Cholly in a flashback of having sex with his wife and Pecola’s mother Pauline, he brutally rapes his daughter. Cholly’s actions are the ultimate collision of the effects of the harsh racism and abandonment he experienced in his life and the fatherly affection he tries to have for his daughter. In the moments leading up to, during, and after the rape that leaves his daughter pregnant with his child, he has an intense inner monologue, where he backs and forths between the rage and violence, and the guilt and impotence he felt when with her. To be honest, he probably had those feelings all the time. “Again the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her” (163). This rape he committed is a atrocious example of horizontal hostility he facilitated toward his own race, and even his own kin.

I think I can relate to some of the characters in this book in relatively small ways- Claudia’s confrontation and struggle with the rules of beauty set before her, experiencing and acting on horizontal oppression in my own life and circumstances- but to say that I have had experiences like the ones the characters had in the books would be heinously untrue. All of these characters had experienced some of the worst (if not the absolute worst of them all) accounts of racism and sexism at a time where tolerance and equality was not widely believed or taught. I think to equate my experiences in life with that of any of these characters would be an insult to not only the characters, but other real people who have been put through similar experiences. In reading this book, I am left with a similar feeling as the one I had when I read Beloved, also by Toni Morrison. These works, while fictional and inclusive of supernatural elements, speak with a weight of truth that is so ugly and so grueling that it is easier to just look away. But we shouldn’t look away and we can’t, because how else are we going to change things so that this never happens again?