Bluest Eye Their Eyes Are Watching God the Women of Brewster Place

Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye is deals with the historical and psychological effects of defining beauty according to race. The Bluest Eye is essentially about how concepts of beauty are instilled from a very young age. It is about the life of the Breedlove family who resides in Lorain, Ohio. The novels focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with self-hatred. Every day 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. The Dick and Jane snippets show just how prevalent and important the images of white perfection are in Pecolas life; Morrisons 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. 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 141. She and her sister plant marigold seeds with the belief that if the marigolds would grow and survive, so would Pecolas 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 Pecolas image of herself. 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.