Dehumanization and Humanity in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
This essay examines Toni Morrison's deliberate narrative strategy in The Bluest Eye of humanizing the very characters who dehumanize young Pecola Breedlove. Rather than assigning simple moral blame, Morrison portrays figures like Cholly and Soaphead Church as broken individuals shaped by their own suffering, allowing readers to understand their cruelty without excusing it. The essay also explores how misplaced societal beauty standards function as the root cause of Pecola's victimization, and how Morrison protects Pecola's identity by keeping aspects of her character purposefully mysterious. Collectively, these narrative choices reveal that Pecola's destruction is a communal failure, not the act of any single villain.
- Introduction: Morrison's Narrative Restraint: Morrison avoids dehumanizing those who harm Pecola
- Humanizing the Characters Who Harm Pecola: Cholly and Soaphead portrayed as broken but human
- Societal Beauty Standards as the Root of Pecola's Suffering: Pecola symbolizes unattainable beauty ideals imposed by society
- Protecting Pecola's Identity Through Narrative Distance: Morrison shields Pecola through deliberate narrative mystery
- Conclusion: Humanity, Victimhood, and Collective Failure: Pecola's destruction reflects communal moral failure
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in Morrison's own stated authorial intent, creating a credible and focused analytical lens from the opening sentence.
- It supports claims with direct textual evidence, including quoted passages with page numbers, demonstrating close reading of the primary source.
- The argument moves logically from character analysis to societal critique to narrative craft, building a coherent interpretation rather than listing disconnected observations.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates intentional close reading combined with authorial-intent analysis. By connecting Morrison's narrative choices—such as multiple perspectives and deliberate mystery around Pecola—to a specific thematic purpose (avoiding further dehumanization), the writer shows how form and content reinforce each other in literary fiction.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by establishing Morrison's guiding principle, then moves through three analytical pillars: the humanization of flawed characters, the role of societal beauty ideals, and the protective narrative distance maintained around Pecola. A brief conclusion synthesizes these threads. The structure is tight for its length, with each paragraph advancing the central thesis about collective moral failure rather than individual villainy.
Introduction: Morrison's Narrative Restraint
In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison admits that she did not want to dehumanize the characters who dehumanize Pecola. She succeeds because she presents characters that are fully real without being overdone. She also succeeds because she does not point a finger at any single individual — or any race — for Pecola's suffering. It is a collective failure that destroys Pecola, and we see these characters most clearly when they are painted in their true colors. They are neither completely good nor completely evil, and we must look at them, warts and all. Only then can we begin to understand their hatred for Pecola.
Humanizing the Characters Who Harm Pecola
Morrison humanizes her characters by allowing us to see them as broken individuals. For example, while we may want Cholly to suffer because he is "dirty" (Morrison 189), we know that he comes from a broken past. Soaphead is another despicable character, yet there is something different about him: he genuinely wants to help Pecola. In fact, he is one of the few individuals who tries to comfort her. We read that for the "first time he honestly wished he could work miracles" (174). He may have been a bad person in many respects, but he was a good person in that he gave Pecola hope. We can look upon these characters and glean some sympathy for them because of their own suffering.
Morrison is also careful not to dehumanize the people who injure Pecola, because doing so would only repeat the very act committed against the young girl. She wants to show us how brutal people can be without making them appear cartoonishly brutal. She wants us to see them in their environment, and she wants us to see Pecola in her environment as well. In order to shield Pecola from further narrative injury, Morrison writes from several different perspectives — a technique that allows her to illuminate not just Pecola's experience but the inner lives of the other characters as well. She is not simply telling Pecola's story; she is telling the story of an entire generation of young girls forced to contend with a very specific notion of beauty that had nothing to do with them. Morrison had to find a balance among those worlds because they all play a part in this novel.
Societal Beauty Standards as the Root of Pecola's Suffering
The real reason for Pecola's mistreatment is misplaced societal values. Beauty is equated with something attainable only by a certain few, and everyone else is simply out of luck. Pecola represents imperfection to those around her, and that only reinforces their own insecurity. Every time someone looks upon her, they are reminded of what ugliness means — and may even glimpse something of that ugliness in themselves. This inability to confront what society has imposed on them reveals just how deeply the issue runs. It is not something that can easily be wiped away. The notion of beauty is buried deep in the human mind, and it is impossible to turn a blind eye to it. In short, Pecola represents imperfection and all the ugliness the world has to offer.
Conclusion: Humanity, Victimhood, and Collective Failure
Morrison chooses not to dehumanize the characters who dehumanize Pecola because doing so allows us to see the humanity in them. There is nothing artificial about them; in fact, they are too real. They are real people with both good and bad qualities, and they allow the bad to get the best of them. Because they are human, we can relate to them and empathize to a certain extent. Morrison also allows Pecola to remain somewhat of a mystery. As noted above, we know all we need to know about Pecola — it is those around her with whom we should be more concerned. Because Pecola represented the ugliness they could not face, she became their victim. It was simply easier to hate her than to confront themselves. In the end, there may have been pity for the girl, but all of it came too late to mean anything.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume Books, 1970.
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