Racial Identity and Beauty in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Introduction: Pecola Breedlove and the Culture of White Beauty

The protagonist Pecola Breedlove, of Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye, grows up in a culture where beauty is equated with whiteness. There is no cultural space — at least not in the mass American culture that has infiltrated the African-American community in which the young girl is growing up — where beauty and blackness can ever be conjoined. Pecola grows up watching the great African-American entertainer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson dancing with the white, blonde Shirley Temple on the silver screen of cinema fantasy, not a little girl of her own complexion, although it is the same color as Bill's face. Shirley's face adorns Pecola's cup of milk. When Pecola buys candy, a white, blue-eyed Mary Jane stares at her from the wrapper. Even the most socially desirable students in Pecola's all-Black school have the lightest complexions, like the relatively wealthy and privileged Maureen Peal. Is it any wonder that Pecola longs for blue eyes and desires to embody the positive cultural image of whiteness, rather than the negative cultural images of blackness upheld even by her fellow African-Americans?

The irony of Pecola's last name, Breedlove, is that she feels no love for herself, and by the end of the novel she can no longer have children. She is raped, but her child is stillborn — demonstrating how the penetration of white culture within her psychological self-esteem yields nothing fruitful. Her father, whose own esteem is bruised and battered by white culture, turns his sense of self-hatred against his daughter. Thus Pecola, like all of Morrison's other major female characters in The Bluest Eye, has her emerging young sense of identity infiltrated by a Black-hating, women-hating American culture in a way that permanently damages her ability to reproduce her own culture.

Morrison's novel "as a whole" is a documentary of cultural invasion "and its concomitant erasure of specific local bodies, histories, and cultural productions — in terms of sexuality as [well as how] it intersects with commodity culture" (Kuenz, 2006). The traditional community in which Pecola dwells — including, for example, the nearby prostitutes who maintain a fairly secure sense of their positive identity as Black women — has been eradicated by oppressive American cultural forces that equate whiteness with beauty rather than the blackness women see every day in the mirror. Morrison has described her own project as a novelist as the process of revealing what Black people do with "each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization" (Moses, 1999, p. 1, citing Morrison, "Language" 371).

Commodity Culture and the Erasure of Black Identity

Prizes like candy and Shirley Temple cups replace a developing girl's sense of self with an image of what the girl is taught to regard as true beauty. Instead of her own people, mass white culture and commodity capitalism teach Pecola to dislike herself — and, in an even more damaging lie, that she can purchase blue eyes, whiteness, and happiness, just as she attempts to drink herself happy from a Shirley Temple cup at the beginning of the novel. This parallels how her father attempts to drink himself into happiness through alcoholism. Morrison suggests by association that alcoholism is another, similar form of using an external object to manufacture a sense of internal well-being.

The pervasiveness of commodity culture extends even into the school system, which teaches Black children to read using white images. Morrison has described this cultural dynamic as central to understanding how African-American identity becomes colonized from within. The widespread presence of white consumer ideals in everyday objects — from candy wrappers to drinking cups — ensures that Pecola cannot escape the message that whiteness equals desirability, no matter where she turns.

Dick and Jane: White Images in Black Education

The grade school reader that prefaces the novel's text was a presence in schools across the country. Its widespread use made learning the pleasures of Dick and Jane's commodified life dangerously synonymous with learning itself. The words of a primary school reader meet the reader's eyes even before the main characters are introduced. Dick and Jane's "placement first in the novel makes it the pretext for what is presented after: as the seeming given of contemporary life, it stands as the only visible model for happiness and thus implicitly accuses those whose lives do not match up" (Kuenz, 2006).

A white child, critic Jane Kuenz argues, can at least aspire to embody the image and life of Dick and Jane, even if that white child is poor. But a Black girl can never hope to embody the purity, happiness, and wealth encompassed in the figure of Jane, no matter how hard she tries. Pecola is an optimist, so she hopes that by having blue eyes like a white girl she might at least stand a chance of becoming the image of American joy. But this apparent optimism is shown to be far less productive than rage. Pecola does not rage that Bill Robinson does not dance with her; she instead plans to become Shirley, thus agreeing with a culture that despises her as to what constitutes beauty. "The effort required to do this [become white] and the damaging results of it are illustrated typographically in the repetition of the Dick-and-Jane story first without punctuation or capitalization, and then without punctuation, capitalization, or spacing" (Kuenz, 2006).

Conclusion: Morrison's Call to Regenerate Black Identity

This is perhaps the most tragic aspect of Morrison's novel. Pecola absorbs self-hatred from mass culture, but she has no untouched Black past to turn to, given how white culture has already influenced and penetrated the previous generation of African-Americans. Thus, The Bluest Eye is not simply a cry of despair about the suffering of one particular Black family, but also a call to arms to regenerate and recreate more powerful images of Black female sexuality and spirituality — before it is too late and the spiritual bankruptcy of white American consumer capitalism reigns supreme.