The novel wasn’t published until Morrison was thirty-nine. The Bluest Eye started life as a short story that she shared at an informal book club while attending Howard University. Of course, all that was after receiving both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. So, how did Nobel Prize award-winning novelist Toni Morrison write this novel? The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel, but she had worked for Random House publishing five years before writing The Bluest Eye. How’d She Do it? author HIGHLIGHT: Toni Morrison This tactic lets us understand, if not agree or sympathize with the actions of these characters. We see the story through several sets of eyes, including Pecola’s mother and father who, in a less complicated novel, would be painted as the villains of the narrative. The story floats between parts and perspectives. It is a reminder that Pecola’s fate is not the fate of all little black girls. While Pecola is forced into womanhood, the MacTeer girls keep their childish ideas and belief in magic. While Pecola’s father abuses her, Mr. MacTeer protects his daughters from a sexual predator. Even though the idea makes them feel uneasy, they can see the flaws in figures like Shirley Temple and the light-skinned girl at their school. They are black and do not hate themselves. The MacTeer girls act as foils to Pecola. The son of the “respectable” colored family is vicious and ends up killing a cat and blaming it on Pecola. The lighter-skinned, rich girl that goes to their school is beloved by the boys in the school, despite having a crooked smile. These seemingly innocuous figures uphold whiteness as exemplary and breed self-hatred in the black girls in the novel. Shirley Temple and white baby dolls represent the inherent racism in society. Throughout the story, the idea of physical beauty becomes more and more distorted. Beauty, defined in this novel as proximity to whiteness, is a veneer that, when peeled away, reveals internal malice. Her parents fight, her brother runs away, and Pecola believes that if only she had blue eyes, all of these problems would be solved. The MacTeers are loving and stable, but they pity Pecola more than care for her.Įventually, she has to move back in with her parents and brother. Her family life is difficult-she initially moves in with the MacTeer family because her father burned down their home. The MacTeer family has two girls just a little younger than Pecola-Claudia and Frieda. No one in the media looks like her-the only little girl in movies is the white Shirley Temple and Pecola wants to be just like her. She also feels that, because she is black, she is ugly. Pecola Breedlove is a little girl who wishes for blue eyes because she thinks they will make her beautiful. In short, this is the story of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. This lake is like a rainbow on an oil slick: beautiful, but disgusting. The water was filled with toxic salts and oxides caustic enough to burn your skin if you touch it. Of course, Instagram users from around the world flocked there to take the perfect photograph.īut why was this Siberian lake so unnaturally beautiful? Because it’s a dumping ground for industrial waste. But this one, Instagram told us, was real. The lake was a remarkably bright shade of turquoise the kind of blue that only exists in tropical vacation brochures augmented with copious doses of Photoshop. In July of 2019, a lake near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk was one of those beautifully perfect places. We live in a world where social media bombards us with images of what it claims is beautiful, elevated, perfect.
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