Blue Eyes

This week we read “The Bluest Eye” by Tony Morrison. In the novel Morrison makes present the white standard of beauty that we have discussed in class. Throughout the novel Morrison shows the preference for white beauty within the black community and its psychological effect on the children of that community. She uses Pecola’s desire for blue eyes and Claudia’s destruction of white baby dolls to illustrate two opposite reactions to the idealization of white beauty in their area. Morrison illustrates the reactions of two girl within this community that has accepted its racial inferiority; one crushed and one toughened under its weight.

With Pecola, Morrison shows the destructive effect that the sense of being inferior to the beauty of white girls has on Pecola. She “fold[ed] into herself, like a pleated wing” (73) when she, Claudia, and Frieda were called ugly by a white girl it seemed they had befriended. Unlike Claudia, who rejected the misery of feeling inferior, Pecola is drowns in it and it “lap[s] up into her eyes” (73). Pecola identifies herself with ugliness. Having the perfect, beautiful blue eyes of a white girl would allow her to reclaim some infinitesimal fraction of beauty. Pecola asks for beauty, “to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes” (175) but in the end “the horror of her yearning is only succeeded only by the evil of fulfillment” (204).

Claudia reacts to the ‘superiority’ of white beauty with an analytical approach that manifests itself in the investigative dismemberment of white baby dolls. Everyone around her accepts that these white dolls should be treasured and worshipped without hesitation and she wants “to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me” (20). Claudia’s analysis of why she is the only one to dislike white baby dolls brings up the discussion of why everyone; older women, older and younger girls all do. She can only note with detachment that adults react to the doll’s dismemberment with the strength of emotion as if a family member had been lost instead. Claudia notes the disturbing transference of her impulse to take apart the dolls to little white girls, to find “what made people look at them and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me?” (22). Claudia’s analytical curiosity moved to a detached violence to hatred, then to a falsified love to hide both of the former.

Little girls in “The Bluest Eye” are presented with no option that they themselves could be beautiful in face perfect white beauty; the inferiority that results negatively affects their psychology in varying ways. This shows the need for our CAP project; to diversify the readily available image of beauty and present depictions from various races.


~Kristen M.