“The Bluest Eye” (1970) by Toni Morrison is a book about a black girl who dreams of having blue eyes. A short but powerful book that you will not forget. I liked it better than “Beloved” (1987), though that was good too.
Here are some of the bits I liked best:
I destroyed white dolls… Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple.
…
But the unquarreled evening hung like the first note of a dirge in sullenly expectant air. … The tiny, undistinguished days that Mrs. Breedlove lived were identified, grouped, and classed by these quarrels.
…
Hating her, he could leave himself intact.
…
It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds – cooled – and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
…
I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live – just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples and Maureen Peals.
…
We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis…
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A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.
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We were beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. … Even her waking nightmares we used to silence our own nightmares.
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… for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good but well behaved, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect, we switched habits to simulate maturity; rearranged lies and called it truth…
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Love is never better than the lover.
…
This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers.
One part that I cannot find but loved is about how Hollywood stands like a giant above all of us, pushing its own strange ideas about not just beauty but love too, ideas that have no love or beauty in them. At one point the three girls are walking down the street and a huge poster of Greta Garbo looks down on them, a King Kong of white beauty.
I have had this book for years, but it was a comment by Miss Licorish to one of my posts (“There is absolutely nothing wrong with being black”) that got me to start reading it. Thank you, Miss Licorish!
See also:
Thanks for this reminder, I think it’s an awesome book too. From my perspective as a white guy, I appreciate it as an insightful story that’s really about whiteness, even though the author and almost all of the book’s characters are black. It’s focal point on that topic is, as you wonderfully put it, the King Kong of white beauty, a monster that attacks the black feminine psyche. By illustrating this monster’s destructive effects, Morrison shines a klieg light on the incredibly pervasive and subtle powers of racism.
I also think it’s worth pointing out that The Bluest Eye is in this way a “white” book because black authors are too often pigeon-holed as experts on black people and culture (whatever the latter really is), and thereby discredited as authorities on much of anything else. Black insight into whiteness, and written documentation and illustration of that insight, too often receive little or no recognition. Let alone authoritative insight by literary authors who are black into any and all other topics.
I did not think of it that way. As I think you pointed out on your blog somewhere, black people know more about white people than white people do. They have to. Something few white people seem to understand – or want to understand.
I think the last few pages of the book are in fact about white people and how they have used racism to make their sad selves feel good.
Of the last four quotes I gave, I think the first two (“We were beautiful…” and “for we were not strong…” ) are about white people and the last one about America: “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers”.
I have that book, I should reread it.
Of the last four quotes I gave, I think the first two (”We were beautiful…” and “for we were not strong…” ) are about white people and the last one about America: “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers”.
Actually, no, I think they’re about black people too, children who wiped off bad projections of themselves onto Pecola, the seeker of blue eyes. The book is about power too, especially self-aggrandizing uses of the weak by the strong, in racial and other terms. I do like seeing the last quote as being about America. I think that’s a really convincing interpretation.
The book is about power too, especially self-aggrandizing uses of the weak by the strong, in racial and other terms.
Good point. That runs through much of the book, the way that power makes life cheap and sad – for both the powerful and the powerless.
I think the book made some good points and had some really nice quotes but I really could not stand the book. I don’t think it made a connection with the reader in a good way. I felt like they were forcing the misery out and trying to forcibly make you sympathize and just laying bad on top of bad on top of bad and not drawing you in or making the connection. Especially the chapter about her father, I could not sympathize and I did not like that the author seemed specifically meaning to cause me to with that.
I liked the girl narrating the beginning(I don’t recall names, I read it two years ago), she made interesting points and had nice quotes. I love the ending paragraphs, everything about people projecting their negatives on Pecola about how people felt in regards to the baby.
“…when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter”(206). my favorite quote of the book.
I might like it better reading it now but I’m fairly certain I will always feel like the tragedy is being shot at me and pushed rather than being enthralling and intriguing, making me feel something other than irritation that the book wasn’t over yet.
It is, admittedly, not a happy story, but once I got to the first passage quoted here, the one about destroying white dolls, Morrison had made the connection with at least this reader.