“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…
…
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.
…
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.
…
… 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…
…
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.
LikeLike
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”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have that book, I should reread it.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
On a lighter note, I guess they didn’t make color contacts back then.
LikeLike
I first read this book when I was getting my teaching credential in 1994. I found it very powerful. I identified a lot with Pecola…which is odd…since I was once a pretty little blonde white girl…but Pecola and I had much in common….I see it as a very honest and blistering expose of the system and the culture of patriarchal white Amerika…which sees all people in terms of commodities…some more valuable than others. I think that one of the things I love about black cutlure is the respect of the female that the dominant culture still has not managed to brutalize out of black people. Morrison shows clearly how Cholly and Helen (?) {Pecola’s mother, Mrs. Breedlove} have been conditioned to hate everything about themselves…even their child. how Mrs. Breedlove only has power as the housekeeper of the white family, how she dotes on their children while scorning her own…Morrison really adresses internalized racism and colonialism (in my mind, at least) in this novel. Cholly, as the rapist of his own child, basically acts out the white male partiarchal perogative: all females belong to him (the whiter pater familias). I find it hugely ironic that there is this stereotype of the black male as the rabid out of control sexualized rapist, when in actuality, it was the white male who was doing the actual rape…on every level. Kind of like the stereotype of black people as lazy…geez…how much more lazy can you get than to import a whole bunch of people from another continent to do your work, while you sit on the veranda sipping mint juleps? Give me a break….anyhow…back to the rape thing….what was his name? That idiot from Edgefield South Carolina…Pitchfork Ben Tillman who beat another member of congress into a coma on the floor of the senate (yeah..nice guy) made an (in)famous speech in defense of lynching using every cliche known to man about sweet white womanhood being defiled by a depraved beast, and then ending with how such beasts deserve death “Kill, Kill, Kill!!!” And they did, black men were lynched in appalling numbers….and yeah, there are probably black rapists too…but not at all on the level of the number of perpetrators who were white men from before the Mayflower to the present…sorry I am ranting…guess I am in touch with my anger…anyhow…that fool Tillman still has a life size statue in the South Carolina state capitol….one of the many reasons I will never go to the South…I hope it is covered in pigeon poop. I also love Beloved. I think Toni Morrison is a genius.
LikeLike
Well, I am of the school of thought that we should be content with what we have. My eyes are brown and even though I wear contacts, I wear clear ones for seeing…..Never had any interest in any other colour contacts, although saying that I have no objection if anybody wishes to wear colour contact lenses, because that is THEIR business, my only advice would be that they have an eye test first to get the proper ones fitted, in order to avoid problems…One girl went blind in one eye after wearing ill fitted colour contact lenses.
Saying that, I have seen blue, green, hazel and other eye colours occurring naturally in all races and faces.
No one race has the monopoly on these features, although it occurs more commonly in white people.
LikeLike
I am intrigued by the way the novel is saturated with questions of God and the naturalization of racism through American popular culture. The character of Soaphead Church expresses this very well. Thanks for the great work you are doing!
LikeLike
I have this book on tape and my cable televison and internet was down so i had to entertain myself one Sunday afternoon with listening to this. The late actress Lynn Thigpen is the narrator and she did an excellent job. I remember the characters China, Poland and Miss Marie also know as the Marginot Line. “Three merry gargoyles, three merry harridans.” I don’t know why that line stuck with me. I have a mental picture of these three women with heavily caked maked up and smelling like cheap perfume and cheap costume jewelry. I remember the pedophile Soaphead Church. I got a cold creepy feeling about him. But i understood what colorism and social class was about where he came from in the Caribbean. He was one of the most disgusting characters in the story. But Knowing about his life before he came to America helps to know how he came to be the nasty character that he was. Learning the before life of Pecola’s parents help me understand how the Breedlove family came to be the tragic family they were.
LikeLike
The theme of self hate and internalized racism is quite prevalent in this story and even today blacks are battling this demon. We see it in our pop culture today. It is quite tragic. My favorite music artist my beloved Michael Jackson battled with this. I wonder when we will come to love ourselves and each other.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The beginning of the story with the repetition of the Dick and Jane. I am guessing Morrison was trying to get us to see the perfection of the white family in the Dick and Jane characters as compared to the perceived ugliness and imperfection of the Breedlove family.
LikeLike
Fun with Dick and Jane Reader is used as a metaphor to show us the perception of the beauty and perfection of the white family to the perceived ugliness and imperfection of the black Breedlove family. I thought that was a brilliant device. I will admit i have a hard time with Toni Morrison she is a challenging author. I have to reread to try to understand what is going on.But she does challenge me as a reader.
LikeLike
Given the mixed ancestry I’m sure there are some black Americans with blue eyes?
LikeLike
@ Anknymous
I saw a Black man with blue eyes in the Jamaican countryside and he did not even seem mixed.
LikeLike
My father has blue eyes, of which I had never noticed until I fashioned myself as Pecola. After reading the book, I began to think of my father’s person as tainted, as a degradation of a people our ancestors did not have the luxury of preserving. Likewise, he once remarked that he did not want to show us his DNA test because there was “too much European”. I was disgusted. And for a short period of time, I had wondered why he had birthed us.
It is especially painful as a Black female who does not pretend that it was just slavemasters raping Black girls and women when even Black men could rape Black females due to the Jezebel and Mammy caricatures and that White men did not continue this practice until the Civil Rights’ Movement when some of the first calls to action for civil rights regarded the common practice of rape of Black females by WHite men during Jim Crow.
But I digress.
LikeLike
According to a genetic research and reconstruction of features, the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain had used to have dark – or even black, perhaps – skin and blue eyes.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/first-modern-britons-dark-black-skin-cheddar-man-dna-analysis-reveals
LikeLike