The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is not for the faint hearted. This is her first book, published in 1970. She went on to win a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize and now has many of her books banned in some libraries. I read Beloved many years ago and only remember its power and awfulness. This book has both. Some of the passages blew me away, yet the book hardly holds together as a novel as it is so segmented.

I do indeed recommend it as a powerful testament to an amazing writer writing about the black experience as it was in the 1960s in America and before. The characters and dialogue in sections will remain with me for a very long time, that's for sure. Can't say it was an easy or pleasant read, but I'm glad I read it. I've included a few passages below that somehow resonated with me. Four+ stars, a library ebook.

Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, “Do this.” White children said, “Give me that.” White men said, “Come here.” Black men said, “Lay down.” The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. pg 111

Cholly lay on his back panting. His mouth full of the taste of muscadine, listening to the pine needles rustling loudly in their anticipation of rain. The smell of promised rain, pine, and muscadine made him giddy. The sun had gone and pulled away its shreds of light. pg 115

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. pg 119

Cholly sat. He knew if he was very still he would be all right. But then the trace of pain edged his eyes, and he had to use everything to send it away. If he was very still, he thought, and kept his eyes on one thing, the tears would not come. So he sat in the dripping honey sun, pulling every nerve and muscle into service to stop the fall of water from his eyes. While straining in this way, focusing every erg of energy on his eyes, his bowels suddenly opened up, and before he could realize what he knew, liquid stools were running down his legs. pg 122

4.5⭐️oh the magnitude of the issues- racism, incest, domestic violence and child molestation addressed by this poetry of a book

4.5 stars, for sure.

This is not a review but more of a musing, which I'll probably edit later.

I was simultaneously reading Alice McDermott's Absolution while reading The Bluest Eye I had to abruptly stop. Little white girl playing with her Barbie in Saigon vs. little Black girl losing her deserved childhood innocence in Lorain, Ohio, USA. Nope. I needed to get through Pecola's story, as gruesome as it was.

Cholly Breedlove and Soaphead Church--Morrison developed their characters very well, I think. I can't understand what makes them tick nor do I want to.

Pecola's drive to have blue eyes instead of brown broke my heart. She was so beautiful to me in this story--the ugliness of her circumstances I saw submerging her into a collected opinion from the community that she herself was ugly.

I was intrigued to read Morrison's book because of Pecola's desire for blue eyes. I picked up an unspoken definition of beauty from growing up in the early 1980s that white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes solely defined beauty. Oh yeah, and extreme thinness. I remember Barbie doll commercials from back then where Barbie was front and center and Christie was behind her or on the very edge of the frame. Was Christie inferior? Was she not pretty or as pretty as Barbie? Of course, she was not inferior nor lacking beauty but as a child I did not know what to think. Christie's placement in the print and TV ads made a huge impression upon me.

It's a masterful book but not for the faint of heart.

“There can’t be anyone, I’m sure, who doesn’t know what it feels like to be disliked, even rejected. Momentarily or for sustained periods of time,” Toni Morrison stated in her author note, as she explained the context of this novel. Imagine a Nobel Laureate reading her work, and then explaining her art. I listened to this via Audible and I was spellbound. Inflections with each character switch and mood, exquisite dialogue performance—I might as well have been in the same room with her.

The bluest eye. Oh what great use of personification. This story, laden with historical and literary context, is narrated by young Claudia and follows three black girls: Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. Raised in small town Ohio following the Great Depression and during a time laced with blatant racism and segregation, let’s just say, the girls were the bearers of grown folks’ wrath.

Pecola’s parents are indifferent towards her. She must call her mom, Mrs. Breedlove, while the blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl her mother takes care of, calls her Polly. When Pecola sees the same mother who beats and yells at her oohing and aahing at the little girl, the blue eyes become her way of wanting to be acknowledged. Maybe if she had blue eyes… Later, the bluest eye will play a role after Pecola goes through a horrific ordeal and we get to hear from her directly.

Pauline Breedlove (Pecola’s mother) on the other hand, loves her job as a housekeeper because she gets to escape her life with the abusive husband, poverty, and invisibility. In her world, no one notices or acknowledges her: the black woman. Shopping for her family is a pain. But in her white employers’ world where she must purchase items and make decisions on their behalf, vendors respect her duty and title. At these moments within the story, Claudia’s first person narration veers to a third-person narrator once you start to get into the adults’ heads (like crazy Cholly’s, for example) and more mature issues are raised.

Toni Morrison started this story in 1962—working on it while getting her MA. In 1965, it started to take the shape of a book. In elementary school, she had a friend who told her that she wished she had blue eyes. Very blue eyes in a very dark skin? She was repelled by her friend’s desire. With the book she tried to “hit the raw nerve of racial self contempt, expose it, then soothe it.”

I’ve never run across an author who writes like Toni Morrison. While reading two of her works simultaneously this week, (I also read Paradise) I noticed her signature style. It’s the good kind of expectation, like buying a Coach purse knowing that there are certain things about it that will not let you down. The lyrical syntax is prolific, the narrator voice oblique, and the story structure will take leaps and bounds.

The second half of this book was my favorite. In the beginning, there is a certain voice that pierces the narrative throughout and I wondered what it was (the white house and Jane playing). Towards the end, I understood the art as I heard from Pecola (in a weird, artistic kind of way) and it was a deeply emotional moment.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Toni Morrison's debut novel is for me a fitting illustration of the truth behind the Hemingway quote above. A painful, uncomfortable, provocative, depressing story that is nevertheless more honest and real than most of the books I've read this year. In a foreword written two decades after first publication, the author expresses some misgivings about the structure of the novel and about how Pecola, the main character, may be lacking in relevance for larger issues of racial identity, her story too particular to lend itself well to generalities. For me, like in the case of Carson McCullers, these flaws in execution may be the very things that convinced me of the sincerity of the feelings described, and the idiom flavored prose more expressive and authentic than later, more polished books (I'm thinking of Home , the only Morrison book I've read before this one).

The main theme, that of self-esteem, identity and prejudice, is as relevant today as it was in 1941 (when the action is placed) or in 1965 (when the book was first published). Only last week I've read in the news about a shameful Fox News debacle on the colour of Father Christmas (and of Jesus) skin. Why can't we have a black Santa? Why would it be considered ugly? an abomination? The standards of beauty imposed by fashion magazines and MTV shows may be more inclusive today in terms of skin colour, but they remain as radical and as dangerous for children and teenagers who are not tall, skinny, 'blue eyed'. Don't even start me on Miley Cyrus as a role model ...

Back to Pecola Breedlove: a little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. . The whole world is telling her she is ugly, worthless, pityful, and Pecola is not strong enough to contradict it and to fight for herself. It is the artist role to be her advocate, to feel her pain, her despair, and to shout it out for all to hear : ... there are some who collapse, silently, anonimously, with no voice to express or acknowledge it. They are invisible. The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has 'legs', so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed. says Morrison in the foreword. I have seen this credo of the artist as the burning, bleeding conscience of his/her generation before (Samuel R Delany comes to mind) but rarely with such intensity and clarity as in the case of Toni Morrison.

The story of Pecola reads more like a parable than a reportage, with the outcome made clear right from the start, extensive use of metaphoric language and a fatalistic inevitability that harks back to the Greek tragedies. Most of the novel is told through the eyes of Frieda and Claudia, two black girls growing up in Larain, Ohio in 1941, witnessing the drama unfolding in the Breedlove family, fighting spirits both but yet too young to be able to do anything about their friend. They plant some flower seeds in the barren earth of their neighborhood (marigolds as a symbol for love and understanding?), but their good intentions amount to nothing:

Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too.
There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since 'why' is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in 'how'.

The following account is non-linear, broken in pieces, jumping back and forth in the timeline and moving around to other locations, passed through from one character to another in an almost haphazard manner, yet coming round by the finish line to Pecole and the marigolds refusing to bloom. Many factors contribute to the little girl's downfall, yet the lion's share of blame should probably be placed firmly at her parents door: Pauline and Cholly Breedlove have a disfunctional relationship that hurts their children more than their own calloused and already defeated souls. Polly takes refuge in the fantasy world of cinema and believes her children should conform to the burgeois standards of the white class:

Into her son she beat a loud desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life.

Cholly is a drunkard who keeps everything inside, unable to express himself other than though violence, regularly beating his wife and terorizing the children. He pities his daughter, but the way he chooses to manifest his emotion is more than horrible. Another abuser is a certain Whitcomb, an Anglophile mullato con man and a pervert who poses as a priest and a dream interpreter. Pecola finds more understanding and kindness in the rooms of destitute whores living in the apartment above than in her own family. What is interesting about all the adults in the story is that behind all their despicable actions, they are not actually corrupted in their own eyes. Pauline was at one time happy in her house chores and even in her passion for Cholly. Cholly was once a free spirit, a fighter and a tender husband. Whitcomb believes he is doing a service to the community, even to the underage girls he fondles. They all find some way to rationalize their failures. The autor goes to great lengths to show their human frailty instead of condemning them outright, leaving the task of moral judgement on the shoulders of the reader: Have I looked down instinctively on someone on account of their race (Romanian Gypsies are quite horribly treated today both in Romania and in Europe)? Have I judged people hastily, without trying to walk some miles in their shoes? Maybe. Will I do it again, after reading this book? Probably: the feelings of euphoria and goodwill tend to evaporate in time under the pressure of mundane preoccupations. But I hope some kernel of truth will remain, and who knows, maybe some marigolds will bloom in my own garden.

My final quote is I believe an illustration of the fact that we do not need to be perfect, we need only to make an effort and to keep learning about the world and the people around us, no matter how old we are in years:

Love is never better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye.

Let us love wisely, for once!
Thank you, Mrs. Morrison for the remainder.

Achingly beautiful and unbelievably bleak. Heavy-handed (by design, I think). In perfect control of its spiraling, recursive structure. Charged. Violent. Delicate. Astonishing to think that this is a book assigned in schools. What would I have made of it at 15?

I wonder who the Mexican Toni Morrison is. Her work is very hard to peg down. It remains a wondrous feat to analyze or attempt to define whatever masterpiece of hers you are reading at the time. Alas, Rest In Power...

A definitive stylist, a poet, Morrison is brilliant. There is one scene deeply ingrained somewhere in the schism that is this beautiful book which will stay with me forever. It involves the main character, a little impressionable girl of color-- & it is through her deep, deplorable suffering that we witness the apathy of mankind. This is not just a tale of whites versus blacks. Here, African Americans condemn themselves, as people turn against their own, & in portraits as striking as this one the effect feels like dynamite.

4 stars.

"Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes."

This book is about a little girl—Pecola—who everyone, including herself, believed was ugly. Why? Because her skin wasn’t white, her hair wasn’t blond. Morrison shows us just how sick humans can be, how we create and reinforce ideas of superiority, tied to skin color, wealth, or whatever twisted beliefs people hold. And what’s horrifying is that this story isn't frozen in time, it still rings true today.

I’m Asian. I know exactly how real these so-called beauty standards are. My skin is brown, my nose is flat, and people have told me my whole life that this isn’t “beautiful.” I believed it, too. When I was a teenager, I tried every product that promised to whiten my skin, just to feel worthy. And I know I'm not alone. We Asians are obsessed with whitening products, the same way the westerners are obsessed with tanning. It’s like there’s this unspoken, universal rulebook that dictates who’s seen as beautiful, who’s treated with respect, who’s considered worthy, and we follow it, consciously or not. It’s not just about looks either; it’s this whole standard protocol of how people treat you based on whether you’re rich or poor, beautiful or plain. It’s disturbing.

"The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us."

Does that hit hard?

As for this book…how do I feel? I had no clue what I was getting into, I just dove right in without reading the blurb. And what the actual hell did I just read? This story is disturbing, brutal, relentless. Every adult in here is messed up beyond words. Not a single one is decent.

And that “letter to God” from Soaphead? I swear, I gagged. My skin crawled just reading it. The self-righteousness, the twisted way he frames his sickness—it’s beyond disturbing. It’s just sick.

Pecola wasn’t just a character, she was a mirror, a brutal reminder of what society does to people who don’t fit its narrow standards. Pecola’s destruction wasn’t some personal tragedy; it was society’s doing, driven by beauty standards, racism, and classism. She wanted blue eyes, the thing she believed would make her lovable and worthy, because that’s what society taught her, that her own features were unworthy, that she was less-than.

And the painful truth? There are still so many Pecolas in the world. So many people crushed by impossible standards, believing they’re not enough because of something as arbitrary as skin tone, features, or money. Pecola’s story is gut-wrenching because it’s real. Every time someone feels they have to change themselves to be accepted or “beautiful,” we’re creating another Pecola, feeding into that same cycle.

Then there’s Claudia and Frieda. These girls are the only reason I could even bear it all. They’re fragile and hurt, but still, they’re the last shreds of hope, the only glimmer of humanity left. Without them, this book would be pure darkness. They make you believe, just for a moment, that there’s still something good left in this world, even when everything else seems lost.