The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison
Given Name: Chloe Anthony Wofford
Also known as: Chloe Anthony Morrison
Born: February 18, 1931; Lorain, Ohio
Gender: Female
National Identity: United States
Cultural Identity: African American
Language: English

Quick Reference
First published: 1970
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Bildungsroman
Time of work: 1941
Locale: Lorain, Ohio

Source: Masterplots II: African American Literature, Revised Edition; December 2008, p1-4
Article Author: Zlogar, Laura Weiss; Includes bibliography

Locale: Ohio; United States; North America

Literary Genres/Subgenres: Bildungsroman; Long fiction; Novel; Psychological fiction; Social
realism
Subject Terms:
1940's

Adolescence North America or North Americans

African Americans Obsession
Alcoholism or alcoholics Ohio
Beauty Poverty or poor people
Child abuse Pregnancy
Domestic violence Race
Emotions Racism
Family or family life Rape
Girls Religion
Incest Sex or sexuality
Jealousy, envy, or resentment Substance abuse
Mental illness United States or Americans
Midwest
Principal Characters:

Claudia MacTeer, the nine-year-old protagonist and narrator, a strong but naïve child
Pecola Breedlove, an abused child brought up to accept white standards of beauty and success
Mrs. MacTeer, the stern but loving mother of the MacTeer family
Pauline (Polly) Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, a maid and frustrated artist, who abuses her children
Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s abusive father
Geraldine, the mother of Pecola’s hateful classmate Junior
Soaphead Church, a strange, meticulous old man who is sexually attracted to young girls

The Novel

The Bluest Eye opens and closes with Claudia MacTeer’s reflection on the meaning and significance
of a little girl’s suffering and her community’s responsibility and obligation to her. Using marigold
seeds as a metaphor for the affection that might have allowed her abused friend Pecola Breedlove to
thrive, Claudia realizes that the failure of her seeds to sprout demonstrates that the soil of her
community “is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will
not bear.” While Claudia MacTeer withstands that world’s harshness through the strength and love of
her family, a fragile child such as Pecola has no chance. 

Dark-skinned Claudia values herself more than the world does. Although kindly relatives and parents
present her with fine white baby dolls for her to love and mother, she sees them only as something
unlike herself, something to dismember, “to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find
the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.” Frighteningly, such
destructiveness carries over to Claudia’s perception of real little white girls such as film star Shirley
Temple; Claudia also resents her light-skinned African American classmate Maureen Peal, who
possesses not only matching skirts and kneesocks, muffs to warm her hands, and beautiful, long,
“good” hair, but also something that draws the attention of teachers and prevents the playground
harassment of boys. In spite of all, Claudia remarks, “Guileless and without vanity, we were still in
love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released
to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.” That
“Thing,” as Claudia calls it, that makes Shirley and Maureen and white baby dolls desirable and
darker-skinned children not, the thing to which Claudia cannot assign a name, is racism.

Pecola, on the other hand, bears her “ugliness” like a cross. Recalling Pecola’s birth, her mother
Polly thinks, “I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.” Polly
Breedlove prefers her white employer’s little girl, with her perfect curls and pretty dresses, to her
own daughter. Never having felt loved and valued, Pecola wonders: “How do grown-ups act when
they love each other?” Her only clues are the choking sounds that emerge from her parents’ bed
when they make love. When Maureen taunts Pecola, Claudia notes that her friend “seemed to fold
into herself, like a pleated wing.” Junior, another hateful child, invites Pecola into his house after
noting that “nobody ever played with her. Probably, he thought, because she was ugly.” Such
treatment makes her ripe for Junior’s abuse; he throws his family’s cat against the wall and blames
the incident on Pecola, which leads Junior’s mother to shout at the hapless girl, “You nasty little
black bitch. Get out of my house.” Pecola cannot bear that much pain and rejection. Soaphead
Church, seizing the occasion to use Pecola to poison his landlady’s offensive, mangy dog, wishes he
could really perform the miracles he promises, especially for this “little black girl who wanted to rise
up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” Instead, her vulnerability allows
Soaphead to indulge in his perverted sexual fantasies and gives Cholly the opportunity to rape his
own daughter. Pecola becomes pregnant as a result, but the baby dies.

Living alone with her mother on the edge of town, Pecola sinks into madness following the death of
her baby. Claudia and her older sister Frieda feel sorry for Pecola and for her baby, because no one
else in the community seems to care. Claudia remarks that “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.” Frieda and Claudia resolve to give the money they had saved to buy a bicycle to the
baby, but it does not survive. Pecola reminds the community of its failure, the emblem of “all the
waste and beauty of the world — which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped
on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to all
of us.” Claudia realizes, however, that the blame for Pecola’s suffering cannot be limited to a few
black people in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941. “It was the fault of the earth, the land, and town,” she says.
Pecola’s pain is rooted in white America’s racism, and in African American self-hatred.

The Characters

The naïvete with which Claudia experiences the world allows readers a rare glimpse into the mind of
a young African American girl coming of age. Much surprises her. When Pecola comes to stay with
the MacTeers temporarily because Cholly has set his family’s house on fire, Claudia cannot believe
that a father could be so irresponsible as to put his own family outdoors: “Outdoors, we knew, was
the real terror of life. . . . There is a difference between being put out and being put out-doors. If you
are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.” During her stay,
Pecola begins to menstruate. Claudia believes that such bleeding must be fatal, until her hardly more
informed sister explains that it simply means that Pecola is now able to have babies. That night,
Claudia feels that “lying next to a real person who was really ministratin’ was somehow sacred.” She
is surprised again when an adult friend of the family inappropriately touches Frieda, and she
concludes that her sister must now be “ruined,” the word applied to the three neighborhood
prostitutes. The girls naturally reason that Frieda will either be fat like the one or thin like the other
and can be cured only by whiskey. Claudia also comes to realize how important color is in the larger
world — through white baby dolls, Shirley Temple, and Maureen Peal, through Mrs. Breedlove’s
greater concern for a white girl than for her own child Pecola when a hot blueberry cobbler falls to
the floor, splattering both. Only the perfect child is comforted; Pecola is scolded and sent away.
Claudia reaches great maturity for the age of nine when she realizes that no one cares about Pecola or
her baby, and that no one cares for dark-skinned children in general.

Claudia’s strength is contrasted to Pecola’s weakness. Pecola has been given none of the tools with
which to fight the sense of worthlessness from which she suffers daily. No loving parents, no close
playmates, not even a house to call her own — only a storefront with sheets strung across the large
interior to separate one person from another. Ignored by shopkeepers, scorned by classmates and
teachers, used by Soaphead Church, Pecola wants only to vanish. She cannot fight her circumstances;
she only wants to escape them.

The narratives of Pauline and Cholly Breedlove help readers at least to understand their characters,
even if it is difficult to empathize with them. Pauline is shown first as a young woman craving
acceptance and love from her family and, when that is not possible, from Cholly. In the integrated
North, acceptance comes only through resemblance to white people. When her rotten tooth
undermines her attempt to fashion herself to white standards of beauty, and when her children look
nothing like Hollywood’s lovable white children, Pauline succumbs to her own self-hatred and
“ugliness,” which expresses itself in self-righteous judgment of her husband and rejection of her
children. Cholly’s rape of his own daughter cannot be excused, but Morrison’s presentation helps
readers understand him. A violent, drunken, and abusive man, Cholly has little chance to succeed,
given the events of his childhood. Rejected by both parents, orphaned by the death of his loving Aunt
Jimmy, and humiliated by white men during his first sexual experience, Cholly displaces his anger
and humiliation upon all African American women, including his wife and daughter. With no father
figure to emulate, Cholly mistakes sex for love. Making “love” to Pauline eventually comes to mean
his noise, her silence, and mutual anger. When he sees Pecola washing dishes in the kitchen and
scratching the back of her leg with her foot, a gesture that reminds him of the young Pauline, Cholly
feels sorry for his daughter and rapes her, showing her affection in the only way he knows — through
sex.

The wholly unsympathetic behaviors of Geraldine and of Soaphead Church are painted against a
backdrop of the past, also creating understanding, if not sympathy. Both are light-skinned people, a
fact that allows them to dissociate themselves from their African roots, their sexuality, and their true
natures. What results is an unfeeling woman who wishes sexual organs were located somewhere
more convenient (such as the palm of the hand) so that bodies would not have to touch during
intercourse, and a latent homosexual whose hygienic meticulousness leads him to pedophilia.

Themes and Meanings

Toni Morrison has stated, “I was interested in reading a kind of book that I had never read before. I
didn’t know if such a book existed, but I had just never read it in 1964 when I started writing The
Bluest Eye. ” Elsewhere, she has observed, “I thought in The Bluest Eye, that I was writing about
beauty, miracles, and self-images, about the way in which people can hurt each other, about whether
or not one is beautiful.” In this novel, Morrison writes of the forces that thwart a black female child’s
coming of age in America while at the same time she suggests the qualities that permit the strong to
survive.

White standards of beauty destroy first Pauline Breedlove and then her daughter, cause even a strong
child such as Claudia to question her own worth, and result in Geraldine’s denial of her own
sensuality and passion. While Claudia will survive such influences (which are counteracted by the
loving strength of her family), others, such as Mrs. Breedlove, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church, are
perverted by such pressures, and some, like Pecola, succumb to mad fantasies.

Morrison shows how the pressures created by white-defined values as reflected in American popular
culture and in America as a whole pervert the relationships within African American families as well
as among individuals in the black community. In a 1978 interview, Morrison explained that Cholly
“might love [Pecola] in the worst of all possible ways because he can’t do this and he can’t do that.
He can’t do it normally, healthily, and so on. So it might end up in [the rape].” Geraldine shows more
affection for her cat than for her son, and no one loves Pecola’s black baby. The three neighborhood
prostitutes use sex to profit from and to humiliate men. Soaphead Church, after being rejected by his
wife years before, desires people’s things more than relationships with actual adults. Because he sees
children, especially girls, as clean, manipulable, and safe, they are the only ones with whom he will
relate.

The division of the novel into sections that reflect the seasons — from autumn to the following
summer — suggests maturation as another important theme. Claudia’s maturation process contrasts
with Pecola’s. Claudia’s ninth year provides her with knowledge of the larger world that includes
isolation, rejection, pain, and guilt. Her experiences bring her to an acceptance of responsibility, not
only for herself but for others in her community as well. This same year in Pecola’s life, though, only
pushes her to the margins of society and sanity. Her journey takes her ever inward, since too much
pain lies in the external world for one eleven-year-old girl to bear.

Morrison has stated that “all of the books I have written deal with characters placed deliberately
under enormous duress in order to see of what they are made.” The stuff of Claudia’s character
endures; Pecola’s is destroyed.

Critical Context

The Bluest Eye fits into a tradition of African American female coming-of-age novels, though
Morrison was unaware of any such books at the time of her novel’s composition. Like Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones
(1959), this novel provides readers with a clear picture of a black girl’s maturation from innocence to
experience.

When The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, The New York Times’ influential critic Haskel Frankel
declared it a success, and the novel has continued to win critical respect since its publication. By now
a standard text in use at many high schools and universities, The Bluest Eye provides readers an
uncompromising examination of race, color, gender, and sexuality in American culture.

Essay by: Laura Weiss Zlogar

Bibliography

Awkward, Michael. “Roadblocks and Relatives: Critical Revision in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” In
Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, compiled by Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Claims that
the novel is in part an intertextual rereading of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man (1952), “giving authentication and voice to specific types of black and feminine
experiences.”

Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” Updated ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary
Criticism, 2007. Collection of important and influential readings of Morrison’s novel by leading scholars
and critics. Bibliographic references and index.

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1983. Contains three essays examining several of Morrison’s works, including The
Bluest Eye.

Klotman, Phyllis R. “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye.” Black
American Literature Forum 13 (Winter, 1979): 123-125. Demonstrates how the Dick-and-Jane primer
passages interspersed through the book and the references to Shirley Temple serve as counterpoints to the
realities of black experience.

Mayberry, Susan Neal. Can’t I Love What I Criticize? The Masculine and Morrison. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2007. Includes a chapter on the construction of the white gaze and the representation of
African American masculinity in The Bluest Eye.

Miner, Madonne M. “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye.”
In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Margorie Pryse and Hortense
Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Sees parallels between the ancient myths of
Philomela and Persephone and Morrison’s exploration of rape, madness, and silence.

Rosenberg, Ruth. “Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature
Forum 21 (Winter, 1987): 435-445. Maintains that Morrison’s novel is unusual because it brings to the
foreground experience — being young, black, and female — that had always been in American society’s
background.

Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007. Collection of essays on Morrison’s work, including a chapter on The Bluest Eye and Sula, as well
as more general discussions of Morrison as author, teacher, and critic.

Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” Black American Literature Forum 16
(Spring, 1982): 34-42. Argues that the novel is a metaphor for the historical changes prompted by African
American migration to the North in the 1940’s.