Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye because “she had a deep need for ‘books that [she] had wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so [she] wrote them’” (source).

Pecola Breedlove is one of the main characters in the novel. She is a young black girl who is deemed ugly by American society. She idolizes Shirley Temple for her blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. Pecola believes that if she only had blue eyes, people would love her. She is fragile and seems very timid at the beginning of the story. The harshness of American society destroys her throughout the novel, and by the end she is driven mad and carries out a conversation with a hallucination. All she can think and talk about are the blue eyes she imagines will make her loved.

Claudia MacTeer is the narrator of the story. She does not focus on the physical love that people can see. She searches for the beauty on the inside of people, symbolized by the fair skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed doll she tears apart, trying to find the beauty inside. She is disappointed by the emptiness she finds. She and her sister, Frieda, befriend Pecola. They feel sorry for Pecola and defend her throughout the novel.

The Bluest Eye is the epitome of the stereotypes that drive this world. It seems that everyone strives for beauty and cleanliness. The outside appearance of all things – objects, animals and people – drive societal norms. Lacking beauty automatically degrades your status and people look for other people or things that are uglier than themselves to increase their own status and make them feel better. Although Ms. Morrison wrote this book to tell the story of black women, it could open the eyes of all races and ethnicities to a world dominated by the image of the ideal American (white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes). Claudia shows us that we need to search for the qualities inside a person to find their true character. The Bluest Eye is definitely worth reading.

“When Claudia says that Pecola’s father dropped his seeds ‘in his own plot of black dirt,’ she exposes the very heart of Pecola’s anguish. To the white world, Pecola is a ‘plot of black dirt,’ inferior because she is black. The figure of speech is darkly ironic, for black dirt is usually the richest of all, but the figurative ‘black dirt’ of Pecola yields nothing” (source).
This quote reveals that blackness in the world is equated with ugliness and inferiority. Pecola is black and ugly and she is deemed so by herself, and both the white and black communities. Pecola symbolizes the black community’s self-hatred, belief in their own ugliness and human suffering. She strives to be pretty and loved through her desire for blue eyes, but her belief in her blue eyes at the end of the novel and the racism she suffers drives her to madness.