Head full of pretty hair, but Lord was she ugly” (Morrison, 126).Īs Pecola grows up, she longs for blue eyes, a yearning for whiteness, which symbolizes beauty and worth. She characterizes Pecola as a “right smart baby” who knew “right off what to do. In the novel, she reflects back to the moment that Pecola was born and was breastfeeding her. Ideas that her blackness is marked by ugliness and worthlessness get reproduced to her daughter, from the moment that Pecola war born. Her dysfunctional and violent relationship with her husband Cholly reaffirm her belief that she is ugly and that romantic love is reserved for those who are beautiful and valued in society. Pecola’s mother, Pauline, feels isolated and disconnected from her community. This is witnessed very vividly in Pecola’s very household. Morrison presents her central character as the inevitable target of Lorain’s deeply ingrained and multilayered racism, of a community that has absorbs and now replicates destructive dominant cultural myths about beauty and value. While Pecola is the protagonist of the novel, this story is told through the eyes of Claudia MacTeer, a nine year old child whose family takes in Pecola after Pecola’s father, Cholly, burns down their home.
#The bluest eye full text series
Set in Lorain, Ohio during the 1930s, this book explores the series of abuses that the main character Pecola Breedlove, an eleven year old child, is subjected to, which includes living in harsh poverty, moving from one home to another as a foster child, experiencing rape by her own father, and being ridiculed at school for being an “ugly schoolgirl”. While many texts in American literature engage with the legacy of slavery and the years of deeply-imbedded racism that followed, Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye focuses specifically on the lingering effects through commentary on internalized racism and black self-hatred.
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