the bluest eye

Title: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Genre: Multicultural

Annotation: In the midst of racial hatred and abuse, an African-American girl longs to possess the beauty she desires and wipe away the ugliness that surrounds her in 1940's Ohio.

Review: Pecola Breedlove wants nothing more than to have blue eyes, the blues eyes one's ever seen. Who can blame her? The pretty white girls all have pretty blue eyes and pretty blond hair. In a place where black is not beautiful, Pecola suffers the degradation of her peers and turns into her own shroud of loneliness and despair. Pecola's family (if it can dare be called that) is wrought with dysfunction. Her mother has a loathing for her daughter and son, and Pecola's father is an abusive alcoholic who is controlled by his bestial passions. After being raped by her father, Pecola becomes pregnant and goes to live with Claudia (one of the story's narrators), but nothing is able to save the young girl from her own madness. The Bluest Eye paints a portrait of grasping for the unreachable, only to collapse within the hollowness of longing.

The Bluest Eye reveals a myriad of little horrors that make this book somewhat hard to read. The brutality of rape, the taboos of pedophilia & incest, the demoralizing nature of racism - all of these things could easily overwhelm any reader. The elegance of Morrison's story lies in how human truths well to the surface above the muck and mire of these said iniquities. The Bluest Eye tells more than just how a young girl unravels after being impregnated by her own father. Everybody has a piece of Pecola within them. We all yearn to belong, to find beauty in what others deem to be broken and ruined. The essence of human struggle can be summed up in our need accept ourselves and be excepted by others, for we are social animals to say the least. The block Pecola faces is society itself. Her culture had standards she could not reach, and without a support system to uplift her, Pecola fails to find the personhood she requires. The tragedy of her story is not in how she fails, but in how her family and community fail her.

This story could be argued as not suitable for adolescent readership, but I would reason that the harsh realities of life are never pleasant and do not change as young adults grow older. Educators and other adults need to provide the stories that will prepare teens to handle the unbecoming qualities society possesses. The Bluest Eye well earns the praise it receives.