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The Bluest Eye Review

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The Bluest Eye Overview

The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.

The Bluest Eye Specifications

Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.

There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus

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Customer Reviews

Dissapointed - NY Dululu -
I heard so much about this book, but I was dissapointed after reading it. I think the discriptions were just too much. Some characters that she wrote so much about had no significant role in the story. And I don't like the idea that the book was classified as YA novel. The sexual content was too explicit and the use of dirty language was a little too much for young adult. This is just a one star novel.

Propelled by a resentment towards whites - Rune Rindel Hansen - Copenhagen, Denmark
This is another quite boring book from Toni Morrison. I mean I acknowledge that Toni Morrison is a powerfull individual who has a remarkable no-nonsense look at life, but most of her books just don't really appeal to me. It seems like a substantial part of Toni Morrisons authorship is propelled by a deepfelt resentment towards white people, and she directly implies that black peoples social problems are a result of white discrimination and slavery. Hm... I just made a brief search on the internet and I found this source which is backed up by statistic facts: "Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery." (www.colorofcrime.com). If this is true, which it appears to be, is it then any wonder that you are a bit more careful when you walk through a coloured neighborhood, than when you walk through a white neighborhood? I believe that white discrimination towards blacks is responsible for some of the problems, but I also think that the major reason for the problems is the cultural origin. Afro-Americans have part of their origin in Africa, and the cultural origin of whites is Europe. When you look at how the two continents have developed it seems obvious that there is a remarkable difference! Hopefully this difference will get smaller in the progress of time!

Great Transaction - SKC - Boston, MA
Novel arrived just as described by seller and prior to expected arrival date. Very happy with transaction.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Nov 01, 2010 21:45:05

Books Reference

Monday, November 1, 2010