Bluest Eye

“The role of the novelist is to ask questions and explore issues about our society.” Discuss.

Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye” explores many issues within the multicultural society of America in the 1940s. The novel is set in 1941, Lorain, Ohio, Morrison’s place of birth. The place is decribed as a “melting pot” of cultures where Black people were drawn from the South for “greater opportunities” in the North. Within this society Morrison explores the issues of racism and the racial self-hatred and loathing that many Blacks felt as a result of living in a society which regarded white standards of beauty and living as all-important.

Being exposed to white American culture, Black people at this time lost the idea of their own unique beauty вЂ" turning to the stereotypical beauty deemed by society as perfect and depicted in its film, television, billboards and magazines. Toni Morrison stated in an interview that the image of physical beauty was the most damaging effect of the white culture on Black Americans.

This damaging effect is illustrated through the character of Pecola Breedlove who was modelled on a black child from Morrison’s school days who wanted blue eyes. Pecola in the novel is a construct of that child вЂ" “Every night without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.” Pecola believes that by having blue eyes (a symbol of white beauty) nothing bad would happen to her, or around her: “Why look at pretty-eyed Pecola, we musn’t do anything in front of those pretty eyes.”

Throughout her life, Pecola had been treated as an outcast due to her “ugliness” that “she put on so to speak”. Pecola and her family were miserable because they did not live up to the ideal middle class white family. The Breedloves ( a deeply ironical name) lived “in a storefront” because they were “poor and black, and they stayed there because they were ugly.”

And why did the Breedloves believe they were ugly? Pecola had experienced rejection and hatred at school and compared it to the love and admiration given to Maureen Peel who “enchanted the entire school” because she was so like a white child: “a high yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropesвЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ. Maureen had money, a nice house, nice lunches, nice clothes and authority. The “boys seemed reluctant to continue under her springtime eyes” and the black girls seemed to worship her too вЂ" “their eyes genuflected under sliding lids.”

Her mother Pauline Breedlove frequented the cinema and began to blur the line between fiction and reality, believing that the relationship between the screen stars Jean Harlow and Clark Gable was the ideal for her to live up to. She saw perfection on “every movie, every billboard, every glance.” When she returned home to the world of reality she discovered that her family was not perfect and was never going to be. Like Pecola praying for blue eyes, Pauline attempted to distance herself from her poor black family and devoted herself, as a black mammy, to the white Fisher family with their “little pink and white girl”. The “sky was always blue” where they lived, and “power, praise and luxury” were hers. Her own family became “musings, afterthoughts one has before sleep.”

The character of Cholly Breedlove is also used by Morrison to convey a sense of “ugliness”, self-loathing and helplessness experienced by blacks at this time in society. He was “small, black and helpless.” As a child, Cholly learn’t white superiority when he was caught by white men having sex with a black girl and forced to continue the act. The authority the white men (coveted by Cholly himself) led him not to blame them for the ordeal, but the girl and his own blackness.

Claudia McTeer, who tells Pecola’s story, on the other hand, is not destroyed by the white ideals of beauty, but rather angered and confused. Unlike many children, Claudia hated Shirley Temple because she had danced with the black dancer Mr Bojangles “my uncle, my daddy.” She “destroyed