The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Critique

Module 2: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Critique

1.         Chloe Anthony Wofford, who we know as Toni Morrison, was the second oldest out of her four siblings. She was born into a working-class family in 1913 in Lorain, Ohio. Her father mainly held an occupation as a welder, but he also took on several other jobs in order to support the family, and her mother was a domestic worker. Toni credits the both of her parents for introducing a love of the arts in her as a young girl.

Because she grew up in an integrated area, she was not fully aware of racial divides until later. She was actually quite superior compared to her class mates when she began school. Although she was the only Black student, she was the only one who could already read. She was very dedicated to her studies throughout her schooling years and graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949. She decided to continue her education at Howard and majored in English. Post-graduation, she completed her MA at Cornell. After her completion, she began teaching English at Texas Southern University.

In 1957, she returned to Howard to teach English where she met her husband, Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. Following her marriage in 1958 they had their first child. After his birth, she focused on working on her first novel, which began as a short story.

After school, she began working in New York as a textbook publisher. Later she took a position as an editor at Random House. Morrison had eventually left Howard and moved back home with her son due to her husband moving back to Jamaica.

In 1970, Morrison published her first novel called The Bluest Eye. Although the book received many positive reviews, it did not sell very well. Morrison decided to continue to explore the experience of African Americans through her work in many different forms and eras through her work, which helped her produce many of her next novels. Her Pulitzer award winning novel, Beloved, won many literary awards and was eventually turned into a film. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to ever be awarded one. She produced a novel the following year called Jazz.

After, she became a professor at Princeton in 1989 and continued to produce literature. At her time in Princeton, Morrison developed a workshop specialized for writers and performers to create original works.

At her time in Princeton, Morrison developed a workshop specialized for writers and performers to create original works. She continued to write works while doing this, such as Paradise, which was published in 1998.

Toni branched out and began to create literature for children, such as lyrics and play writes. She worked with her son to create The Big Box, The Book of Mean People, The Ant or Grasshopper?, Little Cloud and Lady Wind, Dreaming Emmett, and “Four Songs”. She then created her next novel, “Love”, in 2003. A critic from Publisher’s Weekly deemed it as a “gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed.”

She later announced her retirement from Princeton three years after the book. Beloved was still a praised novel and was noted as the best novel of the past 25 years by New York Times Book Review. She began exploring different themes and art forms, which brought upon the creation of the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American Opera that revolved around the theme of a woman’s experiences of slavery. The work was then put into motion and was performed at the New York City Opera for the very first time in 2007.

She began to explore different time periods and published A Mercy, a story revolving around colonial America and was noticed by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of the year. Along with this work, she began to write many non-fiction writings and published it as a collection called What Moves at the Margin in 2008.

She spoke out about free speech and censorship in late 2009 when one of her books were banned at a Michigan high school. She was part of the launch of the Free Speech Leadership Council and spoke on fighting censorship. She thought it was a nightmare to not be able to see new literature, not being able to watch new films and be an audience to any other type of art because of censorship.

Today, Morrison is in her 80s. She published a book called Home in 2012, a story that took place in the post-Korean War era. She also worked on an opera with Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traore that year inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello. It’s first debut was in London in 2012. While she was working on these pieces, Toni lost her son in 2010. Her latest work was published in 2015, called God Help the Child. 

2.         The contrast that is made obvious by creating the Dick and Jane reading primer is between in the norms of both families in correspondence with society’s standards. It contrasts sharply with the Black family’s experience, thus creating an environment where white superiority is obvious.

Then they go along to a narrative form of writing and take away these good things that exist in a white family and kind of flips it around, showing the depressing situation the other experiences.

I think it was a very powerful way to show the two different situations and really helps readers see the contrast between the two different situations. The words running together causes anxiety and attacks in my opinion, just as Percola experiences in her search of beauty. The African-American characters seem to internalize the white word as a world that is perfect, while seeing their own as horrid, and in this era it seemed like it was just that. This primer illustrated that.

3.        The concept of beauty is always created by society, and this concept of “beauty” can really determine how your life is. Especially in Percola’s case, you can see how beauty standards in that era affected her and her familial situation.

Beauty is subjective because not everyone sees beauty as the same thing. Some may find things others find ugly as beautiful in a physical sense, and some may not look at the physical aspect but rather the inner beauty as a person to determine their beauty. The parameters of beauty vary depending on where you are and who you are. For example, in America a lot of people desire to be tan, where in my country and a lot of other Asian countries, people desire to be lighter. Of course, beauty standards will change continuously throughout time and changes, which is why our style of clothing always is changing throughout different decades. Of course, most of us might not see early 2000s clothing as appealing but back then it was what everyone thought looked appealing. Looking skinny and slim used to be popular but the hourglass figure is now popular. Beauty standards are constantly changing as time goes.