The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison Vintage; New Ed edition (4 Mar. 1999)

The Bluest Eye, first novel by Toni Morrison, published in 1970. This tragic study of a black adolescent girl’s struggle to achieve white ideals of beauty and her consequent descent into madness was acclaimed as an eloquent indictment of some of the more subtle forms of racism in American society. Pecola Breedlove longs to have “the bluest eye” and thus to be acceptable to her family, schoolmates, and neighbours, all of whom have convinced her that she is ugly.

The novel suggests that the categories of gender, race, and economics are enmeshed in determining the fate of the 11-year-old tragic heroine. Pecola’s obsessive desire to have the bluest eyes is a symptom of the way that the black female body has become dominated by white masculine culture. Morrison offers a typically powerful critique of the way that black subjectivity continues to be repressed in a commodity culture. The complex temporal structure of the novel and the restless changes in point of view are in part an attempt to imagine a fluid model of subjectivity that can offer some kind of resistance to a dominant white culture. The adolescent black sisters who relate the narrative, Claudia and Freda MacTeer, offer a contrast to the oppressed Breedlove family in that here they exercise both agency and authority.