Introduction

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) centers the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove who prays for her eyes to become blue so that she will be as beautiful and loved as blond, blue-eyed children in America. The Bluest Eye is set in 1941 Lorain, Ohio–Toni Morrison’s hometown. During this time, the nation was grappling with Jim Crow Laws and Segregation, The Great Migration, and the aftermath of the Great Depression. Told through Claudia MacTeer, the daughter of Pecola’s temporary foster parents, the novel is a critical examination of beauty standards, race, and internalized oppression.

Understanding the novel’s historical context–both the setting of the story as well as the time period in which this work was produced–is critical in understanding the book’s central themes and cultural commentary of the African American community at large. The 1960s in America gave rise to a reclamation of beauty, particularly in Black communities throughout the United States. The Civil Rights Movement encouraged unapologetic racial pride. When Morrison began writing the book, she began thinking heavily about the internalization of inferiority that trickled all the way down to young girls like those that were characterized in The Bluest Eye.

In 1970, the year Toni Morrison published The Bluest Eye, society was transitioning from the Black Arts and Black Power movements that brought visibility to Black women’s narratives. This period, however, was also a Black girl renaissance with representations that included voices that had not been heard in a concentrated way since the late nineteenth century. The Bluest Eye (1970) represents a well-known narrative of Black girlhood with a focus on the plight of Pecola Breedlove, who was raped and impregnated by her father and finds girlhood solace and a home (and magically, “blue” eyes) with the MacTeer family.

Pecola Breedlove is described as inhabiting space “outdoors,” having been placed in the MacTeer home after her father’s physical abuse of her mother and sexual abuse of her leaves her family without a stable environment.  As Pecola stays in the MacTeer household, Claudia’s narration of Pecola places her in a more supportive domestic environment, from Frieda MacTeer helping Pecola when her menstrual cycle begins to the girls being part of her school network as well (along with Maureen Peal, who becomes a source of sore response when Claudia becomes jealous of Maureen buying Pecola ice cream).  After wishing for (and believing she gets) blue eyes, Pecola is ultimately left further outside of social expectations of redemption. 

Movement, however, is redemptive in this text. In the lives of the women in The Bluest Eye, girlhood migrates from southern spaces to pervade every inch of the text and across class spaces as well.  Toni Morrison’s migratory narratives of Black girlhood to Lorain, Ohio, where Pecola wishes for blue eyes (a trait that exceeds the normal appearance or identification of Black girlhood in order to change what she is able to see).

Even upper- middle-class women such as Junior’s mother Geraldine (whose cat Junior throws violently to frighten Pecola) move from Aiken and Mobile to Ohio and also represent travel from rigid to fluid, seemingly more beautiful spaces. Pecola’s dream for blue eyes, the bluest eyes, in front of which people won’t do “ugly things,” is also represented as excessive, as the ability to make and realize her own dream is her only escape from the fixedness of poverty and abuse. The magic of the eyes is transformative for her even if only she believes that she has received them. The arguments that these examples and these texts make in a larger canon of Black girlhood are that girlhood spaces, and specifically dreams and desires realized within them, represent a different model of being. Pecola’s eyes are an example of the aesthetics Black girls (and women) search for that appear to make the world more beautiful even when it is the same behind the illusion.  

We look to texts like The Bluest Eye to mark both when girlhood was arrested and failed in addition to liberatory potential to move through trauma. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison reaches into her own childhood in order to find a point of origin for Pecola’s desire for beauty, one rooted in the ugliness she sees in her daily life.  Pecola, the character, does not have a chance for existence as she is outcast from the community.

In terms of The Bluest Eye’s narrative structure, the text is fragmented into four seasons (fall, winter, spring, and summer). Most chapters are titled using extracted phrases from the “Dick and Jane” primer textbook (which appears in the novel’s opening prologue). This serves as a figurative and literal contrast and encourages the reader to compare two American realities simultaneously. An idealized white family juxtaposes Pecola’s reality. The novel is written in a non-linear structure, often switching points of view and shifting perspectives. From Claudia and Freeda MacTeer’s perspective to a third-person omniscient narrator, the reader sees the story unfold from a child’s eyes. Through an omniscient narrator, the reader also interrogates the layers of individual consciousness.

While the novel is grounded in the historical context of 1940s Lorain as well as 1960s America, the themes are very much still present in today’s cultural landscape. Morrison’s work is a timeless and universal exploration of race, gender, sexual violence, and coming of age.

We can look at Black (em)powered literature not as a beginning, but as a renaissance of sorts of how African American women authors look to girlhood to think about self-construction, images, and ideals. These novels and memoirs of Black Power written by women writers (which also go back to their childhoods) represent both cultural representations and fictional production during the 1960s to ultimately realize how moments of tragedy and resistance were presented by the media, including the bombing of the 16^th St. Baptist church, Birmingham, Alabama, Sept. 15, 1963, which took the lives of four Black girls and injured an additional 22 present in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” The narratives provide social analysis of the Civil Rights Movement through the Black Power (and its cultural component, Black Arts) Movements and feature prominent representations of Black childhood, with a specific focus on what is passed down to Black children, and specifically Black girls, about the world around them through media.