Book: The Bluest Eye
Author: Toni Morrison
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Completed this for the Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt #16 (A book less than 260 pages).
Ohio in the 1940s.
This is the story of the lives of a poor Black family – Cholly, Pauline, and their children, Sammy and Pecola.
Pecola – who is considered ugly – grows enamoured by the idea of having blue eyes like the white girls at her school.
This is not an easy story to read. It is told in a series of vignettes and a patchwork of passages about the various characters, including the main narrator, Claudia.
Claudia and her sister Frieda are children who know Pecola, and seeing the situations as they unfold through their point of view – both the good and the bad- makes the experience of absorbing Pecola’s story extremely powerful.
It is, at its core, about beauty – especially through the lens of race.
In a society where whiteness was so prized as beautiful, how could someone like Pecola be beautiful?
In her Afterword, Morrison writes:
“The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalisation of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.”
Beauty, of course, is inextricably linked to gender and the focus on the woman’s body as beautiful or ugly, always by external parties.
Morrison is also careful not to villainise the people who are responsible for what happens to Pecola.
Ultimately, it is a haunting story. It is just 204 pages long, but it is not a fast read. You’ll want to sit with this heaviness for a while.
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