The Bluest Eye

About The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's debut novel, published in 1970 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. It is set in Lorain, Ohio in 1941, narrated principally by Claudia MacTeer — a young Black girl who reconstructs the story of her classmate Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is eleven years old, desperately poor, and has absorbed from every direction the message that she is ugly, unwanted, and worthless. The novel's central tragedy is Pecola's wish for blue eyes — her conviction that blue eyes, the symbol of white beauty, would make her lovable and would make the people who hurt her unable to hurt her anymore.

The novel unfolds the entire architecture that produced Pecola's self-hatred: a racist society that defines beauty in white terms, an absent and violent father, a self-loathing mother who takes more care of the white family she works for than of her own children. It climaxes in an act of destruction that Morrison renders not as shock but as the inevitable consequence of everything that preceded it. Cholly Breedlove rapes his daughter. Pecola becomes pregnant. The community, unwilling to examine its own role in what happened to this child, turns its back on her.

Morrison narrates the novel in fragments, voices, and seasonal sections structured after the basal reader "Dick and Jane" primers that appear in corrupted form at the book's opening — an ironic counterpoint between the idealized white American family of the primer and the destruction of the Black family at the novel's center. The formal innovation here is not showing off; it is essential to meaning.

Toni Morrison and The Bluest Eye's Legacy

Toni Morrison is one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988, and the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award at various points in her career. The Bluest Eye is the entry point into her work for many readers and has been widely taught in high schools and universities for decades.

Morrison wrote in her afterword that the novel arose from her observation that aesthetic racism — the internalization of white beauty standards by Black people, to their own psychic destruction — was rarely discussed in the literature and criticism she encountered. She wanted to write a book that made that internalized racism legible and its consequences undeniable. The novel has done that for more than fifty years.

Why The Bluest Eye Has Been Banned

The Bluest Eye has been banned or challenged in 14 states across 65 school districts. Challenges most commonly cite the rape scene — in which Cholly Breedlove rapes Pecola, rendered in a third section of the novel that includes, devastatingly, his point of view as well as hers. Challenges also cite the novel's language and its explicit treatment of racism, poverty, and violence. Some challenges have characterized the novel as racially divisive or as presenting a negative view of Black family life.

Morrison responded directly to banning efforts in interviews and writings over her lifetime. She argued that the discomfort generated by The Bluest Eye — the discomfort that makes people want to remove it — is precisely the discomfort literature is supposed to produce, because the alternative is literature that does not tell the truth. For students who have experienced violence, poverty, or the psychic damage of racism, the novel offers a kind of bearing witness that few texts can match. Removing it, she said, removes the only mirror some readers have.