Using Pecola’s story as a focal point, The Bluest Eye reveals the destructive impact of social hierarchies and of social invisibility. Morrison examines the impact of this exclusion on individuals and on the community as a whole. Through exposure of the embedding of the dangerous hierarchies associated with these concepts into our primary narratives- reading primers, movies, and products-the novel demonstrates the difficulties of growing up and of surviving for African-American young women. These constructs are a particular issue for African- American communities that often are excluded from representation. The novel addresses the social forces that drive understanding and definition of cultural constructs such as beauty, normalcy, family, and sexuality. Pecola’s story intersects with and contrasts with that of the novel’s primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, whose coming of age, while challenging, is not the alienating, ultimately impossible situation experienced by Pecola. Individually and collectively people mark Pecola and her dysfunctional family as falling outside the boundaries of what is normal and, thus, as undesirable. The novel takes place in the 1940s in the industrial northeast of Lorian, Ohio, and tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American woman who is marginalized by her community and the larger society.

The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first published novel.

We substituted good grammar for intellect we switched habits to simulate maturity we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.Analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyeīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Janu We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.Īnd fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive we were not free, merely licensed we were not compassionate, we were polite not good, but well behaved. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. Even her waking dreams we used-to silence our own nightmares. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. All of us-all who knew her-felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. “All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed.

The bluest eye sparknotes