Book Review: The Bluest Eye

Title: The Bluest Eye
Author: Toni Morrison
Rating: 4 of 5 STARS
Finished Reading: February 3
Own: Yes!
Why Chosen: My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge selection

This is Toni Morrison's first book (written in 1970) and the first book by her I have read. She was awarded the Pulitzer in 1988 for Beloved. I can see why if Bluest Eye was her first attempt at a novel. It is a disturbing book, but one of the very few books I've ever sat down and read from cover to cover in one day. I was home sick with a cold and just read and read. The characters really captured me.

The story is about a young black girl, Pecola, growing up in Ohio in 1940. It is narrated by Claudia, Pecola's friend. Pecola is physically described as ugly and is obsessed with having blue eyes, thinking that then she would be beautiful. Her mother, Pauline, works for a white family and adores their white, blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter. Her father, Cholly, always comes home drunk and beats Claudia. Sammy, Pecola's brother, alternately runs away to avoid the fighting or jumps into the fray. Pecola just withdraws inside herself and dreams of having blue eyes.

The thing I liked the most about this book was how Morrison told the childhood stories of both Claudia and Cholly. Although both are unlikeable characters because of what they do to Pecola, especially Cholly, understanding what happened to them as children makes you remember how we all are influenced by cycles of abuse or disfunctional family situations. But for the grace of God...

This book made me think a lot about beauty...about what real beauty is, about what I think when I look in the mirror and examine all my "flaws"...about what my girls think of themselves when they look in the mirror. Do they see the beauties they are or do they see the ways they differ from the definitions of beauty that is constantly being explained to them in movies, on TV, in magazines?

Favorite Excerpts:

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, "You are ugly people." They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict that statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance.

Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick,, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair.

She was older now, with no time for dreams or movies. It was time to put all of the pieces together, make coherence where before there had been none. The children gave her this need; she herself was no longer a child. So she became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification.

Their voices blended into a thrnody of nostalgia about pain. Rising and falling, complex in harmony, uncertain in pitch, but constant in the recitative of pain. They hugged the memories of illnesses to their bosoms. They licked their lips and clucked their tongues in fond remembrance of pains they had endured - childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles. All of the bruises they had collected from moving about the earth - harvesting, cleaning, hoisting, pitching, stooping, kneeling, picking - always with young ones underfoot.