The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Bluest Eye
Book Review: Bluest Eye review
Summary: 2 Stars
I read "The Bluest Eye" for a college class in American Literature. While the basic emotion of the story is important, I did not care for the writing style; it's too disjointed. Pecola is never the speaker. Too much of the book is devoted to descriptions of other characters. The basic theme is a black child looking to be loved in a world that equates love with beauty, and beauty with blond hair and blue eyes. It's very sad. But Pecola is a victim of everyone, including her family, and the storyline jumps around too much. I was also extremely put off by the nauseatingly graphic ways Toni Morrison describes physical living -- from food to illness to sex. This is not a book you can read with a snack in your hand. If you like reading descriptions about snot, phlegm, vomit, swallowing globs of Vicks salve, child rape, animal abuse by angry children, sexual satisfaction produced by loose sanitary napkins, dogs choking on poisoned meat, and preachers who can't resist female children's blossoming bosoms, and an unhappy ending, then this is the book for you.Book Review: Brilliant exploration of the phenomenology of oppression
Summary: 5 Stars
With The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison brings us into the world of Pecola Breedlove, a young girl whose self-concept/ego is stunted from developing, whose psyche is essentially murdered, by a combination of an internalization of negative societal images (of blacks, and of women) and a lack of a network of support. Morrison weaves narratives of people whose life spheres intersect with Pecola's, because, as she explains in the preface, Pecola's ego is too damaged to cohere its own story. In the end, the violent violation of Pecola by her very flesh (her father) is too much for her fragile, barely-formed ego to handle, and it disintegrates, leaving Pecola in a permanent state of oblivion and senility.
The Bluest Eye explodes the "Dick and Jane" ideal, in which the values of the "West" are used as a measuring stick against which all other cultures are judged. In their very essence, Western ideals are hierarchical: they rely and ground themselves in a demarcation of spheres of inferiority and superiority. In this way, Western ideals are built through processes of exclusion (and inclusion).
Morrison explores how such a culture, in which only one ideal is accepted as superior, in which a hierarchy dictates how individuals think about the worth of things, can damage the soul/ego/person of individuals who are on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy, for their gender, race, and class, and how some individuals defy this ego-death. Through the intertwining stories of two sisters who are socially and economically in the same position as Pecola, but who have additional means of coping with the oppressive environment (such as intimate relationships with each other and with their parents, for example), Morrison shows how it is possible to make meaning and develop agency in spite of oppression. Primarily, Morrison implies, such resistance is made possible through the strength and resilience of social, personal, and familial networks.
The picture Morrison paints is not ultimately one of bleakness and social death. In fact, most characters in The Bluest Eye find ways of making meaning in their lives in spite of societal conditions. Pauline, for example, affirms herself by claiming her pain in childbirth as valid, her body just as sensitive as white women's: "I hurt just like them white women.... What'd they think? That just `cause I knowed how to have a baby with no fuss that my behind wasn't pulling and aching like theirs?" (125). Claudia's mother, on the other hand, learned to cope in ways similar to whites, yellows, browns, and all others: "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" (126). Claudia and her sister coped within the bounds of their intimate relationship with each other, and more or less understanding that despite their mother's fits of wrath and their father's absence, essentially they were loved, provided for, and protected. They had a home, they were not `outdoors', like Pecola.
At the core of the novel is a reliance on relationships to tell the story of Pecola, as Morrison explores the web of influences within which Pecola suffers her tragic ego-death. Each relationship manifests itself as some sort or expression of love. Pecola's rape is instantiated by an urge in her father to recreate with her what he had had with Pauline long before their marriage had disintegrated into endless fighting. Cholly glances tenderly at Pecola's foot wrapped around her calf and is reminded of a time when he felt loved, and loved deeply. Soaphead's perversion also begins in love: he describes with affection his affinity for little girls. They are, essentially, the only ones around whom he feels perfectly safe, because he does not feel violated by them--their bodies don't offend him. He is not "a pervert" in that at heart, he craves the bodies of little girls. However, his instinct for love and its transformation into action has been perverted. Taking solace in the only type of body that could not possibly hurt him, he hurts back, he becomes the oppressor. Thus the colonized/oppressed becomes the colonizer/oppressor. Soaphead mimics the oppressive conditions by which he feels violated in replicating the power asserted over him into power asserted by him onto little girls.
Although oppressing conditions have the power to pervert manifestations of love, The Bluest Eye is not only a story of perversion, it is also a story of transformation. "Love is never better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe" (206). And, it should be added, good people love deeply and unselfishly. Claudia's father, for example, protects her from manly conquest, her mother nurtures her, while her sister loves her openly, honestly, and deeply. And so Claudia understands what anyone might arguably recognize as a constructive image of love: on Christmas day, for example, Claudia imagines her ideal present--sitting in mamma's kitchen, her daddy playing the violin, her senses fully engaged, enveloped in love. Pecola, who feels no such stability from her mother because Pauline's home is essentially her white employers', also receives no support from her brother, who is often missing, and is not only not protected by her father in the face of manly aggression, but is violated by him. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that she does not seem to understand love, how to `get it': Pecola constantly asks others, "How do you do that? How do you get somebody to love you?" (32).
Book Review: Brilliant!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is beautifully written and should be read by any pre-teen to late adult African-American female. This book helped me to realize the true definition of beauty! No matter the age of the reader, one will not miss the important lessons that are woven through out this book. This is a must for young females who are eager to alter their appearance in the name of beauty.Book Review: Brilliantly crafted novel that reads like poetry....
Summary: 5 Stars
This is quite possibly one of the most heartbreaking stories you will ever read. Imagine being a young black girl when the ideal is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Shirley Temple-type, and being told constantly (both directly and indirectly) that you are ugly. Imagine growing up as the scapegoat for everyone else to take their anger and frustration out on - the whole time dreaming of how you could someday have beautiful blue eyes. Imagine the madness you retreat into just to live in the world of your creation - where you have those beautiful blue eyes and nobody can hurt you any more. It's riveting and eloquent - you won't be able to put it down.Book Review: Catalyst for change
Summary: 5 Stars
This book changed my life. If I could, I would make every little girl in America read this book. It is rare that a writer captures the essence of a character in such a profound way that the reader becomes one with the character. This book gave me hope and it reinforced my faith in people. I am a better, brighter and more accomplished person because of this book. I owe a great deal of credit for who I am to Toni Morrison. Thank you for writing this book.