The Bluest Eye, 1970 - Information about the Book

This short novel counterbalances two points of view: one, the tragic consequences of racism (in the Breedlove family), and two, agency and resistance to that racism (in the MacTeer family). The story's focus, however, is on the Breedloves, and readers are immediately faced with the dissonance between the realities of the Breedloves'--and especially Pecola's--lives and the chapter headings that begin with excerpts from the white, middle-class Dick & Jane reader. Much as Pecola's world falls apart in the novel, the Dick & Jane passages, repeated three times, degenerate into formless, meaningless print: "seemothermotherisverynice."
The object of scorn for her "ugliness" from her family and acquaintances, Pecola yearns to become beautiful and, (she thinks) as a result of her beauty, loveable. That beauty is strictly defined by white and unattainable standards; however, a Shirley Temple mug and Mary Jane candies become the emblems of that for which Pecola yearns.
The same racism that underpins the standards of beauty under which Pecola and her mother, Pauline, suffer, is also at the root of Pecola's father's alcoholism and violence. After he impregnates Pecola and she is beaten by her mother for it, Pecola (with the treachery of Soaphead Church, a "faith healer") goes mad, believing she has obtained her blue eyes. By novel's end she obsessively, repeatedly asks an imaginary other if, indeed, her eyes are "the bluest."
There is an interesting (and excerptable) scene in the novel when Pauline is in the hospital giving birth to Pecola. The doctors come by her bed as the attending physician says, "these here women you don't have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses." Pauline counters by moaning "something awful" to teach the doctors that "[j]ust 'cause I wasn't hooping and hollering before didn't mean I wasn't feeling pain."
While the doctors have their "story" about Pauline, she resists their version, retelling it, "talking back" to medicine and to readers. This section raises important questions about assumptions and the ways social factors such as race, class, and gender can get in the way of hearing stories and understanding patients' lives.

After receiving her B.A. from Howard University in 1953, Toni Morrison continued on to Cornell to pursue graduate work in English. There, she completed a thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Masters Degree in Hand, Toni returned to Howard University where she took a position teaching English, and where she met and married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. The couple had two sons before their marriage crumbled. Morrison found solace from the unhappy union in a small group of poets and writers who met informally to discuss their work. It was in this setting that her creative instincts began to stir. A short story she "dashed off" about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes would be her first completed literary work, and the seed of her first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Excerpt from Toni Morrison, About the Author

"I was a member of a writers group and at some point, I was unable to turn in school assignments from the past to read, so the other members required me to write something fresh. This was in 1962. I wrote a short story...put it away. Three years later, I took it out and began expanding it into a novel. "
Ms. Morrison's answer to "How did you come to write The Bluest Eye?" in the Oprah's Book Club Chat

The beginning of the book is taken from a traditional American children's reading book - a Dick and Jane reader, very common in the 1940s and 50s for teaching children not only how to read by using simple sentence structures, but also for teaching children the values of the dominant, European-American culture. (See also the "Reading with and without Dick and Jane" exhibit from the University of Virginia). It represents the standards of white society for beauty: a very nice Mother, a strong Father, a friend, a cat, a friendly dog, a pretty little girl named Jane, and they all live in a very pretty green and white house with a red door. It is just the opposite to Pecola's life. The accepted concept of beauty by society destroys Pecola's life leaving her no chance to survive because it was started from the school primer, from the very beginning of her education.
This excerpt from the children's book repeats itself. However, this time, there is no punctuation. The sentences run on and on together and capital letters disappear.
Finally, the paragraph repeats itself a third time. This time even the spaces between the words disappear along with the punctuation, showing the way Pecola goes, blindly trying to copy white society's standards.