The Idea and Standard of Beauty in The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye is the story of a young African American girl and her family who are affected in every direction by the dominant American culture that says to them,

"You're not beautiful; you're not relevant; you're invisible; you don't even count."

Here, Paul C. Taylor argues,

“a whitedominated culture has racialised beauty, [in] that it has defined beauty per se in terms of white beauty,” (Taylor, 1999, 17)

Morrison, an Afro-American woman writer, challenges in the novel the Western standards of beauty and demonstrates that the concept of beauty is socially constructed. Morrison shows that the value of blackness is diminished and this novel works to subvert that tendency.

In the novel, there is an obvious hierarchy, distinction drawn among the rich white, poor white, (and) the rich black and poor black families. Morrison shows how the novel's black characters have been affected in some way by the white media, by the white standard of beauty, by the

“cultural icons portraying physical beauty: movies, billboards, magazines, books, newspapers, window signs, dolls, and drinking cups” (Gibson, 1989, 20).

Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola's mother, has settled down with Cholly to live the simple, happy, love-filled life of her dreams. But, when Mrs. Breedlove loses her front tooth on a piece of candy, she thinks that she is ugly and worthless.

“I settled down to being ugly.”

Because, she has learnt from going to the movies that to be happy you have to wear pretty clothes and have a lovely smile. Missing a tooth, she is flawed according to Hollywood standard of beauty, so she gives up on her hopes of glamour or even happiness.

A light-skinned and green-eyed rich girl, Maureen Peal, classmate of Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, embodies the problematic correlation between beauty and worth. She is adored and privileged. Because she is “cute” and she is

“A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes,”

She is haughty and capricious, but people like her regardless of her behavior. She "enchants" the school: teachers encourage her, boys stop fighting when she appears, white girls tolerate her, black girls defer to her.

  

Pecola Breedlove, the central attention of the novel, from the day she is born, is told that she is ugly, and the more she grows up, the more she is constantly tormented and abused by her family and school mates, and others. More than anything, she wants to be loved and to fit in. As a result, she thereby learns to hate herself. Even she wishes to have blue eyes which will solve every thing,

"I want them blue so people don't do ugly things in front of me and I stop being invisible."

  

Even Pecola is raped by her own father, Cholly, and becomes pregnant.  Cholly is a living lesson that the cruelties visiting upon us play out in our conduct. When Cholly rapes Pecola, it is a physical manifestation of the social, sychological, and personal violence that has raped Cholly for years. Once he was humiliated by two white men who found him having sex for the first time and made him continue while they watched. Yet,

“Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him.”

Eventually, the violence and degradation of her life pushes Pecola to insanity:

"I have prayed now going on a year, but I have hope still...To have something wonderful as that happen would have to take a long, long time."

She believes she has blue eyes, and she lives within the world she has created rather than the abusive community available to her.

  

However, Morrison’s mouthpiece in the novel is Claudia and Frieda who are aware of the danger of adopting Western standards of beauty As children, they are happy with their difference, their blackness:

“We felt comfortable in our skins…and could not comprehend this unworthiness”

Moreover, Claudia blames the black community which adopts

“a white standard of beauty … that makes Pecola its scapegoat” (Furman, 1996, 21).

In the afterward to the book, Toni Morrison says,

"In exploring the social and domestic aggression that could cause a child to literally fall apart, I mounted a series of rejections"

To sum up, through the treatment of the standard of beauty in the Bluest Eye, Morrison portrays the true picture of the blacks in Africa who have been “demonized” and “the most vulnerable members” are the children and women. Pecola’s desire for the blue eyes is not caused by her desire to be beautiful, but by the neglect, hatred and oppression in the society.