THE BLUEST EYE

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, the

daughter of a shipyard welder and a religious woman who sang in the church choir. Her

parents had moved to Ohio from the South, hoping to raise their children in an

environment more friendly to blacks. Despite the move to the North, the Wofford

household was a world steeped in the oral traditions of Southern blacks. The songs,

stories, and women's gossip of Chloe Wofford's childhood undoubtedly influenced her

later work; a great part of Toni Morrison's struggle has been to create a literary language

of black America that draws strength from the oral art forms of that culture.

She was an extremely gifted student, learning to read at an early age and doing

well at her studies at an integrated school. Her parent's move succeeded in many respects:

racial prejudice was less of a problem in Lorain, Ohio than it would have been in the

South, and Chloe Wofford played with a racially diverse group of friends when she was

young. Inevitably, however, she began to feel more of the effects of racial discrimination

as she and her peers grew older. She graduated with honors in 1949 and went to Howard

University in Washington D.C. At Howard, she majored in English and minored in

classics, and was actively involved in theatre arts through the Howard University Players.

She graduated from Howard in 1953 with a B.A. in English and a new name?Toni

Wofford, Toni being a shortened version of her middle name. She went on to receive her

M.A. in English from Cornell in 1955.

She began teaching at Texas Southern University that year. Unlike Howard,

Texas Southern University had a less assimilation-oriented approach to black education.

Consciousness of a distinct Afro-American history and culture was part of the intellectual
territory, and during her years there Morrison may have had her first exposure to the

academic approach to the black experience. She left Texas Southern for Howard

University in 1957, meeting Harold Morrison the next year. They married, and before

their divorce in 1964, Toni and Harold Morrison had two sons. It was also during this

time that she wrote the short story that would become the basis for her first novel, The

Bluest Eye.

1964 marks the beginning of her twenty years as an editor at Random House.

With two sons in tow, she took a job in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor. She

worked as an editor, raised her sons as a single mom, and continued to write fiction. In

1967 she received a promotion to senior editor and a much-desired transfer to New York

City. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. The story of a young girl who loses her

mind, the novel was well received by critics but was a commercial failure. Between 1971

and 1972 Morrison worked as a professor of English for the State University of New

York at Purchase while holding her job at Random House and working on Sula, a novel

about a defiant woman and relations between black females. Sula was published in 1973.

The years 1976 and 1977 saw Morrison working as a visiting lecturer at Yale and

working on her next novel, Song of Solomon. This next novel dealt more fully with black

male characters. As with Sula, Morrison wrote the novel while holding a teaching

position, continuing her work as an editor for Random House, and raising her two sons.

Song of Solomon was published in 1977 and enjoyed both commercial and critical

success. In 1981 Morrison published Tar Baby, a novel focusing on a stormy relationship

between a man and a woman. In 1983 she left Random House. The next year she took a

position at the State University of New York in Albany. Beloved was published in 1987.
Many consider Beloved to be Morrison's masterpiece. Mythic in scope, Beloved tells the

story of an emancipated slave woman named Sethe who is haunted by the ghost of the

daughter she killed. The novel is an ambitious attempt to grapple with slavery and the

tenacity of its legacy. Dedicated to the tens of millions of slaves who died in the trans-

Atlantic journey, Beloved could be called a foundation story (like Genesis or Exodus) for

black America. It became a best seller and received a Pulitzer prize.

In 1987 Toni Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of

Humanities at Princeton University. She is the first Afro-American female writer to hold

a named chair at a university in the Ivy League. She published Jazz in 1992, along with a

non-fiction book entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

The next year she became the eighth woman and the first black woman to receive the

Nobel Prize in Literature. 1998 saw the publication of her seventh novel, Paradise.

One of the most critically acclaimed living writers, Morrison has been a major

architect in creating a literary language for Afro-Americans. Her use of shifting

perspective, fragmentary narrative, and a narrative voice extremely close to the

consciousness of her characters reveals the influence of writers like Virginia Woolf and

William Faulkner?two writers that Morrison, not coincidentally, studied extensively

while a college student. All of her work also shows the influence of Afro-American

folklore, songs, and women's gossip. In her attempts to map these oral art forms onto

literary modes of representation, Morrison has created a body of work informed by a

distinctly black sensibility while drawing a reading audience from across racial

boundaries.
CHARACTERS

Claudia MacTeer: the first-person narrator of the first section in each of the four

units. Claudia is nine years old, extremely bright, and comes from a loving family that

owns their own house. She is warm-hearted and sensitive, but she is also angered by

injustice and instinctively feels threatened by the standards of beauty that glorify Shirley

Temple while ignoring black children. As a narrator, she fluctuates between an adult

voice and a child's‹without problems.

Pecola Breedlove: Pecola is twelve years old. Her family lives in a converted storefront.

She is considered ugly, and is emotionally and socially awkward. She prays for blue eyes,

because she knows from images in movies and on candy wrappers that to have blue eyes

is to be loved. She is raped by her father, Cholly, in the spring, and becomes pregnant.

Her baby comes too early and dies. Terrified of her parents, she is not free (due to gender

and age) to run away from home as Sammy does. Either during the pregnancy or after the

miscarriage, Pecola goes mad, manufacturing an imaginary friend who becomes her only

conversation partner.

Frieda MacTeer: Claudia's sister, age 11. Frieda makes important decisions at several

places in the novel, and she is the clear leader of the MacTeer sisters. Like her sister, she

is sensitive and concerned about Pecola, and is willing to stand up for herself and others.

She is the more fearless of the two girls.

Pauline Breedlove: Mother of Sammy and Pecola, wife to Cholly. She has a lame foot

and a missing front tooth. She is harsh and abusive to her children. She lavishes her love

on the Fishers, her generous white employers, while her own family falls apart. She and
Cholly battle constantly. Although once she longed to have nicer things and romantic

love, she settles into surviving through her work and being a martyr by staying with

Cholly. She is religious in a vindictive and vengeful way, hoping that the Lord will help

her in her war against Cholly.

Cholly Breedlove: A violent drunk, an unfaithful husband, an abusive father. Cholly was

humiliated by white hunters when a young boy, and the shame stuck with him.

Abandoned by both of his parents, he has no concept of parenting. He rapes Pecola,

skipping town when she becomes pregnant.

Mrs. MacTeer: Mother to Frieda and Claudia. She is not an indulgent mother, but she is

fiercely protective and loving. Her word is law with the two girls‹at several points the

girls attempt to decide what to do based on literal interpretations of things Mrs. MacTeer

has said.

Mr. MacTeer: Father to Frieda and Claudia. Like his wife, he is a harsh but loving

parent.

Sammy Breedlove: An unhappy and young teenage boy, constantly in trouble,

constantly running away from home for months at a time. Unlike Pecola, he has freedom,

as a male, to escape the Breedloves' miserable home life.

Soaphead Church (aka Elihu Whitcomb): a man of mixed white and black ancestry

from the Caribbean. He is the town fortuneteller, in addition to being megalomaniacal

pedophile who plays God. His "magic" is the final snap that breaks Pecola's sanity.

Bertha Reese: an old, religious woman from whom Soaphead Church rents his room.

She is the owner of Bob, the dog that Soaphead Church loathes.
Mr. Henry: The middle-aged boarder taken in by the MacTeers near the beginning of the

novel. Mr. Henry is charming but is somewhat lecherous‹he invites prostitutes under the

MacTeer roof when the MacTeers are gone, and later he makes sexual advances at

eleven-year-old Frieda.

China, Poland, and Marie (aka the Maginot Line): the three prostitutes who live

upstairs from Pecola. Pecola seeks refuge in their company when her family is too

unbearable. All three women are long past their prime, but fat Marie is the most despised

by Mrs. MacTeer and the most feared by Frieda and Claudia. Their names are heavily

symbolic, as all three refer to countries where are occupied or facing invasion by fascist

armies in 1939.

Geraldine: A well-off black woman with a husband, one son, and a cat. Geraldine is

concerned with being respectable, and despises poor blacks. When her son, Louis, Jr., lies

to her and tells her that Pecola killed Geraldine's beloved cat, her treatment of Pecola is

brutal.

Louis, Jr.: a little boy, son of Geraldine. He tricks Pecola into coming into his house,

where he throws a cat in her face, kills the cat, and then blames her for it.

Maureen Peal: the new girl at school. She is mulatto and very well-off. Walking home

with the MacTeer sisters and Pecola one day, she starts out being civil but very quickly

becomes haughty. She is the darling of teachers, and Claudia sees in her all of the social

forces that she fears and despises. Claudia insists that the societal forces are more to be

feared and hated than Maureen herself.

can read in his eyes the impatience and disdain that he feels for her, and she internalizes

all of it.

Rosemary: a girl who lives next door. A tattletale. Claudia and Frieda dislike her

immensely.

Miss Dunion: A nosy neighbor who lives next door. When she insinuates that Mr. Henry

might have "ruined" Frieda, she incites the wrath of Mrs. MacTeer.

Great Aunt Jimmy: the woman who raised Cholly. She was already ancient when she

took him in, right after he had been abandoned by his own mother. She dies when Cholly

is a young teenage boy.

M'Dear: An old wise woman who comes to give Aunt Jimmy medical advice. She is a

tall woman, and her authority is considered infallible. Sure enough, when Aunt Jimmy

violates one of M'Dear's prescriptions, she dies.

Samson Fuller: Possibly Cholly's father. When Cholly is a young man, he tracks Samson

down. Samson humiliates him and tells him to go away.

Blue Jack: The closest thing to a father figure in Cholly's early life. He shares a

watermelon heart with Cholly and it's one of the happiest moments Cholly ever knows.
SUMMARY

The Bluest Eye is split into an untitled prelude and four large units, each named

after a season. The four larger units begin with "Autumn" and end in "Summer," with

each unit being split into smaller sections. The first section of each season is narrated by

Claudia MacTeer, a woman whose memories frame the events of the novel. At the time

that the main events of the plot take place, Claudia is a nine-year-old girl. This device

allows Morrison to employ a reflective adult narrator without losing the innocent

perspective of a child. Claudia MacTeer lives with her parents and her sister in the

humble MacTeer family house in Lorrain, Ohio. The year is 1939.

The novel's focus, however, is on a girl named Pecola Breedlove. Pecola, we are

told in the prelude, will be raped by her father by novel's end. The prelude frames the

story so that the reader knows from the beginning that Pecola's story ends tragically. The

Breedloves are poor, unhappy, and troubled. Their story seems in many ways to be

deterministic, as they are often the victims of forces over which they have no control.

Their situation is a powerful contrast to the MacTeers, who are of slender means but have

a strong family unit. The MacTeers also seem to have much stronger agency, and are

never really passive victims in the way that the Breedloves are.

When Claudia is not narrating, a third-person narrator takes her place. The narrative style,

even in third person, is one of great psychological intimacy. The third-person narrator of

The Bluest Eye is no dispassionate observer, but one who gives insights into the thoughts

of characters and occasionally interprets events in a very explicit manner. The sections

narrated in the third person are all focused on some aspect of Pecola's life‹the sections

explore either a family member or a specific significant event. These sections have
headings, taken from a reading primer's Dick and Jane story. The use of the primer is a

biting comment on the distance between Pecola's life and the pink-skinned bourgeois

world in the Dick and Jane story. Each heading is a clean, straightforward match up: the

section about Pecola's house is headed by a Dick-and-Jane sentence about their house, the

section about Pauline is prefaced by a Dick-and-Jane sentence about their mother, etc.

The basic plot is very simple: when Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's father, attempts to burn

their house down, Pecola is sent by social workers to stay temporarily with the MacTeers.

Claudia and Frieda befriend the girl, who is lonely, abused, and neglected. While staying

with the MacTeers, she menstruates for the first time. Her first period, as the reader must

consider it, becomes an upsetting event‹it makes it possible for her to be impregnated

later by her own father. Pecola Breedlove goes back to live with her family, and we see

aspects of her life depicted one section at a time. The Breedlove home is a converted

storefront, cold and in disrepair. Pauline and Cholly Breedlove fight incessantly and with

terrifying ferocity‹their battles always end up being physical‹and her brother Sammy runs

away from home constantly. The Breedloves' name is suggestive and ironic: "love" is

exactly what the family lacks, and certainly they are unable to generate more of it, as

suggested by the word "breed." Instead, "breed" becomes an ominous reference to what

Cholly ends up doing with his own daughter.

Pauline is an unhappy woman who takes refuge in the wrathful and unforgiving aspects

of Christianity. She lavishes her love on the white family for whom she works, while her

own family lives in squalor. Cholly is an angry and irresponsible man, violent, cruel, and

uncontrollable. All of the Breedloves are considered ugly, although part of the novel's

work is to question and deconstruct what that ugliness really means. To get away from
her parents and to pass the hours, Pecola spends a great deal of time with the whores who

live upstairs. China, Poland, and Marie tolerate her presence without providing any deep

love for the girl.

Pecola is obsessed, we learn, with blue eyes. She prays for them constantly, and is

convinced that by making her beautiful the blue eyes would change her life. From

Pecola's wish and from many other events in the novel, it becomes clear that most of the

people in Lorrain's black community consider whiteness beautiful and blackness ugly.

The novel has many character who long to look white, and also has several characters of

mixed ancestry who emulate whites and try to suppress all things in themselves that

might be African. Soaphead Church's Anglophile family and Geraldine are examples of

this kind of black person.

The MacTeer family goes through their own small dramas, as Frieda and Claudia deal

with stuck-up schoolmates and a lecherous boarder. Consistently, the MacTeer family is

able to insulate the girls from harm. When their boarder, a man named Mr. Henry, makes

an indecent pass at eleven-year-old Frieda, Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer react with force,

protecting their daughter violently and without any doubt of her innocence. In contrast, in

the Breedlove family the sexual threat comes not from outside the family unit but from

within. One Saturday in spring, Cholly rapes Pecola. He rapes her a second time soon

afterward. Pecola then becomes pregnant with her father's child.

Miserable and desperate, Pecola believes more than ever that blue eyes would change her

life. She goes to a pedophilic fortune-teller named Soaphead Church to ask for blue eyes.

Soaphead Church decides that he can use her for a small task, and so he uses an unwitting

Pecola to kill a dog that he hates. She completes the task, which she believes will be like
a transformative spell. The dog dies in a gruesome manner, and Pecola runs away in

terror. The next time we see Pecola, she's lost her mind. She spends all of her time talking

to a new "friend"; he/she is an imaginary friend who is now the only person with whom

Pecola speaks. The topic of conversation is most frequently the blueness of Pecola's eyes.

Pecola spends the rest of her life as a madwoman.

The title of the novel provides some interesting insights about standards of beauty.

Morrison is interested in showing the illusory nature of the social construction of beauty,

which is created in part by the imaginary world of advertising billboards and movie stars.

The title uses the superlative of blue because at the end of the novel, when Pecola has

gone mad, she is obsessed with having the bluest eyes of anyone living. But the title also

has "eye" in the singular‹by disembodying the eye, Morrison subverts the idea of beauty

or standards of beauty, tearing the idealized part away from the whole, creating a beauty

icon that is not even human. Reinforcing this non-human aspect of the ideal eye, Pecola's

new blue eyes at the novel's end are not described with colors in the human range‹her

eyes are blue like streaks of cobalt, or more blue than the sky itself.

At key points in the novel, important plot information is revealed through gossip.

Morrison writes long stretches of beautiful and uninterrupted dialogue, with great

sensitivity to oral language. Pauline Breedlove gets a chance to speak in the first person

near the middle of the novel; in a section divided between third-person narrator and

Pauline, she gets to address the reader directly and in dialect. Morrison's interest in

carving a place for oral language in literary art is readily apparent in this novel.

Morrison occasionally switches tense, moving fluidly to present tense when it serves her.

The move has different effects: for some scenes, it provides a sense of great immediacy.
In one sequence narrated by Claudia, it creates the feel that Claudia is reliving the

experience. In other scenes, it creates the feel of a pattern. When Pecola tries to by candy

at a local grocer's, we read about the moment in present tense. In this case, Morrison's use

of the present tense suggests that the unpleasant interaction between Pecola and the

shopkeeper forms a template for all of her interactions with other human beings.

Morrison, by employing multiple narrators, is trying to make sure that no single voice

becomes authoritative. The gossiping women become narrators in their own right,

relaying critical information and advancing the story at key points. Claudia's perspective

is balanced by the third person narrator, and Pauline Breedlove narrates for parts of one

of the middle sections of the novel. This method of multiplying narrative perspectives

also demands more active participation on the part of the reader, who must reassemble

the parts in order to see the whole. Morrison is still working somewhat clumsily with this

type of narrative in The Bluest Eye. In later novels, she has a chance to experiment and

refine her forms further.