Toni MorrisonThe Bluest Eye (Vintage International)

The Bluest Eye is a classic for the powerful themes that continue to relate to society today. As Toni Morrison mentions in her foreword, we all know what it feels like to be disliked or rejected, be it for a moment or for a suspended period of time. Moving beyond this statement, we all know what it feels like to be dissatisfied with our appearance. Even if we are generally happy with how we look, there will be periods of time when we wish that we were "prettier." The media bombards with with images of the feminine (and masculine) ideal. Advertisements tell us how we can look sexier and be more confident (by buying their products). We are constantly told that we are not up to standard and ought to try harder to look like the ideal. The problem is that we can try our whole lives and never look like the "ideal." Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye examines the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and age in the oppression of black people through beauty ideals and the pressure to conform to them.She does this through sketches in the lives of multiple characters of different backgrounds and across generations. Generally, I'm not very fond of novels that move around so much, as it makes it difficult to get to know any particular character, but this technique works for Morrison's novel. Rather than events moving the plot forward (like most novels), the plot takes us through the lives of different characters in order to show how the white beauty ideal influences black people of different temperaments, class, and circumstances . . . causing them to internalize racism. This does mean that there is a lot of narrating going on. At times, I even found it hard to focus on the page. For the most part, however, I felt that Morrison does a good job moving the plot forward. It definitely helps that her writing is strong and interesting with many, many beautiful, powerful lines that moved my heart. Once I started The Bluest Eye, I was reluctant to put down the novel for lengthy periods of time.Most importantly, these sketches show us how people come to be the people that they are today. Humans are not born to be terrible. The way our natures interact with the environment to which we are exposed shapes our character. There were characters who I disliked early in the book only to realize later that they were not such terrible beings. At least, not at first. Things happened, and maybe their response wasn't the healthiest, but they lived at some point in their lives. Until they internalized racism and began to believe that they deserved the bad things that happened to them. That people couldn't change. The most notable example of the influence of internalized racism is in the home of the Breedloves. Learning about the lives and thoughts of Mrs. and Mr. Breedlove helped me to better understand the environment in which Pecola grew up. Thinking about how Pecola and her brother's lives could have been different helped me to realize how oppression not only influences the people with whom it comes into immediate contact but also their children and the generations to come. (Compare the parenting Pecola receives to the parenting Claudia receives.)I also want to note how Morrison uses the Dick and Jane primer to emphasize the psychological element to oppression. The Dick and Jane primer portrays the ideal white family. The way its grammar and structure falls apart in the first pages of the novel reminds me of horror movies where a seemingly benign and pleasant scene falls apart to become something terrifying. In the same way, the lives of the black families, particularly that of the Breedloves, will upend in The Bluest Eye. The inclusion of distorted sections of the primer at the beginning of certain chapters foreshadows this.The Bluest Eye is haunting and beautiful. At the same time, it is terrible and brutal in its honest portrayal of the interlinking systems of oppression through race, class, gender, and age. There are explicit scenes of domestic violence, rape, and sex, as well as a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Nevertheless, there is life, love, and tenderness behind seemingly harsh acts. As Claudia says at the beginning of the novel, "since why is hard to handle, one must take refuge in how." Building upon this statement, if we can learn how things come to be, then we can learn how to ensure history does not repeat itself. We can learn how to keep future generations from sharing Pecola's end.

Listed as one of the most often challenged or banned books, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye warrants being read, reread, and discussed. It offers avenues through which powerful conversations can occur, and our teachers as much as our students need to engage with this complex text. The Bluest Eye is a lyrically written painfully beautiful narrative with a didactic style (especially when compared with the more oft taught canonical American Novels that represent time as linear and plot as a series of events that build toward a crescendo) that engages with beauty, poverty, perception, love, sex, sexuality, friendship, bullying, birth, death, happiness and cruelty. It is a coming of age story that may at first seem to lightly dismiss topics that would, in other works, serve as climactic tragedies. Rape, incest, domestic violence and death serve, in the context of the novel, as almost a backdrop that sets off the real insidious danger that pervades the lived experiences and interactions the characters have throughout the course of the novel: idealized beauty. This idealized beauty is intertwined with issues of race, class, and gender and this novel and serves as a metaphor for a variety of social ills. In addition to offering beautifully written lyrical prose and a means of discussing narrative form, this novel gives a powerful opening to discussions of power, hegemony, heterosexism and classism and would be ideal to discuss various lenses through which we as scholars read not only our novels but our lives.Although the novel includes topics that could be seen as unsavory, they are far from gratuitous and are absolutely essential to the themes being investigated: in addition to beauty, power dynamics, social mores, institutionalized racism in schools and other timely topics are all included. In the scope of the novel the sexual violences are enmeshed with the overall narrative that questions the effects of a culture which values a rigid ideal of beauty, an ideal that is realized only by white children with blonde hair, and follows characters through the seasons of their existence, creating a cast of characters whose travails are well written and developed using non-linear sequencing which adds to the destabilizing effect of the prose.This novel would fit well in a curriculum that asks students to investigate questions of power, compares narrative voices and various ways in which stories are told, or as a suggested text for an individual research project on societal norms or stereotypes. Students who have read Sharon Flake’s The Skin I’m In or Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak in middle school will be challenged and rewarded with The Bluest Eye, as it develops themes from such works and provides richer and more mature text. This text is suggested by the Common core to be read in grade 11 or 12 and would pair well with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Faulkner’s As I lay Dying (specifically investigating the different approaches to discussing sexism by the various characters within the text, for example asking students to discussing how their age, class and race may influence the character’s perceptions of how they are treated.) Another familiar text for students to use to compare and discuss is Hamlet (Students could be asked to think about Ophelia and Hamlet’s interactions through the various critical lenses of gender/feminism, class and power.)Overall, despite the challenges The Bluest Eye has received to being taught in the classroom, the overwhelming opportunities for rich discussion and the literary merit of the book far outweigh any challenge related to teaching it. This text has and will continue to be read and reread within schools because of rather than in spite of the violence and sexual content as the novel asks students, teachers, and readers in general to question stereotypes and ideals of beauty and success. I highly recommend it!