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Beauty In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

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The Bluest Eye: Beauty

People often say that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” in The Bluest Eye this takes a new meaning. The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison 's first novel published in 1970. Set in the author 's hometown in Lorrain, Ohio, it narrates the story of a black little girl named Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for blue eyes like the ones her idol Shirley Temple has, because that way she will be beautiful and loved. Throughout the novel Toni Morrison takes us on Pecola 's journey to self-destruction because she lives in world that doesn 't find her beautiful or even worth to be looked at. The novel tells not only the story of Pecola but the story of the whole black community that unable to conform to white standards of beauty are condemned to sink into a pit of darkness. In this paper I will discuss how beauty is constructed in The Bluest Eye.

Beauty is one of the main topics in The Bluest Eye and its importance relies on the fact that this is a novel about finding self-identity, but most of the characters from the novel search for their own identity in others. They value beauty over other things such as intelligence because they live in a society in which beauty is constructed in a way that they associate it with being loved and approved by others and as I just said they establish their self-worth based on how others perceive them. In the case of Pecola, she believes that having blue eyes will make her beautiful and wanted and she will never be sad again, as

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