The Bluest Eye

"It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.[…]There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how." 

Claudia MacTeer, one of the narrators of the novel, represents the innocence with which she and her sister viewed the rape of Pecola and the death of her baby. As an adult, Claudia explains the purpose for recounting the story—her effort to understand how Pecola's family and community failed to nurture the little girl. 

"So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die." 

Morrison uses the seasons of the years to organize the narrative. Claudia frequently comments on how her memories of the events in the narrative are tied to the seasons. Many of those memories are painful, difficult ones; her hard childhood memories underscore the degree to which racism and inequality shape the childhoods of African Americans. Nevertheless, Claudia notes in this quote the compensating factor of her mother's love. 

"Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs — all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured." 

One of the key sources of the internalization of white beauty ideals for African American girls is popular culture, represented here with the white dolls given to little African American girls. At this moment in her life, Claudia is still young enough not to have completely internalized these self-hating ideals, so she despises dolls and white girls equally.

"They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly." 

The Breedloves are people who have internalized the message that their race and class status make them ugly. This self-hating attitude makes Pecola vulnerable to the damage she suffers later in the novel.

"It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. […] Every night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.” 

Blue eyes are an important symbol of white beauty standards. For Pecola, blue eyes represent all the stability and nurturing she does not receive from her parents and the society around her.

"She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition—the glazed separateness. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. […] And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes." 

Despite her youth, Pecola at age 11 is already aware of the way that racism and poverty shape how non-African Americans interact with her. The store owner's refusal to see Pecola and his disgust when he does see her represent the dehumanizing, racist gaze of white society. Pecola is also aware that she is sometimes seen as a sexual object despite the fact that she is a preteen. Her growing awareness of these dehumanizing and objectifying gazes are parts of a rite of passage for African American girls.

"Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence." 

As a girl, Pecola is already curious about the nature of love. Because of the lack of privacy in her home, Pecola is aware of her parents' sexual activity and confuses the hurried, sometimes nonconsensual encounters between her parents as the sum of what love is. In this instance as in many others, she lacks models for healthy love and intimacy.

"This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me." 

Claudia's description of Maureen Peal shows her awareness of how valued affluence and light skin are in her community. The description of Maureen's braids as “lynch ropes” implies that white supremacy explains why people see her as attractive and that this attitude is a kind of violence. Maureen Peal's popularity is represented as an unnatural interruption in Claudia's childlike faith in her own self-worth.

"'I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!'

In this quote, Maureen ridicules the MacTeer girls. Her words indicate that she has internalized the message that having light skin makes her superior to her darker peers. This belief is another form of internalized racism that is damaging to both her and the MacTeer girls.

“We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. […] What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.” 

Claudia, on the cusp of adolescence, still has not yet internalized the racism that makes some African Americans see anything that approximates whiteness as more beautiful than blackness. That ability of Claudia and her sister to still love themselves is one element of their innocence.

"Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud." 

Geraldine has instructed her son in the ideals of black respectability. Her use of the racial slur to refer to poverty-stricken African Americans shows how classicism and internalized racism undergird black respectability.

"They agreed to marry and go ’way up north, where Cholly said steel mills were begging for workers. Young, loving, and full of energy, they came to Lorain, Ohio. Cholly found work in the steel mills right away, and Pauline started keeping house.” 

Cholly and Pauline's decision to go north for jobs and to establish a home connects this narrative to an important part of its historical context, the Great Migration. 

"There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. […] In equating physical love with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap." 

In this quote, Morrison reveals that African American women, just like African American girls, are vulnerable to Eurocentric beauty ideals. Pauline takes in these ideas by watching popular films.

"She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs." 

The poverty of her life and the racism that limits her opportunities lead Pauline to focus all of her energy of filling the role whites make available to her—that of the servant. Morrison's representation of Pauline as the “ideal servant” highlights how limiting white perceptions of African Americans (especially women) are.

"Them she bent toward respectability, and in so doing taught them fear." 

Having committed all of her energy to her role as a servant, Pauline has little nurturing to spare for her own family. In place of love, she instills fear in her children. Because her actions conform to societal expectations of black respectability, she is praised by society despite the psychological damage caused by her parenting.

"I begin to feel those little bits of color floating up into me—deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama’s lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I’m laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors, and I’m afraid I’ll come, and afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside." 

Despite her critical representation of Pauline, Morrison refuses to present a stereotyped image of the interior life of a woman primarily defined as a black domestic servant. In this passage, Morrison emphasizes that Pauline has the capacity for sexual desire and play lacking in so many other aspects of her life. This passage undercuts the stereotype of women like Pauline as sexless black mammies. 

"Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. […] For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight. The hee-hee-hee’s." 

Although the novel is mostly focused on the damaging impact of racism on African American women, Morrison's inclusion of the story         of how Cholly came to direct his anger and violence toward African American women provides context for the psychology behind this displacement of anger.

"Cholly was free. Dangerously free." 

Cholly refuses to abide by the expectations associated with respectable black masculinity. He owns no property, does not provide for his children, and engages in violence at will. Although Cholly has  apparently murdered whites, the people who are most endangered by his freedom are those closest to him—his wife and children.

"Here was an ugly girl asking for beauty. A surge of love and understanding swept through him, but was quickly replaced by anger. Anger that he was powerless to help her. Of all the wishes people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl wanted to rise up out of the pitiful blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles." 

Soaphead Church's role in the novel is to confirm externally for Pecola her delusion that she can change her dark eyes to blue ones. He represents the most extreme version of the common belief that Pecola's blackness and youth make her worthless. His self-serving sense of rage also reveals the degree to which he sees girls like Pecola as objects designed to serve his ego.

"We looked for eyes creased with concerns, but saw only veils." 

In this passage, Claudia reveals her puzzlement over how all of the adults in her life failed to show compassion to Pecola. This puzzling    failure leads Claudia to attempt to take on the adult responsibility of intervening to save Pecola's baby.

"I thought about the baby that everyone wanted dead, and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals." 

In this passage, Claudia uses adjectives with positive connotations to describe Pecola's baby. Because of her innocence—the fact that she has not yet absorbed the racism of American society and the internalized racism of the African American adults surrounding her—she is still capable of seeing the baby as a person worthy of love. Her description implies that the baby is a black doll.

"Love is never any better than the lover." 

In retrospect, Claudia comes to understand that the forms of love given to Pecola were sparse and damaging. The flaw in the love people like Cholly and Miss Marie gave to Pecola was that this love was itself marked by the overwhelming force of racism in their lives.

"All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her." 

As an adult, Claudia is finally able to see what she could not see as an innocent child: Pecola served as a kind of scapegoat onto which the entire community displaced its guilt, self-hatred, and impotence in the face of overwhelming racism and inequality.