The Bluest Eye

Beauty in the American culture has been transformed so many times most people do not even know what real beauty is. Someone can see a woman posing on a billboard in New York City and believe that she is beautiful, but who decided who and what can be beautiful. The way our culture is American people watch television, movies, internet clips constantly. People are fed images of what “beauty” is supposed to be, but this idea of beauty is from the eyes of producers, models, musicians, and actors. It seems to me that only the people who are thought to have beauty are deciding what is beautiful.

In Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye there are many instances dealing with the idea of beauty, both through the eyes of some young girls and from an older point of view. For example, Claudia has a problem with white people who she believes to be more beautiful than anyone else. For Christmas one year, Claudia received a blue eyed doll with a skin color opposite of her own. She was given the doll and expected to love and care for the doll but Claudia only felt hatred and animosity towards the doll. Claudia became fed up with the cold hard feel of the dolls fake skin and decided to destroy the doll; she even pretended it is an actual white girl. I think that Claudia believes that white girls are the only pretty girls, and that she will never be able to be as beautiful as she makes the white girls out to be.

“I destroyed white baby dolls.

But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls… To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, “Awwwww,” but not for me.”(pg. 24)

The Breedlove’s are another example of beauty in The bluest Eye. The Breedlove family is very poor and live in a store front only having cardboard separating each room. In The Bluest Eye the Breedlove’s are labeled ugly. For example:

“She be lucky if it don’t live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.”

“Can’t help but be. Ought to be a law: tow ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry none. It be a miracle if it live.” (pg. 189-190)

In my final example we’ll look at Pecola and her wish to have blue eyes. Pecola believes that if her eyes were blue, making them beautiful in accordance to white standards, her life would be less “ugly”, and her problems would go away. I believe Pecola also thinks that if her eyes were blue that her peers and teachers would like her more, making life easier. Pecola also hates the fact that she stares at herself in the mirror attempting to figure out how she became way she is.

“Do you know what