The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Summary
Nine year old Claudia MacTeer narrates from 1941 Lorain, Ohio, where her family has taken in Pecola Breedlove, a classmate whose own home has just burned down. Pecola has absorbed, from every direction, the idea that she is ugly, and she comes to believe that blue eyes, the mark of the white beauty she sees celebrated everywhere around her, would finally make her lovable. Morrison interrupts Claudia's narration with the histories of Pecola's own parents: her father Cholly, humiliated as a teenager by white men who forced him to have sex in front of them and later abandoned by his own father when he went looking for him, and her mother Pauline, who has withdrawn into movies and into the white household she keeps house for, favoring the white child in her care over her own daughter. Cholly, drunk and overwhelmed by a confused mix of tenderness and rage, rapes Pecola at home, and she becomes pregnant; rather than sympathy, the news brings the community's disgust down on Pecola rather than on Cholly. Desperate, Pecola visits Soaphead Church, a fraudulent spiritualist who tricks her into poisoning a sick dog, framing the act as the ritual that will finally grant her blue eyes. The baby is born prematurely and dies, and Pecola, having lost everything else, breaks entirely, coming to believe her wish has actually been granted and that she now has the bluest eyes of anyone, spending her days after that in conversation with an imagined self about her new eyes. Claudia, grown and looking back, closes the novel admitting how completely the whole town, herself included in small ways, used Pecola's ruin to feel better about themselves rather than helping her.
Morrison structures the novel around a corrupted excerpt from a Dick and Jane primer, the cheerful see Jane run prose broken down letter by letter and repeated ahead of each section as a bitter contrast to what actually happens inside it. The novel is short and reads quickly, but it does not soften Cholly's abuse or the town's complicity, and it was written mostly in early mornings before work, while Morrison, then in her thirties, edited textbooks by day and raised two sons alone.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize marked The Bluest Eye when Holt, Rinehart and Winston published it in 1970 in a modest first printing that drew little immediate attention. A November 1970 review in the New York Times, in which critic Haskel Frankel praised Morrison's control and talent, helped turn notice toward it, though the book built most of its early readership through Black studies courses rather than mainstream sales. Morrison's Nobel Prize in Literature came twenty three years later, in 1993, for her entire body of work, and her Pulitzer Prize for Fiction belongs to Beloved in 1988; neither honor reaches back to name this first novel specifically.
The Bluest Eye instead built its reputation through repeated censorship fights rather than prizes, ranking among the American Library Association's most challenged books across nearly every decade since the 1990s. It was banned outright in Baker City, Oregon in 1999 and in Wentzville, Missouri in 2022, among many other districts. Lydia R. Diamond's stage adaptation premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2005 and later moved off Broadway, carrying Pecola's story to audiences the novel's early print run never reached.