The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison (1970)

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I made my way through my first Toni Morrison novel, and I am not the same person I was when I started it. The Bluest Eye is a beautifully moving portrait of three young Black girls in an impoverished Lorain, Ohio in the 1940s as they discover what beauty means and begin to covet it for themselves. This envy of beautiful things manifests itself in different ways between Claudia and Pecola (Frieda's perspective is explored within her sister Claudia's); Claudia resents the idolization of white beauty and demolishes all of her light-skinned dolls, while Pecola resigns herself to her hideousness and allows herself to enjoy only the company of the outcasted prostitutes living upstairs.

Considered one of the greatest works of American fiction, The Bluest Eye is hauntingly accurate both in its historical depiction of Black girls' inaccessibility to white beauty standards as well as in its depiction of the dilemma all women face when they are exposed to the most beautiful women the world has to offer on the big screen (an issue that has grown exponentially in its complexity today).

Given my passion for film, this theme in the novel really moved me. What was beauty before we had anything to compare it to? The medium of film allowed for women to see beautiful, idealized women on the big screen (I don't mean to say women were alone in this; there is certainly a large conversation to be had around men's personal image and the competitiveness of masculinity, but I'll focus on the girls today). The emotional connection that film elicits from the audience member to the characters onscreen extends beyond a simple sense of sympathy to the dramatic notion of looking in a mirror. As opposed to a novel or a work of fine art, in film, the actor is looking right at you, performing directly toward you, embodying somebody you wish to be or some aura you wish to possess.

When I really connect with a film's protagonist, I see myself in how they handle situations, how they move, how they think about life, and it is not a dissimilar psychological experience to looking in a mirror. So, of course, how can we not compare ourselves? In the time period of The Bluest Eye, where cinema is still finding its foothold in American culture, women who were previously only exposed to the appearances of the women in their immediate neighborhoods are now shown a glowing, doe-eyed Greta Garbo on the silver screen as she prances around beautiful men in beautiful gardens while wearing beautiful gowns.

Greta Garbo

The characters that felt this experience the most in The Bluest Eye were the mothers of the children Claudia and Pecola encounter during the events of the novel. (Spoilers ahead!) My favorite passage in the book is leading up to the scene where Pecola's interaction with a young boy causes him to kill his mother's beloved cat and blame Pecola. The passage before this event occurs tells the backstory of the boy's mother and other women like her, who are from large, idyllic towns and who dress in ironed white skirts and keep everything clean and their emotions buried deep, impervious to the world around them and perfect in an untouchable way, like statues of ideal women who have never allowed themselves to feel or express the depths of emotion that come with womanhood. Pardon the poetics.

I couldn't help but compare the women described in this passage to the notion of the "clean girl" that has been one of Tiktok's longest lasting aesthetic trends. The idealized lifestyle of prioritizing health, beauty, and work at the expense of clutter, stress, sugar, or anything unexpected. Clean girls work out regularly (exclusively pilates), drink green juice, work stable careers (not jobs, but careers), and have a twelve-step skincare routine for morning and night. If you've been on Tiktok at all in the past few years, I'm sure you're familiar. The clean girl has received a lot of criticism as of late for a number of reasons I won't get into, but this lifestyle is eerily reminiscent of the pristine women Morrison describes in The Bluest Eye.

Clean girls aside, the issue of women comparing themselves to other women has only skyrocketed since Greta Garbo graced the screen in the 1930s. Now, beauty is more accessible than ever on the Internet, and when the world is seemingly full of beautiful women living idealized lives with beautiful boyfriends while running their own media businesses in their beautiful Mount Washington, Los Angeles homes, it's hard not to feel inferior. I have always found myself drawn to lifestyle vloggers like Emma Chamberlain (she's the reason I bought a camcorder) and their effortlessly relatable content, but I felt I could never film myself doing the same activities because my kitchen is too messy or my bookshelf is too small or my bedroom isn't cozy enough. Those same comparisons apply to the observation of other women's bodies online, hence the classic dilemma on Pinterest: is this a great outfit or is the person wearing it just skinny? We find ourselves constantly reminded of our "inadequacies," yet we wouldn't be inadequate if we had no "adequate" women to compare our bodies, our jobs, our workout routines, or our lives to.

So, I guess this isn't really a review of The Bluest Eye, these are just the things that I've thought about every day since reading it. If any of these ideas sound interesting to you, I highly recommend you read Morrison's work. I am so excited to dive into her novels (Beloved is next on the list) and to uncover in myself a better appreciation of Black women's experience as well as women's experience overall in the US and worldwide. Morrison writes about them so expertly and with such compelling narrative structures that I felt myself enter a state of deep self-reflection every time I read her words. Beauty is a strange thing, and maybe ignorance of other beautiful people is beautiful bliss. May we all find beauty in ourselves regardless of the absurd amount of content online that tries to convince us we do not possess it. You are beautiful!

Thanks for reading, I hope this one didn't get too off the rails. Check out my Goodreads to see what I've read and what I'm reading now. I have also made the big move over to Fable, so be sure to check in with me there! As always, let me know what you think in the comments, whether you've read The Bluest Eye or not. Happy reading!

★★★★

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

-Cheyenne