Beauty in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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Beauty in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Some people will argue with you that there is always an ugly duckling somewhere in a family. I see it different, I see these people as unique. In Toni Morrison's book, The Bluest Eye there is the issue of being beautiful and ugly. In this essay I will discuss how Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye initiates that during 1941 white was beautiful and black was ugly in the surrounding of two families.

The issue of beauty versus ugliness is portraying through out this book. I found nine different segments of beauty in Toni Morris's book The Bluest Eye. The first part of beauty that's reflected in Morrison's book, is when Claudia is constantly faced with the society's views of beauty. The societies ideal beauty is being white. Claudia one year for Christmas gets a "blue-eyed, blond-haired, pink skinned doll"(21), and rather than adoring this doll, she destroys and dismembers it because of her anger. Claudia feels she can not measure up to the beauty of white children, because her mom makes the comment "'Here,' 'this [doll] is beautiful'"(21), and this makes Claudia feel ugly. The Breedloves are a poor and ugly family. At least that is how they think the world views them. Morrison stated very clearly that "their ugliness was unique"(38). Their beliefs that they are ugly come from white Americans portraying that whites are the representations of what is beautiful. The white people "wondered why they were so ugly[.]" However, " [they] looked closely and could not find the source[.]" After a while of always hearing that they the Breedlove family was ugly, they finally said, "you are right" (39).

Pecola at one point wishes that she had blue eyes. Pecola states that if she had blu...

... middle of paper ...

...hope that he will be able to fulfill her wish to have blue eyes. She thinks that with blue eyes, all of her problems will disappear and the world will love her because she will be beautiful. The world, seen through blue eyes, will also appear beautiful to Pecola. "Soaphead thought it was at once the fantastic and most logical petition he had ever received. Here was an ugly girl asking for beauty. A surge of love and understanding swept through him, but was quickly replaced with anger"(174).

At the end of Morrison's novel, Claudia prays that Pecola's baby will survive. She needs the baby to live to counteract society's standards set on beauty, which say that blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girls are all that is pretty. Claudia hopes that with this new black baby people will change and see blackness as something that can be admired and something that is beautiful.

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