The Search for Beauty in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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"Starlight star bright" make me beautiful tonight. So many young girls gaze into the stars wishing that they could be beautiful so they would be accepted at school, as well as loved and acknowledged more. Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is no different than any other little girl. She too wants to be beautiful. America has set the standards that to be beautiful one must have " blue eyes, blonde hair, and white skin" according to Wilfred D. Samuels Toni Morrison (10). This perception of beauty leads Pecola to insanity because just as society cannot accept a little ugly black girl neither can she.

Children will always be children and the playground will always be a place where they tease and taunt one another. Pecola is unlike the other children; she does not participate in the teasing, she is the brunt of all the criticism because she is not only black but ugly too. On the other hand, there is Maureen Peal. Maureen is not white but is light- skinned therefore, accepted by everyone; the “ black boys didn’t trip her; the white boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth [at her and] the black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink…”(Morrison 62). Everyone was nice to Maureen regardless of their race and her own. One day Pecola’s dream of acceptance is granted when Maureen rescues her from the taunting of the boys on the playground. During their short-term superficial friendship Maureen does not fail to point out that Pecola looks like a movie character that “hates her mother because she is black and ugly”(Morrison 57). Karen Carmean in her book Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction makes the point that Maureen has succumbed to the “traditional white associations of darkness with ugliness”(Carmean 21). This means that Maureen has accepted the American standards of to be black is to be ugly. Maureen’s true reason for being Pecola’s friend is revealed when Pecola does not give in to Maureen when she asks personal questions of Pecola's life. It is at this point that Maureen does like all the other children do and taunt Pecola with “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos”(Morrison 73). Maureen’s words further emphasize to Pecola that she is ugly because she is black and the only way for her to be happy is if she were beautiful. The key to being beautiful is for her to have “the thing that mad...

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...203). Finally the blue-eyed Pecola leaves promising to return when the dark eyed Pecola receives “the bluest eyes”(Morrison 204). Now Pecola is once again left alone neglected because she does not fit the American standards of beauty. Her inner self has picked up and left illustrating that the complete insanity has set in because she cannot obtain beauty. Pecola is now left “searching the garbage” in hopes that she will recover somewhere the key to beauty; the bluest eyes (Morrison 206).

In conclusion, a person cannot be happy without knowing happiness. Pecola was never shown happiness therefore could not be happy. From the beginning she was looked at as ugly from the one person who was supposed to love her regardless of appearance, her mother. She did not ask to be born ugly and black she just was. All she ever wanted was to be happy. Happy like all the pretty blue eyes white girls. Society has shaped beauty to be blue eyes and white and because Pecola cannot achieve this it leads her to a life of insanity. It is only through insanity that she can continue living because without it she will have to face the fact that her dream will never come true.

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