Personal Identity In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

As citizens of the contemporary world, we apt to regard ourselves as unique and nonpareil individuals. We regard our personal identity as something to which we alone have privileged access and in which we are especially entitled to speak. We, citizens of the free world, think of ourselves as singular beings, who are capable of self-knowledge and who can differentiate between the authentic self and the unauthentic self. So therefore with this self-knowledge, we tend to project our own belief onto the less fortunate. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of the main characters, Pecola Breedlove wants blue eyes. In the 21st century, this is possible, but in 1941, the dream was not feasible. Pecola bought into the conviction that a person who has blond hair and blue eyes can achieve success because of their appearance.

She believed people with blond hair and blue eyes are the signifier of beauty.

She did not believe black is beautiful. Idealization such as these have dominated American culture since the 18th century. In order to appease society, a person will have to achieve specific physical attribute, obtain a particular career and habituate in a particular neighborhood. In The Bluest Eye, characters associate beauty and fulfillment with being white. The African American characters have grown up in a society that does not deem them beautiful because of the color of their skin. Pecola Breedlove is constantly being referred to as ugly. She longs to be what society considers beautiful—blue eyes and blond hair. Pecola’s belief that blue eyes will make her beautiful shows specific effects of racism on young African American girls, which is the envy of white

personnel.
In the 1940s until the present, the media pushes an image of perfection and beauty onto the public. Toni Morrison asserts in her narrative, “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. . . . She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.” (122) Often time the images that are depicted on the screen are fake, but to a young girl this image is the epitome of beauty. The young girl does not know any better; the faces and object she once considered beautiful are no longer exquisite. Everything she knows has been stripped and she is forced to acknowledge only society’s standard. The young girl is left in dismay and self-contempt and does not know how to distinguish between what is forged and what is not. If this girl does not fall within the standardization of beauty based on the media, she is considered ugly by herself and her peers. Pecola Breedlove never believed she was beautiful; since the day she was born, her mother called her ugly. Her parents felt grotesque because of their past. Once society deemed the characters unpleasant, they portray it in their actions.