The Bluest Eye Critical Analysis

In Haskel Frankel’s review, the aesthetic criteria is centered on reading with hope. Frankel wants The Bluest Eye to give him positive emotions, such as comfort and happiness, and yet the language makes him think about what makes something beautiful, a question which he would not like to raise in the first place. Frankel mainly focuses on what the novel did not do and what he thought could have made it more successful. Although overall Frankel was “still in favor of” the novel, he wanted Pecola to be the central character and when she became one it was “far too late to achieve the impact it might have had” (Frankel). This shows how much value Frankel places on literature in which good triumphs over evil in the end. However, hope was not completely obliterated for Frankel as he was able to discover “the beauty and the hope beneath the surface” (Frankel). Although Frankel did not completely avoid contaminated reading, as Morrison hoped for her book, he turned that contamination into something productive for himself by being able to find beauty in the language, even though it did not lead him want to leave his comfort zone as a reader. The aesthetic criteria used in John Leonard’s review places an interest in form and content of the novel. Leonard’s criteria seems unafraid of reading

By being made to empathize with the supposed outsiders of society, such as Cholly Breedlove, the reader challenges the assumption that readers of American fiction only think from a white perspective. The novel, if read closely, shifts the trend of the white audience by making the reader aware of the inner workings of a racialized imagination and the consequences of not questioning such a mechanism. This awareness causes the reader to start to question the consequences of a racialized imagination in other