The Bluest Eye Ugliness

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In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s uses her critique of racism so that white readers can imagine or understand what it feels like to be the on the other side of what is not considered beauty as Pecola, Claudia, and Freida suffer from the stigma of ugliness and being African-American (Bump). Through Morrison’s ability to convey the truth to readers about how beauty is socially structured, she uses Claudia, the narrator, to signify the search for the truth, “..the edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all the words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre” (Morrison). We all were the ages of nine …show more content…

“Her writing demands participatory reading” (Bump). But do critics or even readers themselves feel comfortable enough to discuss this experience? Did Morrison tell too much of the truth about society that it exposed their own ugliness? Some critics have remarked on the emotional impact of The Bluest Eye but can feelings about beauty and ugliness enable white readers to become more conscious of the impact of racism? We can use this novel as a template as an ethical emotive criticism that connects feelings to thought - psychological models of racism, stigmatism, judging by appearance, and hierarchies of emotions (Bump). Using Claudia as the narrator, Morrison uses her feelings of anger to express how she herself feels; Pecola is too vulnerable to be angry at what she goes through but it is Morrison who is angry at the dissolution of African-Americans and their appearance. The novel itself intensifies rather than deflects the reader’s sense of Morrison’s anger. Morrison’s scale of anger about racism parallels with the characters and what happens to them in the book, meaning that as Claudia gets angry or upset with Pecola at times, us as readers should too. Morrison’s anger does not just come about to write a good story but out of frustration, she wants readers to understand that race is an ideologically

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