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Toni Morrison was the only black authoress of America who won the Nobel Prize in literature. Her first full-length novel The Bluest Eye had great social reflection. The story was mainly about a black girl who desires to have a pair of blue eyes and finally she was going dotty. The whole work used flowery languages which reflect author’s anxiety to the vanishing Negro’s culture,and she hoped to find a way for black people to preserve their own culture through writing. In general, The Bluest Eye was a book to advocate national equality. In this book, Morrison extended Pecola’s personal tragedy to the whole black people. She criticized the cultural value of white American through a serious of actual images of black, revealed the harm that racism bring to the black people.
The Bluest Eye was mainly about the life of Breedloves family. Nine years old Claudia and ten years old Frieda MacTeer lived in Lorain, Ohio, with their parents. It was the end of the Great Depression, and the girls’ parents were more concerned with making ends meet than lavishing attention upon their daughters, but there was an undercurrent of love and stability in their home. The MacTeers took in a boarder, Henry Washington, and also a young girl named Pecola. Pecola’s father had tried to burn down his family’s house, and Claudia and Frieda felt sorry for her. Pecola loved Shiley Temple, believed that whiteness is beautiful and that she is ugly.
Pecola moved back in with her family, and her life was difficult. Her father drank, her mother was distant, and the two of them often beat each other. Her brother, Sammy, frequently ran away. Pecola believed that if she had blue eyes, she would be loved and her life would be transformed. Meanwhile, she continually received confirmation of her own sense of ugliness---the grocer looked right though her when she buys candy, boys made fun of her, and a light-skinned girl, Maureen, who temporarily befriended her make fun of her too. She was wrongly blamed for killing a boy’s cat and is called a “nasty little black bitch” by his mother.
Cholly, Pecola’s father, was abandoned by his parents and raised by his great aunt, who died when he was a young teenager. He was humiliated by two white men who found his having sex for the first time and made him continue while they watched. He ran away to find his father but was rebuffed by him. By the time he met Pauline, he was a wild and rootless man. He felt trapped in his marriage and had lost interest in life. Cholly returned home one day and found Pecola washing dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and hatred that are fueled by guilt, he raped her. When Pecola’s mother found her unconscious on the floor, she disbelieved Pecola’s story and beat her. Pecola gone to Soaphead Church, a sham mystic, and asked him for blue eyes. Instead of helping her, he used her to kill a dog he dislikes.
Claudia and Frieda found out that Pecola had been impregnated by her father, and unlike the rest of the neighborhood, they wanted the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they had been saving for a bicycle and plant marigold seeds. They believed that if the flowers live, so will Pecola’s baby. The flowers refused to bloom, and Pecola’s baby died when it was born prematurely. Cholly, who raped Pecola a second time and then ran away, died in a workhouse. Pecola gone mad, believed that her cherished wish had been fulfilled and that she had the bluest eyes.源!自`优尔~文)论(文]网[www.youerw.com
The story was written in first person, it recounted by a black girl Claudia who is the playmate of Pecola’s childhood. The story was about how Pecola madly cling to the blue eyes. Because of the narrator in the story which provided authenticity to this story. In her narration, Claudia’s life was showed to us as well. As a nine year old black girl, Claudia didn’t understand why people hold different attitudes to black child and white child, in order to know why people like a dull with blue eyes and what’s its charms, she dismantles a dull. Through her perspective, we getting to know what is a black girl’s reception to white people when the white do harm to black people. At the same time, different attitudes to the blue eyes bring different outcomes, it provide a way to identify the black girl (Tang 2006).