The Bluest Eyes

 The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
  
1.      Theme

The theme in this novel is about the appearance from the black people. In The Bluest Eye, characters associate beauty with whiteness. The novel constantly refers to white American icons of beauty and innocence such as Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple. African-American girls during this time period (the 1940s) were encouraged to aspire to be white; all of the female African-American characters in the novel have grown up in a society that does not find them beautiful or even worthy of being looked at.

2.      Main Characters 
      
     Pecola Breedlove 
              Pecola is the protagonist of The Bluest Eye, but despite this central role she is passive and remains a mysterious character. Pecola is a fragile and delicate child when the novel begins. And by the novel’s close, she has been almost completely destroyed by violence. At the beginning of the novel, two desires form the basis of her emotional life. First, she wants to learn how to get people to love her and second, when forced to witness her parent’s brutal fights, she simply wants to disappear. Neither wish is granted, and Pecola is forced further and further into her fantasy world, which is her only defense against the pain of her existence. At the end of the novel, we know that her ugliness has made them feel beautiful, her suffering has made them feel comparatively lucky, and her silence has given them the opportunity for speaking.

3.      Summary of the Story (plot)

The MacTeers take in a boarder, Henry Washington, and also a young girl named Pecola. Pecola’s father has tried to burn down his family’s house, and Claudia and Frieda feel sorry for her. Pecola loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is beautiful and that she is ugly.

Pecola moves back with her family, and her life is difficult. Her father drinks, her mother is distant, and the two of them often beat one another. Her brother, Sammy, frequently runs away. Pecola believes that if she had blue eyes, she would be loved and her life would be transformed. Meanwhile, she continually receives confirmation of her own sense of ugliness. Like when the grocer looks right through her when she buys candy, boys make fun of her, and a light-skinned girl, Maureen, she makes fun of her too. She is wrongly blamed for killing a boy’s cat and is called a nasty little black bitch by his mother.

We learn that Pecola’s parents have both had difficult lives. Pauline, her mother, has a lame foot and has always felt isolated. She feels most alive when she is at work, cleaning a white woman’s home. She loves this home and despises her own. 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 him 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 feels trapped in his marriage and has lost interest in life.

Cholly returns home one day and finds Pecola washing dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and hatred that are fueled by guilt, he rapes her. When Pecola’s mother finds her unconscious on the floor, she disbelieves Pecola’s story and beats her. Pecola goes to Soaphead Church, a sham mystic, and asks him for blue eyes. Instead of helping her, he uses her to kill a dog he dislikes.

Claudia and Frieda find out that Pecola has been impregnated by her father, and unlike the rest of the neighborhood, they want the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they have been saving for a bicycle and plant marigold seeds. They believe that if the flowers live, so wills Pecola’s baby. The flowers refuse to bloom, and Pecola’s baby dies when it is born prematurely. Cholly, who rapes Pecola a second time and then runs away, dies in a work house.  Pecola goes mad, believing that her cherished wish has been fulfilled and that she has the bluest eyes.

4.      Setting and atmosphere

Setting 

The novel begins in Ohio after the Great Depression. Economic security is of particular concern for African Americans, who have far fewer opportunities for mobility than do their white counterparts. From the beginning, we see how important every last penny is to the MacTeers, as their entire family spends time picking coal for Zick's Coal Company even though it harms their health.

When we get to Pauline's and Cholly's stories, we can view their moves north to Ohio from the South as part of the Great Migration of African Americans that occurred from 1910 to 1940. Waves of African Americans seeking better jobs and more racial tolerance moved from rural southern towns to more industrial northern ones. 

Atmosphere 

I think this play have a sadness and gloomy atmosphere, because the black people always get different treatment just because they are black.

5.      Symbol/ Allegory 

      Blue Eyes
                  Blue eyes seem to symbolize the cultural beauty and cachet attributed to whiteness in America. Different characters respond to blue eyes in different ways. Claudia, for example, resents the blue eyes of her white dolls, viewing their association with beauty ironically and with disdain. For Pecola, however, blue eyes are something to strive for. She believes that having blue eyes would change the way other people see her, giving her something white America values as beautiful.

                 We also like the idea that "blue" can refer to sadness. When Pecola believes she has acquired blue eyes at the end of the novel, we might understand her as actually having the saddest eyes of anyone in the novel.