A review by ceallaighsbooks
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

dark emotional sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? N/A
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late.”

TITLE—The Bluest Eye
AUTHOR—Toni Morrison
PUBLISHED—1970

GENRE—literary fiction
SETTING—Lorain, Ohio, just before WWII
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—poverty, anti-Blackness, racism, & oppression; love & human connection; childhood; trauma; Black history; internalized self-loathing; human psychology

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—“She is not seen by herself until she hallucinates a self.”
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Unseen scars are left on us every time we’re shown, and told, that we aren’t beautiful. These unseen scars are re-opened when it comes to love, friendships, relationships.” — from the Introduction (2022) by Candice Carty-Williams

I cried for AN HOUR after finishing this book. I read it in two sprints two days apart. What was particularly heartbreaking for me were Morrison’s words about what she was trying to accomplish in the writing of this book in her foreword, repeated again in the afterword: “Besides, it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.”

This book is now over fifty years old. It’s been banned countless times in countless places. It’s a literary classic, an immortal example of the American novel, and yet its message continues to go unheeded and misunderstood. A character from the text even anticipates this with these words: “Consider: How I needed a comfortable evil to prevent my knowing what I could not bear to know.”

The dehumanization that racism causes is demonstrated by Morrison so precisely and powerfully it is just devastating. And the sheer believability of everything that happens in this book... Whew.

I am grateful for books like this that tell the hard truths so impactfully. From those who are seen through these pages to those who are taught to see through them, Morrison’s words bring to light the true horror of the damage, the heinous toll that whiteness inflicts upon all aspects of human life.

“You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // child abuse, child rape, pedophilia, poverty, anti-Blackness,  domestic violence, colorism, animal cruelty (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
  • everything else by Toni Morrison
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Zami, by Audre Lorde
  • Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
  • The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi

Favorite Quotes—
from the Introduction, by Candice Carty-Williams (2022):
“When we think about the ways that we have to bend and contort ourselves, sometimes quite literally, into the mould that society has set out for us, is it not horrifying?”

“Unseen scars are left on us every time we’re shown, and told, that we aren’t beautiful. These unseen scars are re-opened when it comes to love, friendships, relationships.”

“And the last mistruth here is that life is ever kind. It’s not. But there is kindness within it, and within acceptance of self, even when the world is telling you that there is always a way for you to be better.”


from the Foreword, by Toni Morrison:
“…the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident….reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over.”

“Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.”

“Begun as a bleak narrative of psychological murder…”

“Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was?…The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.”

“Why, though reviled by others, could this beauty not be taken for granted within the community? Why did it need wide public articulation to exist?”

“I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.”

“One problem was centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing. My solution—break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader—seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now. Besides, it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.”


from the Text:
“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941… It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds… I had planted them too far down in the earth. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding.”

“Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life… If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go… Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership.”

“The other dolls, which were supposed to bring me great pleasure, succeeded in doing quite the opposite… [I] Traced the turned-up nose, poked the glassy blue eyeballs, twisted the yellow hair. I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable.”

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.”

“Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.”

“…she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.”

“Folks started gettin’ born old.”

“It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit.”

“And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

“Changes in weather began to affect her, as did certain sights and sounds. These feelings translated themselves to her in extreme melancholy. She thought of the death of newborn things, lonely roads, and strangers who appear out of nowhere simply to hold one’s hand, woods in which the sun was always setting.”

“Then they had grown. Edging into life from the back door. Becoming. Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, “Do this.” White children said, “Give me that.” White men said, “Come here.” Black men said, “Lay down.” The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other… They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other… [As old women,] They were, in fact and at last, free. And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes—a purée of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.”

“His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.”

“Knowing his label provided him with both comfort and courage, he believed that to name an evil was to neutralize if not annihilate it.”

“Consider: How I needed a comfortable evil to prevent my knowing what I could not bear to know.”

“You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.”

“We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.”

“…I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.”

“So it was. A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.”

“The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of the mind. …all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was.”

“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word. She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end.”

“I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late.”


from the Afterword, by Toni Morrison (1993):
“…the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze. I focused, therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society…”

“Besides, it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.”

“Because I know… that this is a terrible story about things one would rather not know anything about.”

“…a speculation on the disruption of “nature” as being a social disruption with tragic individual consequences in which the reader, as part of the population of the text, is implicated.”

“She is not seen by herself until she hallucinates a self.”
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