THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison

THE BLUEST EYE

                        -Toni Morrison

                                    Toni Morrison is an African-American writer and professor. Growing up in Ohio, she developed a love for literature and storytelling. She studied English at Howard University and Cornell University, before teaching English at various universities and working as an editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She continued to write and gradually garnered national attention before publishing Beloved in 1987. Beloved was hugely successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is regularly included in the discussion of the best novel written after World War II. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writings often focus on the experiences of black women in the United States. She is currently a professor at Princeton University. Morrison's work joins the African-American literary tradition, which strives to depict the African-American experience of living in the United States. With The Bluest Eye, Morrison set out to create a distinctively black literature, what she calls a "race-specific yet race-free prose." Her novel joins an abundance of texts that center on African-American experience in the decades after the Civil War, most notably, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston, Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, Native Son, by Richard Wright. Morrison's prose is infused with black vernacular, and black musical traditions such as the spirituals, gospel, jazz, and the blues. Her novel also joins the modernist tradition established by Faulkner and Woolf, utilizing techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation.

                                    Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" is an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed specifically to murder possibilities; the "bluest eye" refers to the blue eyes of the blond American myth, by which standard the black-skinned and brown-eyed always measure up as inadequate.

                                    The Bluest Eye is a harsh warning about the old consciousness of black folks' attempts to emulate the slave master. Pecola's request is not for more money or a better house or even for more sensible parents; her request is for blue eyes — something that, even if she had been able to acquire them, would not have abated the harshness of her abject reality.