Southern Connecticut State University
English Department

Toni Morrisson: The Bluest Eye

2003

Table of contents

The subtext of the reading ...2

1.1. The Dick and Jane narrative ...2
1.2. Whiteness as the standard of beauty ...4
1.3. Seeing versus being seen / Eyes and vision ...7

1. Critical source ...9

2. Creative source ...10

3. Questions for discussion ...11

The subtext of the reading

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison′s first novel and was published in 1970. Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child′s and an adult′s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia′s and Pecola′s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character′s points of view.
The subtext of the first part of the novel (Autumn and Winter) suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the "Dick and Jane narrative" by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes "whiteness as the standard of beauty" and "seeing versus being seen" which are sometimes closely connected.
The Bluest Eye provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her. However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.


1.1. The Dick and Jane narrative

The novel begins with a series of sentences that seem to come from a children′s reader. The sentences describe a house and the family that lives in the house - Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane. The brief narrative focuses on Jane. The pet cat will not play with Jane, and when Jane asks her mother to play, she laughs. When Jane asks her father to play, he smiles, and the dog runs away instead of playing with Jane. Then a friend comes to play with Jane. This sequence is repeated verbatim without punctuation, and then is repeated a third time without spaces between the words or punctuation (page 3-4).

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