Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. She knows what she’d find there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has distorted the reflection of her face. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free-free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. And the dream is this: that someone-God, perhaps-will grant her the gift of blue eyes. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her classmates heap on her is to dream. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. Like all the principal characters in “The Bluest Eye,” Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison, who died last August, was born in 1931. 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.Spectacular even alongside other early novels bathed in the blood of gothic dread-William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930), say, or Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” or Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (both published in 1952)-Morrison’s book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black girls at the center of the story. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.Īnd 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. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. Even her waking dreams we used-to silence our own nightmares. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. All of us-all who knew her-felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. “All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed.

The bluest eye sparknotes