This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is-yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. 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. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear: You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly you looked closely and could not find the source. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control.
Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel.
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