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The Bluest Eye | Introduction

As Toni Morrison has become one of America's most celebrated contemporary authors, her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, has gained increasing attention from literary critics. Most of the novel is narrated by a young black girl, Claudia MacTeer, who is part of a poor but loving black family in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1940s. However, the primary focus of the novel is on Pecola Breedlove, another young black girl who lives in very different circumstances from Claudia and her sister, Frieda. Pecola's mother, Pauline, is cruel to her family because they are a constant reminder that her life can never measure up to the ideal world of the white family for which she works as a maid. Not only is her mother distant and aloof, but Pecola's father is also unreliable for any comfort or support. Cholly Breedlove drinks excessively and later rapes Pecola. She bears his child, who dies shortly after birth. Because Pecola, like Pauline, yearns to be seen as beautiful, she longs for the blue eyes of the most admired child in the 1940s: Shirley Temple. After visiting Soaphead Church, a "spiritualist" who claims he can make Pecola's eyes blue, Pecola believes that she has the bluest eyes in the world and now everyone will love her. Clearly, Pecola is the truest kind of victim. Unlike Claudia, who possesses the love of her family, Pecola is powerless to reject the unachieveable values esteemed by those around her and finally descends into insanity. The Bluest Eye portrays the tragedy that results when African Americans have no resources with which to fight the standards presented to them by the white culture that scorns them.

The Bluest Eye Summary

Part I: "Dick and Jane" and Preface
The Bluest Eye opens with a short "Dick and Jane" primary reader story that is repeated three times. The first time the story is written clearly. In the second telling, however, the text loses its capitalization and punctuation. By the third time through, the story has also lost its spacing. The novel then shifts to a short, italicized preface in the voice of Claudia MacTeer as an adult. She looks back on the fall of 1941. We find that this book will be the story of Claudia, her sister, Frieda, and their involvement with a young black girl named Pecola, pregnant with her father's child.

Part II: Autumn
In this section, the tense shifts from present to past, indicating shifts between the nine-year-old Claudia and the adult Claudia acting as narrators. The story begins with the arrival of Mr. Henry Washington, a boarder who will live with the MacTeers. At the same time, Pecola Breedlove comes to live with the MacTeers. She has been "put outdoors" by her father, who has gone to jail and not paid the rent on their apartment. Frieda and Pecola talk about how much they each love Shirley Temple. Claudia rebels. She does not like Shirley Temple nor the white dolls she receives each Christmas with the big blue eyes. To the dismay of the adults, she dismembers these dolls, trying "to see what it was that all the world said was lovable."

The text shifts to the third-person ("he"/"she") omniscient point of view and gives the reader a brief of the inside of the Breedloves' two-room apartment. The whole family shares one bedroom and there is no bath, only a toilet. At the same time, the Breedlove family is introduced. The family is described as ugly: "No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly. Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness (the result of despair dissipation, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people) was behavior, the rest of the family … wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them."

Pecola's parents both fight and make love in front of their two children. In the midst of the turmoil, Pecola comes to believe that if she had blue eyes, she would only see the things she wanted to see. Pecola's only refuge from her life is with the three prostitutes who live upstairs and who treat her with affection, the only people who do so.

Part III: Winter
Claudia and Frieda endure the gray Ohio winter until a "disrupter of seasons," a new girl named Maureen Peale, comes to school. She is lighter... » Complete The Bluest Eye Summary