Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye (1970) is a female Bildungsroman, a novel of growing up, of growing up young and black and female in America. The story centers around the lives of two black families, the McTeers and the Breedloves, migrants from the South, living in Lorain, Ohio. But its emphasis is on the children, Claudia and Frieda McTeer and Pecola Breedlove—their happy and painful experiences in growing up, their formal and informal education. In fact, education by the school and society is the dominant theme of The Bluest Eye.

The novel opens with three versions of the "Dick and Jane" reader so prevalent in the public schools at the time (the 1940s) of the novel. Morrison uses this technique to juxtapose the fictions of the white educational process with the realities of life for many black children. The ironic duality of the school/home experience is illuminated through the ingenious structure of the novel. The "Dick and Jane" referent effectively introduces the fictional milieu of Morrison's characters; it is one with which we are all familiar…. It is the world of the first-grade basic reader—middle-class, secure, suburban and white, replete with dog, cat, non-working mother and leisure-time father…. This first version of the simulated-reader quotation is clear, straight, rendered in "Standard English"—correct and white. The second, while it repeats the message exactly, assumes a different visual appearance on the page which is less clear yet still comprehensible although written without proper capitals or punctuation…. The third, the wording of which is likewise unaltered, is completely run together, one long collection of consonants and vowels seeming to signify nothing….

These three versions are symbolic of the lifestyles that the author explores in the novel either directly or by implication. The first is clearly that of the alien white world (represented by the Fisher family) which impinges upon the lives of the black children and their families while at the same time excluding them. The second is the lifestyle of the two black McTeer children, Claudia and Frieda, shaped by poor but loving parents trying desperately to survive the poverty, the Northern cold and Northern style of racism they encounter in Ohio. The Breedloves' lives, however, are like the third—the distorted run-on—version of "Dick and Jane," and their child Pecola lives in a misshapen world which finally destroys her. The simulated "here is the house" quotation, with its variants, serves several purposes: as a synopsis of the tale that is to follow, and as a subtly ironic comment on a society which educates—and unconscionably socializes—its young with callous disregard for the cultural richness and diversity of its people. (p. 123)

The epitome of the good, the true, and the beautiful is, of course, Shirley Temple. Morrison uses the contrast between Shirley Temple and Pecola, like the contrasting versions of "Dick and Jane," to underscore the irony of black experience. Whether one learns acceptability from the formal educational experience or from cultural symbols, the effect is the same: self-hatred. Pecola's actual experience cannot be found in "Dick and Jane," for in the school primer, society denied her existence. In yearning to be Shirley Temple, she denies her own: "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment."…

Very early in the novel, Pecola's terribly pathetic desire to be Shirley Temple is demonstrated by her fascination with Frieda's blue-and-white Shirley Temple mug. She would inundate herself with milk (three quarts worth) just to hold the cup with "the silhouette of Shirley Temple's dimpled face,"… and gaze fondly into the blue eyes. It is in fact the blue eyes for which Pecola prays nightly; they are the answer to all things….

Pecola does not have joy and love to balance the pain and ugliness of her "normal" everyday experiences. Growing gradually into puberty is a luxury denied her. So she retreats into madness, a madness that includes the blue eyes she has prayed for, bestowed upon her by a "magic man," Soaphead Church, a strange outcast of a man suffering from his own delusions. (p. 124)

Pecola takes on some of the scapegoat characteristics that Trueblood has in Ellison's Invisible Man, at least for those in the black community. While Trueblood is rejected by the Blacks, he is supported by the white community and "displayed" as a kind of atavistic throwback, a comforting reminder of the dark, libidinous forces truly civilized man has repressed. The white community in the world of Morrison's novel has little or nothing to do with Pecola: She is rejected out of hand. But Claudia, struggling toward maturity and understanding, finally perceives the depth of her involvement in Pecola's descent into madness: "All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness…."

Nature serves as the unifying element in the novel. Each of the major sections is designated by season from autumn to summer. Time moves back and forth for the characters, whose lives unfold against the natural but inexorable progression of the seasons. The novel sets up its own tensions between the natural and unnatural, between the aberrations of nature and those of man. What makes the earth unyielding? What aborts life and stunts the growth of nature's offspring? These are the questions explored by the novelist through the marigold imagery and through the pattern of relationships intricately worked out around an act of violence against a child.

Although the Dick-and-Jane and Shirley Temple techniques set up a dichotomy between black experience and white culture, the issue of growth and development set into the framework of the Bildungsroman points to the commonality of human experience. All stages of life from birth to death are engaged. The rite of passage, initiating the young into womanhood at first tenuous and uncertain, is sensitively depicted. We also learn about the beauty and ugliness of the lives of women at the other end of the continuum—old women whose lives "were synthesized in their eyes—a purée of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy."… The Bluest Eye is an extraordinarily passionate yet gentle work, the language lyrical yet precise—it is a novel for all seasons. (p. 125)

Phyllis R. Klotman, "Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in 'The Bluest Eye'" (© Indiana State University 1979; reprinted with the permission of the author and Indiana State University), in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 13, No. 4, Winter, 1979, pp. 123-25.