Motherhood In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is considered as one of the prominent writers in African-American history. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature and she became the eighth woman and the first African-American to win the prize. Her novels furnish themselves to feminist interpretation because they challenge the cultural norms of class, gender and race. In her novels, Beloved bagged Pulitzer Prize award for Fiction in 1988 and remains one of the most well-known and critically-acclaimed works. Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white standards of beauty on black women and the creation of cultural perversion and also presents the concept of motherhood has been distorted by racial ideology. The purpose …show more content…
Toni Morrison portrays unimaginable dark-skinned young girl, Pecola, who finding herself by her family and the society embarks on a search for what she believes to be an acceptable self, by achieving in her imagination the blue eyes of a young girl. Light thinks Pecola is ugly but her ugliness doesn’t stem from a grotesque physical deformity, but is rather a quality arbitrarily assigned to her by a dominant culture that equate worthiness with skin color (33). Sugiharti also believes the novel dwells on the beauty which is the central focus of many women, it is something has been derived from the myth. The ideal beauty is depicted as a woman with a light skin and blue eyes, a physical feature, that white people more likely to have(2). She grows up in a family bare of any affection, zenith and self-esteem. She wants to have blue eyes because she only wants to be loved by the people and knows that her huge difference with whites is the definition of beauty in society. “It is [her] blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distastes in white eyes” (39). As Oshiro believes Pecola doesn’t want materialistic fulfilment, she only wants it to fulfil her wish (168). So Pecola is locked in a perpetual conversation with herself because the self is fragmented and she has no one to speak with to ease herself off. Quoted in Wen-Ching Ho, Naintara Gorwany points out succinctly, “the …show more content…
Claudia, the young girl narrator, at the very beginning of the novel, describes herself as indifferent to both white dolls and Shirley Temple. She also realises that she does not really hate light-skinned Maureen but hates the thing that makes Maureen beautiful: “and all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us” (58). It is the ideology of whiteness that makes Maureen appear beautiful (8) and Bouson argues in this