Toni Morrison


The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

I. Background information on Toni Morrison
A. Where she was born.

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B. Where she attend college
C. Why she changed her name
D. When she got married
II. The Bluest Eye
A. Summary of The Bluest Eye
B. What is a theme?
1. The main theme of The Bluest Eye.

C. What is a Plot?
1. What is the plot of The Bluest Eye?

1.The significance of Pecola’s name






In the novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison incorporates various techniques, such as her use of metaphors, the ironic use of names, and the visual images that she uses. The theme of The Bluest Eye, revolves around African Americans’ conformity to white standards. A woman may whiten her skin, straighten her hair and change its color, but she can not change the color of her eyes. The desire to transform one’s identity, itself becomes an inverted desire, becomes the desire for blues eye, which is the symptom of Pecola’s instability.

The Bluest Eye opens with a Dick and Jane paragraph, a white American Myth far removed from the realities illustrated in the novel. Thereafter, the black narrator Claudia MacTeer relates much of the story, and the reminder, which concerns events that Claudia could not have witnessed, is narrated mostly by an unidentified voice. Claudia’s narrative reveals the guilt that for a long time plagued her and her sister in connection with another girl’s miscarriage. The girl, Pecola Breedlove, was pregnant with her own father’s child in the fall of 1941. Told by the different narrators, the understanding of events up to her tragedy is organized according to the four seasons.



In the spring, Mr. Washington, the border fondles Frieda’s breasts, and Mr. MacTeer beats him up and throws him out of the house. Later, Frieda and Claudia go and visit Pecola who is at the Fisher’s where Mrs. Breedlove works as a housekeeper. While the children are there, Pecola spills a pan of hot blueberry cobbler all over herself, the dress of the white girl, and the clean white floor. Mrs. Breedlove viciously abuses Pecola and comforts the little white girl. In the next section, a third person omniscient narrator flashes back to Pauline’s young adulthood and her marriage. This narration only tells how Pauline came to work as a servant, for the white rich family.


It is summer when Claudia and Frieda hear that Pecola is pregnant with her father’s child. They overhear adults talking about the child and how it will probably not survive. Claudia and Frieda seem to be the only ones who want the baby to live. They make a promise to God to be good for a whole month and plant marigold seed that will serve as a sign for them; when the seeds sprout, they will know that everything will be alright. However, as readers already know that “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941” and nothing turn out right for Pecola.

The next chapter is a deranged dialogue carried out between Pecola and herself in which she discusses her new blue eyes, questioning if they are “bluest eyes” in the world. We also discover that Cholly has raped his daughter more than once. Her madness, then, appears to be a defense against the pain of living her life. The last voice that we ear in the novel is that of Claudia’s, now looking back as an adult, trying to assign the blame for the tragedy of Pecola. She tells us that Pecola’s baby died soon after birth, Cholly is died as well, that Mrs. Breedlove still works for the white people and Pecola spends her days talking to herself and picking at the garbage in a dump. The novel closes with the indictment of the community and the culture.

The narrative structure in The Bluest Eye is important in revealing, just how persuasive and destructive the “Racialization” (Morrison’s term for racism that is a part of every person’s socialization) is (Leflore) Narration in The Bluest Eye comes from several sources, but most of the narration is from Claudia McTeer as a nine year old child. Morrison also gives the reader the benefit of Claudia reflecting on the story as an adult, some first person narration from Pecola’s mother, and by Morrison herself as an omniscient narrator.

Morrison intentionally kept Pecola from any first person narration of the story. She wanted to ” try to a little girl as a total and complete victim of whatever was around her” and she needed the distance and the innocence of Claudia’s character to do that (Stepto479). The experience would have been less meaning coming from Pecola herself because, ” A total and complete victim would be an unreliable narrator, unwilling (or unable) to tell relate the actual circumstances of that year (Stepto479).


The “Dick and Jane” snippets show just how prevalent and important the images of white perfection are in Pecola’s life. Morrison’s strange typography illustrates how irrelevant and inappropriate these images are.

Names play an important part in The Bluest Eye, because they are often symbolic of conditions in society and in the context on the story. The name if the novel, The Bluest Eye, is meant to give the reader thinking about how much value is placed on blue eyed little girls. Pecola and her family are representative of the larger African American community and their name “Breedlove” is ironic because they live in a society that does not ” breed love”. In fact, it breeds hate, hate of blackness and the hatred of oneself. The name “MacTeer”, can have an argument to be made, that it refers to the fact that the MacTeer girls are the only ones who shed a tear for Pecola. Soaphead church represents as his name suggests the role of the church in African American life. The implication is that the church’s promise that if you worship God and pray to him that everything will be alright is no better than Soaphead’s promise to Pecola that she will have blue eyes.

Morrison reveals the significance of Pecola’s name through the character of Maureen Peal. Maureen confuses Pecola’s name with the name of the character in the movie Imitation of Life.
“I just moved here. My name is Maureen peal. What’s yours”
“Pecola? Wasn’t that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?”
“I don’t know. What is that?”
“The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother cause
“Oh” Pecola’s voice was no more than a sigh.

“Anyway, her name was Pecola too. She was pretty. When it comes back, I’m going to see it again.”(Morrison56-57)
Maureen’s reference to the film illustrates how white cultural values shape the black community’s idea of physical beauty. But Maureen’s discrepancy, was that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life, is not in fact Pecola, but Peola. The irregularity is appropriate because it denotes Pecola’s failure to be like her cinematic double. Maureen’s mistake is relevance as well, for Morrison in her act of (mis)naming signifies the community’s power to deny an individual autonomy and to use people for its own needs.


There are two major metaphors in The Bluest Eye, one of marigolds and of dandelions. Claudia, looking back as an adult says, at the beginning of the book, “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941″(Morrison 9). She and her sister (Frieda) plant seed with the belief that the marigolds seeds would grow and survive, and so would Pecola’s baby (Morrison 149). Morrison’s scope to all African Americans on the last page ” I even think that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits it will not bear(Morrison160). The implication is that Pecola like so many other African Americans never had the chance to grow and succeed, because she lived in a society (“soil”) that was inherently racist, and would not nurture her.

The other metaphor, the dandelion is also an important metaphor that Morrison uses because it represents Pecola’s image of herself. See, Pecola passes some dandelions going into Mr. Yacobowski’s store. “Why she wonders, so people call them weeds? She thought that they were pretty”(Morrison 41). After leaving the store and being humiliated by Mr. Yacobowski, she again passes the same dandelions and thinks; “They are ugly. They are weeds (Morrison 43). Pecola has transferred society’s dislikes of her unto the dandelions.


Red = alarm
Green = tranquillity
Blue = pleasure nurturing
White = mystical



Works Cited
Bakerman, Jane. “The Seams Can’t Show: An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Black American Literature forum. 12(1978): 56-60.

Dittermar, Linda.”Will the Circle be Unbroken?” The Politics of Form in The Bluest Eye.”Novel. 23.2 (Winter1990): 137-55.

Leflore, Fannie,”Author Morrison uses fiction to challenge prevailing images,” Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Journal, October 20,1990

Stepto, Robert B. “Intimate Things In Place” A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Massachusetts Review. 18(1977): 473-89