This article was originally written for the sixth issue in the Advent 2025 semester of The Sewanee Purple and has been reproduced digitally.
Harper Rzepczynski
Contributing Writer
Widely loved and critically acclaimed author Toni Morrison has remained a household name in literature for the past fifty years, releasing novel after novel with gracefully communicated bold messages that set her work apart from other writers of her time. Though upon hearing her name one might first bring up her most iconic stories, such as “Beloved” or “Song of Solomon,” her other works highlight the twentieth-century Black struggle with the same fearless, vivid, and strikingly explicit criticism surrounding the United States’ racial hierarchies as her most famous novels. “The Bluest Eye” was Morrison’s first ever published book, released in 1970, and though it was widely ignored upon its initial publication, this story was later recognized as a breakthrough piece after the author began gaining traction just a few years later.
“The Bluest Eye” follows an eleven-year-old Black girl named Pecola Breedlove as she suffers her entire childhood trapped in an abusive home with an alcoholic father and neglectful mother. Pecola has dark skin, dark hair, and, most notably, dark eyes– her appearance epitomizes the opposite of whiteness. As the little girl navigates her bleak and brutal upbringing, where she is ignored both by her community and mistreated by her family, she internalizes the hatred she receives and concludes that she would not be abused if she were “not ugly” and “beautiful,” in this case, solely meaning closer to whiteness. Pecola begins wishing for blue eyes, innocently believing that if she looked conventionally pretty, then she would be loved like the light-skinned or white children around her.
Through this story, Morrison provides a harsh tragedy that simultaneously documents the traumatizing consequences of abuse as it all unfolds and exposes the detrimental suffering of children and adults alike resulting from racist beauty standards.
The story of “The Bluest Eye” contains many details and central themes that define this novel as ahead of its time and justify its immense praise. Interestingly, the majority of the novel is actually not told from Pecola’s point of view; rather, the reader sees the world through the eyes of her nine-year-old neighbor, Claudia MacTeer. “The Bluest Eye” presents a stark contrast between the two girls as Claudia observes Pecola’s dangerous situation, evidencing that though the two look physically similar, the people around Pecola have gravely failed her. A notable overarching theme is innocence and youthful impressionability, as tragic Pecola only understands the abuse she endures as a reflection of her personal value as she grows to loathe herself and see her “ugliness” as the root cause of her sullying mistreatment. The novel takes disturbing yet realistic measures to display severely treacherous situations, such as domestic violence and molestation, to reveal the damaging effects of Black Americans’ historical mistreatment. With that said, it is no surprise that generational Black trauma is another theme in “The Bluest Eye,” prominently displayed towards the end of the novel when Morrison provides the backstory of Pecola’s parents. Familial trauma stretching across generations and its continuous consequences is perhaps the most important theme within the novel because it explains that the dysfunctionality within Pecola’s family is not just an isolated, independent, and non-racialized occurrence; rather, the hazardous reality of the Breedloves is a result of drawn-out racist power dynamics, and Pecola just happens to be the newest victim in their bloodline. Morrison’s debut novel does a superb job of displaying both the origins and the consequences of systemic racism through the eyes of innocence.
“The Bluest Eye” does not simply hold up well over fifty years later– it has aged undeniably wonderfully. Morrison’s intersectional approach especially places the novel ahead of its time, as this story focuses on the crossover between womanhood and the Black experience, with its focus on beauty standards revolving around white femininity. It is also essential to acknowledge the beauty in Morrison’s writing style as she paints literary landscapes of each situation using such careful detail and as she remarkably describes the painfully understandable inner-workings within each character’s mind. This story has lost no accuracy in the last half-decade and is instead even better understood from a modern standpoint now that feminism has grown more intersectional; this novel is finally receiving the recognition it deserves in the twenty-first century. Toni Morrison is not just an author– she is an artist, an activist, and a published genius whose dramatic legacy only just began with her first masterpiece, “The Bluest Eye.”