The Weight of Blue Eyes: A Reflection on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Apr 19, 2025

I wasn’t ready for The Bluest Eye.

I thought I was. I thought I knew what it would be: a classic, a coming-of-age, a hard look at race and beauty. And yes, it is all of that. But it’s also a quiet storm. It moves through you slowly and softly at first, like a sad song, and you’re standing in the wreckage before you realize it. And the worst part is… the wreckage looks familiar. As a Black Puerto Rican woman raised in the South, I’ve felt the weight of not being enough—not light enough, not soft enough, not small enough, not holy enough. Reading this novel as a grown woman, a mother, and a storyteller pulled me right back into the ache of those girlhood years, where beauty was something we chased, not something we were.

Toni Morrison doesn’t write for comfort. She writes for truth. And in The Bluest Eye, she tells the kind of truth that sits in your spirit long after the pages close.

Beauty, Broken

The book is set in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1940s, and the central character is Pecola Breedlove, a dark-skinned, poor Black girl who believes that if she had blue eyes, everything in her life would be better. That she’d be beautiful. That her parents would stop fighting. That the boys at school would be kind. That the world would finally see her, maybe even love her.

But this isn’t a fairytale. This is a story about what happens when a child internalizes hatred. Not just from the outside world, but from within her own home, her people, her mirror.

From the beginning, Pecola is starved of tenderness. Her family is fractured and violent. Her mother, Pauline, is so busy chasing a whitewashed version of perfection that she doesn’t know how to nurture her daughter. Her father, Cholly, is broken beyond measure, a man who spirals into addiction, abandonment, and ultimately, abuse. Pecola grows up in the shadow of their trauma, and in the end, becomes its scapegoat.

And what’s especially heartbreaking? Nobody saves her. Not the adults. Not the neighbors. Not the community. Not even God.

Claudia: The Witness

Much of the story is narrated by Claudia MacTeer, a young girl who watches it all unfold. Claudia doesn’t buy into the idea that whiteness equals beauty. In fact, she gets angry when white baby dolls are forced into her arms as gifts. She can’t articulate it yet, but her spirit knows that something is off. That something about the way the world treats girls like Pecola is wrong.

Claudia’s voice grounds the novel. She’s not perfect. She’s a child. But she holds a kind of sacred curiosity, a quiet resistance to the systems around her. And as an adult, when she looks back on what happened to Pecola, she doesn’t just tell the story; she mourns it. She asks the questions we don’t want to ask. Why do we let this happen to our girls? Why do we scapegoat the ones who need the most love? Why do we call it ugly when it’s really just wounded?

The Ugly Truth

Morrison is never heavy-handed, but she is intentional. Every line in this book matters. Every metaphor, every flashback, every character sketch, all weave into a bigger truth about how internalized racism, generational trauma, and beauty politics show up in Black communities.

Pecola doesn’t just want blue eyes because she thinks they’re pretty. She wants them because she’s been taught that everything about her — her skin, her hair, her nose, her Blackness — is unworthy. And it’s not just white society doing the teaching. It’s her mother, who idolizes her white employer’s family. It’s her classmates. It’s the storefronts, the media, the silence. The sickness is everywhere.

There’s a part of the book where Pecola visits a man named Soaphead Church, a self-proclaimed mystic. He tells her that her wish for blue eyes has been granted. And she believes him. She begins to live in a delusion, convinced that she finally has the beauty she always wanted.

It’s one of the saddest, most chilling parts of the novel. Not just because Pecola has lost touch with reality, but because no one fought for her reality in the first place.

Generational Wounds

I want to pause here, because this part hit deep for me. The generational pain. Morrison doesn’t give anyone a simple backstory. Everyone’s brokenness has roots.

Cholly Breedlove isn’t just a villain. He’s a man shaped by deep humiliation, abandonment, and powerlessness. Pauline Breedlove isn’t just a cold mother. She’s a woman who never got the chance to see herself as worthy. Even the townspeople, who gossip and look the other way, are steeped in shame, survival, and disconnection.

It’s a reminder that none of us are born knowing how to love. Especially not in a world that refuses to love us first. And when love is absent, it gets replaced by control. By abuse. By avoidance. By silence.

A Mirror and a Warning

Reading The Bluest Eye felt like being handed a mirror I wasn’t sure I wanted to look into. Because Pecola isn’t just a character; she’s a symbol. Of every little Black girl who was called fast instead of hurt. Of every dark-skinned child who never saw herself on a magazine cover. Of every daughter who was left to figure it out alone while her mother tried to survive.

I saw pieces of myself in Claudia — that quiet rebellion, that confusion, that longing to protect something you can’t quite name.

I also saw pieces of myself in Pecola. A young, impressionable girl whose boundary was crossed by a family member.

And I saw pieces of people I’ve known in the Breedloves. People who never had a blueprint for softness, for healing, for grace.

But Morrison doesn’t write to shame us. She writes to remind us. We need to do better. That we have to be the ones who see the Pecola’s before they break. That we can’t wait for the world to validate our beauty. We have to reclaim it, affirm it, live it, every day.

Final Thoughts…

The Bluest Eye isn’t an easy read. But it’s a necessary one.

It left me tender. Quiet. Reflective. A little heavier, but in a way that felt honest.

Morrison knew what she was doing. She wasn’t just telling a story, she was telling our story. And she did it with language that cuts and heals at the same time. Her writing is poetic, textured, sometimes disorienting, but always purposeful. She doesn’t hold your hand through the pain. She lets you sit in it. And then she dares you to do something with it.

What I’m Taking With Me:

• Blue eyes won’t save us. But knowing who we are just might.

• Beauty isn’t just about what we see; it’s about what we’ve been taught to believe.

• Silence is a choice. So is love.

• Our girls deserve more than survival. They deserve softness, safety, and joy.

• It’s not enough to recognize the trauma. We have to interrupt it.

If you haven’t read The Bluest Eye yet, go into it with tenderness. Take breaks. Sit with it. Cry if you need to. But don’t look away.

And if you’ve already read it? Read it again. The second time, you’ll catch the things you missed when you were too stunned to breathe.

This isn’t just literature. It’s a call to remember and to rebuild.

Here’s an interview I watched recently where Morrison explains why she wrote The Bluest Eye:

Have you read Morrison’s work? What did Pecola teach you? How do you define beauty now, as a grown woman? Let’s hold space in the comments.

With love,

Angel Jae’

Bio

Angel Jae’ is a lifestyle + wellness writer, mama of three, and founder of Nurtured Notes, a soft life space for women rewriting what strength looks like. She believes in slow mornings, deep healing, and being radically well. You can find her journaling with incense, fighting the urge to overthink, and learning to choose herself daily.

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