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Oct
02
In Praise of Banned Books, day 6: The Bluest Eye
2008 at 9am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Toni Morrison really knows how to shake people up. She isn’t afraid to explore topics that many find offensive, taboo, or just plain difficult—race, gender, class, color, sex, etc.—because she wants to force a conversation, a dialogue between people who are more similar than we are different, and she wants to get us thinking and talking about these things. This fearlessness is one of the reasons she tops my list of favorite writers. The fact that her books are like nothing else I’ve ever read also helps. There’s a reason she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. And it all began with The Bluest Eye.
The Bluest Eye presents the story of Pecola Breedlove, a poor young Black girl who yearns to have blonde hair and blue eyes (and, presumably, white skin). Her desire stems from internalized hatred caused by the racism in her community, the trauma of being raped by her father, and the complicated intersections of race, class, and color in the American south, and it represents the dangerous physical, social, and psychological impacts of being “othered.”
Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time.
Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
Like all of Morrison’s novels, The Bluest Eye is difficult to read because of the visceral responses it elicits and the difficult, unpleasant, and downright horrifying facts it forces us to face. Morrison’s writing never fails to help me understand what life is like for someone who is very different from me, and it pushes me to explore my role as a young white woman in a culture that breeds contempt for women and people of color. It’s rarely easy, but it is always worthwhile.
The Bluest Eye has been challenged for its strong sexual content (click here to read more) and for its portrayal of race and the Black community. Like I said, Toni Morrison knows how to shake us up; she knows which buttons to push and which issues to present in order to challenge us to examine and re-examine our ideas and to begin thinking about things in a new way.
It is these ideas that I think people are afraid of. They don’t know what to do with intelligent, well-written material from an articulate Black woman who sees to the core of the problem and points it out, even when it’s not pretty. Especially when it’s not pretty. Her willingness to push the envelope and her ability to tell amazing stories—to give us reading experiences that are truly life-changing—make Toni Morrison one of our greatest contemporary American authors and a national treasure.
If you love Toni Morrison, or if you’ve never read her and are looking for an accessible point of entry, The Bluest Eye is a great place to begin. As her first novel, it is the jumping-off point from which everything else develops and within which she introduces concepts that become more complex with each new book. And you know what? Pretty much everything she’s ever written has been banned or challenged at some point, and that should tell you something about how good she is.
If you’re coming late to the banned books party, check out my other featured banned books: The Perks of Being a Wallflower—And Tango Makes Three—Catch-22—The Giver–The Things They Carried
Devourer of Books is also doing daily features: See these: Kaffir Boy—The Grapes of Wrath—The Handmaid’s Tale—Native Son–In Cold Blood
Related posts:
I’ve read most of Morrison’s other works, but not this one. What a great choice to spotlight! One of mankind’s greatest failings has been the inability to confront ugly truths head on and deal with them. Instead, we hide from them and if they are put in front of us, it’s just easier to remove it from our sight.
[...] The Perks of Being a Wallflower — And Tango Makes Three — Catch-22 — The Giver — The Things They Carried — The Bluest Eye [...]
I read this a few years ago and it was SO sad!
Sometimes, to enable a discussion, you need to exaggerate stereotypes and prejudices, make them so shocking that nothing but a discussion can ensue. Comedy is another medium that allows for such discussions (have you seen Achmed the dead terrorist? It’s on my blog page if you are interested!) but the problem with comedy is that when it is really well done, you laugh so hard that you forget about the (crucial) conversations you need to have afterwards.
Another great review
I have this book, and I think I read it several years ago, but I don’t remember it at all. That’s the problem when you read so much! I think I’ll pick it up again. Great review!