Novel prompts readers to question the label 'beautiful'

by Holly Schreiber

Although it originally was released in 1970, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye surely will captivate a whole new breed of readers.

Peculiar and tragic, the story is about Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who constantly is told she's ugly. In her mind, the only way she will become beautiful is if her eyes turn blue because all the pretty white girls have very blue eyes.

The story takes place in a black community in Lorain, Ohio. An older Claudia MacTeer narrates the majority of the novel, but the heart of the story occurs when Claudia is 9 years old and Pecola is 11 years old.

Pecola was born into a family that offers her no support to endure society's racial prejudices, and she becomes obsessed with white female beauty. One instance of this obsession takes place when Pecola and her family are evicted from their apartment. Pecola briefly lives with the MacTeers, who include Claudia, her older sister Freida, and Claudia's parents.

While there, Pecola becomes oddly fond of a drinking cup the MacTeers own. The cup has an image of Shirley Temple on its side - Shirley with her dimples, curly, bouncy hair and, of course, white skin. Pecola drinks quart after quart of milk just to be able to hold and look at the cup.

It was as if she were trying to drink herself to beauty.

The novel takes a long journey into the pasts of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. They both originally were from the South; but when they got married, Cholly wanted to move to Lorain because of the many jobs available at the Steel Mill.

Pauline, as a child and even into womanhood, also is searching for beauty. Having pierced her foot with a nail at a young age, she always walked with a limp. Because of this defect, she was deemed unusual and not beautiful.

Cholly's father abandoned him and his mother before he was born, and his mother died when he was a baby. His aunt raised him, but she too suddenly passed away when he was 14 years old. Confused and lonely, he went in search of his father, only to be rejected.

The two came together to marry and had two children, one of them being Pecola. But their inability to find beauty causes ignorance and sometimes denial of their own children. It even drives Cholly to rape and impregnate his own daughter.

Morrison's novel explores the tragedy of a black community coping with the standard of white beauty. It does so with a voice very poetic, complex and often disturbing.

This is a novel to get lost in - to look around at the difficult situations it proposes and, most of all, to reflect on what society labels as beautiful.