The Themes of Beauty and Happiness in the Bluest Eye

In Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a young girl faces all challenges in the world as we follow her sorrowful yet oddly hopeful life. She is a broken soul just curious enough to wonder what love feels like, a dreamer in a hard reality. There is nothing beautiful about the events in Pecola’s life, only in the way she fought on through it all, until she couldn’t anymore. In a world full of hatred, Pecola still hoped for love and beauty.

In the beginning of the book, we encounter a family called the MacTeers. Frieda and Claudia are the two young sisters in that household who become close friends with Pecola. Although it is not entirely clear at first what landed Pecola there, we do know her house burned down and she was placed into foster care at the MacTeer’s house. Right away, we discover Pecola’s love for beauty. She is infatuated with the idea of being beautiful, or being ideally beautiful. The theme of idealistic beauty is shown throughout the book through other women, flowers, and comments of ugliness. “She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face. Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cute Shirley Temple was.” Because this scene is very clearly not buying into the beauty standards that are Shirley Temple, and pretty blue-eyed baby dolls, there is a strong push towards how important beauty will be in the story, foreshadowing the struggles around physical appearances that will occur later on.

Although there is a negative stigma centralized around beauty, in the end, when Pecola finally thinks she is beautiful, there is a sad peace hinted at in Pecola’s life. She finally has what she longed for to escape the sadness and, although it’s not real, it’s so real for her that her happiness is beautiful enough to smile upon. The real story on Pecola begins in her home. Her brother Sammy is a troubled boy with anger issues, for very obvious reasons, who aids in the fighting and abandonment of Pecola. He is young so it is not necessarily as severe as abandonment, but every time he leaves Pecola behind. She justifies his actions a little by blaming herself, only showcasing how innocent a child she really is. Pecola’s mother, Pauline, is horrible because she shares so many of the desires that Pecola does but still refuses to understand her. They both long for love, beauty, and purpose, but Pecola doesn’t know how to look for those things. Pauline has a bad foot that for a long time made her feel like less of a person until Pecola’s father, Cholly, came into town and made Pauline not only feel loved despite it but also loved and embraced because of it.

“For the first time, Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset.” However, Pauline and Cholly didn’t stay happy for long. She grew jealous of the girls with nice clothes and makeup and fell back into the place that Pecola had been stuck in her whole life, a place of jealousy and sadness. There was a sympathy for Pecola around her mother, because of how unimportant she was constantly made to feel, especially when she was at her mother’s workplace. “Mrs. Breedlove yanked her up by the arm, slapped her again, and in a voice thin with anger, abused Pecola directly and Frieda and me by implication.” “The little girl in pink started to cry. Mrs. Breedlove turned to her. ‘Hush, baby, hush…'” Pecola’s mother chose, right in front of her, to show love to the child she worked for while beating her own flesh and blood without so much as a what happened. At home, it was much the same, but instead of being hit, she was forced to listen to the awful fighting between her parents, praying for it all to stop while they emotionally abused each other and, by association, her. “‘Please God,’ she whispered into the palm of her hands, ‘Please make me disappear.'” Her mother was not a terrible person; she was a woman in an abusive relationship who shouldn’t have had children. However, no one was as bad as Pecola’s father.

Cholly was abandoned by his parents, his father before he was born and his mother when he was just ten days old. His aunt took him from the dump where his mother had tried to leave him, and raised him herself. When she died suddenly, he had no one to look after him and no one to teach him about love. He had intense anger issues which usually targeted black women because he felt dominance in those relationships, while his real anger was towards white men. After his aunt died, he went to find his father, running away from his uncle who was supposed to take him in after his aunt’s passing. When he found his father, he was rejected and found himself out on the streets at only fifteen. His rough family life growing up explains but doesn’t justify why Cholly was a mean drunk his entire adult life. “Even from where Pecola lay, she could smell Cholly’s whiskey.”

Pecola knew to pretend to be asleep in the mornings when her parents fought, silently hoping that they would kill each other in a fight one morning. She also silently hoped that she herself would die. “She struggled between an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a profound wish that she herself could die.” The author throws a strong image into the book of the difference between the MacTeer’s home life and Pecola’s, when we discover that Pecola has been sexually assaulted and raped by her father. This evokes a completely different reaction when compared to when Frieda is assaulted by Mr. Henry. In Frieda’s case, her parents get rid of him, her father even beats him up showing love and protection towards their daughter. In contrast, her mother becomes furious with the neighbor, Miss Dunion, when she suggests that Frieda might be “ruined.”

However, in Pecola’s case, there is no sympathy for her or the child she ends up pregnant with. Everyone is quick to gossip, and no one wants the child to survive except Claudia. Yet, it is evident that she only wishes this because no one else does. Claudia even says, “More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live, just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.” Even Pecola’s own mother beats her nearly to death, blaming her for what happened to her rather than the criminal Cholly. There is a sort of peaceful karma afterwards, however, when Cholly dies at work. The girls, Claudia and Frieda, don’t understand what happened when Pecola loses her baby. They believe it’s because of the earth somehow; they plant seeds in the ground and pray that if the plants grow, so will the baby. However, neither the baby nor the plants grow, leaving the girls with the assumption that it was the earth that was barren and unwarranted the child to be born.

This all shows and proves the theme of lack of love between families and even people in the general population. Throughout the entire book, Pecola is pushed down and ignored like a broken toy by her community. For example, when she goes to the grocery store to buy candy, she is ignored by the store clerk for no discernible reason. Or when a young boy, Junior, targets Pecola in the playground because of his own sad life, convinces her to go to his house to see kittens, but when she gets there, he throws his mother’s cat at her. Then, when she pets it with affection, he kills the cat and blames Pecola. His mother shouts horrible names at her, unaware of the things Pecola is feeling on a daily basis and only reiterating the loneliness and unimportance Pecola feels. This scene, and the scene with Cholly, show that sometimes bad people do bad things, but also that sometimes sad people do too.

Despite so many horrible things having happened to her, she is still a young girl who wants what all girls want: to be pretty and to be loved. Another strong theme throughout the book is the yearning for love, but with this theme, we never see anyone truly achieve love. Even Claudia and Frieda’s parents don’t seem to have a strong sense of love. That may be more centered around their father having such a small role in the book, but there are no real examples throughout the book of people who truly love each other. They ask, “How do you do that?” “It would involve, I supposed, ‘my man,’ who, before leaving me, would love me.” The girls, Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, all live in a world where people leave, and they expect that. To them, ‘before leaving me, would love me’ suggests that love is such a temporary thing. Perhaps this is true for them because of the self-image issues surrounding the girls their whole lives. This brings back the theme for the girls and the community around them: beauty is scarce, so love is fleeting.

The theme of beauty and happiness is depicted when Pecola interacts with the whores who live above her, intrigued by their fancy clothes and apparent contentment. Although she doesn’t completely understand why, Pecola finds comfort there. As a reader, it becomes evident that society typically associates being a whore with low stature, especially considering the era of this story. Pecola, however, remains oblivious due to her innocence and obliviousness, even as she falls prey to others capitalising on her vulnerability to boost their self-esteem. Her attempts to elude the hatred do not lead her to discover love or happiness. Nonetheless, she meets a deceitful churchman, who, after exploiting her innocence, promises to give her ‘beautiful’ blue eyes in exchange for executing his malicious act: feeding poisoned meat to a dog he despises.

After accomplishing this deed, Pecola’s psyche shatters. Considering her traumatic experiences, her response could not be deemed as unreasonable. She starts believing she really does have blue eyes and even invents an imaginary friend who, unfortunately, is not entirely affable towards her. The man who “granted her the blue eyes” convinced her that only she could see their blueness, and she believes him. As she spends time in front of the mirror, her imaginary friend grows impatient, complaining of boredom and threatening to abandon her: “If you’re going to keep this up, I may as well go on by myself.” Even her invented friend intimidates her with abandonment. However, Pecola’s condition can’t be simply characterised as insanity; it’s loneliness. She might not conventionally beautiful, but she certainly isn’t ugly. She believed so fiercely in the possibility of having blue eyes that she made it a reality, at least in her mind. Despite this being the result of make-believe, Pecola finally embodies the beauty she yearned for, thus creating her own version of happiness.

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