TONI MORRISON: THE BLUEST EYE

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ought to come with a warning about reader discretion. Toward the end of the novel, it portrays the truly disturbing scene of the rape of the 11-year-old Pecola by her father Cholly. And yet Morrison’s novel is not the only one in World Literature to portray the violent destruction of the bond between parent and child. We have other unsettling examples in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in the Oresteia as well as in Euripides’s Medea. In each instance, the challenge that is placed before us is that of the complex motivations for ethically consequential choices of any kind, with the destruction of the bond between parent and child providing an emotionally charged platform for reflecting on the issue of ethical choice. But The Bluest Eye also gives us much more than the rape scene. It poses the question as to why a black girl should be so self-revolted that she would desperately wish for blue eyes as a way of changing both herself and the attitude of the world toward her. The corrosive sources of this desire are arguably as damaging as the effect of the rape on her, and, read in parallel, raises further complex issues about the effects of race and racism in America. But The Bluest Eye is no propaganda document. It is first and last of work of literature and is crafted in such a way as to prevent us to settling on any conclusions without paying attention to its extraordinary craftsmanship. This and the next episode will be devoted to exploring these and other questions in the novel. Suggested Reading Suggested Readings Namwali Serpell, On Morrison, London: Hogarth Press, 2026. La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London: Picador, 1992.