Da Bluest Eye

For Mass Comm, I read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. It was about Pecola Breedlove and mostly her desire to become a white child. With that said, I truly enjoyed the writing in this book because it was such an easy read. It was so conversational and the pages just flew by. I know this because I only began reading it yesterday and here I am no reviewing it with only a few pages left.

However, if I were to discuss this book with Toni Morrison, I got the impression that she would look at me disapprovingly and say "Yeah, well I don't care, I did't write the book for you." She would say that I can't relate to it because I am basically within the majority since I am a caucasion female and I am what Pecola longs to be.

I found a lot of the themes within the text very disturbing and yet I yearned to keep reading and see what happened. Cholly is who disgusted me the most. The drunk, child-molesting rapist father of Pecola made me think about some movies that I have seen. In the movies, it usually turns out that a white man rapes the little girl and a black man takes the fall for it. An example of this is 1996's A Time to Kill, where the 10-year-old black girl got raped by two white men and then the father kills them. That father was Samuel L. Jackson, and then everythig gets questioned as to when it is ok to kill another man.

But I digress. That last little tangent was a little much, but I couldn't stop thinking about that movie when I read the book. One part that really got me in the book was when Pecola talked about the Maureen Peal. The "high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back" (62). I was intrigued by the way Pecola looked at the girl and regardless to what Toni Morrison may say to me, I know how the little girl felt. The perfect angel child walking through the halls that makes everyone else feel like dirt. The one that all the boys treat nicely and all the teachers and girls respect and like. Regardless what color you are, there's always someone like that that's better than you. I liked the way Frieda and Pecola delt with it though:

"We looked hard for flaws to restore our equilibrium, but we had to be content at first with uglying up her name, changing Maureen Peal to Meringue Pie. Later a minor epiphany was ours when we discovered that she had a dog tooth--a charming one to be sure--but a dog tooth nonetheless" (63).

There is not a single child out there black, white, or purple that hasn't resorted to name-calling in order to feel better about themselves. It helped me relate to the text a little more.

I really enjoyed this book and it opened my eyes to a lot of things that I may not have thought about before. I recommend it to anyone who is literate.