Is Beauty Beautiful: The Bluest Eye. Book Review.

Book: The Bluest Eye
Author: Toni Morrison Genre: Fiction. List Price: $15.00
Pages: 224
Publisher: Knopf

We have often heard people say 'beauty is skin deep'. It may indeed, be deeper. Yet, what charms us is what pleases the eye. And we are often bound to think "should we see ourselves only in the mirror or just look into someone’s eyes?"

Pecola breedlove, an 11 year old Afro- American, the protagonist of the novel ‘The Bluest eye’ ponders the same. She chooses to see herself not in the mirror (to become beautiful to her own eyes) but in the eyes of people. She found she was black, harelip, repulsive, ugly. But who told her so? Who told her that the white skinned, blond hair, blue eyed girls were better than she, that they were beautiful. Pecola yearns for blue eyes, she prays for it every night before retiring to bed. She thinks of it in the morning when she stands facing the mirror which reflects the horror of her life, of her ugliness, of how people stare at her with a vacuum in their eyes. Why don’t they see her with the same love, the same wanting with which they see the whites? she wonders.

Beauty to her is blue eyes, white skin and blond hair because beauty to others is that. Beauty to her is love which she thinks she can only get when she'll be beautiful, in the eyes of her loved ones. Pecola's yearning for blue eyes and not for fair skin or blond hair shows that she is not actually yearning for beauty, but for love of those who find only beautiful worth loving.

It is her love for beauty (blue eyes as a motif) that devastates her. Pecola by wishing for blue eyes wants to become beautiful in the eyes of her own parents, her own community, the society that has made her feel that she is ugly. It is the discovery of her ugliness that comes from her family which drives her to the brink of madness. The final step to Pecola's insanity comes from her own father Cholly who rapes his young ugly daughter for loving him. Pecola's sexual abuse drives her insane.

Pecola gets not just the blue eye, she gets the bluest one, the most beautiful one. She gets it at the cost of her sanity. She thinks the blue eyes she has has been given to her by the town physic and spiritualist, a paedophile who spares Pecola for her ugliness. She talks to herself moving up and down- "How beautiful I am….i wish these blue eyes stay forever…oh! Tell me…aren’t they really b’ful…will they stay so forever…should they stay the same forever? oh! All those who envy me…."

The novel poses question of beauty and the importance our society has given to it. It compels us to think and rethink that if society can be the builder of mankind it too can be its sole destroyer. We, the readers, suffer with pecolaand ask people around and ourselves how important it is to be beautiful? What does it mean to be beautiful? Is it how we see the world or how the world sees us?

PS. The novel was written during the most turbulent transformations of Afro-American life- one of these transformations was a new recognition of black American beauty or Black is Beautiful movement. It reads beyond its geographical and racial setting as it applies to the contemporary rage for beauty which devastates many a youngsters.