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Themes

Whiteness is beauty

In this book whiteness stands for beauty. This is a standard that the black girls can not meet, especially Pecola, who has darker skin than the rest. Pecola connects beauty with being loved and believes that if she would just have blue eyes all the bad things in her life would be replaced with love and affection. This desire that is obviously hopeless leads her to madness by the end of the novel.

Beauty is subjective

Pecola’s story is essentially her quest to find beauty. While she believes that the blue eyes of a white girl will make her beautiful, this view of beauty is not Pecola’s. Her society has revered whiteness, so she begins to see that as the essence of beauty. At the end of the book, Pecola believes that she got her wish. She has an eerie conversation with herself, which seems to reveal that Pecola has traded her sanity for the blue eyes she has always dreamed of. However, Claudia clarifies that “A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment”. By trying to conform to everyone else's ideas of beauty instead of her own, Pecola never actually obtains what she wants. She thinks blue eyes are beautiful simply because society thinks that blue eyes are beautiful, which is what fuels her desire for them. The conformity in the end does not lead to Pecola’s true satisfaction, as what she is satisfied with she cannot have. Although she believes that she has the blue eyes, it is clear to everyone except Pecola that the pleasures of being white, and blue eyed is not attainable. Although the goal is unattainable physically, Morrison makes the point that it is unattainable metaphorically as well. We cannot achieve beauty unless we achieve our own idea of beauty, not just what others have led us to believe is beautiful.

Love is only as good as the lover

The Bluest Eye is a novel that contains several relationships, although the relationships never end pleasantly. Morrison sees love as a dynamic force, which can be extremely damaging depending on who is doing the loving. The biggest example of this is the relationship Cholly has with his daughter Pecola. Cholly is the only character in the whole book that can see past Pecola’s seemingly revolting shell enough to touch her. While this sounds like a beautiful thing, in actuality it is the violent rape that serves as the climax of the story. As Claudia points out in the final chapter of this novel, “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly…” While Cholly definitely loves, the core of his personality forces him to manifest this love in violent ways. Because he is not a good person, his love is extremely tainted. The reader can look at this in one of two ways. It can be seen as a very pessimistic view, claiming that true love can only be achieved if the lover is a good, honest person. However, the reader can also see this as uplifting. Even though love can be distorted, Morrison makes the point that everyone can, in fact, love. Even if an evil person loves evilly, they still love.