Pretty Women, Ugly Exchanges: Beauty, Power, and Rage in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

By Micah Williams

Introduction

How white supremacist patriarchy interprets and values the bodies of Black women is one of the key points of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. The Black body’s value, as suggested by the text, is determined primarily through physical beauty according to a white aesthetic. In the novel, beauty standards for women have explicit ties to race. Whiteness in the eye of the white, patriarchal beholder is synonymous with attractiveness, goodness, Shirley Temples, and Dicks and Janes. Conversely, blackness is synonymous with ugliness and at worst, evil and uncleanliness.

Morrison emphasizes in her novel that beauty, a valuable social good for women, is power. Because beauty is power, it has a price; one must exchange something of adequate worth in order to earn it. This exchange is cruel and unwarranted, but for white women of higher socioeconomic classes there is some promise (albeit unstable) for security and power after the exchange. However, there are barely any spectrums of Western beauty that the Black women of Lorain, Ohio—the novel’s setting—can earn. Black women, who have been commodified and objectified since slavery, exchange an exuberant number of resources (including their own bodies) to receive a modicum of basic rights, many of which are not even guaranteed.1 Thus, this system of earning beauty acts less as an equivalent exchange and more of a master-slave relationship, or as Morrison states, “an irrevocable slavery of the senses” that teaches Black women to see and treat themselves as only consumables rather than multidimensional people.2

Nevertheless, Lorain and its townspeople succumb to America’s appearance obsession. The Black women characters in the novel—Geraldine, Pauline, China, Poland, and Miss Marie—exchange an important aspect of themselves to remain visible in society, even if it does not save them from the devastating triad of racism, sexism, and classism. With them lacking whiteness, and thus access to Western beauty, their “ugliness” coerces them to express their inner turmoil through negative emotions of envy, depression, and most of all, an ill-tempered rage that further perpetuates oppression in the community, especially on Black girls like the focal protagonist Pecola Breedlove, whose psyche implodes due to both the community’s rage-fueled oppression and her own self-hatred. The only people who undermine white beauty standards are the narrator Claudia MacTeer and her sister, Frieda. Their social rebellion against white beauty standards allows them to stand up for themselves and determine their own sense of beauty. However, as children, it is much too late for them to save the town and Pecola from a mad, ugly world.

A Note on the Multiplicity of Rage

Before analyzing the Black women in Morrison’s novel, I want to clarify the definition of rage this essay subscribes to. Most readers may define “rage” as a one-note emotion, usually coded as a negative, dangerous feeling to avoid, much less use for good. However, I define rage through the lens of philosopher Myisha Cherry, who identifies it in her book The Case for Rage as not one negative emotion, but rather multiple types of anger. Cherry’s lens allows there to be both unconstructive and constructive forms of rage that can be analyzed in The Bluest Eye.

Cherry discusses an array of politically unconstructive rage types, but most of Lorain’s women either utilize rouge rage or narcissistic rage. The most prominent form, rogue rage, is anger with no political intention, other than a “them versus the world mentality.”3 Rogue rage does not target the people nor individuals that harm the victim, but instead harms other people within the community, specifically those further marginalized than the victim themselves. As I will suggest later in this essay, rogue rage, in the form of self-hatred, can also implode and harm the victim. Narcissistic rage, a term coined by the late bell hooks and her book Killing Rage, can be best exemplified through the characters of Geraldine and Pauline Breedlove. Women like these become “outraged because although they have worked hard and risen through the ranks…they face the reality that ‘they are not exempt from racist assault.’”4 Even though some women may only participate in narcissistic rage, I argue that all these women participate in some sort of rouge rage.

For Cherry, establishing the multiplicity of rage is important because it allows us to analyze political anger in terms of its aims, actions, and perspectives as to why it may be valid or invalid. Analyzing rage in Morrison’s novel reveals how the Black women in Lorain have some sense of agency while also being victims of a horrendous system. Rage is a valid emotion and response against social injustice and white supremacy. However, most of the women handle it in unjust ways as a response to the exchanges they make for a social capital that does not save them from white supremacy. In fact, what makes unconstructive rage most frightening, and thus essential to analyze, is its ability to perpetuate. In committing to these exchanges for a fallible white aesthetic, the rage only continues to fuel and burn until there is nothing left to consume.

Lucas Pezeta, Cat Standing Near Blue Window, 2019, Photograph 5616 x 3744. (Pexels.com) Free image.

Geraldine’s Exchange of Sexuality for Stability

At the highest echelon of Lorain, we meet the character Geraldine, who exemplifies the most explicit intersection between race, class, and beauty. Born in Meridian, Mississippi, she is one among a group of “sugar-brown,” Southern girls. These girls originate in towns “where everybody is gainfully employed” and in the Black middle class.5 The text details much about these women’s bodies, and how slim, soft, and valuable they are to Black men. However, these women never seem to have boyfriends or individual, public lives. They marry, have children, and become wives, almost as if they were born to do so. For girls like Pecola, Geraldine would be looked upon as having a lavish, well-to-do life. She has a nice house, a family, and exquisite clothes; however, the text implies that her life is not as dreamy as it seems.

Though some Black women may envy Geraldine and her middle-class life, learning how to do “the white man’s work with refinement” as a proper Black housewife is debilitating in its own way.6In the exchange for financial stability, she loses her sexual agency in order to be beautiful outside of a white, restrictive standard. She also relinquishes her ability to be emotional and to be angry at the institutions that have placed her in this situation. In being middle-class in these Southern cities, such as Meridian, Aiken, and Mobile, she is expected to be a domestic, emotionless servant for others, such as her husband and children, so much so that she cannot act upon her own desires. She is conditioned to be always clean and proper, even during sex, which—unlike how the media portrays it—is a physically dirty act. She, in fact, seems to hate sex and love with her husband because of how dirty, unsensual, and inconvenient it is: “While he moves inside her, she will wonder why they didn’t put the necessary but private parts of the body in some more convenient place…someplace one could get to easily, and quickly, without undressing.”7

Her disgust with sex stems from the lack of cleanliness and formality. But because she lacks sexual agency, she also longs for the beauty of sensuality and touch. In society, scholar Katherine Stern states, white beauty relies on the power of the eye rather than on the power of touch.8 Touch, in Western thought, was considered lowly and animalistic while the eye was seen as the key to supremacy. In Morrison’s beauty formula, however, touch is important for not only love but for recognizing beauty. Touch is a sensation that is cooperative, unlike a person’s gaze upon another. It is a period of touching and being touched, which elicits ecstasy and beauty.9 This is why the only times Geraldine feels any sense of ecstasy is when her sanitary napkin grazes her crotch as she walks down a street—it is a sensual touch that is more than just senseless penetration.10 The family’s cat serves as another source for her beauty because he is clean, precise, and has an instinctual understanding of Geraldine’s wants for sensuality. A sensuality that the men in her life cannot give her.

Because other than with the Black cat, Geraldine is sensually deprived in her relationships, two distinct consequences occur. One, her familial relationships, such as with her husband and son, Junior, are distant. Two, she develops an obsession with not only the cat and its touch, but also with the household itself and keeping it clean and beautiful. Because of how she was conditioned, she wants her son to have no affiliation with “dirty, loud niggers”: those suffering in abject poverty that she feared to become, and later despised, in her childhood.11 Her son must wear crisp, clean clothes and play with white children or neat, quiet colored people only. All these anti-Black commandments are less for Junior’s benefit and more for hers. Cleanliness, both physically and metamorphically in whiteness’s association with the pristine, is a form of beauty, which we’ve already established as social capital. Having her son grow up clean and as far from Blackness as possible allows both access to the privileged white aesthetic. But under distant, parental guidance, Geraldine treats Junior as another piece of her property to maintain in her home. All the while, these commandments to keep her child away from Blackness strain their mother-son relationship. Instead, Junior learns that his mother does not love him, and to cope with the parental distance, he channels his own rage through anti-blackness, especially to young, Black girls like Pecola Breedlove.

Geraldine’s rage culminates in one scene where Junior leads Pecola into his house to bully her. In the chaos, the cat, which is thrown at Pecola, begins to comfort her. In a jealous fit, Junior hurls the cat at a generator, killing it, and then blames Pecola for the murder when Geraldine arrives. According to Paul Mahaffey, Geraldine is immediately reminded of “everything she has sought to escape—everything associated with the poor, struggling African masses: their physical appearance, their behavioral patterns, their lifestyles, and the speech patterns12.” In retaliation to the accusation, Geraldine calls Pecola “a nasty little Black bitch” and orders her out of the house.13In one phrase, the reader sees a testament to Geraldine’s narcissistic rage of Pecola and other, impoverished Black people because of the trauma and conditions she has been through to be a clean, respectable Black woman at the cost of sensuality and optimism. In avoiding dirtiness, she essentially locks herself from a piece of her humanity. And in the end, she will never be clean or proper enough to fit the standards of white beauty, and neither will her child—which makes her classism all the more distressing.

China, Poland & Miss Marie Exchange Sex for Power

Above the storefront of Pecola’s family live three women, China, Poland, and Miss Marie. Instead of the “sugar-brown” girls of Geraldine’s type, Black women in Lorain consider them “sugar-coated whores” for fornicating with the town’s men.14 They are said to hate everyone except for Pecola, who does their errands for them. In return, they tolerate and later invite the young pariah to take part in their daily rituals. They reminisce on memories of past lovers long gone. Some of these experiences recall pain, and others invoke laughter, or perhaps both. They cook. They curl their hair. They buy things, and later buy pretty dresses, shoes, candy, and jewelry for Pecola. They show more affection and kindness to each other and to her than her actual family could afford her.15

In fact, they participate in all the activities a normal people would. But the town has ostracized them to the point that these simple things come at an exchange. China, Poland, and Miss Marie sacrifice their physical bodies through sex in exchange for power and vengeance upon an exclusive community. Out of the exchanges so far, it seems they utilize the objectification and sexualization of Black women to their benefit, which almost seems like a victory. Nonetheless, sex work in Lorain is undesirable. Since the town’s residents subscribe to white supremacist logic, the ownership of one’s own body as a Black woman is deemed ugly, especially to other women who envy their liberation.16 As the novel progresses, we learn more about the three women that makes us question whether their actions are symbols of women’s empowerment or trauma responses.

China, Poland, and Miss Marie may have once been considered beautiful until they were “ruined.” The concept of “ruining” is first introduced when Claudia interrogates Frieda over why Mr. Henry, a bachelor rooming in the MacTeer household, was beaten by their father. Claudia and the reader learn that Frieda was sexually assaulted by Mr. Henry, and in recalling what happened, Frieda cries because she fears that Mr. Henry has “ruined” her. China, Poland, and Miss Marie—known to the children as The Maginot Line17—are examples of those ruined. Translated from the naive rhetoric of children, it is clear these women were raped and abused. Because of this, they coped with their trauma through unhealthy habits, such as alcoholism and overeating, and the companionship they share through their trauma.18 Though not explicit in the text, I gather these women were ostracized because they were sexually assaulted and manipulated by men, and any type of known fornication (even forced) is sinful to the community of Lorain. With ruined reputations and bodies, sex work is the only option for them to survive.

Educating Black girls to fear rape because they might become the town’s pariah is horrific. The anger of any Black woman made victim to this fallacious narrative is valid. China, Poland, and Miss Marie are angry so much that they utilize the sexualization and objectification of their bodies for power over others. Men desire them for sex, and in return, they receive money and then go further to steal the rest of it, such as the time “they lured a Jew up the stairs, pounced on him, all three, held him up by the heels, shook everything out of his pants pockets, and threw him out of the window.”19 Regardless of these occurrences, these women are human and hold the capacity to be kind. For instance, Miss Marie, responds kindly to the MacTeer sisters when they attempt to visit Pecola until they bluntly remind her that she is “ruined” amongst the townsfolk.20 Their hatred is in response to the hatred they received from Lorain, which stemmed from racist, sexist institutions that demonize victims and support perpetrators.

Nevertheless, valid rage does not necessarily equal productive rage. In the case of China, Poland, and Miss Marie, their rage goes rogue. They hate men with a passion because of how they were ruined and abused by them in the past; so, although they temporarily care for Pecola, they are not sustainable role models for her because the trauma they experienced as younger women provides Pecola no solace.21 They might care for Pecola’s wellbeing, but they most definitely do not care about protecting her childlike innocence. In fact, the women find innocence as a dangerous type of ignorance, for they believe that their naivety when they were younger women led them to being ruined and abused in the first place. Their company, although beneficial in some ways, provides Pecola with no option to escape from the trauma of any beauty standards. Prostitution requires a desire for the body. Pecola, because of her age and her physical features, is deemed so ugly by the people of the town that no one other than her father would rape her in a drunken stupor. The value of physical attributes is problematic, as it later leads to the ever-notorious mental deterioration of Pecola Breedlove, for her reality will never allow her to be desirable, even in an objectified way.

How Pauline Exchanges Reality for Fantasy

Morrison further explores how Black bodies are excluded from the benefits of beauty through Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, and in some ways, her main antagonist. In Pauline’s chapter, the reader learns that she has a physical deformity: a flattened foot that leaves her with a noticeable limp. With this limp, she has no chance in her hometown to assimilate into American beauty standards, but it is not enough of a disadvantage to completely ostracize her. Her deformity made her invisible.

Invisibility is a crucial part of The Bluest Eye. According to feminist scholar Patricia J. Williams, the feeling of being transparent, and having a white world see through Black women—at the trauma, the stolen history, the stereotypes, the statistics—is terrifying. In this “seeing-through,” Black women are not seen as human individuals who have been defiled, made vulnerable without their consent, and validly angry.22 However, because the ugliness Pauline has made her invisible, she tolerates it over humiliation. When she meets her future husband, Cholly Breedlove, he falls in love with all of her, including her deformity. This newfound visibility grants Pauline a temporary glimmer of pride in her beauty and self-worth.

Once the couple marries and moves North, things dramatically change. In this new town, Black women are coerced to conform to white beauty standards; they are conditioned to straighten their hair, apply certain makeup, and avoid Southern Ebonics talk. These attempts to fit in either devalue and dissociate blackness from the self, or leads women to give up entirely on beauty, which can come at the price of one’s self-worth and relationships with others, especially their peers. Pauline’s deformity here becomes entirely visible in the wrong way. So, she attempts to connect with the women of this town by beautifying herself; as she states, she does not care for buying beautification products except for the desire to have “other women cast favorable glances her way.”23 Her purchase of clothes and later makeup displease Cholly because her funds are being spent on her social survival rather than on the home and their physical survival (and Cholly’s drinking habits). In Lorain, Ohio, and moreover the world, the assumption is that beautiful people are destined to have beautiful lives, and ugly people are destined for terrible lives unless they themselves do something to fix themselves. So, in this case, Pauline is justified to use her own money to obtain a social good.

Pauline’s dream crumbles once she loses one of her front teeth in the movie theater. At that point, she “settles down to just being ugly” because she cannot afford a new tooth to become beautiful again.24 Pauline stops applying makeup, purchasing many clothes, and fixing her hair like Jane Harlow25 so that her appearance matches the rage of her dream deferred. Arguably, giving up and accepting her visibility through ugliness is part of her rage. Her foot disability, as well as her missing tooth, are aspects of herself that could have been fixed if she had the finances to do so. She also realizes that her reality and relationship with her family could have been dramatically improved if she did not succumb to the media’s obsession with physical beauty: “She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.”26 American cinema, especially in the time period of The Bluest Eye, mostly portrayed white characters, and if Black people were on screen, they were harmful stereotypes that presented Black people as servile and childlike.27 Thus, Pauline adheres to beauty standards that result from Black misrepresentations, which further exacerbates the fallacy that a limp and a missing tooth make her an ugly nothing.

Literature scholar James Robert Saunders argues Pauline dwells in her own fantasies to fit within the beauty standard and to be visible in a good way.28 Thus, Pauline exchanges labor with a white family, and her relationships with her own family to be loved and embrace the fantasy of whiteness that she wanted. This exchange, I argue, is a form of narcissistic rage has disastrous effects on her daughter. Pauline internalizes self-hatred and that the Black female is at the bottom of a social hierarchy. Because of this, she distances herself from her family, especially Pecola, so that she can find self-worth and beauty in being a servant and caretaker of the Fishers, a white household.29 Eventually, dreams clash with reality when Pecola drops a hot blueberry cobbler all over the floor and herself within the Fisher’s kitchen. At once, Pauline strikes her down while the MacTeer sisters witness it in horror. Soon, a young daughter of the Fishers comes in and questions the presence of the three Black girls. Pauline, in exchange for daughters, ignores Pecola for the white girl.30 This decision is twofold. First, not consoling the white child could have left Pauline without her job, as Black house servants were not expected to have families of their own to attend to. Pecola, in this situation, is technically a trespasser. Second, Pauline chooses whiteness, beauty, and her dreams over blackness, ugliness, and reality, which she compartmentalizes in Pecola. Pauline hates her daughter, and her choice demonstrates the commonplace rage she has against Pecola, which keeps them forever estranged.

White Lies, Blue Eyes, and their Effects on Pecola Breedlove  

The focal character of Morrison’s novel, Pecola Breedlove, is like her mother Pauline in that both fantasize to achieve beauty and purpose. As seen through the other Black women in Lorain, an exchange must occur so that one may become more beautiful. For most women, it is an attempt to dissociate themselves from their blackness and reach closer to the aesthetic of whiteness. In Pecola’s case, however, she is not considered beautiful because she is the antithesis of white beauty standards, especially for young girls. Instead of Pecola’s rage being directed at those around her because of her exchange, her rage implodes her mental psyche, so much it could be considered a psychological death.

If beauty is a currency, having no beauty means having nothing; when that currency is attributed to skin color, blackness for Pecola is not only ugliness but also nothingness.31 As philosopher George Yancy states, “Pecola's wish for blue eyes is itself a desire to possess property (valued by the aesthetic standards of whiteness) that is fundamentally antithetical to the very being that she is to the world through her body.”32 Thus, Pecola thirsts for something of value because blackness signifies nothingness and ugliness. So, at once, Pecola is simultaneously invisible and hypervisible in a negative way, and as a young girl in utter poverty, she does not have the privilege to transcend her Black body. She wishes for any sort of property of whiteness because whiteness is beauty, and thus a corporeal commodity.

Cottonbro Studio, Spilled Milk in Clear Drinking Glass, 2021, Photograph, 3442 x 5163. (Pexels.com) Free image.

The opposite of Pecola and her African features is Shirley Temple and her white, innocent face plastered on the side of a cup. The reader encounters Pecola’s fixation on this cup (as well as her first encounter with desiring whiteness) early in the novel:

“The three of us, Pecola, Frieda, and I, listened to her downstairs in the kitchen fussing about the amount of milk Pecola had drunk. We knew she was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face. My mother knew that Frieda and I hated milk and assumed Pecola drank it out of greediness.”33

The MacTeer mother’s assumption of Pecola’s greed is half-correct. Pecola does drink the milk out of greediness, but not to the extent of her enjoying milk more than she needs. Rather, the milk acts as a source of transformation for Pecola, akin to a potion—the more milk she drinks, the closer she can get to becoming white, thus beautiful. In this case, milk becomes a symbol and currency of whiteness that can grant her access to becoming someone, as opposed to being nothingness.34 As Yancy Notes, even the raising of the cup as she drinks the milk-potion further allows her to be absorbed in the face of Shirley Temple, to give into the fantasy of becoming white by becoming the child actress, even if temporarily.

Throughout the novel, Pecola has no Black women to save her from her obsession with whiteness. The closest set of role models are China, Poland, and Miss Marie, who may provide material worth for Pecola (such as clothes and jewelry), but not parental love. Really, the only thing they can provide Pecola with is lessons on the utilization of sex for power, which are embedded with warnings of how they were sexually assaulted and coerced into abusive relationships at a young age. As such a young child, many ideas about her self-image were, and could mostly be crafted, by her home life. That home life is desolate and loveless: her mother Pauline denies her as a daughter and her father Cholly doesn’t see her until she becomes sexualized, mostly from her resemblance to her mother.

The domestic life and socialization process are important for young Black children so that they are reassured of their beauty and worth in a world that will teach them that they are worthless. But since no one can acknowledge Pecola of her beauty in her blackness, she must bargain. Her ultimate bargain---the most sacrificial of the novel---is that she exchanges her true, Black identity for a white lie.35 To receive her blue eyes, another symbol for whiteness, Pecola must kill a dog with a piece of rotting meat. This trade-off happens between her and the character Soaphead Church, a self-named Spiritualist and Psychic Reader who can “overcome spells, bad luck, and evil influences.”36 Church believes his lies help Pecola, and perhaps even save her more than the glorious power of God.37 On the contrary, those lies coerce her to believe that her salvation will come in the fantasy, which takes over completely at her most vulnerable state.38 Pecola did not need someone to lie to her, to make her white. Pecola needed someone to love her and her blackness.

Unfortunately, her self-hatred does not magically disappear with this new “appearance” of blue eyes. A part of Pecola knows she is not saved, and the reader witnesses this dubious, rageful voice that nags at her, consistently reminding her that she’s living a fantasy in her mind. This other side of Pecola, who came “right after her eyes,” implies that the town won’t look at her because she was raped and impregnated by her father, rather than Pecola’s excuse---that the townspeople are jealous of her blue eyes.39 This voice also gets Pecola to admit that she obsesses for more than just blue eyes; she wants the bluest eyes for the most amount of beauty possible, more than anyone else in the town. The mysterious voice, I suggest, is the last bit of psychological awareness left in Pecola’s mind, pressuring her to remember the awful reality she is in. Pecola takes the psychological pressure as bullying and hate, akin to all the hatred she had for herself before her eyes were transformed. When the voice finally leaves, Pecola escapes the realities of being a young Black girl in a society dominated by white, violent aesthetics. In this new fantasy, she worries not about hate, love, blackness, whiteness, ugliness, or beauty. Just her and her blue eyes.

The MacTeer Sisters Deny the Bargain

According to hooks, Black women have either passively absorbed imagery in the media that has assumed them as expendable beings, or they have actively resisted it.40 The Black women in Morrison’s novel, plus Pecola, have unfortunately been of the former group. Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, though, are of the latter group. These sisters actively fight white supremacy. Their rebellion is blasphemy in the community, and in many ways, they are looked down upon almost as much as Pecola. But due to their loving family, even while living in poverty, and their refusal to sacrifice their youth, empathy, or voice to adhere to Lorain’s social values, they are heathens to white supremacy, but young heroines to readers.

Cherry coins the term Lordean rage as a genre of productive anger. Taken from the poet-scholar Audre Lorde, Lordean rage is a “metabolized energy” that can be utilized to kickstart social change and fight against racist institutions. The goal motivating this rage is that “I am not free while any other is unfree”.41It is not like wipe rage or rogue rage, where anger is directed either at everyone or a certain group with the intention of destroying the world and others. It is not like narcissistic rage, where anger is selfish and selective depending on how one is affected by social justice. Rather, it is a rage that stands on its own to motivate action and spark optimism without having to transition to another seemingly positive emotion, such as joy or sympathy.42

Lordean rage is what Claudia and Frieda learn to develop from other types of rage to help and defend Pecola when none of the adults will. We first witness an attempt at productive rage when Claudia destroys (or rather dismantles) the white baby dolls she receives for Christmas. However, her rage turns rogue when she eventually starts targeting and bullying white girls. An adult Claudia recognizes this as her anger’s transition from indifference to shame to a “fraudulent love” to worship whiteness in order to avoid violence.43In Cherry’s terms, Claudia believes her rage floundered within rogue rage, remaining there until she was grown enough to understand her horrifying actions.

Both sisters prove their potential for Lordean rage in their interactions with Maureen Paul. Maureen is an interracial child at their school who they at first envy. The Black boys at school do not bully Maureen because they see her as pretty; meanwhile, these same boys are willing to fist fight with poorer, darker-skinned Black girls like Claudia and Frieda.44 She consistently brags about her affluence and proximity to whiteness, and therefore beauty. However, the MacTeer sisters, upon discovering that Maureen’s interactions with Pecola are to pry into her abusive family life, begin to highlight and make fun of her dogtooth. By doing this, the sisters dissociate Maureen from whiteness and supposed bodily perfection.45 This is exacerbated when they learn that Maureen used to have six fingers. In exchange for Pecola and the MacTeers’ names of “Black e mos,” they grant themselves the power to call Maureen “six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie”.46

Even though the humiliation of physical deformity may not be the best way to challenge whiteness, it allows them to critique whiteness in the best way they can as children. Revenge bullying may not be the most productive form of rage, but they enact rage directly towards the ideas and actions of those harming them or Pecola. Instead of punching down at the vulnerable, they punch up at the perpetrators, all while maintaining a sense of innocence and optimism in them. Pecola is not afforded that luxury unless she relies on the MacTeer sisters.47 When Pecola eventually succumbs to her fantasy of blue eyes, not even Claudia and Frieda’s rage or pity can pull her back into reality.

3MotionalStudio, “Braided Hair Woman Portrait”, 2018, Photograph, 3500 x 4315. (Pexels.com) Free image.

Conclusion

What The Bluest Eye teaches best is that America’s obsession with physical beauty and how we value people through it is, as Morrison herself puts it, “one of the dumbest, most pernicious, and destructive ideas of the Western world.”48 hooks bolsters Morrison's point, warning that appearance obsession leads to compulsive overspending and financial strain in an effort that leads us further from “the real work we must do to be truly beautiful.”49 Scholars, including Morrison, have shown that beauty is a social construction that is as fickle as it is influential; society’s perception of Black women and their bodies, even through the lens of a white aesthetic, can and do change, oftentimes without a moment’s notice. So, should we desire to view beauty in an entirely new way? Morrison believes so. For the author, beauty is not only in the physical perception of a person, but the person themselves having agency and vulnerability. The commonality of suffering and how we feel versus how we look is more of beauty than what currently is now.50It is the ability of responsiveness that creates experiences of beauty, rather than the usual notion that physical beauty preexists and elicits a response.51

Along with Morrison, I interpret beauty as self-love—the power to see oneself and elicit a response that one is enough, regardless of other perceptions. Beauty adhered to a white aesthetic serves to restrict Black lives on the physical and psychological level, but outside of that standard, there is a beauty that recognizes multidimensionality as sacred, and accessibility to all our emotions—rage, sadness, and hope—as beautiful. The MacTeer sisters teach the reader how to defy the fallacy of white Supremacy and muddle the pristineness of whiteness. But in this genre of beauty, one’s race or appearance pales to the beauty of loving oneself wholly—physically, mentally, and spiritually. This love can then be used to spark love and relationships with others, or it can even spark and motivate Lordean rage. Who is to say that anger-inspired action against social injustices is not a form of love?

Endnotes

1 bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 114.

2 Katherine Stern, “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula,” in The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. by Marc C. Conner (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000): 77. 

3 Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021): 17.

4 Cherry, The Case for Rage, 21-22.

5 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage Books, 1970): 83.

6 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 83.

7 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 84.

8 Stern, “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula,” 83.

9 Stern, “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula,” 85.

10 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 85.

11 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 87.

12 Paul Mahaffey, “The Adolescent Complexities of Race, Gender, and Class in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,’” in Race, Gender & Class 11, no. 4 (2004): 162-163.

13 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 92.

14 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 56.

15 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 107.

16 hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy.”

17 History.com Editors, “Maginot Line,” HISTORY, last modified Oct. 4, 2022, accessed Nov. 7, 2022, https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/maginot-line.

​​18 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 98-102.

19 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 56.

20 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 102-104.

21 Mahaffey, “Adolescent Complexities of Race,” 160.

22 Patricia J. Williams, “On Being the Object of Property,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 160-161.

23 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 118.

​​24 James Robert Saunders, “Why Losing a Tooth Matters: Shirley Jackson’s The Tooth and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” in The Midwest Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2012): 195.

25 A White American actress and sex symbol of Hollywood with blonde, wavy hair. 26 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 122.

27 Elizabeth Blair, “Shirley Temple and Bojangles: Two Stars, One Lifelong Friendship,” NPR, Feb. 14, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/02/14/276986764/shirley-temple-and-bojangles-two-stars-one-lifelong -friendship. 

28 Saunders, “Why Losing a Tooth Matters,” 199.

29 Mahaffey, “Adolescent Complexities of Race,” 162.

30 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 108-109.

31 George Yancy, “The Black Self Within a Semiotic Space of Whiteness: Reflections on The Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye.’” CLA Journal 43, no. 3 (2000): 307-308.

32 Yancy, “The Black Self Within a Semiotic Space,” 305.

33 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 23.

34 Yancy, “The Black Self Within a Semiotic Space,” 311.

35 Yancy, “The Black Self Within a Semiotic Space,” 318.

36 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 132.

37 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 140.

38 Yancy, “The Black Self Within a Semiotic Space,” 316.

39 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 148-153.

40 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 117.

41 Cherry, The Case for Rage, 24.

42 Cherry, The Case for Rage, 25.

43 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 22-23.

44 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 65; 87-88.

45 Mahaffey, “Adolescent Complexities of Race,” 159-60.

46 Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 70-73.

47 Mahaffey, “Adolescent Complexities of Race,” 160.

48 Stern, “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula,” 77.

49 bell hooks. “Appearance Obsession.” in Essence 26, no. 4 (1995): 69.

50 Stern, “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula,” 90.

51 Stern, “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula,” 88.

Author Bio

Micah Williams wrote this article as an English and Philosophy major with a minor in African American Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Rochester with hopes to contribute to literary criticism concerning protest literature, gender and sexuality, and inclusive representation in African American literature and media. His work has been previously published in Young Scholars in Writing.