The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison (1970)
“Morrison's devastating debut asks what happens when a little Black girl in 1941 Ohio prays every night for blue eyes — and what kind of world taught her to want them.”
At a Glance
In Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove believes that if she had blue eyes, everyone would love her. Her family is violently poor and violently broken — her father Cholly rapes her twice, she becomes pregnant, and the baby dies. Morrison frames this destruction through the eyes of Claudia MacTeer, who narrates retrospectively as an adult, and through the novel's central ironic device: the Dick-and-Jane primer, whose cheerful domestic sentences are reprinted at the front of the book and then fragmented and distorted as the novel proceeds. Pecola ends the novel in madness, convinced she has the bluest eyes in the world. The community that destroyed her — through poverty, racism, internalized self-hatred, and indifference — watches her walk the edges of fields talking to herself, and nobody does anything.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Bluest Eye sold poorly in 1970 and was largely ignored. Morrison's later work — Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved — brought readers back to her debut. It is now a foundational text of both the Black literary tradition and American women's literature, widely taught in AP and college courses. It was one of the books that began the reintroduction of Black women's experience as a subject of serious literary fiction in the American canon.
Diction Profile
Ranges from formal literary prose to Black vernacular to fragmented stream-of-consciousness, often within the same chapter
High