This is absolutely an insane debut. It was really emotionally charged and I needed several breaks while reading before I could finish. Morrison’s writing style is interesting and different and there were multiple sentences where I needed to step back momentarily to take in what she meant. Even the opening line was extremely powerful.

I don’t even know where to even begin when discussing the themes. Maybe internalized racism? The juxtaposition of Pecola and Freida & Claudia? The parallels between Pauline and Pecola?

Pecola is told how ugly she was her whole life, she’s treated as subhuman by those around her, for example with the shopkeeper trying to keep from coming into contact with her hand, so she strived for this assimilation into whiteness as seen by her hunger, her desire for blue eyes, as she was constantly surrounded by the white beauty standard (specifically shown by the prevalence of white media like Shirley temple in the book). If you combine that with the inherent violence that girlhood and womanhood bring, Pecola suffers an extremely intersectional form of oppression from those around her, even in comparison to Frieda and Claudia, who are loved and uplifted and safe enough in their family to reject whiteness and traditional female roles like motherhood (Claudia destroyed her white dolls and didn’t like Shirley temple the same way that Frieda and Pecola did, nor did she want to be a mother or play as a mother with her dolls as was normal for girls her age).

Violence and shame are also extremely prevalent throughout The Bluest Eye. Cholly felt emasculated and shamed for being exploited by the white men who forced him to have sex with his “one true love” in front of them. The violence and shame Cholly felt got passed onto the relationship he had with Pauline, in the way he beat, raped, and cheated on her, and in the way that Pauline justified the abuse that she underwent, as well as the justify the rape that Pecola was forced to deal with. Pauline essentially martyred herself for not living up to white beauty standards and passed down that shame to Pecola, the same way that Cholly passed violence to them both.

Morrison also has an interesting take on Christianity. Pecola tried to rationalize what happened to her as an act of God as opposed to an act by evil man, and Pauline also similarly falls into Christianity, and it’s as if they creat a dual sided god or Jesus, “Christ the redeemer”  versus “Christ the judge” which have two very different connotations.

Morrison wrote at length about the violence that black girls and women undergo as victims of racism and patriarchy and the dehumanization they face, especially at the hands of white people, for example Pecola being compared to a horse when she was in the hospital by a doctor, which furthers the point Morrison was making with the shopkeeper, that black women are treated as subhuman.

This was intense and beautiful and entertaining, but not positive entertaining. My attention was rapt the entirety of this book and I cannot wait to recommend it to others.