Beauty, Blackness and Humanity: The Hyperreal Operation of Beauty Standards in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

It remains impossible to produce an analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye that ignores her treatment of beauty. Morrison conceives physical beauty as a form of racial reification which drastically informs the social and personal development of the novel’s Black characters. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison likens the standards of physical beauty to whiteness and in turn, virtue: “beauty” becomes an objective term, one entirely defined in relation to whiteness despite its projection onto African American characters. This paper thus explores the effects of the pernicious application of White beauty standards onto Morrison’s African American characters. As a character encounters a representation of such standards, they either mold themselves through actions to approach this ideal, or harshly realize the impossibility of succeeding to the standard of physical beauty. In their rigid adoption of traits, virtues, or actions to approach themselves to Whiteness and in turn beauty, these characters neglect their own identity in favor of this ideal. The result is a stripping of one’s individual identity, culture, and personal value; the very traits which make them human. This approach is fundamental, as it examines the effects that social beauty standards have on the self. Morrison’s work remains a powerful artefact of the cultural and social treatment of African Americans which still exist today: Black Americans are denied their cultural status and humanity. Instead, Morrison’s work showcases how they are instead perceived as something to be molded and altered into something that may attempt to absorb into whiteness yet remain entirely different and ultimately subaltern.