Reflections on Fifty Years of The Bluest Eye

Abstract

Reflections on Fifty Years of The Bluest Eye Stephanie Li (bio) This year will mark fifty years since Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. In the past five decades, the cover of Morrison’s book has featured an array of pensive and melancholy black girls. They are often posed against shades of elusive sky or denim blue. The girls are always presented alone, completely detached from any community or connection to others. Often they wear hats as if to cover the hair that must be as hated as their dark skin and brown eyes. The collective effect of these images is to suggest that black girlhood is not just tragic, but profoundly solitary. For anyone familiar with the first edition of The Bluest Eye, these images are necessarily disappointing—too obvious to capture any of Morrison’s eloquence or wisdom. By contrast, the original publication cover contains no visual image at all. Instead it looks like the first page of the book, with the opening paragraphs of the novel printed in full. These paragraphs contain no reference to Pecola’s desire for blue eyes. Rather, Pecola is presented in relation to others. Claudia, the text’s narrator, laments with her sister the horror of Pecola’s pregnancy and stillborn baby. They mention her father, who impregnated Pecola in a desperate, profoundly misguided display of love. Moreover, their concern [End Page 682] with the marigolds that do not grow in their garden implicitly roots Pecola to the natural world. While the front cover of the first edition is filled only with words, the back is devoted entirely to an image. It features a black and white photograph of Morrison’s imposing face. Her portrait extends across the entire back of the book and just as Morrison’s name is not featured on the front jacket, only on the spine, her name is also absent on the back cover. By eliminating her name from the front and back of the book, Morrison reminds us that this text is less about her than about us. To this end, she looks evenly at the reader, eyes level and unsurprised. While Morrison’s large afro exceeds the frame of the photograph, it is her face that is most striking. Her closed lips do not smile, but she does not radiate anger or frustration. This is a woman who has never wanted blue eyes. Although she too is presented alone, she is the very opposite of the girls that populate contemporary covers of Morrison’s novel. The steady gaze that emanates from the book’s back cover implies a deep connection to others, if not to us, her readers, then to a community that has sustained and loved her. The original cover’s absence of a lone black girl reflecting on her tragic fate suggests one way that The Bluest Eye has evolved in our cultural imagination since its original publication. The book has come to signify most readily as a commentary on the idealization of white beauty and the self-hatred this perpetuates in the African American community. And certainly, Morrison’s book has much to say about the pernicious master narratives of beauty and race. But to accept that this is the most important insight of The Bluest Eye leads to dangerous claims that Pecola’s self-hatred is a thing of the past. The diversification of lines of Barbie dolls and other popular toys marketed for children has led some to contend that whiteness is no longer the uncontested standard of beauty. Now we have Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Lupita Nyong’o on the cover of Vogue. And briefly we had Sasha and Malia dolls named in honor of the Obama daughters before their mother rightly protested the commercialization of her children. With these images before her, might a Pecola Breedlove of the twenty-first century not pine for blue eyes at all? I’d like to suggest that this question elides a more central concern of the novel and its implications fifty years since its publication. Let’s return then to the original cover of The Bluest Eye, which has very little to...