The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Toni Morrison knows people. She can see how they grew from their surroundings, she can see how their self image, and how their attitudes affect those around them, especially those of children. She shows us the saddest case here, the most helpless, a female child, who being born of dysfunctional surroundings is taken to the last straw, last shred of self image. If one’s self image is destroyed, if she hates herself, insists on her own beauty by escaping into fantasy, she can stand all the scorn and hatred of those who look at her. Those most extreme bit of depravity and debasement of the human condition is drawn out as a marker of how all oppression: racism along with classist dehumanization affects all those concerned.
What also helps make Morrison so masterful is her understanding of vantage. She tells us this story from girls who are sympathetic; closeby but far enough apart to be objective… their dialectic dialogue decides for us what is pure and true in understanding the debasement that appears before us. In this sense, Morrison creates an abstract narrative vantage point so that we can witness this horrific debasement, this series of the world shitting on this one little girl, by a community that neither fully cares for its own, or has a stable sense of self worth. Morrison shows us how poverty and class can create the self hatred in the Breedloves as it can in anyone. The shattering of the narrative works as a collage to both allow us to be more fully in the story, but also so that the story doesn’t disintegrate into a particular girl only. But showing us a larger scope, we see we all are participants in this system, of capitalism that prizes the wealthy and creates ideals of beauty and wealth so that those who do not have it can shatter themselves in their pain.
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