The Bluest Eye 797she can provide Pecola with the physical love that
Pecola longs for.
Even though Pauline’s past negatively impacts
Pecola, understanding it is vital to understanding
Pauline’s effort to resist a descent into a state of iso-
lation. Pauline seeks friendship as a means of filling
the void of love that her mother does not provide. In
Pauline’s dreams, she longs for a companion who will
fulfill her emptiness: “ . . . the Presence would know
what to do. She had only to lay her head on his chest
and he would lead her away to the sea, to the city, to
the woods . . . forever.” Pauline’s willingness to remain
hopeful that this “Presence” will materialize enables
her to embrace an opportunity for companionship
when she meets Cholly Breedlove, her future hus-
band. Although Pauline finds her “archless foot” to be
a negative dimension of her body, Cholly embraces it:
“Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was
not there, he made it seem like something special and
endearing.” Pauline recognizes Cholly as her “Pres-
ence” because he recognizes that she matters. The
attention that Cholly gives to her helps to fill some
of the void. Pauline’s inadequacy is a source of attrac-
tion for Cholly, which is a strong utopian suggestion
that physical deformities cannot hinder true love. The
emotional support Cholly shows Pauline suggests
that love can be instrumental in helping vulnerable
people from falling prey to the ravages of emotional
and physical isolation.
Unfortunately, Pecola Breedlove does not receive
enough love from Cholly Breedlove to overcome
her emotional and physical isolation from society.
Instead of assisting Pecola with the harsh realities
of her social milieu, Cholly contributes to her tragic
condition: He rapes Pecola. The Bluest Eye evinces
the significance of parental involvement in helping
children to avoid isolating themselves physically and
emotionally from others. Although Pauline is able to
gain some help with combating emotional isolation
from Cholly, Pauline and Cholly do not seem to
understand the need to help their daughter (Pecola)
with her vexing descent into a disquieting emo-
tional and physical isolation from others. It would
seem natural that Pauline would want to return the
support she receives from Cholly with the internal
demons of her past, but she simply leaves her daugh-
ter to become the prey of a vicious and racist society.
Left without emotional support, Pecola attempts to
find happiness in the false comforts of her physical
and emotional isolation from her reality.
Antonio Maurice Danielsrace in The Bluest Eye
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, the
reader encounters Pecola Breedlove—the protago-
nist of the novel who has to confront the dominant
culture’s oppressive standard of beauty. Morrison’s
narrative is situated in 1941, a time period that
featured tremendous racial discrimination against
African Americans on the basis of their skin color.
Since the dominant culture’s standard of beauty
does not allow African Americans in 1941 to be
considered as beautiful because of their dark (non-
white) skin color, Pecola Breedlove experiences great
racial shame because of this oppressive standard of
beauty and desires to transcend the manacles of
race. Pecola does not desire to be considered simply
beautiful, but she has the strongest desire to be the
most beautiful living human being. Therefore, in
order to become the most beautiful living human
being, Pecola aspires to have the bluest eye (a physi-
cal characteristic of the dominant culture’s standard
of beauty) to enable her to escape the oppressive
bondage and limitations that her race places on her
ability to see herself as the most beautiful human
being. For Pecola, the only way that she will be able
to be perceived as beautiful is to live imaginatively
in a world where she does have the bluest eye—bio-
logically impossible in the world in which she physi-
cally resides. In helping the reader to understand
how Pecola Breedlove perceives how the dominant
culture views her, Morrison writes: “She has seen
it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The
distaste must be for her, her blackness . . . But her
blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness
that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged
with distaste in white eyes.” Although Pecola is able
to see the “distaste” that the dominant culture has
for her “blackness,” Morrison is able to share with
readers one of her most pervasive themes, permeat-
ing all eight of her novels, including The Bluest Eye:
African Americans must seek alternatives to the
oppressive reality that the social construction of race
has caused them to experience. While Morrison’s