Quest For Beauty In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison (1931-), the 1993 Nobel Laureate in literature, enjoys worldwide acclaim for the rediscovery and reconstruction of African American history and experience in her works. Her first novel The Bluest Eye was written between 1965 and 1968. This was the first time a black little girl had been the central figure in American literature. The novel reveals the cruelty of the white norm of beauty and the self-negation of the black people who have internalized this norm. They unquestioningly accept the white-skinned, blue-eyed, blond ideal of beauty and relegate all that linked with blackness to ugliness and inferiority. Black-skinned Pecola is definitely "ugly" according to this criterion. Attributing the rejection and misfortune to her "ugliness," she desperately longs for blues eyes that would dazzle everyone into loving her. Blue eyes stand for all that she lacks:beauty, friendship, family, affection. However, she can never live up to the white norm—her quest is doomed to failure.In The Bltest Eye, Toni Morrison is writing about the present (the late 1960s) by writing about the past (the 1940s):though she writes the story that took place between autumn 1940 and autumn 1941, she is writing about what is prevalent in the late 1960s—the heated political and intellectual debates of black beauty. Written against the backdrop of Black Aesthetic Movement and Black Power Movement, it lays bare the operation of power relations beneath the white beauty norm. The dissemination of this norm through school, family, popular culture involves the black into the mechanism of power. Under the dominant beauty discourse, all the members within the black community lead very depressing and unnatural lives, dark-colored and light-colored alike. By using Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power, we can better discern how the beauty norm functions in the process of normalization. Disciplinary power exerts meticulous control over body individually and renders it docile through instruments of surveillance, normalizing judgment and examination. Morrison shows us that beauty is not an essence or property:beauty is not entirely constituted biologically in the body, but is constructed in the functioning of disciplinary power. Individuals become the instrument as well as the production of power. The Bluest Eye belies the "Black Js Beautiful" rhetoric by exposing that all kinds of beauty standards are normalizing and manipulating in nature. She transcends the blind spots in this slogan and recognizes the same logic behind "white is beautiful" and "black is beautiful" standards. The simple reversion of "ugliness" and "beauty" is no solution to the problems faced by blacks. Instead of resorting to the fanatic counter-rhetoric, Morrison shows that beauty norms are mechanisms of docility that should be resisted. Establishment of new standards is just a confirmation of the alleged importance of physical appearance. The way to find self-esteem for the black is transcending the normalizing standards which use physical appearance to devalue them.