Reflections from Seminary Students

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, centers around the complexity of race and how this determines beauty.  While Morrison wrote the novel in the late 1960s, she was contemplating an encounter from her childhood.  Morrison recounts in the preface that she was confounded as a child when her friend, another African-American girl, wanted to have blue eyes.  Morrison, even as a girl, was disturbed that her friend could not see the beauty in her own natural features.  Interestingly enough the only dark body with blue eyes in the novel is a cat who promptly, though accidentally, is killed after the main character Pecola sees the strange feline. » Read the rest of this entry «