The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, published in 1970, and it is set in Lorain, Ohio, the town she grew up in. It tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old who has been made to understand that her Blackness is why people treat her as they do.

Pecola prays for blue eyes because she has decided that beauty is the thing she lacks and that it would fix everything around her: her parents' fighting, her father's drinking, her brother's leaving. The book follows her through a year of fostering and school, and it gives the other lives in the town their own chapters, so the conditions that produced her are shown rather than summarised.

Morrison tells the story in several voices and in fragments, opening with a piece of a primary-school primer, so the form of the novel is part of what it argues about whose stories are told. Its material is a community that has absorbed other people's standards, and the book shows that through the habits of a whole neighbourhood rather than through a single villain.