The Demise of the Ugly Black Girl in The Bluest Eye Jonathan August Peshek

“‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?’ But Frieda was asleep. And I didn’t know” (Morrison 32). The innocent question posed by Pecola from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is representative of a recurring theme in the novel: love. However, while Pecola feels anxiety about finding someone that will love her, she doesn’t even realize how many horrible things have already happened to her and just how many more are going to occur. Each atrocious, brutal occurrence takes a little more of Pecola’s sanity away, resulting in the empty shell of a long-gone little girl that has lost everything, especially her lone shred of original “beauty” that is innocence.

The primary victimization of Pecola is the constant berating of the fact that she is ugly by the white definition of beauty. The first example of Pecola’s feeble attempt to gain the knowledge of how to become beautiful is the unnatural amount of milk she drinks just to see the bottom of the Shirley Temple glass. Mrs. MacTeer’s “fussing soliloquies always irritated and depressed… they were interminable, insulting, and although indirect (Mama never named anybody- just talked about folks and some people), extremely painful in their thrust” (24). Mrs. MacTeer...