Portrait of an African American Girl: 

Mazes of "Beauty" in The Bluest Eye  

            Thirty thousand years ago in the forests of Austria, a prehistoric artist carved an image of feminine perfection.  Known as the Venus of Willendorf, the resulting statuette depicts a bulbous, faceless woman with tendril-like limbs and hips nearly as wide as she is tall (Janson 29).  And though modern Americans would sooner label such an image morbidly obese than beautiful, no doubt prehistoric women strived toward this ample-hipped ideal with all the yearning that present-day teenage girls hold for Britney Spears.  Definitions of beauty change, but the psychology behind these definitions remains constant: Since the days of meteorites and mastodons people have believed that only the truly beautiful are truly accepted, happy, and good.  Eager to attain these heights, people embrace their society's standard of beauty, and rate themselves as well as others on their ability to conform to the standard.  In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison portrays the African American community as a society ensnared by its internalization of a "blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned" beauty ideal (20).  "Women of color are judged according to white standards of beauty," and therefore they are always considered ugly (Halprin 7).  Accordingly, blacks learn to hate themselves; and Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist, prays every night for blue eyes.  Thus the ideal of beauty becomes a dangerous and racist trap into which African Americans are born, and from which they can never entirely escape.  In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce provides a similar account of a society trapped by its own self-defeating conventions.  Joyce compares these conventions to a maze, and the protagonist Stephen to the mythical character of Daedalus.  Like Pecola, Stephen has internalized his society's maze of destructive social standards.   Stephen's eventual transcendence of this maze parallels Daedalus' flight from the Labyrinth.  Though Irish society remains imprisoned in the maze, Portrait ends on an optimistic note, as a free and enlightened Stephen sets out to begin his life anew.  Tragically, neither African American society nor Pecola are ever able to transcend the maze of internalized white beauty.

            Pecola Breedlove, the most hated (and also the most innocent) character of The Bluest Eye, experiences abuse at the hands of her peers, teachers, and parents.  Ostracized by both white and black society, Pecola's status as a pariah mounts to legendary proportions.  Despite Pecola's unique social situation, Morrison asserts that "some aspects of her woundability [are] lodged in all young girls" (Morrison 210).  In fact, Pecola's representative status can be expanded beyond even that, to include the African American community as a whole.  Her urgent desire for blue eyes encapsulates the complex attitude that society holds for beauty, and that blacks hold for whiteness.  To blacks, blue eyes represent the white beauty that they can never attain, neither biologically nor socially; thus blue eyes become objects of both adoration and hate.  Even as they long for the ideal lives that they equate with blue-eyed whiteness, blacks realize the utter impossibility of such a hope and despise blue eyes as reminders of their innate inferiority.  America's racist society imposes this self-defeating mindset on the black community, yet blacks, as a substantial portion of American society, assist in their own subjugation by accepting the racism and passing it on to their children.  The idea of blacks as inferior beings, therefore, comes not only from external sources (American society) but also internal ones (the blacks themselves).  Pecola suffers merely from a particularly acute case of internalized racial self-hatred, which manifests itself as an unshakable belief in her own ugliness.

            Beauty--and ugliness, by proxy--form the basis of black self-loathing.  A so-called ugly person, "even if she...is brilliant, accomplished, and rich, must still deal with a relentless standard, almost always internalized, which tells her she is inferior...." (Halprin 158).  In simplest terms, blackness is linked to ugliness and therefore inferiority, while beauty is seen as a trait found only among whites.  In addition, white beauty becomes synonymous with goodness and purity, and Pecola's father Cholly imagines God as "a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes" (Morrison 134).  Interestingly, of the few whites that appear in The Bluest Eye, none can even approach this idealized white beauty.  White beauty, therefore, exists as an ideal and not a reality, a goal to which even white people can only aspire.  The ultimate impossibility of such an ideal becomes apparent from the first page of the novel, in which Morrison describes this white beauty in storybook terms: "Here is the house.  It is green and white.  It has a red door.  It is very pretty.  Here is the family.  Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house.  They are very happy" (Morrison 1).  In ensuing paragraphs, Morrison repeats this description while removing punctuation and spacing, bringing a sense of impending doom to an otherwise absurdly innocuous narrative.  Through her manipulation of text, Morrison reveals the superficiality and emptiness of such a "beauty."  Nevertheless, characters dedicate their lives to its pursuit; and even as Pecola prays for the storybook Jane's blue eyes, her mother works as a servant to a white family to give herself the illusion of the Mother/Father/Dick/Jane family.

            By accepting the ideal of white beauty, blacks condemn themselves as its exact opposite.  Since "the myth of white beauty is exclusive from the outset and denies the the value of black beauty," blacks thus lock themselves into a self-destructive cycle in which their only victory lies in their ability to simulate whiteness (Halprin 87).  Pecola's family, the ultimate victims of this harmful cycle, have abandoned their search for beauty, preferring to accept their ugliness in an act of hopeless fatalism:

    "You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source.  Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction....They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance" (Morrison 39).

            This nation-wide yearning for blue eyes and beauty becomes truly dangerous only when it is internalized, and Pecola, more so than any other character, successfully incorporates it into her heart and soul.  Her extreme case of self-hatred comes from "a series of rejections, some routine, some exceptional, some monstrous" that combine to form the means of Pecola's ultimate destruction (Morrison 210).  Such rejections range from being taunted by her schoolmates and assaulted by Geraldine's son Junior, to being raped by her father.  Everyone sees Pecola's deep-seated feelings of inferiority, yet they are tragically blind to the similar feelings of inadequacy that they have within themselves.  To recognize themselves in Pecola is to acknowledge their own degradation; desperate to avoid this painful truth, blacks put as much distance between themselves and Pecola by further humiliating her.  Yet in the process of victimizing Pecola, they also victimize themselves and their race by contributing to the propagation of racial self-hatred:

    "All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.  We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.  Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor....And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt" (Morrison 205).

            In contrast to Pecola's pitiable situation as a piece of social refuse, the Stephen of Portrait refuses to live a life circumscribed by his restrictive society.  As an Irishman, Stephen is born into a network of mazes that Joyce defines as "nationality, language, [and] religion" (Joyce 220).  Embittered by their long-ago subjugation at the hands of the English, the Irish people rebel against English tradition by adopting an adamant Irish jingoism, speaking their native Irish tongue, and becoming devout Catholics.  This rebellion, however, is in itself a defeat.  By reverting to antiquated and exaggerated Irish traditions, they fail to acknowledge their new identity as British-influenced residents of Ireland, and thus allow British rule to define their lives completely.  In The Bluest Eye, the loathing that blacks hold for blue eyes is a similar defeat, because in actuality this hate attests to blacks' longing for whiteness--and, by extension, their complete servitude to the ideal of white beauty.  In both novels, members of each society struggle to free themselves from the influence of a more powerful social group (either the English or the whites), yet their attempts are unsuccessful, amounting merely to rebellion, and not transcendence.  In this way, both the Irish and the African Americans attach themselves firmly to social mazes by internalizing the limitations imposed on them.

            In Portrait, however, Stephen at least attains transcendence from his maze.  In a beautiful response to the accusations of a fervent (and utterly entrapped) Irish nationalist, Stephen sums up his views on life in Ireland:  "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.  You talk to me of nationality, language, and religion.  I shall try to fly by those nets" (220).  Stephen goes on to compare Ireland to an "old sow that eats her farrow," a comparison that parallels the condition of blacks in American society (220).  At the end of The Bluest Eye, Pecola has in effect been devoured by her racist society.  Forever locked in a maze of idealized white beauty, Pecola's belief in her own ugliness eventually drives her insane.

            The structure of The Bluest Eye is directly comparable to that of Portrait, and Morrison employs the obvious parallels between the two books to further emphasize Pecola's final destruction.  Firstly, each book begins with a simple childhood story that introduces the book's basic theme.  In The Bluest Eye, the opening Dick and Jane narrative describes the ideal of whiteness that dominates the lives of all black characters and serves as the source of all racial conflict.  Portrait begins with a similarly infantile story: "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moocow coming along the road, and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy name baby tuckoo..." (1).  In this case, the cow narrative underlines Stephen's maturation as a person; beginning with the quintessential storybook cow, increasingly complex conceptions of a cow accompany Stephen's stages of personal development.

            In addition, each book recounts the life story of one representative character; Pecola represents African American society, whereas Stephen's experiences encapsulate the situation of his homeland, Ireland.  Towards the end of each book, these characters come into decisive conflict with the restrictive mazes of their societies.  While Stephen emerges victorious as a free individual, Pecola's conflict ends when she is driven to insanity.  Morrison describes Pecola's final, tragic state:

    "The damage done was total....Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly.  Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach--could not even see--but which filled the valleys of the mind" (204).

            Thus Morrison creates the final irony, comparing Stephen's glorious flight from his maze to Pecola's vain and hopeless attempts at escape.  In stark contrast to Stephen's winged namesake Daedalus, Pecola can only flap her arms.  She achieves no flight, no escape, and at the end of the book she is attached even more firmly to her own private hell, the maze of idealized white beauty that has ensnared her as well as her race.

Works Cited

deLaszlo, Violet S., ed. The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. New York: Random House, 1959.

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1991. 

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.

Gay, Kathleen. Rights and Respect. Brookfield: Millbrook Press, 1995.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist Young Man. New York: Penguin Books Ltd,

Long, Courtney, ed. Love Awaits: African American Women Talk about Sex, Love, and Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1996.

Shipler, David K. A Country of Strangers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 

Thernston, Stephan, and Abigail Thernston. America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.