Bluest Eye, The

Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, The, January, 2001 by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trud

Bluest Eye, The. The first novel by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison , The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 and was heralded for its sensitive treatment of African American female identity. It is the tragic story of a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove , whose loneliness and desire for love and attention is manifested in her desire to have blue eyes. The novel opens with an epigraph from a Dick and Jane primer that presents an ideal family with a house, mother, father, children, cat, dog, and friend. The story that shapes the novel is narrated through the eyes and voice of Claudia McTeer, whose narrative shifts the reader's attention to a very different world from that of the primer. Before she commits the taboo of telling the community the secret of Pecola's...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.