The Bluest Eye: Toni Morrison

"Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty.  Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.  Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife.  A brilliant examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing."

You might have noticed that this is different from the other reviews I've been posting lately.  This was one of the assigned books for my graduate Topics in American Literature course I'm just finishing up (this is the last week!).  I ended up writing my final paper on this book by Morrison, and Langston Hughes' poem, "I, Too;" I used these works of American literature as evidence of continued oppression of African Americans.  I will be entirely honest and tell you that I have not cared for Morrison's writing in the past.  I struggled to "read" (when I say "read," I really mean "began to read with earnest and good intentions, then fought terribly to maintain interest, and then skimmed for important parts when I could no longer stomach it) "A Mercy" and "Tar Baby" during my undergraduate work.  (I actually went back and read my review of "A Mercy;" contrary to what I just wrote, it doesn't seem like I hated that book, though I did struggle through some very difficult portions from the point of view of Florens).  "The Bluest Eye," for me, was the easiest to read.  It was easier for me to fall into the story than with Morrison's other works I've read.  Also, this book was obviously interesting enough to me that I chose to use it as the basis of my final essay for the course.  As social, cultural, and historical commentary, I thought this book was moving and it really made me think more deeply about racism (even racism within a race, which is not something I'd considered before) than I had in the past.  I really love literature that makes me think (yes, I do enjoy more of a mental challenge than my typical romance novels...).  I feel like this book is yet another example of why Morrison is a Nobel Prize-winning author; she exposes new facets of African American life and makes us question our lives and history.  She confronts harsh issues that are difficult to stamen, but - at the same time - are extremely important and need to be discussed.  Pecola is a tragic character.  As Morrison writes in the book's forward (which I also saw turned into an afterward in another copy of the book), "I focused...on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society:  a child; the most vulnerable member:  a female" (Morrison xi).  Pecola is this personification, stemming from Morrison's own childhood conversation with a classmate when she was growing up in Loraine, Ohio.  That girl, too, wanted blue eyes.  Blue eyes were the personification of beauty; while anything seen as a traditionally "black trait" is ugly or undesirable.  It is heartbreaking when anyone hates themselves for something they cannot control, and this is part of what makes Morrison's work so powerful.

I do recommend this book.  It made me think and it touched me.

A Mercy: Toni Morrison

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy.  Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North.  Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland.  This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm.  Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding to their lives.

"A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery.  But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and daughter--a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise the abandonment."

This was another book that I read for my Multicultural American novel course.  I can certainly see why Toni Morrison is the winner of the Nobel Prize.  Her writing has something about it that is profoudly deep and almost lyrical.  This book took me only a few days to read.  While I enjoyed parts of it, there were the passages from the point of view of Florens that really, really...baffled (is that the word I want to use...I'm not so sure) me.  I practically got to the point of actually disliking the portions from the girl's point of view.  I really do understand that the point of these passages was to breathe life into the character, Florens, and show that--while she knew how to read and write some--she was still untrained and "simple"-for lack of a better word.  The plot was extremely jumpy and was hard to follow, but I was able to catch up after re-reading passages.  It is very difficult for me to say whether or not I enjoyed the book.  I liked it better than a lot of books that I've had to read for other classes in the past, but it certainly was not my favorite.  The wrting--while rich and interesting--was sometimes difficult to follow.  I genuinely believe that the only reason that I somewhat liked the book was only because I forced myself to look deeper than the words.  I will not try to dispute Morrison's status as a well-known and widely touted brilliant author, but this book was not really the most delicious cup of tea for me.  Like I said earlier, I liked portions of the book.  The work as a whole was not bad.  I am just not sure if I will--by my own choice--choose to read a book by Morrison in my free time.  I recommend this book for the conditions under which I read it--in a classroom/educational setting.  It was a decent book with interesting situations and history to the plot, but one really has to be open to it.