“There was a wide vacuum in the literature.

“What was driving me to write was the silence-so many stories untold and unexamined,” she told The New Yorker in 2003. Ultimately, Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye because it was a book she wanted to read, about a particular audience-“ all those peripheral little girls”-whose stories weren’t featured in literature. … And for an audience that wasn’t written about.

“They’re going to skip over something, and no one’s going to remember that it wasn’t always beautiful.” She wanted to write about internecine-and, by extension, internalized-racism, and, as Morrison put it, “the feelings of being ugly.” 3. “I thought, ‘Yeah, but why so loud?’” Morrison recalled. Leonardo Cendamo/GettyImagesĪt the time, most of the books written by Black male authors-fiction or non-fiction-were “very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary” with a “positive, racially uplifting rhetoric,” Morrison said, including mantras like “Black Is Beautiful.” Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye as a response to other Black literature at the time … “So I had to write something new.” Morrison didn’t touch the story-which featured a Black girl who desired blue eyes-for years, but eventually, she incorporated what she wrote into The Bluest Eye. “At a certain point they wouldn’t let you bring your little high school essays or whatever,” she recalled in an interview. The Bluest Eye began as a story in a writing group in the early 1960s.ĭuring her time as a teacher at Howard University (her alma mater), Toni Morrison joined a writer’s group. Here’s what you need to know about The Bluest Eye. Told through multiple narrators in four sections, the novel also deals with intergenerational racism, poverty, and the American Dream. So begins Toni Morrison’s debut novel, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, which tells the heartbreaking story of an impoverished Black girl growing up in Ohio who-having been fed the American narrative that beauty lies in whiteness-desperately prays for blue eyes.

Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house.

Books like the bluest eye