Feeling in The Bluest Eye
It makes sense for authors to focus on emotions. After all, if I wrote a novel or essay, I wouldn’t want people to just read it and cast it aside. I would want them to read and respond to it. I would want my work to somehow influence and change people for the better. As Professor Bump’s essay, “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism,” states, emotions are necessary for any change, and in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, emotions indeed play a major role. I realized that her writing made me “’feel something profoundly’” (Anthology 330).
The greatest works of art are those that resonate the most with us and make us feel.
For the most part, the novel made me feel angry, annoyed, and frustrated. I had a hard time understanding Pecola’s situation. If a group of boys started teasing me, I would be taken aback. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t let them get to me, and I’d somehow defend myself. Pecola, on the other hand, submits herself completely to their cruelty. Only when Frieda and Claudia come to her rescue is Pecola safe again. Claudia confesses, “Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets” (Morrison 73). Countless other times Pecola fails to stand up for herself—when Maureen yells at her and when Junior deceives her.
Many times, Pecola seems helpless and vulnerable.
While many of Pecola’s experiences made me feel angry, annoyed, and frustrated, at the same time, I felt sympathy for her. For her whole life, Pecola believes she is ugly and prays desperately every day to be made beautiful. Everyone around her defines beauty so narrowly and arbitrarily that her definition of beauty is equally limited. Even now, magazines, advertising, movies, television shows, etc. still seem to rule our definition of beauty. Girls try to lose weight to be as thin as models. Some even go as far as getting plastic surgery to be society’s version of “pretty.” The girls of Morrison’s novel shed light on “one of those embarrassing facts of life…a deep secret that is always between us but we feel we must keep from our consciousness” (Anthology 333).
The video below is for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. While ads, billboards, magazines surround us and seem to define beauty, this video proves that looks can be deceiving!
In this way, I’m not as angry, annoyed, or frustrated with Pecola or the other characters of the novel. The more I learn about them, the more I am able to sympathize with them and fully understand their situations. Above all, “Suffering with her [Pecola], knowing that pain consciously, feeling it, acknowledging it openly and directly, most of us will be less likely to inflict in on others, and more likely to take action against those who do” (Anthology 339). My emotions, my anger, annoyance, frustration, and sympathy, all help me read and learn from Morrison’s story. Ultimately, Morrison effectively proves that there’s more to looks, more to the color of our skin.
