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A list of all the characters in The Bluest Eye. The Bluest Eye characters include: Pecola Breedlove , Claudia MacTeer , Cholly Breedlove , Pauline Breedlove , Frieda MacTeer.
- Pecola Breedlove
Pecola is the protagonist of The Bluest Eye, but despite...
- Claudia MacTeer
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- Cholly Breedlove
A detailed description and in-depth analysis of Cholly...
- Quick Quiz
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- The Bluest Eye: Study Guide
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- Pecola Breedlove
- Pecola Breedlove. The novel's protagonist, Pecola is an eleven-year-old black girl from an abusive home. She believes she is ugly and suffers the cruelty of her parents, classmates, and other individuals in the community.
- Claudia MacTeer. The narrator of parts of the novel, Claudia is a strong-willed and passionate nine-year-old black girl. Still young, Claudia has not experienced overt racism and violence to the extent many of the novel's other characters… read analysis of Claudia MacTeer.
- Frieda MacTeer. Claudia's older sister, Frieda is ten-years-old and possesses the same independence and resilience as Claudia. Frieda loves Shirley Temple and other white actresses, sharing the community's belief that whiteness is the paragon of beauty and… read analysis of Frieda MacTeer.
- Cholly Breedlove. Pecola's father, Cholly is a violent and severely damaged man. From a young age Cholly has been free—his mother left him on a trash heap as an infant, and his caretaker dies when he is… read analysis of Cholly Breedlove.
Bluest Eye study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
- Overview
- Structure
- Summary
- Origin and analysis
- Form and style
- Publication and reception
- Legacy
The Bluest Eye, debut novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, published in 1970. Set in Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio, in 1940–41, the novel tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, an African American girl from an abusive home. Eleven-year-old Pecola equates beauty and social acceptance with whiteness; she therefore longs to ha...
The Bluest Eye is divided into four sections, each of which is named for a different season. (The novel begins with “Autumn” and ends with “Summer.”) The four sections are further divided into chapters. Most of the chapter titles are taken from the simulated text of a Dick and Jane reader. Three versions of the simulated text appear at the beginning of the novel. The first version is clear and grammatically correct; it tells a short story about “Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane,” focusing in particular on Jane, who seeks a playmate. The second version repeats the message of the first, but without proper punctuation or capitalization. The third version lacks punctuation, capitalization, and spaces between words. It reads:
Britannica Quiz
49 Questions from Britannica’s Most Popular Literature Quizzes
Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisveryprettyhereisthefamilymotherfatherdickandjaneliveinthegreenandwhitehousetheyareveryhappyseejaneshehasareddressshewantstoplaywhowillplaywithjaneseethecatitgoesmeowmeowcomeandplaycomeplaywithjanethekittenwillnotplay...lookherecomesafriendthefriendwillplaywithjanetheywillplayagoodgameplayjaneplay
Pecola’s story is told through the eyes of multiple narrators. The main narrator is Claudia MacTeer, a childhood friend with whom Pecola once lived. Claudia narrates from two different perspectives: the adult Claudia, who reflects on the events of 1940–41, and the nine-year-old Claudia, who observes the events as they happen.
In the first section of the novel (“Autumn”), nine-year-old Claudia introduces Pecola and explains why she is living with the MacTeers. Claudia tells the reader what her mother, Mrs. MacTeer, told her: Pecola is a “case…a girl who had no place to go.” The Breedloves are currently “outdoors,” or homeless, because Pecola’s father, Cholly, burned the family house down. The county placed Pecola with the MacTeer family until “they could decide what to do, or, more precisely, until the [Breedlove] family was reunited.”
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Despite the tragic circumstances of their friendship, Claudia and her 11-year-old sister, Frieda, enjoy playing with Pecola. Frieda and Pecola bond over their shared love of Shirley Temple, a famous American child star known for her blonde curls, babyish singing, and tap-dancing with Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson. Claudia, however, “couldn’t join them in their adoration because [she] hated Shirley.” In fact, she hated “all the Shirley Temples of the world.” The adult Claudia recalls being given a blue-eyed baby doll for Christmas:
From the clucking sounds of adults I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish...all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.”
Questions of race and gender are at the centre of The Bluest Eye. In a 2004 interview Morrison described her motivations to write the novel. She explained that in the mid-1960s “most of what was being published by Black men [was] very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or non-fiction.” These publications “had a very positive, racially uplifting rhetoric.” Black male authors expressed sentiments like “Black is beautiful” and used phrases like “Black queen.” At the time, Morrison worried that people would forget that “[Black] wasn’t always beautiful.” In The Bluest Eye, she set out to remind her readers “how hurtful a certain kind of internecine racism is.”
Morrison conceived of the idea for the novel some 20 years before its publication. During an undergraduate creative writing workshop at Howard University, she worked on a short story about a young Black girl who prayed for blue eyes. The story was in part true; it was based on a conversation with a childhood friend who wanted blue eyes. “Implicit in her desire,” Morrison observed, “was racial self-loathing.” The soon-to-be author wondered how her friend had internalized society’s racist beauty standards at such a young age.
The Bluest Eye is a work of tremendous emotional, cultural, and historical depth. Its passages are rich with allusions to Western history, media, literature, and religion. Morrison’s prose was experimental; it is lyrical and evocative and unmistakably typical of the writing style that became the hallmark of her later work. Some 20 years after its initial publication, Morrison, reflecting on the writing of her first novel in a 1993 afterword to The Bluest Eye, described her prose as “race-specific yet race-free,” the product of a desire to be “free of racial hierarchy and triumphalism.” In her words:
The novel tried to hit the raw nerve of racial self-contempt, expose it, then soothe it not with narcotics but with language that replicated the agency I discovered in my first experience of beauty. Because that moment was so racially infused…the struggle was for writing that was indisputably black.
The form of this novel was also experimental and was highly innovative: Morrison built a “shattered world” to complement Pecola’s experiences. She changed narrators and focal points within and between the four sections. The narration itself alternates between first person and third-person omniscient. Although the events of the novel are, as Morrison wrote, “held together by seasons in childtime,” they are narrated mostly nonchronologically. The novel itself is fairly short; it concludes after only 164 pages.
The temporal structure and frequent shifts in perspective are a key part of Morrison’s attempt to imagine a fluid model of subjectivity—a model she hoped could offer some kind of resistance to a dominant white culture. By shifting the point of view, Morrison effectively avoids dehumanizing the Black characters “who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.” Instead, she emphasizes the systemic nature of the problem. She shows the reader how the racial issues of the distant and not-so-distant past continue to affect her characters in the present, thereby explaining, if not justifying, many of their actions.
After several rejections, The Bluest Eye was published in the U.S. by Holt, Rinehart and Winston (later Holt McDougal) in 1970. Somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 first-edition copies were printed; Morrison had expected only about 400. At the time, Morrison—a single mother living in New York City—was working as a senior editor in the trade division of the publisher Random House.
The Bluest Eye was not a commercial success. In a 2012 interview with Interview magazine, Morrison claimed that the Black community “hated [the novel].” The little critical attention the novel received was generally positive. The New York Times celebrated Morrison’s willingness to expose “the negative of the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-Cat photograph that appears in our reading primers…with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” All things considered, Morrison felt that “the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, [and] misread.”
Since its publication in 1970, there have been numerous attempts to ban The Bluest Eye from schools and libraries because of its depictions of sex, violence, racism, incest, and child molestation; it frequents the American Library Association’s list of banned and challenged books . Nonetheless, the novel has been categorized as an American classic ...
Who are the "good" characters in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye? Discuss Pecola Breedlove's role as the central character in The Bluest Eye.
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Complete List of Characters in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Learn everything you need to know about Claudia MacTeer, Pecola Breedlove, and more in The Bluest Eye.
