Why the incest happened, Claudia says, is too difficult to fathom. That was the fall, she says, when Pecola Breedlove gave birth to her father's baby.

She says that she remembers the autumn when no marigolds bloomed. Claudia MacTeer, a childhood friend of Pecola's, is talking. Finally, the same paragraph, repeated once more, dissolves into a river of print, having absolutely no meaning, visual evidence of Pecola's consuming madness - a madness that has its genesis in her quest to be beautiful and loved, to have blue eyes, and to experience the happiness and love illustrated in the Mother-Father-Dick-Jane white family.Īfter this section, Morrison offers us a fragment of memory, set in italics. The second paragraph of the novel contains the same paragraph from the first-grade primer however, this time, the typography loses all punctuation, a visual metaphor for Pecola's losing her perspective about her worth as a person. It contains reproductions of the original Eleanor Campbell watercolor illustrations of squeaky-clean Dick and his blonde-haired, blue-eyed sister Jane, the little girl whom Pecola Breedlove so longs to become.

In fact, the first paragraph of the novel doesn't seem to be written by Morrison at all it reads as if it were copied from a first-grade reading book, or primer, one that was used for decades to teach white and black children to read by offering them simple sentences about a picture-perfect, all-American white family composed of Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane.įor those who have never seen this first-grade reading book, go to the library and check out Kismaric and Heiferman's Growing Up With Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream, published by Collins San Francisco. The novel isn't told in a straightforward narrative. If she were white, blonde, and very blue-eyed, she would be loved. A victim of popular white culture and its pervasive advertising, Pecola believes that people would value her more if she weren't black. Through Pecola, Morrison exposes the power and cruelty of white, middle-class American definitions of beauty, for Pecola will be driven mad by her consuming obsession for white skin and blonde hair - and not just blue eyes, but the bluest ones. The Bluest Eye, Morrison's first novel, focuses on Pecola (pea- coal-uh) Breedlove, a lonely, young black girl living in Ohio in the late 1940s.

Pecola the bluest eye