The Quest for an Ideal Beauty in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Abstract

In The Bluest Eye (1970), the American-African writer, Toni Morrison explores how
Western standards of ideal beauty are created and propagated with and among the black
community. The novel not only portrays the lives of those whose dark skinned and Negroid
features blight their lives; it also shows how the standard of white beauty, when imposed on
black youth, can drastically damage one’s self-love and esteem which usually occurs when
beauty goes unrecognized. Morrison in this novel focuses on the damage that the black
women characters suffer through the construction of femininity in a racialised society where
whiteness is used as a standard of beauty.