The Bluest Eye Research Paper

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Recommended: Theme of race and racism in the bluest eye

In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the idea of dirtiness and cleanliness comes about in multiple ways. One way is in its literal sense, while the other is synonymous with racism. Although, the two ways of the theme’s presentation do tie to one-another. “Whiteness” is associated with values, virtue, beauty, and cleanliness. Being black, however, is associated with worthlessness, immorality, ugliness, and dirtiness. The novel's characters use the other black individuals as reference points against which they judge their own "whiteness" and sense of self-worth.
Nearly all of the black characters in the book have underlying “whiteness” are obsessed with cleanliness. This ongoing need to be clean extends to the woman's moral and emotional want for purity. They are so …show more content…

If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she was—then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser… What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural—a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us.” (74)
This may suggest that Claudia resist the pressure to conform to a white vision of beauty.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye represents the theme of cleanliness/“whiteness” as a standard of beauty and dirtiness/being black as ugliness and immorality throughout the entire novel. At the end of the novel, Claudia hopes that Pecola’s baby will live. She wants the baby to live so that it can counteract society’s standards of beauty, and that this new black baby people will alter their views and see being black as something that is

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