On Beauty and Beauty Norm in The Bluest Eye

So it was. A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfilment.

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

THE quote above seems to me the best description of Pecola, a girl whose yearning for beauty brings destruction, whose tragic ending comes too soon in the book to create suspensive effect that lures readers to be expectant for something good or to at least build up courage to accept the reality. ‘Pecola was having her father’s baby,’ Morrison writes, ‘The seeds shrivelled and died; her baby too.’ Her outcome is all in this ominous prolepsis. It’s the blue eyes she’d never endowed with that destroyed her. Namely, the beauty norm and the so-called standard beauty destroyed her. Here in this article, I intend to cover some key points concerning beauty, the construction and deconstruction of beauty norm according to the book, as well as the relation of beauty, beauty norm, and ugliness.

At the very beginning of the book, Morrison quotes an extract from a primer reader, which millions of American school-children utilised to learn how to read up until 1970s. The story elaborates a harmonious scene in which a family of four happily lives together and its members interact peacefully: well-behaved kids, devoted couple, and two lovely pets. This primer is the prototype of white family and employed by Morrison metonymically to reflect the predominant rules set by white people including norms of beauty, standard living, ideal family structure and so on. A white narrative that excludes non-white individuals, in a way, conveys the idea that black people are dominated as well as marginalised at the same time, also the message that these assimilated and pervasive ‘white rules’ will strongly affect and control our protagonists’ behaviours and thoughts.

Preceded by the primer, an intimate sketch of MacTeer family life illustrates poverty – a prototype of black family at that time. The warmth maintained by collected coal fragments fallen off of trains, the leaky window, the limited lighting, but also a sense of security because of the family bond, the protective mother and father, the hard-earned warmth, the chattering and singing. Claudia, the younger daughter of MacTeer, also the narrator of most of the chapters, from whose viewpoint the situation and condition of Pecola is demonstrated, gives the readers a profile of Pecola’s life – even worse-off than the MacTeers’ – which denotes no love at all, where the father and the mother make love as though fighting, which is finally eliminated by fire set by the father who fathered his own daughter. A hierarchy is established by the contrast among the three kinds of family. An ideal way of living is thus constructed and will be reinforced by the witness of better-off families later in the book.

Analogous to the way ideal living is constructed, the construction of beauty norm starts simultaneously as the story unfolds. ‘Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley.’ Claudia says, feeling rather revolted by the look of Shirley. Shirley Temple, who had a distinguishable pair of blue eyes, fitted perfectly in the white-dominated beauty norm while in the novel, Morrison makes use of her look as the first step to construct such norm. Quite different from Pecola and Frieda, Claudia is shaped from an opposite aspect which gives her a sense of detachment from the beauty norm in their world and thus she is able to doubt, to question the binary black-and-white aesthetic perception, where blackness is considered ugly while whiteness, beautiful. Claudia’s narration of her revolt against Shirley Temple is a ‘quasi-deconstruction’ of such beauty norm. The reason why I call it a ‘quasi-deconstruction’ is that despite Claudia’s indifference towards Shirley’s beauty, she eventually resorts to Jane Withers, another white actress who, together with Shirley Temple, starred in the movie Bright Eyes (1934), which was released before the time setting in the book, (and which I assume to have directly influenced Morrison’s background setting of the story). By setting Shirley Temple as the very prototype of the beauty under white beauty norm, Morrison presents a tremendous contrast between white aesthetic and an covert black aesthetic – which everyone in the black community is born with but has failed to maintain or to exhibit; meanwhile, by setting Jane Withers as a ‘shelter’ which Claudia later resorts to, Morrison undermines this little girl’s attempt to rebel against the alien beauty norm forced on her and her people by the dominant ones.

Later, white beauty norm is reinforced by the presence of a white-girl-based doll, which serves as the symbol of beauty norm. The succeeding scene in which Claudia dismembers the doll pulls stings to weaken such reinforcement: Claudia thinks that she only has interests in her fellow humans, not dolls. ‘I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable.’ She says. This statement displays a displacement of the aesthetic experience of an individual contradicts that of the outer world. Instead of conforming, she starts her deconstruction – too genuine to be called ‘quasi’ but too superficial and unintended to be genuine – she tears off its fingers, bends the feet, loosens the hair, twists the head, and removes the eyeballs. Consequently, the doll – the symbol of beauty norm, the embodiment of the prototype of beauty – is reduced to a mere metal roundness. But this is the comment she gets from the adults:

Grown people frowned and fussed: ‘You-don’t-know-how-to-take-care-of-nothing. I-never-had-a-baby-doll-in-my-whole-life-and-used-to-cry-my-eyes-out-for-them. Now-you-got-one-a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with-you?’

The adults are disciplined to accept the binary black-and-white aesthetic perception constructed by white-dominated discourse system, i.e., the white beauty norm, and gradually develop an inward racial self-loathing. Their self-denial of their own bodies means their self-identity is lost in the narration of beauty; therefore, they start to take such constructed beauty norm for granted without pondering over its reason or validity and as a result, their self-recognition is no longer ‘black’ but ‘non-white’. This is how they become disciplined. So they outraged at Claudia’s destroying the beautiful doll that they have never been able to possess; they criticise her, claiming she has ravaged the so-called beauty without knowing that they have unconsciously acquired and accepted the alien beauty norm and have relinquished their common aesthetic sense to their oppressors. This is also why Claudia says ‘I did not know why I destroyed those dolls. But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas.’ Her rebellion against the alien norm is also unconscious, but as a girl she has somehow maintain her common sense of self-esteem and self-appreciation, which impose quite a challenge to her obedient fellows, who has been trying to nourish the young with their acquired self-depreciation and force their self-loathing on their kids. Moreover, in reality black people are the ones sullied by the white; but Claudia’s dismembering the doll stands for a metaphor for the deconstruction of the white-dominated beauty norm – an exchange of the roles in the opposition between the black and the white – for the white is made the object and Claudia is the subject.

In the end, however, Claudia, as a grown-up, in retrospect, regrets forming the idea of dismembering the dolls or pinching white little girls, that she learns ‘how repulsive this disinterested violence was,’ and thinks ‘the best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love,’ that she admits to have taken a small step to Shirley Temple, and ‘has learned much later to worship her.’ Knowingly, she asserts, ‘the change was adjustment without improvement.’ She finally becomes disciplined, like her fellow adults, who once may be little rebellious kids dismembering the white-girl-based doll thinking ‘why is it not my colour and why is it beautiful and I don’t think so.’ This rebellion-to-obedience change in Claudia is depressive but inevitable as long as the white beauty norm is taking charge and coercing people into acceptance and obedience. The power with which one can narrate and regulate the norms of beauty is not in the hands of the black; however, apart from the white people, who dominate such discourse system, it is black people themselves who internalise this alien beauty norm and self-loathe that strengthens this inequality.

Another important point illustrated in the novel is that in most characters’ mind, beauty is something to possess, or as Morrison puts it in foreword, ‘something to behold.’ Beauty is objectified. Such objectification is also the way the black people cognise and perceive ugliness in the story. Throughout the book, we cannot find any single authoritative description of the Breedloves’ ugliness, because the clue merely lies in their own thought and conviction which, in this sense, are the very basis of their ugliness:

It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, ‘You are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. ‘Yes,’ they had said. ‘You are right.’ And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his way.

Morrison describes their conviction for ugliness as a cloak of ugliness imposed by an imagined ‘master’, who must also be white. Ugliness is then objectified. Breedloves think that they can get rid of that cloak once they have attained beauty, which for Pauline, is embodied as ‘power, praise and luxury’ in Fisher’s household; for Pecola, a pair of blue eyes. What Morrison means by saying ‘beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do,’ is that beauty as an action defies beauty as a possession – a decorative accessory is not beauty in itself, true beauty lies in the action that we have perceived this accessory, and we have selected it, decided to wear it, and at last we have decorated ourselves with it. Beauty lies in our perception, selection, decision, and decoration. However, Pecola’s pursuit of the blue eyes is not comparable in that Pecola did not perceive the blue eyes, she just wanted them. ‘Beauty as an action’ is based on the action itself being purely innate – like beauty – that is to say one should not be forced to relinquish their common sense or be normed to become a fraudulent advocate of a totally alien beauty norm to take this action. Such alien beauty is ubiquitous – living in a world predominated by white people, Pecola can see the blue eyes she yearns owned by Shirley, Junior, Joanna, Alice-and-Jerry Storybook, Mary Janes on the candies, even Yacobowski the immigrant. The existence of this so-called beauty keeps reinforces itself, through its mere existence or through acts or utterances like Maureen screams at MacTeer sisters and Pecola: ‘I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!’ But ugliness is ubiquitous just as beauty is. In their minds, their ugliness will be reinstated by each witness to beauty, white beauty that excludes racial beauty.

Just as Morrison’s purpose of writing this piece of story – to articulate against the ‘white rules’ in support of the movement named ‘Black is Beautiful’ – the issue of beauty is that beauty is innate, never possessed or attained. But ugliness is. Ugliness is the cloak people wear when they think themselves ugly. Ugliness is the result of the construction of beauty norm that excludes other race, other people, or simply ‘others’. The white grab hold of the very right to speak, to regulate, they have managed to construct beauty in their effort to construct beauty norm. But beauty is never constructed, beauty norm is. Ugliness is the other side of what beauty norm measures. For all those years, people so naturally put ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ on both pans of the beauty scales, weighing one with the other without realising that it is ‘beauty norm’ that weighs both of them respectively. Ugliness is created the moment people constructed beauty norm to weigh beauty. Racial ugliness is born the moment white people established white beauty norm to rule out racial beauty.

The saddening fact is that, out of these sorrowful experiences and thwarted rebellions, as long as white beauty norm still exists and reinforces itself constantly, those who revolt against this norm will eventually become normed and those who are normed will but fail on their way to attain beauty. Beauty is unattainable not because it is out of reach; black people stay ‘ugly’ because ‘the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.’