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. 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. A victim of popular white culture and its pervasive advertising, Pecola believes that people would value her more if she weren't black. If she were white, blonde, and very blue-eyed, she would be loved.
The novel isn't told in a straightforward narrative. 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.
For 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. 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.
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. 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.
