Morrison's story about a young black girl's growing self-hatred begins with an excerpt from a typical first-grade primer from years ago. The tone is set immediately: "Good" means being a member of a happy, well-to-do white family, a standard that is continually juxtaposed against "bad," which means being black, flawed, and strapped for money. If one is to believe the first-grade primer, everyone is happy, well-to-do, good-looking, and white. One would never know that black people existed in this country. Against this laughing, playing, happy white background, Morrison juxtaposes the novel's black characters, and she shows how all of them have been affected in some way by the white media — its movies, its books, its myths, and its advertising. For the most part, the blacks in this novel have blindly accepted white domination and have therefore given expensive white dolls to their black daughters at Christmas. Mr. Henry believes that he is being complimentary when he calls Frieda and Claudia "Greta Garbo" and "Ginger Rogers." The schoolchildren — the black schoolboys, in particular — are mesmerized by the white-ish Maureen Peal, and Maureen herself enjoys telling about the black girl who dared to request a Hedy Lamarr hairstyle.
The Bluest Eye is a harsh warning about the old consciousness of black folks' attempts to emulate the slave master. Pecola's request is not for more money or a better house or even for more sensible parents; her request is for blue eyes — something that, even if she had been able to acquire them, would not have abated the harshness of her abject reality.
Pecola's story is very much her own, unique and dead-end, but it is still relevant to centuries of cultural mutilation of black people in America. Morrison does not have to retell the story of three hundred years of black dominance by white culture for us to be aware of the history of American blacks, who have been victims in this tragedy.
