The Bluest Eye is a novel, written by Toni Morrison. The novel is about sexual violence, gender disparity and racial hatred. In the book, which is divided into four parts as Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer -in this context, the author may have given us the message that discrimination against blacks does not end in the fall, in the summer, in the south or the north – is told by the main character Pecola’s childhood friend, Claudia. Pecola thinks that being beautiful is directly proportional to being white. The book begins with, “No marigolds came out of the ground.”  The reason for this is due to all of Pecola’s experiences and the fact that she was pregnant by her own father. We can say that the marigold symbolizes rebirth and a new self. In another context, perhaps, the author might want to explain the disappearance of innocence by stating that there is no rebirth. The novel is presented to the reader from many different perspectives, and many images and stream of consciousness techniques are used. While declaring a single judgment, she was able to arouse different emotions in each reader by characterizing many meanings with images. For this reason, we can say that she has created the desired awareness by reaching a universal discourse.

     In the first part of the novel, Claudia says she shattered white dolls. Shirley Temple, a doll represents the white culture and western-centered imposing beauty in the novel.  She states that she has the same impulses towards white girls. The whites reminded her, perhaps, of the dolls she loved so much. For them, beauty consisted of blond hair and blue eyes. Especially for Pecola, this was almost a door of life to happiness. She prayed to God for blue eyes every day. Maybe if her eyes looked beautiful and different, she would have imagined that both Colly and Miss Breedlove would not do bad things in front of her beautiful eyes. The beauty portrait, which the society’s perception of beauty draws, is a mechanism that can be shaped according to place, time, space and culture. According to whom and according to what, the question is often not asked. It is lined up one after the other. It is accepted. We can also say that the punctuated, comma-free writings that the author created from the words she had listed one after the other were actually a rebellion against all that acceptance and accepted perceptions. The ugliness was always in the daylight, the desperation of the race, Pecola’s first being abused by the society, then the rape of her own father, the despicable face of incest, the characters’ acceptance of helplessness – the author’s anger at this – the attitude of a helpless child’s mother,  all were just another definition of ugliness. The definition of beauty, on the other hand, was hidden in a single sentence: Real consciousness, the only thing that can transcend time and space, could only be granted to those who did not discriminate between gender, color, language, religion, or race. Morrison was able to skillfully instill this knowledge in her reader, although it was difficult to articulate her war. It tells the story of the main character Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old girl, living in strict, naked poverty on the one hand, being subjected to racist violence on the one hand, and domestic sexual assault on the other. As an “ugly black girl” raped by her father and subjected to racial humiliation, Pecola’s fate bears the scars of a long-standing enslaving, racist, exploitative politics of the black man, rather than the traces of a personal tragedy. In the book, the white man’s edition was deliberately removed from physical visibility by Toni Morrison. Oppression now emerges in different forms and situations against its own race, internalized in the psyche of the black. It is the devastating effects of enslavement on the soul, the exposure. Because her father, Cholly, who raped Pecola, also commits this terrible act under the pressure of this internalized racism, hatred against his own race, nothingness and extreme fondness. Perhaps for this reason, Morrison deals with such disgusting and detestable acts in her narrative in a distant and objective manner, without vilifying, condemning, or stigmatizing their perpetrators. In this way, she tries to point out the real culprit, the crime and the victim. In order to maintain this objective distance, the hero does not tell Pecola’s tragic story to herself, she does not tell it himself as a writer, nor does she make a white person tell it; we learn from the naive, clean, unprejudiced perspective of Claudia MacTeer, another nine-year-old black girl.  While creating the central character, Morrison prefers to rely on the black man’s internalized violence, which is based on a certain colonial personality accumulation, rather than the apparent physical violence of the white man. It works this ingrained hatred by giving place to the denial of the black person’s own existence, appearance, and the psychology of hatred. At this point, the author put into effect the destructive effects of the myth of being “beautiful, dominant, sublime and valuable” in the mind of the black man, which she assumed from the very beginning in the white man.

     It tells the story of the black, who assimilated these dominant cultural myths, as an inevitable victim of racism, to find what is in himself worthless, and to try to possess the white one without exception and without question. In terms of sexuality, the main desire is the white female body. Because it is marked as beautiful. This corrupts the black man’s relationship with the black woman and creates an image of ugliness. The white world, aestheticized, fixed as beautiful and valuable, creates opposition, depression and chaos from the moment it enters the lives of blacks. It has always been the white world that is subconsciously right and to be reached. The effects of this create a spiritual split in black people, creating a dilemma in themselves. Morrison marks this out in the scene in which Cholly, at the age of 14, has his first sexual experience with Darlene in an open field, where they are caught, humiliated, and harassed by white men. They are forced to continue the relationship and humiliated by the white people they are caught in sexual intercourse. The anger caused by this is directed towards himself and mainly his sexual partner in Cholly. Hating his partner is a reflection of his own weakness and inferiority complex. In the novel, there is no idealized, qualified sexuality or emotional relationship in the world of black people. It is almost as if the love of a black person for a black person is forbidden and has to be corrupted from the very beginning. This prohibition is not a physical obstacle, of course, it is the nature of such a relationship that does not allow anything good. Because the essence of the black man, his character is corrupted as a colonial personality, and these personalities have nothing good to offer each other. Also, love should signify the admiration for the white man in the racist colonial ideology. Otherwise, the myth of white supremacy will be shattered. All feelings that are good, valuable and happy must emerge in the white one. Once the black man gets good, quality love, he will begin to step out of the aestheticized white world. That is why we see Pecola persistently obsessed with having a “blue eye.” In a society where being black is marked by ugliness and worthlessness, comfort, comfort, beauty and value; to romance, good love; It is the birthright of the white man to have bright, clean and beautiful clothes, healthy and quality food, and well-kept houses with gardens. The black man, on the other hand, has the right to serve the owner of all these with absolute obedience and to have a value only as much as he can give. Black has no intrinsic value. They cannot produce value for each other, so the only thing black can give to black is pain and corruption. Thus, Pecola’s mother Pauline’s initial expectation of her husband, Cholly, to be a good-honest and romantic husband soon turns into utter disappointment. Because after the first months, Cholly tries to drink, torment his wife and exploit her economically. Although Pauline struggles at first, she cannot prevent this evil course and isolates herself from her own society, minimizes her relationship with her husband, and finds peace in absolute obedience and service to her white master. As a black, her expectations from life seem to have been reset. Even Pauline will not have an internalized, warm, sincere feeling towards her child. However, she is extremely kind and sensitive to the children of the white man she serves. However, her own daughter is a black, ugly waste formed from the seed of a man she hates. She is devalued, unnecessary and ugly before she was born. The physical appearance of the ugliness here is simply about being black. The fact that she has black, curly hair and black skin is enough for her to be ugly. Since these traits are in all blacks, the black man is inevitably ugly. The point of view of the white master, which finds the black one to be vile and ugly, finds its stronger and neurotic reflection in the black’s view of the black. Stigmatized as ugly, Pecola, as she grows up, turns this idea into an obsession and wants to have blue eyes that represent white people. The desire for a blue eye is a symbol that can compensate for its blackness being translated as worthlessness and ugliness. At this point, we see that the hero loses her sense of reality under psychological violence and believes that she can really have a blue eye. Because blue eyes represent a remedy for the structural violence she faces.

As a result, we can say that The Bluest Eye deals with the active role of gender, race, economic and political conditions in determining the fate of people, societies and nations. While trying to describe the obsessive and morbid relationship between black and white bodies, which are defined by certain adjectives from the very beginning, the novel examines the demonic evil and hypocrisy of the white racist colonialist culture and the black man’s reflection of the effects of this evil in different ways. Morrison does this with a well-founded logic of criticism, an admirable richness of language, and a natural, relaxed, sincere style full of witty dialogue and jokes.