The Blue-eyed Girl

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison has an unusual beginning.  It starts with a brief description of the characters house and family. The author writes this information in three different ways: one with choppy sentences, the other with no punctuations or capitalizations, and the third with no spaces between the words. Why did the author did this? I believe it was to demonstrate that the person that’s going to tell the story is a young kid, since it is written in a childish way. It might be a weird introduction, but it surely got my attention.

As I started reading the book I was immediately able to see that Claudia, the girl telling the story, does not have a good relationship with her mother. We can see this when she states, “I do not know that she is not angry at me, but at my sickness. I believe she despises my weakness for letting the sickness `take holt´” (11). This is not a normal daughter-mother relationship. At least in my case, when I am sick, my mother becomes very sweet and does anything in order to make me feel better. Yet we can see that Claudia is not only feeling bad because of her sickness but also humiliated by her own mother. Why? Based on my conclusion I drew out from the introductory paragraph, Claudia seems like a young girl. Is this the correct way to treat your kids?

At the same time I believe that Claudia seems older than what she really is. She states, “Mama had told us two days earlier that a `case´ was coming…” (16). The way she wrote it seems as if her mother is sugar quoting something important that she would not be able to understand. But she then starts talking about the real dangers of the outdoors. The next paragraph seems like a really deep analysis. If Claudia can make such analysis there is no need for her mother to sugar quote the big event that is going to occur. This is probably because of the disintegration of the family. When she states, “Mrs. Breedlove was staying with the woman she worked for; Sammy, was with some other family; and Pecola was to stay with us. Cholly was in jail” (18). When can see how there is a lack of unity. This clearly leads to many social issues including Claudia´s relationship with her mother.

I kept reading and I got to the part where Claudia receives a blue-eyed baby doll. As soon as I read this I knew where the title of the book had come from: she wanted to be a blonde, blue-eyed girl. She states, “The other dolls, which were supposed to bring me great pleasure, succeeded in going quite the opposite” (20). She clearly did not like the idea of being the mother of these dolls. I believe that her admiration for “the blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll” (20) played and important aspect for why she did not like being a mother. On the other hand, I also believe that her mother was portraying a bad image of what a mother was supposed to be like. She did not want to become like her.