The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

  Merriam- Webster’s online dictionary defines the word shame as the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, and ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. Toni Morrison takes this definition further in her famous novel The Bluest Eye by illustrating it in the dynamics of her characters. Each character in the story is affected by shame in one way or another and each character is weakened by not dealing with it, so much so that the love they give to each other and themselves is greatly affected. Simply put, Toni Morrison uses The Bluest Eye as a vehicle to show readers how corrosive shame can be on love when it’s not dealt with. And thus, warns the reader to not provoke shame by way of racism or the pursuit for physical perfection.- Kim

"Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye."

"And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to stimulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the revelation and the word."

"The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap green days, walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach- could not even see- but which filled the valleys of the mind.

We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near. Not because she was absurd, or because we were frightened, but because we had failed her. Our flowers never grew. I was convinced Frieda was right, that I had planted them too deeply. How could I have been so solven? So we avoided Pecola Breedlove-forever."
 
The Bluest Eye can be found at any legitimate bookstore for approximately 10 dollars. Go out and buy it.