Beauty plays an important role in a woman’s femininity; it gives a woman confidence and acceptance from society. However, when a woman’s “whiteness” became the standard of beauty across the 1940s white-dominated society, African American females faced the wrath of their own community through the rise of internalized racism, which defined beautiful women as lighter-skin colored females while demeaning those with a darker skin color.
Toni Morrison, the author of the remarkable novel, The Bluest Eye, explores the endeavors of characters from both perspectives conforming, rather than subverting, to the rules of institutionalized beauty; characters such as Pecola and Geraldine, reflections of young black girls and women at the time who suffered from the internalized racism and desperately searched for ways to retain their beauty to escape the grotesque perspective of society. Pecola Breedlove, Morrison’s representation of all young black girls at the time, desires to have blue eyes, the definitive symbol of whiteness and beauty. She believes that having blue eyes will relieve the horrible situations occurring in her life and change how society views her.
However, fulfilling this wish will ultimately lead to her oblivious desolation. Although Pecola as a young black girl constantly endures discrimination from white people, she is suffering the most from her own community. This is demonstrated as a couple of black boys and a light-skinned black girl, Maureen Peal, victimize Pecola for her own blackness and turn it into an insult; “It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth” (Morrison 65).
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The boys and Maureen taunting Pecola for her blackness is a way of angrily expressing their own self-hatred and internalized racism. The idea of equating blackness to ugly as part of the standard of white beauty creates internalized racism in the black community by allowing those with lighter skin color to dominate those with darker skin color. Pecola, with her uncontrollable dark skin, must live with this oppression from her own community as society deems her ugly.
To overcome and escape this misery, Pecola fantasizes about becoming beautiful through having blue eyes after acknowledging that “if her eyes…were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 43). Pecola believes that attaining a set of new eyes will drastically improve her life by changing how others perceive her. Consequently, after attaining her precious blue eyes, Pecola’s dissatisfaction of them begins as she is still under the delusion of feeling ugly since the community still looks at her strangely.
This false belief turns out to be utterly destructive for Pecola, consuming her whole life and eventually her sanity as stated by her friend Claudia: “the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment” (Morrison 203). The desire for blue eyes, in particular, shows that in order to become beautiful, one must have similar features to a “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll” (Morrison 19) which every girl in the nation adores and treasures. Whiteness as the standard of beauty determines Pecola’s fate from birth and causes her later in life to suffer from internalized racism and to obsess over it in the form of blue eyes, leading to her insanity when beauty becomes an important role in a young girl’s femininity.
Overall, Pecola’s story illustrates the way cultural conceptions of beauty can be devastating to young black girls who do not fit those conceptions. In contrary to desiring beauty, Morrison provides a different perspective on conforming to the notion of white beauty that postulates internalized racism by constructing the character Geraldine, a light-skin black woman who has attained “beauty” and supports the social hierarchy. Her emphasis on decorum and cleanliness is a representation of her own internalized racism.
For instance, she explains to Junior, her son who wants to play with the other darker-skin black boys, “the difference between colored people and niggers… Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud” (87). Geraldine’s hatred of disorder and dirt is fundamentally linked to her hatred of “niggers”; therefore, her own self-hatred symbolizes the separation within the black community where racism is the forefront of discrimination. Additionally, once Geraldine discovers Pecola in her household, she realizes that “she had seen this little girl all of her life” (Morrison 91) and refers to Pecola as a fly that had settled in her house from all the other hovering flies (Morrison 92).
Geraldine scapegoats poor, dark-skinned black children like Pecola because she hates her own blackness. This scapegoating is intensified by fear: the fear that distinguishes respectable “colored” people and “niggers”. Geraldine’s blind credence of this segregation sustains her beauty which in turn, gives her a higher place in the social hierarchy among the black community and liberates her from the “niggers”.
Although hidden behind a veil woven by fear and disgust, Geraldine, much like Maureen, is a victim from the influence of white beauty that causes her to seek her own self-esteem and physical confidence by demonizing “dirtier” individuals. Thus, Geraldine’s distinct way of disguising herself as a white woman through her cleanliness and racial attitudes towards her own kind indicates Morrison’s intent of showcasing the internalized racism that emerges among the black community from the delusion of black women attempting to empower themselves with the standard of beauty made available by the white society.
In the end, Toni Morrison demonstrates the inescapable internalized racism that exists within the black community causing detrimental effects to African American females because the standard of beauty is lighter skin color within a white-dominated society. Morrison best exemplifies this through her characters such as Pecola, who loses her sanity for the sake of acquiring beauty through blue eyes, and Geraldine, who discriminates against her own kind because of her fear of diminishing her social status by equating herself with darker individuals.
In addition to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin, an influential commentator on racial politics in the turbulent 1960s America, further elaborates in his work “A Letter to my Nephew” how white society influences African Americans as a whole by manipulating their beliefs towards beauty and acceptance. He concludes “There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you” (Baldwin). Baldwin and Morrison both encourage that all African Americans should learn to accept their beauty, their race, and their own black identity rather than surrendering themselves to society’s perceptions.
References
- How the Standards of Beauty Have Changed Over the Last 100 Years
- The Synthesis of Ideas: Key Concepts for Understanding African American Literature
- Ethnic Differences in Skin Barrier Function, Sensitivity, and pH
- Hair and Scalp Disorders in Ethnic Populations
- The Central Conflict, Climax and Resolution of The Bluest Eye
