Beauty on the Bluest Eye

            
             The book portrays the African American population as a culture fascinated by its internalization of a "blue-eyed, yellow haired, pink-skinned" beauty ideal. Women of color are judged according to white standards of beauty", and consequently they are always considered ugly. Hence blacks learn to hate themselves; and Pecola Breedlove, prays every night for blue eyes. As a result the ideal of beauty becomes a unsafe and racist ensnare into which African Americans are born, and from which they can never completely escape. In other words, blackness is associated to ugliness and therefore weakness, while beauty is seen as a characteristic found only among whites. In addition, white beauty becomes equivalent with goodness and wholesomeness and even Pecola's father Cholly imagines God as "a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing with beard, and little blues eyes"(pg 134).
             By toleranting the ideal of white beauty, blacks denounce themselves as its exact opposite. Given that the legend of white beauty is restricted from the outset and denies the worth of black beauty, blacks accordingly lock themselves into a self-destructive cycle in which their only triumph lies in their ability to encourage whiteness. Pecola's family, the ultimate victims of this destructive cycle, have deserted their search for beauty, preferring to accept their ugliness in an act of hopeless fatalism: "You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and couldn't find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance"(pg 39).
             Some instances that deal with beauty in the book are as follows: Claudia is constantly faced with ideals of beauty. For Christmas on e year, she receives a blue-eyed, blonde -haired, pink-skinned doll.