Beauty and Ugly: The Major Patterns in The Bluest Eye.
Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane" (Morrison 50). This quote shows one of the many patterns Morrison uses to brilliantly bring us closer to the world of Pecola Breedlove: beauty. Through two of the novel's main characters, Pecola and Claudia Macteer, we see their world and time through that main pattern of beauty and it's counterpoint ugly. In The Bluest Eye beauty/ugly constantly shows up through both internal thoughts and narration or spoken through conversations. .
The idea of beauty can turn someone's life upside down and in the end lead him or her to madness. Thus, Morrison is trying to impress upon her reader's what a negative effect that society's ideas and views can have on an individual and how that individual's life is changed forever.
In the 1940's Ingrid Bergman, Jean Harlow, and Shirley Temple because of their talents were famous, and because of their porcelain white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes were considered beautiful. The majority of the magazines and movies adorned their faces and faces like theirs. By society's standards, Pecola is ugly. "As long as she looked the way she did, as long as she was ugly, she would have to stay with these people. Somehow she belonged to them. Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike. She was the only member of her class that sat alone at a double desk."(Morrison 45). The Shirley Temple's of the world were adored and cherished, many sought after their beauty. Baby dolls with blue eyes and blond hair were all the rage.