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Essay on Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of Ramah Willis Wofford and George Wofford. Having grown up in a family of storytellers and musicians, she developed an early admiration for language, folk understanding, and literature. Through her own use of the spoken and written word, she has formed new spaces for readers to bring both their imaginations and their intellects to the complex cultural, political, social, and historical issues of our time. Moreover, through her work as an editor and novelist, she has made it possible for the texts of both African American and feminist writers to reshape the contours of what we call American literature. (Harris, Trudier) During her early years as an editor at Random House, she developed the short story she began at Howard into her first novel, The Bluest Eye , and thus established her reputation as a writer with its publication in 1970. From 1970 to 1992, Morrison published five more novels, a play, a book of literary criticism, and an anthology of social criticism.
In the midst of her already demanding schedule of editing and writing, she also began teaching part-time at various places on the East Coast, taking positions at SUNY-Purchase in 1971, at Yale in 1976, at SUNY-Albany in 1984, and at Bard College in 1986. Since 1988 she has been the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she teaches in the Afro-American Studies and creative writing programs. (Gibson, Donald)
The Bluest Eye, the novel about Pecola Breedlove , the black girl whose voracious longing to be loved is manifested in a longing for blue eyes that in the end drives her into lunacy. The novel's behavior of a few disastrous dimensions of black life, such as incest and poverty........
