Eng 152 2nd Literary Analysis

Emily Mullins ENG 153 Paper # 2 April 2, 2007 Shirley Temple and Society’s Ideal of Beauty The novel, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, projects to readers an image of beauty which revolves around the idea of whiteness, as well as society’s standard and idealization of beauty. The allegoric representation of Shirley Temple in the novel metaphorically and symbolically signifies the self-hatred and unattractiveness the black characters in the novel feel and direct towards themselves and one another because of the color of their skin. Shirley represents what each character desires to look like. She symbolizes the white people society sees as being the standard of what is beautiful. The idealization of beauty and whiteness is represented throughout the novel in a myriad of ways which all lend to the larger theme of unobtainable ideals reflected by society’s idea of beauty. The novel introduces Shirley Temple as a picture image on a “blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup” (Morrison 19). Frieda and Pecola find Shirley to be adorable, while Claudia “hated Shirley” because she had yet to internalize the concept that she is ugly because she is black (Morrison 19). Pecola and Frieda have both accepted it. Claudia has yet to arrive “at the turning point of [her] development which would allow [her] to love her (Shirley)” (Morrison 19). Shirley Temple, as an icon of the late 1930s and the early 1940s, was cute in and of herself, but she was also white with blue eyes and blonde hair, which made the young black girls in this novel see her as not only their superior, but as the definition of what was beautiful. Furthermore, Shirley danced with Bo Jangles, a

black man, and this made Claudia even more jealous. Claudia also hated white baby dolls. She wondered why the world “had agreed that a blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink skinned doll was what every girl treasured” (Morrison 20). She had yet to turn her hatred of the dolls upon herself, so she instead attempted to solve why society had decided that was what was beautiful by dismembering the doll to try and unravel its desirability. She was confused by the worth and value society placed in these features, and how she was supposed to love something she, in reality, could not obtain. To her, it was ridiculous the black adults who give her the dolls declared them as beautiful and withheld them until the recipient was seen as being worthy enough to own one. To Claudia, the doll was not beautiful. The self-hatred of each character’s blackness is reflected in the jealousy or envy of whiteness by other characters. The young girls, Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, are both covetous and resentful of Maureen Peal, but they are also somewhat mesmerized and in awe of “the high yellow dream child” (Morrison 62). Maureen was a young black girl, but she also had light skin, and this made her beautiful. Light skin was more desirable than dark skin in society. For the other characters in the novel, Maureen fit the ideal of beauty and embodied the standard for which other people should attempt to aspire to, and to which most are found to come up short. Everyone, especially Pecola, feels inadequate and inferior compared to Maureen. Frieda and Claudia try their best to not compare themselves and judge themselves based on the ideal of beauty Maureen personifies. The two girls hoped to maintain their self-worth and to not relent to their feelings of bitterness and resentment. They realized that “Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us”

(Morrison 74). They envied Maureen and they were desperate to find the secret to her beauty. Pauline is another example of a character whose ideal of beauty rests with a skewed image of whiteness, which in her case is seen through the movie screen. Those characters, for Pauline, symbolized beauty and happiness, as well as cleanliness. She was introduced to the idea of physical beauty through the movies, and those ideas were “probably the most destructive ideas in human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion” (Morrison 122). These ideas and the internalization of what is beautiful only produces self-hatred in individuals who cannot match up. Shirley Temple, an adorable movie star, allowed audiences to see a perfect world and a perfect happy little girl, something a black woman leading a poverty stricken existence could not even begin to imagine. Pauline’s education from the movies allowed her to not be able “to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty” (Morrison 122). Pauline also cared for a white family when she had to go back to work when her children were younger. She loved the little girl of the family more than she loved her own children because this child was truly beautiful. In this job, she found “beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise” (Morrison 127). These attributes she could not find in her daily life, and she was both envious of the family she cared for and admired them at the same time. They signified for her the life she longed to lead, and the white beauty she could never obtain. The characters in this novel admire beauty and are influenced by society’s ideal of what is beautiful. Pecola longs for blue eyes because she believes people would be kinder to her if she was pretty and they would not do dirty things in front of her. To her, blue

eyes are a symbol of beauty and she longs for them so much it drives her to the brink of insanity. Soaphead Church felt so sorry for this young “ugly little girl asking for beauty” when she came knocking on his doorstep (Morrison 174). Pecola would pray for blue eyes every night, as she longed, with every fiber of her being, to have those eyes, which would, in her new eyes, make her beautiful. Pecola admired beauty, and even before her adoration of blue eyes became an obsession, “she was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face” (Morrison 23). Pecola worshipped Shirley as the symbol of the American societal beauty. The connotations of the symbol and the character of Shirley Temple are of whiteness, beauty, superiority, and happiness. These function to make the black characters in the novel feel inadequate and ugly. Physical beauty is a societal flaw blown up to extreme proportions by society’s dependence and marketing of the ideal of beauty and how most people do not measure up to the standards set. A beautiful black woman was a contradiction in terms. Both Claudia and Frieda were very pleased when Mr. Henry tells the girls they resemble two white movie actresses Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers. These two actresses symbolize ideal beauty for them and for the American society. Beauty is relative and the standards of beauty are internalized by the characters in The Bluest Eye. Claudia hated the whiteness and what Shirley’s physical beauty represented, but then as she grew, she “learned much later to worship” Shirley Temple, but she grew in her dislike of herself as well (Morrison 23). The idealization of Shirley Temple is reflected in other aspects of this novel, and they all took on similar connotations and meanings to the characters who saw by society’s standards they were not beautiful because they were black. The black characters in this novel are juxtaposed

to the adorable white and dimpled-faced Shirley Temple, and this difference is not only blatant and discriminatory, but it is detrimental to the psyches of those who do not fit the ideal of what is beautiful.

Works Cited: Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, Simon and Schuster. 1994.