The Bluest Eye

Seeing and invisibility in the novel serve to underscore African-American girls and women's struggles with racism and sexism. Pecola's invisibility to Mr. Yacobowski, the storeowner from whom she buys candy, is the result of her perceived unattractiveness and his inability to see Pecola as fully human because she is African American.

Paradoxically, Pecola becomes too visible when her pregnant body shows the evidence of her father's abuse and her mental breakdown becomes public as she wanders the streets of Lorain. Being seen or being invisible are thus associated with whether or not one is seen as fully human.

Seeing and invisibility are also symbolic of the weight of social disapproval or approbation. When Claudia and Frieda fight and heckle Maureen in public, the disapproving glares of adults enforce adult expectations that girls—especially African American ones—should be neither seen nor heard because of their race and sex. 

Claudia opens and closes the novel with the observation that no marigolds bloomed in Lorain, Ohio in 1941. As a plant, the marigold is a hearty flower that usually thrives in even the most difficult of conditions, including the cooling weather of fall. In Western culture, the flower is associated with the Virgin Mary ("Mary's gold") and is thus a symbol for the sacredness of motherhood. The failure of the marigolds to bloom points to a disruption in the natural order.

In the specific belief system of the novel, the marigold embodies the MacTeer girls' innocent hope that God will intercede to preserve Pecola's baby. The girls imbue the marigold with magical powers that the girls also hope will counter the cruelty of the adults around them. The failure of the flowers to bloom proves just how misplaced the girls' faith is, however.

Morrison also draws parallels between the sterility of the soil that fails to nourish the marigold seeds with the hostility of an American society that fails to nourish black girls like Pecola. The implication of the final words of the novel is that the fault is in society rather than the girls themselves.

The Dick and Jane primers are 20th-century textbooks written in simplistic language. These books were used to teach young children to read, and the figures in them primers are usually white children, their parents, their homes, and their pets. In keeping with the repetitive, simple sentence structures, the representation of the characters and actions are relatively flat. In The Bluest Eye, these works are used to represent the myths associated with whiteness—the myth of the nuclear white family as a nurturing one and the myth of the American Dream of owning a home as being readily accessible to everyone.

Morrison systematically represents how race, class, and gender undercut the possibility of this representation becoming a reality for African Americans and poor people. The Breedlove family, for example, is fractured throughout the narrative, and the family home is an unattractive place where violence occurs on a regular basis.

Shirley Temple was an adorable, white child actress who appeared in a series of films in the 1930s. She shared the screen with Mr. Bojangles, an older black male character who danced and played with her. Shirley Temple appears early on in the novel as an image on the tin tea set with which Frieda and Pecola play. Both Frieda and Pecola treat the tea set as a revered set of objects. The tea set is a means by which young girls can engage in play that reinforces traditional notions of gender. This particular tea set therefore serves as an example of idealized girlhood.

The image of Shirley Temple on the tea set adds an extra layer of meaning. As a young white girl who is the object of Mr. Bojangles's affection, Shirley Temple is a symbol of white supremacist ideas that see white girls as valuable and black girls as not being valuable. 

Like the Shirley Temple tea set, the white baby dolls referenced in the novel are toys that allow girls to practice traditional roles—in this case, the role of the mother. The blue eyes and blonde hair of the dolls also reinforce white supremacist notions of what constitutes beauty.

Claudia's early rejection of the dolls signal her lack of socialization into an aesthetic order that values whiteness and devalues blackness. Her attempts to destroy these white dolls is her intuitive effort to express her own sense of self-worth. 

Pecola's baby dies shortly after its birth. Neither a gender nor a name is attached to the baby, which is a measure of how the townspeople see the baby as evidence of the shameful and incestuous origins of the baby.

Despite this negative attitude toward the baby, Claudia imagines the baby as someone with a "head covered with O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth" (190). The diction implies that the baby is something like a precious black doll made of fine materials and with features that celebrate African-American beauty—the doll Claudia would have in a world that valued African Americans. This imagined baby symbolizes Claudia's defiance of white beauty standards.

Pauline cooks a blueberry cobbler for the Fishers, the white family for whom she works, but the cobbler falls to the ground when Pecola attempts to get a piece of it. Ignoring the possibility that the hot contents of the cobbler have burned Pecola, Pauline yells at Pecola and comforts the daughter of the house, who is upset by the presence of the MacTeer girls and Pecola.

While blueberry cobbler, with its sweet, rich taste, would ordinarily be a symbol of nurturing, Pauline's actions transform the cobbler and her reaction to its destruction into a symbol of the way her ability to nurture her own child has been displaced by nurture as a service that her white employers can purchase. The cobbler in this instance points to Pauline as a figure who embodies the stereotype of the black mammy and the impact of racism and economic inequality on even the most intimate of relationships between African Americans.

At the end of the novel, Pecola and her mother move to a small house on the edge of the town dump. Pecola, who is completely disengaged with reality at this point, spends her days picking through this garbage. The dump symbolizes the perceived worthlessness of Pecola as an African-American girl but also the communal guilt of the town, whose refusal to intervene on Pecola's half and use of her frailty as a foil to build themselves up make them complicit in her destruction. 

One of the few positive memories Cholly has is of watching an African-American man crack open a watermelon in front of his family during a picnic on the Fourth of July. Cholly describes the watermelon in the man's hand as blocking the sun and the father as a figure who impressed Cholly with his masculinity. The melon splits apart in such a way that it shatters, leaving Blue to share the heart of it with Cholly. The heart of the melon symbolizes masculinity and wholeness, while Cholly's receipt of the watermelon as a result of a mishap and the generosity of Blue symbolizes how haphazard and infrequent are the instances in which Cholly is nurtured.