In Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye, the idea about what is “beautiful” is a central theme. But who has constructed the image of the beautiful in the lives of the characters in this novel?
We have discussed in class the idea that popular media constructs what is considered "beautiful." They accomplish this by continually displaying a certain model of beauty, the ideal that everyone should or at least aspire to look like, and they exclude all other depictions of beauty that are divergent than this one. The result on the psyche of the American population, young girls in particular, is that there is one way to embody beauty, and anything that doesn't look like what is presented in pop culture is not beautiful, even ugly.
There are discussions about how the media warps the impressionable minds of today's youth. But this has gone on for years, growing extremely influential when television shows and movies were starring young people and geared toward young people. To demonstrate what I mean I will start with contemporary examples and move backwards in time.
When I was young, the pop culture role model us preteens were suppose to look up to was Hilary Duff. The contemporary equivalent would be Miley Cyrus. These two individuals are women now but during the time the most press attention was focused on them was when they were in their preteen and teenage years. I used specifically said "suppose to look up to" to indicate that the media, through its constant bombardment of images and time, present these people as the ideal: what you should be and should want to be. As such many of us did aspire to be Hilary Duff, and many girls today love Miley Cyrus. At the same time however, there are some people that passionately dislike these girls and are adamant in rejecting them as people they should look up to. One reason I often here people give for justifying why they don’t like a certain media personality is because they “cannot relate to them” or see them as bad representations of what teens should be or look like.
Similarly, in the 1930s Shirley Temple was a movie sensation. Young, cute, and perky, she was often thought to be the perfect child. Her movies were popular with young people and her image was prevalent throughout the media. Moreover, young girls of color were not shown in movies, TV, magazines and other forms of pop culture as representations of beauty. If young women wanted to have a role model in the public eye she was going to be white. We can see some of Shirley Temples influence, of the media's chosen representation of child beauty, on the minds of the young girls in the Bluest Eye.
Shirley Temple’s beauty was also distributed onto toy dolls, one of the most popular girls to award ones female child with. On page 20, Claudia describes her Christmas experience of receiving a doll as a gift. “The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll. From the clucking sounds of the adults I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish.” But Claudia did not like this doll. In fact, she hated it and thought she could not relate to it because of the way it looked. “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs –all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured” (21). When she subsequently mutilates the doll she explains being told: “‘you-got-a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with you?’” Claudia’s rejection of this doll, and the rejection of the type of beauty it represented, was unimaginable to adults. Rejecting the blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty was radical for it demonstrated a denunciation of the overreaching ideal set out by society.
But Claudia’s ill will towards Shirley Temple faded with age. This might have been due to the fact that she became use to the idea of white, blue eyes, blonde indicating beauty because of its repeated representation in the media. It was therefore seen as normal. People of color are a minority living amongst majority whites, and living within a white controlled media. Subsequently, blacks compare themselves and get compared to white people in various aspects of their different lives. One aspect is in their differences in physical appearance. We already know what was pushed as being “beautiful” in the media, and it wasn’t black girls who had similar physical features like Claudia.
I can’t help but think that if there had been women of color represented in the media, whether they were young women or mature, as beautiful these three young girls would have a better appreciation for their own appearances. They saw their contrast as too extreme from these white, blonde haired, blue eyed girls like Shirley Temple. I am left to question if there had been representations of black women in the media as beauties, would these girls, as well as other black girls in similar circumstances as the characters in the Bluest Eye have felt pretty and not so ugly?
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