What could be better than the author’s note on her own work
“The origin of the novel lay in a conversation I had with a chidlhood friend. We had just started elementary school. She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what i imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I “got mad ” at her instead. Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the Nice, the ugly, and, although I had certainly used the word”beautiful”, I had never experienced its shock – the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one recognized, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it.
The bluest eyes was my effort to say something about that. To say that something about why she had not, or possibly ever would have, the experience of what she possessed and why she prayed for an alteration. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing.
The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originated in an outside gaze. I focused therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member:a female. In trying to dramatize the devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause, I chose a unique situation, not representative one. The extremity of pecola’s case stemmed largely from a crippling family. In exploring the social and domestic aggression that could cause a child to literally fall apart, I mounted a series of rejections, some routine, some exceptional, some monstrous, all the while trying hard to avoid complicity in the demonization process pecola was subjected to. That is, I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed pecola and contributed to her collapse.”
Toni Morrison
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