The Bluest Eye

acclaim for Toni Morrison “[Toni Morrison] may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner.” —Newsweek “In the first ranks of our living novelists.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —The New York Review of Books “She is the best writer in America.” —John Leonard, National Public Radio “[Toni Morrison] has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison.” —Entertainment Weekly “Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers.” —The Kansas City Star The Bluest Eye “Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability.” —New York “Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time.” —Vogue “Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.” —Louisville Courier-Journal Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey. also by toni morrison fiction Love Paradise Jazz Beloved Tar Baby Song of Solomon Sula nonfiction The Dancing Mind Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination L THE BLUEST EYE L a novel Toni Morrison v i n ta g e i n t e r nat i o na l Vintage Books A Division of Random House, Inc. New York F I R S T V I N TA G E I N T E R N AT I O N A L E D I T I O N , M AY 2 0 0 7 Copyright © 1970, copyright renewed 1998 by Toni Morrison Foreword © 1993, 2007 by Toni Morrison All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, in 1970, and subsequently published in slightly different form in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1993. Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. Portions of the foreword were previously published as the afterword to the 1993 Knopf edition. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Morrison, Toni. The bluest eye / by Toni Morrison. —1st ed. p. cm. 1. Afro-Americans—Ohio—Fiction. 2. Girls—Ohio—Fiction. I. Title PS3563.08749855 1993 813.54—dc20 93-43124 eISBN: 978- 0-307-38658-8 w w w. v i n t a g e b o o k s . c o m v1.0 To the two who gave me life and the one who made me free Foreword There can’t be anyone, I am sure, who doesn’t know what it feels like to be disliked, even rejected, momentarily or for sustained periods of time. Perhaps the feeling is merely indifference, mild annoyance, but it may also be hurt. It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated— hated for things we have no control over and cannot change. When this happens, it is some consolation to know that the dislike or hatred is unjustified—that you don’t deserve it. And if you have the emotional strength and/or support from family and friends, the damage is reduced or erased. We think of it as the stress (minor or disabling) that is part of life as a human. When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else. Not resistance to the contempt of others, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as selfevident. I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing turn out to be dan