Paper Summary:

A look at the way the characters in "The Bluest Eye" and "The Black Notebooks" perceive beauty. These perceptions are compared to each other and to the cliched phrase of "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder." "The Bluest Eye" tells the story of a young black girl growing up in the 1930's and how, even though she is pretty, does not consider herself beautiful because of racial laws lowering her self image. "The Black Notebooks" tells of a boy, Junior, who is obsessed by his skin color and the way people perceive him. Both novels deal with the way a child is perceived by others and how this influences their opinions of themselves.

From the Paper:

"Beauty, we have all been told practically since we were born, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and to a lesser extent Toi Derricotte's The Black Notebooks provide us with a very new way of understanding this very cliched cliche. For while we are theoretically enabled to search for beauty wherever we might find it in the world, we are in fact limited by our own eyes, by the ways in which we can see. Morrison asks us to take this adage seriously: The eyes that we physically see the world through determine what of beauty is available to us. For Derricote, her understanding of the role of the eye of the beholder is somewhat more metaphorical. But for both authors, the relationship between vision and the ability to see clearly is central to their understanding of race."

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