The Bluest Eye and Dove Beauty Campaign

Everyone is faced with the challenge of living up to a created, idealized perception of beauty. Society has fabricated this perception and enforces it every day through ads in magazines, movies, ect. The goal of the Dove Beauty Campaign is to increase awareness that "our perception of beauty is distorted" and to encourage people to find beauty in themselves and boost their self-confidence.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison critiques society for teaching racial self-loathing to African Americans through the media and advertising. Likewise, the Dove Beauty Campaign advocates for women to recognize that the models we see everywhere are fake and should not determine what we define as beautiful since their beauty is oversimplified and in this case, a product of very effective photoshopping:

During the photoshopping scene in this video, the model's neck is elongated, and her eyes and lips are enlarged. People have agreed that these features are the most important features on the human face, and the more prominent they are, the more beautiful that person is. Similarly, Claudia recognizes that "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" (20). During the time period in which The Bluest Eye was written, society was especially keen on white skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Claudia can't understand this phenomenon, and dismembers the white dolls she receives for Christmas "to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty" (20). Once Claudia pulls apart the dolls, however, there is nothing left but "a mere metal roundness" (20). Hence, there is nothing that makes white people more beautiful than black people; it is merely society determining what is beautiful or not. Society, the "mysterious all-knowing master," has determined that being poor and black is synonymous with being ugly. The Breedlove family has no choice but to believe society, since "they had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance" (39). The boys who taunt Pecola for being black do so out of "contempt for their own blackness" (65). Society has "smoothly cultivated [their] ignorance" of their own unique beauty. They are described as having "learned self-hatred" and their hopelessness is "designed" (65). Morrison indirectly states that society has planned blacks' hatred of themselves, by bombarding them constantly with images of whiteness as more superior in regards to physical appearance. 

Toni Morrison begins her novel with an excerpt from a Dick and Jane storybook, one of the many books used for teaching children how to read. However, the subtext of storybooks like these teach children what is "good," "normal" and "beautiful." A child reading Dick and Jane would learn at a very early age that to be beautiful is to be like Jane, who is white, has blond hair and blue eyes. What is "normal" and "good" is a functional family with time and money on their hands to play cards and bake cookies with their children on rainy days. Morrison criticizes the Dick and Jane storybooks, advocating that real life is more complicated than what is presented in these fairytale books, and not every family or person fits into a precise mold of "good" or "beautiful" according to societal standards. 

                                           

Throughout her novel, Morrison selects sentences from the Dick and Jane excerpt and places them above the chapters corresponding to the individual characters of the Breedlove family, providing a sharp contrast between real life and the over-simplified, idealized life of the family portrayed in Dick and Jane storybooks. For instance, above the chapter about Pauline Breedlove, the excerpt is:

SEEMOTHERISVERYNICEMOTHERWILLYOUPLAYWITHJANEMOTHERLAUGHSLAUGHMOTHERLA (110). 

However, Pauline certainly does not play with her own daughter Pecola. Instead, she rebuffs Pecola after Pecola accidentally drops a pie on the ground in favor for the little Fisher girl Pauline works for. But in this chapter Morrison also provides us with a detailed background of Pauline's life, not to excuse her behavior towards her daughter, but to make her actions more understandable given what her life has been like. Morrison argues that not every mother can be like the mother in Dick and Jane, but we cannot simply label them as bad mothers because a) a "perfect" mother like the ones in storybooks don't exist and b) we don't know everyone's full history. Pauline's dislike for herself and Pecola's blackness is not due to some biological defect; it is a societal construction. Pauline has learned through the movies to equate "physical beauty with virtue," therefore collecting her "self-contempt by the heap" (122). Thus, her self-hatred for her herself and her race extends towards her daughter and her husband, which is why she neglects her family in favor for the Fisher family.