In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison suspends her tale of a young girl's pursuit of misguided transcendence from a web of interrelationships among women. She does not idealize this elaborate framework and the women in her story are as fallible and subject to the influence of their environment as people are in real life. But Morrison extends the reach of this net of relationships into the future through the narrator, Claudia, and her sister Frieda and suggests that the strength that some women draw from others is where the hope for the future lies. Claudia and Frieda are not terribly remarkable girls--they are subject to envy and childish errors just like anyone else. But they have a far better moral grasp of the world that comes in large part from their mother's influence and enables them to sort among the examples offered by other women in order to make correct choices. In this they are contrasted with the pathetic figure of Pecola Breedlove whose victimization is only completed by incestuous rape, pregnancy, and madness. Throughout the novel Pecola is shown to be incapable of making the kinds of distinctions that Frieda and Claudia make. Unlike the two sisters Pecola's vision of the world is affected all the more directly by such outside influences as the society-wide worship of Anglo-Saxon blonde and blue-eyed beauty because she has no other example to intervene and, most of all, because she has never been given any strong sense of herself. Pecola cannot even express anger over what happens to her--operating as she does from the assumption, inherited from her mother, that she deserves such treatment. Instead she is merely bewildered as to why this should be true. Frieda and Claudia, however, are capable even of anger on behalf of others and it is this capability for generalized, somewhat disinterested moral anger that holds promise for the future.
The women in the novel cover a broad range from the three prostitutes--China...