"Allegory of the Cave"

Toni Morrison's "Allegory of the Cave": Movies, Consumption, and Platonic
Realism in "The Bluest Eye"


In Toni Morrison’s “Allegory of the Cave”: Movies, consumption, and Platonic Realism in “The Bluest Eye”, author Thomas H. Fick discusses Pecola’s obsession with blue eyes, the use of the Dick and Jane excerpts as counterpoint to the “real lives” of the character’s, and compares the societies and Pecloa’s obsession with blue eyes and whiteness with the narrator, Claudia’s, rejection of whiteness and the social images that all of the other characters in the book are so obsessed with, the commercial aspect of being “mainstream”. “Movies convey an adult version
of Dick and Jane's ideal world, but in The Bluest Eye the emphasis is not just on the
particular scenes, formulae, or characters -that special hairdo or inflection-but
on the medium itself.” Claudia rejects this world, on one occasion tearing apart a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby doll in an effort to discern what makes this image beautiful. What she ends up with is a pile of sawdust and the conclusion that this “beauty” is a myth. Fick uses these examples of Claudia and Pecola’s reactions to the images of beauty much like the comparisons I have made between Maya and Pecola. Like the difference between Dorothy and the inhabitants of the Emerald City, One sees the “man behind the curtain”, the fakeness of the accepted world about them, the other refuses to take the green tinted glasses off and see behind that curtain.
I feel that this essay is beneficial to my understanding of The Bluest Eye because it gives another perspective on how the stereotype of beauty can affect parents like Pauline Breedlove, who in turn pass this stereotype on to their children, and the eventual problems it can have on the malleable young minds.