Emily Mullins

ENG 153 Paper # 2

April 2, 2007

Shirley Temple and Society’s Ideal of Beauty

The novel, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, projects to readers an image of

beauty which revolves around the idea of whiteness, as well as society’s standard and

idealization of beauty. The allegoric representation of Shirley Temple in the novel

metaphorically and symbolically signifies the self-hatred and unattractiveness the black

characters in the novel feel and direct towards themselves and one another because of the

color of their skin. Shirley represents what each character desires to look like. She

symbolizes the white people society sees as being the standard of what is beautiful. The

idealization of beauty and whiteness is represented throughout the novel in a myriad of

ways which all lend to the larger theme of unobtainable ideals reflected by society’s idea

of beauty.

The novel introduces Shirley Temple as a picture image on a “blue-and-white

Shirley Temple cup” (Morrison 19). Frieda and Pecola find Shirley to be adorable, while

Claudia “hated Shirley” because she had yet to internalize the concept that she is ugly

because she is black (Morrison 19). Pecola and Frieda have both accepted it. Claudia has

yet to arrive “at the turning point of [her] development which would allow [her] to love

her (Shirley)” (Morrison 19). Shirley Temple, as an icon of the late 1930s and the early

1940s, was cute in and of herself, but she was also white with blue eyes and blonde hair,

which made the young black girls in this novel see her as not only their superior, but as

the definition of what was beautiful. Furthermore, Shirley danced with Bo Jangles, a
black man, and this made Claudia even more jealous. Claudia also hated white baby

dolls. She wondered why the world “had agreed that a blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink

skinned doll was what every girl treasured” (Morrison 20). She had yet to turn her hatred

of the dolls upon herself, so she instead attempted to solve why society had decided that

was what was beautiful by dismembering the doll to try and unravel its desirability. She

was confused by the worth and value society placed in these features, and how she was

supposed to love something she, in reality, could not obtain. To her, it was ridiculous the

black adults who give her the dolls declared them as beautiful and withheld them until the

recipient was seen as being worthy enough to own one. To Claudia, the doll was not

beautiful.

The self-hatred of each character’s blackness is reflected in the jealousy or envy

of whiteness by other characters. The young girls, Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, are both

covetous and resentful of Maureen Peal, but they are also somewhat mesmerized and in

awe of “the high yellow dream child” (Morrison 62). Maureen was a young black girl,

but she also had light skin, and this made her beautiful. Light skin was more desirable

than dark skin in society. For the other characters in the novel, Maureen fit the ideal of

beauty and embodied the standard for which other people should attempt to aspire to, and

to which most are found to come up short. Everyone, especially Pecola, feels inadequate

and inferior compared to Maureen. Frieda and Claudia try their best to not compare

themselves and judge themselves based on the ideal of beauty Maureen personifies. The

two girls hoped to maintain their self-worth and to not relent to their feelings of bitterness

and resentment. They realized that “Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of

such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us”
(Morrison 74). They envied Maureen and they were desperate to find the secret to her

beauty.

Pauline is another example of a character whose ideal of beauty rests with a

skewed image of whiteness, which in her case is seen through the movie screen. Those

characters, for Pauline, symbolized beauty and happiness, as well as cleanliness. She was

introduced to the idea of physical beauty through the movies, and those ideas were

“probably the most destructive ideas in human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived

in insecurity, and ended in disillusion” (Morrison 122). These ideas and the

internalization of what is beautiful only produces self-hatred in individuals who cannot

match up. Shirley Temple, an adorable movie star, allowed audiences to see a perfect

world and a perfect happy little girl, something a black woman leading a poverty stricken

existence could not even begin to imagine. Pauline’s education from the movies allowed

her to not be able “to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of

absolute beauty” (Morrison 122). Pauline also cared for a white family when she had to

go back to work when her children were younger. She loved the little girl of the family

more than she loved her own children because this child was truly beautiful. In this job,

she found “beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise” (Morrison 127). These attributes she

could not find in her daily life, and she was both envious of the family she cared for and

admired them at the same time. They signified for her the life she longed to lead, and the

white beauty she could never obtain.

The characters in this novel admire beauty and are influenced by society’s ideal of

what is beautiful. Pecola longs for blue eyes because she believes people would be kinder

to her if she was pretty and they would not do dirty things in front of her. To her, blue
eyes are a symbol of beauty and she longs for them so much it drives her to the brink of

insanity. Soaphead Church felt so sorry for this young “ugly little girl asking for beauty”

when she came knocking on his doorstep (Morrison 174). Pecola would pray for blue

eyes every night, as she longed, with every fiber of her being, to have those eyes, which

would, in her new eyes, make her beautiful. Pecola admired beauty, and even before her

adoration of blue eyes became an obsession, “she was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and

took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face”

(Morrison 23). Pecola worshipped Shirley as the symbol of the American societal beauty.

The connotations of the symbol and the character of Shirley Temple are of

whiteness, beauty, superiority, and happiness. These function to make the black

characters in the novel feel inadequate and ugly. Physical beauty is a societal flaw blown

up to extreme proportions by society’s dependence and marketing of the ideal of beauty

and how most people do not measure up to the standards set. A beautiful black woman

was a contradiction in terms. Both Claudia and Frieda were very pleased when Mr. Henry

tells the girls they resemble two white movie actresses Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers.

These two actresses symbolize ideal beauty for them and for the American society.

Beauty is relative and the standards of beauty are internalized by the characters in

The Bluest Eye. Claudia hated the whiteness and what Shirley’s physical beauty

represented, but then as she grew, she “learned much later to worship” Shirley Temple,

but she grew in her dislike of herself as well (Morrison 23). The idealization of Shirley

Temple is reflected in other aspects of this novel, and they all took on similar

connotations and meanings to the characters who saw by society’s standards they were

not beautiful because they were black. The black characters in this novel are juxtaposed
to the adorable white and dimpled-faced Shirley Temple, and this difference is not only

blatant and discriminatory, but it is detrimental to the psyches of those who do not fit the

ideal of what is beautiful.

Works Cited:

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, Simon and

Schuster. 1994.