Seeds and Growth in Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”

Matthew Teutsch
5 min readAug 6, 2023

On her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison states that she wanted to explore the “tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident.” While some become dangerous and violent, “reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over,” others become invisible, melting away as they “collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or…

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Matthew Teutsch

Here, you will find reflections on African American, American, and Southern Literature, American popular culture and politics, and pedagogy.