SOURCE: Kuenz, Jane. “The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity.” African American Review 27, no. 3 (fall 1993): 421-31.

In the following essay, Kuenz shows the relationship between images of mass culture and identity development by focusing on its detrimental effects on the subjectivity of the African American female characters in The Bluest Eye.

In Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye, the Breedloves' storefront apartment is graced overhead by the home of three magnificent whores, each a tribute to Morrison's confidence in the efficacy of the obvious. The novel's unhappy convergence of history, naming, and bodies—delineated so subtly and variously elsewhere—is, in these three, signified most simply and most crudely by their bodies and their names: Poland, China, the Maginot Line. With these characters, Morrison literalizes the novel's overall conflation of black female bodies as the sites of fascist invasions of one kind or another, as...