Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Began: 1/12/07
End: 01/16/07
Quality: Seven Out of Ten.
Reason: Book Club
Genre: Literature ; African-American Literature???
Number: Second???
Thoughts:

Ah, Toni Morrison. Now here is a woman who knows how to write. Fuck Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson and give me some more Toni Morrison. She is a woman who makes me want to read. She is a woman who has me pausing a thousand times and sending my wee little brain scattering in a thousand directions. She is a woman who can inspire and horrify and move me with her words.

Okay, now that I am finished with that little brown nose session, I expect I should be talking about the book, the Bluest Eye. This is her first novel written during the late sixties and published in 1970. The general consensus is that this novel is the story of Pecola Breedlove and her struggles with beauty and the resulting madness which these struggles awaken in her.

Yet, I find that synopsis false to the actual story in the book. It simplifies the novel too much. It tries to wrap it into a neat little package that readers can easily categorize in their minds. I found this work more to be a collage. Pecola wasn’t really the protagonist. She was more like a prop which other characters revolved around through the story. She is central to it but is never really developed in any way. We get the story from a few different perspectives….Pecola, Claudia, Pauline Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove and Soaphead Church. Each character brings their own little piece of understanding to the reader’s awareness. "There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how." (3)

As you probably gleaned from my opening paragraph, I enjoyed this work quite a lot. I have read it a few other times, but it seems to grow in my estimation the more that I read it. I do not think that it is the best of Morrison’s canon but I still find it powerful and resonate quite a lot with me.

It was a quite deft attempt at coming at the problems of self-hatred, of the problems of beauty in America, of the “damaging internalizations of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze” as Morrison states in her afterword. And it was not just Pecola who was infected by these assumptions of beauty and worth. Yes, she was destroyed by them in the end but no other character was unaffected. We see Claudia in the beginning hating Shirley Temple and destroying her dolls. Pauline Breedlove taking in the messages of the movies she goes to again and again. Cholly Breedlove hated not the perpetrators of his humiliations but rather those sharing his humiliation.

I think that the breaking up of the narrative structure is both one of the novel’s great strengths as well as one of its weaknesses. It allows her to get at the problem from many angles as well as give the reader a larger awareness of the story as a whole but it also fractures the story in some ways, giving it a sense of disorder and of disunity, like the various sections were just jammed together for no apparent reason. Morrison herself admits to some of these foibles saying "My solution-break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader- seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now."

I think the only other thing that I really wanted to talk about in terms of this novel was the solidarity in some ways that I felt with Pecola. Morrison feels that “many readers remain touched but not moved.” I cannot speak for others readers but I was most definitely moved. I do not know how I could not be moved by a story of self-hatred. I am a gay man. How many of us have escaped battling it out with self-hatred? And I spent nine years immersed in the evangelical Christian world. I have had my struggles.
And my self-hatred stems not just from my homosexuality. I have also had probably a far longer and insidious struggle with trying to live up to the concepts and expectations of beauty in the gay world. I still, to this day, sometimes think…if I only looked like that or if I was only that much cuter then… I still struggle with accepting myself as I have been made. And while I usually don’t find myself quoting scripture as I don’t really believe in Yahweh, that bible has some great fucking lines…”For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are they works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” (Ps. 139: 13-14)

And now that I am getting into it, I also remember as a child and teenager, trying to make myself as quiet as possible, as small as possible, as unnoticeable as possible.

“Please, God,” she whispered into the palm of her hand. “Please make me disappear.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush. Slowly again. Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too, went away. Then her chest, her neck. The face was hard, too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left. (33)

I understand, all too well really, that need to want to disappear, to not want to be viewed and laughed at and scorned. I remember hiding in closets, under beds, at the beach, trying to avoid contact with those in my household, wishing I could just become invisible.

Well, on that happy and carefree note, I will leave off with some quotes that I wanted to highlight….

"Frieda and she (pecola) had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn't join them in their adoration because I hated Shirely. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never slid down under their heels. So I said, "I like Jane Withers."
,,,
"Younger than both Frieda and Pecola, I had not yet arrived at the turning point in the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her." (13)

"I turned, the bone-cold head collided with my own. It was a most uncomfortable, patently aggressive sleeping companion. To hold it was no more rewarding. The starched gauze or lace of the cotton dress irritated any embrace. I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me." (14)

"You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question." (28)
"Frieda and she (pecola) had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn't join them in their adoration because I hated Shirely. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never slid down under their heels. So I said, "I like Jane Withers."
...
"Younger than both Frieda and Pecola, I had not yet arrived at the turning point in the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her." (13)

"I turned, the bone-cold head collided with my own. It was a most uncomfortable, patently aggressive sleeping companion. To hold it was no more rewarding. The starched gauze or lace of the cotton dress irritated any embrace. I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me." (14)

"Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another-physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit." (95)

"Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another-physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit." (95)