Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Begin: 12/23/07
End: 12/25/07
Quality: Ten out of Ten.
Reason: Reading Plan.
Genre: Literature. African-American Literature.
Original Language: English.
Date of Publication: 1970.
Fog Index: 7.2/90% are harder.
Flesch Index: 76.8/92% are harder
Flesch-Kincaid Index: 5.3/92% are harder.
I have a difficult time in writing about Toni Morrison’s novels. It is exceedingly difficult for me to parse out reactions and intelligent commentary on her fiction for a number of reasons. Her prose is filled with such mesmerizing lyricism and she really says so much and get to such fundamental layers of humanity. It is hard to parse out what is important and what is not. My main trouble with writing about her is that her novels mainly touch my subconscious and a lot of what I get from her novels is below the surface, so to speak. I mean that she touches below where there are words. I am not sure if that makes sense or maybe it’s just my excuse for not being able to write critically about her and not really having developed good writing skills.
I do have a few things that I would like to talk about in terms of the Bluest Eye.
Pecola Breedlove: What can anyone say about this poor thing? This whole novel is centered on her, is centered more specifically on how she is destroyed. I am not even sure if destruction is the right word here. It does not adequately get at what happens to Pecola. It’s like her very mind/soul shatters and she is not even aware of it. And it shatters not just by that one horrible act which occurs to her but also by a multitude of factors.
I should probably start by talking about her family. This is how we are introduced to them in the novel:
But their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly.Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness (the result of despair, dissipations, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people) was behavior, the rest of the family- Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove- wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them. …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 comes from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one of cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his way…And Pecola. She hid behind hers. Concealed, veiled, eclipsed-peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask. (28)
This is not a happy, loving family which gives support and a foundation of a healthy life to their children. And it just doesn’t end with the fact that they believed, which seems to stem from Mrs. Breedlove’s education in movies, that they are ugly. Neither the mother nor the father are happy in their own selves and they seem to take it out on each other and simply ignore the children.
Toni Morrison puts a strong parraell between the family of Frieda and Claudia and the family of the Breedloves. We see an example of a healthy family with Frieds and Claudia. Parents who loves their children. Parents who explain, nurture and raise their children. We see none of this with the Breedloves. The first thing that we discover about them is that the father had burnt down their home and we later discover that neither the father nor the mother even bothered to visit Pecola while she was staying at someone else’s house.
We then have the community. Morrison writes of a community in this novel that is damn right vampiric in effect. She is a complete outsider. The first time that we hear of her, Claudia is told by her mother that “a ‘case was coming-a girl who had no place to go.” We later see a bunch of schoolchildren mocking her. And when her father rapes her, the community further rejects her.
“They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor Little Girl,” or, “Poor Baby,” but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern but saw only veils. (149)
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us- all who knew her- felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used-to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our ego on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.” (163)
Had she had the support of her community or of her family. Morrison writes of how her mother beat her senseless and her father ran off. Who knows what would have happened to Pecola? Certainly, she wouldn’t have shattered.
And the last aspect of Pecola that I would like to write about here is how her internalized standards of beauty shattered her.
“Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley. 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 heals. So I said, ‘I like Jane Whithers.’” (13)
She sees herself as ugly and she in Shirley Temple the idealized beauty that she is missing and she somehow thinks that if she gets blue eyes that she will be loved and accepted. She has wholly internalized the standards of beauty, the white standards of beauty. We have the black community giving their daughters white dolls and loving white children. We have Mrs. Breedlove choosing her white employers over her own family.
I also saw Toni Morrison set up some interesting parallels. Pecola vs. Maureen. Gerladine vs. Pauline and furthermore the parallel between the Breedloves and the Macteer. I would also like to pay more attention to the description of the Breedlove’s house next time. I think that might be an interesting exploration.
The last thing of note to me, and I am sure that I talked about this the last time I wrote about the Bluest Eye. I connect to this story on a deep level because I am a gay man and my community is very shallow. I am part and parcel to that community, another cog in the faggy factory of vanity.
I know there was a bunch of more stuff that I noted and found and should be talking about but I did finish this a while ago and still need to write one more of these and then hit the hay.
Here’s Quotes…
“Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley. 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 heals. So I said, ‘I like Jane Whithers.’” (13)
“To see of what it was made so discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escape me, but apparently only me.” (14)
“I destroyed white baby dolls.
But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulse to little white girl. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, ‘Awwww,’ but not for me. The eye slide of back woman as they approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them….Thus the conversation from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.” (15-16)
“He did not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two year old white immigrant shopkeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl. Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.” (36)
“They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control; the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds-cooled-and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit.” (50)
“Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had Fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her ip, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up in her eyes.” (57)
“We walked quickly at first, and then slower, pausing every now and then to fasten garters, tie shoelaces, scratch, or examine old scars. We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute-and if anything could be believed, she was-then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obediene in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encounters the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it so important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our sense released to us, adired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and though natural- a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the tome we knew 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.” (57-58)
“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 was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. “(95)
“Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed hunters. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.” (118)
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us- all who knew her- felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used-to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our ego on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.” (163)
"And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habtits to stimulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.” (163)
The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us.
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye."
