Morrison, Tony - The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison - The Bluest eye

Date of publication: Originally published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, in 1970

"Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticedPecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her."

Plot synopsis: The Breedlove family has moved from the rural south to urban Ohio and the displacement contributes to the family's dysfunction. The story is told from the perspective of the pre-adolescent sisters Claudia and Frieda Mac Teer. Nevertheless the story's focus is on the Breedloves. The story shows us a destroyed family in every sense. Cholly B. the father is a violent alcoholic who is married to Pauline B. their fight against each other even erupt in physical confrontations. Pauline B. personal history plays out in extreme measures in the life of her daughter Pecola. Form the early part of her life she feels a sense of separateness and unworthiness which is primarily because of her injured foot. Firstly her husband gives her a feeling of warmth and love. But time goes by and their love fades away and turns into hatred. This feeling of shame is intensified by her experiences of exclusion and loneliness after moving up north. She is confronted by prejudice on a daily basis both classism and racism, and for the first time, the white standard of beauty. That beauty is strictly defined by white and unattainable standards: Shirley Temple or Mary Jane become the emblems of beauty. These standards and feelings of rejection are the qualities that Pecola inherits from her mother. Her mother from her birth, placed upon her the same shroud of shame and loneliness. Pecola desires to become beautiful and (she thinks ) as a result of her beauty, loveable. She says of Pecola when she is born:

"Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly." (97-98)

Claudia the novel's narrator and her sister Frieda cannot completely understand why things happen as they do to Pecola. The relationship between Pecola and the two sisters is a peculiar friendship. The sisters feel sorry for her and they often try to defend her but in some way they are disgusted by her passive and vulnerable behavior. Pecola's woundability- her tendency to absorb - is demonstrated in a series of shamings and rejection: the boys taunting at school, the contempt of her schoolmates, her mother's wrath.....

One afternoon her father staggers in drunk and sees his daughter washing dishes, he rapes her. His rape is only the last, most graphic and literal violation of the victim Pecola. After this incident Pecola and her mother move away in a house outside the town. Pecola gives birth to a stillborn child. At the end of the novel Pecola is trying to escape her sense of ugliness and unworthiness. Her yearn for blue eyes turns into madness. Finally she repeatedly asks an imaginary friend if indeed her eyes are the "bluest".

Main characters:

- Pecola Breedlove

She is the most broken, wounded, traumatized person in the novel. Her anger, frustration and shame turn into self-hatred and self-disgust. She does not understand why she is considered as ugly she just knows so and all she can do is wishing for beauty. In her introduction to the Breedlove family, M. impugns the Breedlove's ugliness to a higher power saying:

"No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly ugly 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 (69)

It is the classic tale of the ugly duckling turned into a beautiful swan. While Pecola seems doomed whatever she does- if she resorts fantasy, she is considered crazy, and if she tries to live in the real world there is no place for her.

Pecola's wish is so intense because she is never given the opportunity, in any surroundings (home, school, playground) to see anything positive in herself as she is. In each case Pecola responds to ridicule or castigation in silence, simply absorbing the censure and humiliation. In the end M. allows Pecola to bear witness to her suffering in her conversations with her imagined friend, in this dialogue teller and listener share the burden of the sufferer's history because Pecola's story cannot be told in the real world.

- Pauline Breedlove

In her youth Pauline struggles with the same type of ambiguity and contradiction. After moving up north she starts going to the movie theatre and in this time she gets to know all the white and beautiful heroes. She feels inferior and passes this feeling onto her daughter. This puts them both somehow in a vicious circle, they are both looking for warmth and security but they are not able to give it to each other because on the one hand Pauline is much too strict and Pecola is much too scared.

- Cholly Breedlove

The father of the family seems to be the most evil person in the novel. But I do not think that you can blame him - he is doubtless mentally disturbed. I know there is no way to defend or understand his deeds. But in some way M. makes us understand why Cholly is the person he is. When Cholly experiences his first sexual encounter with a girl, white hunters appear and tell him to go on while they watch. The belief that blacks are inferior leads the white men to treat Cholly an san object as if he was conjured up for their eyes for their pleasure this somehow creates intense aggression and hatred in him. Nevertheless is Cholly's behaviour and attitude towards his family inexcusable.

- Claudia and Frieda / Mac Teer family

This short novel counterbalances two points of view:

- the tragic consequences of racism(Breedlove family)
- the resistance to that racism(Mac Teer family)

The two sisters tell the whole story they are the spectators of this tragedy. Both families seem to be the opposite: Claudia's and Frieda's mother may be tough and often angry but she nevertheless communicates a fierce and protective love, Pecola's mother is more protective of her white charge; Claudia's father throws the child-molesting boarder out of the house, Pecola's father is the molester of his own child..

But both of them like Pecola have to struggle, with the harsh definition of beauty- that black cannot be beautiful, too. As Claudia admits later, when reflection on how she hates and envies Maureen Peal, an infuriatingly self-assured, light-skinned schoolmate: "All the time 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" (58)

Interpretation:

In this novel, a little black girl Pecola Breedlove, longs to have blue eyes. Why does she? I think because everyone she has ever met, and everything in her environment, either consciously or unconsciously, has consistently upheld an ideal of beauty in front of her, and that ideal is white: "white skin, long blond hair and blue eyes" the cultural epitome of beauty, which is culturally equated with being good. M. dramatically reveals what happens to a person's sense of self-worth when their individually and personal appearance are totally negated by the society in which they live. One of the most fascinating and confusing habit of M.'s books are passages shifting between third person omniscient and first stream of consciousness. M. uses these combined voices to give varied perspective without resorting to authorial intrusion or preaching. She wants her readers to participate fully in her fiction, to go with her to examine the often painful circumstances of her character's lives. M. gives us the feeling that nature is an important factor in life's experiences by designing the structure of her novel so. Instead of conventional chapters and sections, the novel is broken into seasons- Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer. These are constants in nature that cannot be controlled by any hum influence. The novel narrates about racial pride and racial beauty in a racialised country. " The Bluest eye" illustrates the possible consequences of entirely depending on external images for self-image, for attempting to satisfy an image that differs radically from reality. In American culture the message is given that black cannot be beautiful indeed the Breedlove's self-loathing demonstrates the blacker the less beautiful.

Personal comment:

It is hard for me to say whether I liked the book or not. I have a lot of respect because there were some parts of this book that deeply touched me. But I was severely shocked and terrified by some parts of the novel:

_ Rape scene: The nature of Pecola' silence is particularly important in the rape scene, controversially narrated largely from the father rapist's point of view. Though we are following Cholly's thoughts and successive emotional responses to Pecola- rage, revulsion, hate, love, tenderness, lust- Pecola is present through descriptions of her intake of breath- " a hollow suck air at the back of her throat" (128) and the description of Cholly's painful attempt to remove himself from her dry vagina. Pecola's feelings are not represented in this scene at all, but the description of her physical state, presumably from the point of view of the omniscient narrator, suggests her feelings through descriptions of her bodily state. M. has provocatively has Claudia recognize that Cholly loved his daughter enough to " touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her" (163). The reader cannot tell what kind of emotions Pecola has during this dreadful incident. M. does not, it seems, write Pecola' s feelings into the scene, but rather represents through their absence the collapse of witnessing that the rape effects. The scene is narrated as if a slow motion camera were taking in its details.

As I said I wondered how a female author could write from the rapist's point of view, how how she could write something painful as that without assessing it.

_ After Pecola has been raped she is pregnant and even beaten by her mother for it. And people in town gossip that it was her fault in some way too because she must have done something( to deserve it) or that she enjoyed it.

As a matter of fact I decided to like this book because it shows how identity is constructed in young women- it shows us girls becoming women in a society that evokes the superiority of whiteness. I was very moved by the character of Pecola her woundability hurt me somehow. I always ended up feeling sorry for her. But after all I was fascinated by the lyrical beauty of this book it is beautifully written. It was the story of this girl and the characters of the Breedlove family that totally convinced me.

Secondary literature:

- "Contemporary World Writers" Jill Matus; Manchester University Press
- "Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison" Trudier Harris; The University of Tennessee Press