Exploring Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Themes of Racism, Gender, and Desire

Presentation by: Shubham Singh Semester IV American Literature Bakground Picture Courtesy: Vintage International

The Bluest Eye is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, acclaimed Nobel prize winning author who passed away last year in 2019. The novel is set in Lorain, Ohio and is written in the backdrop of the years following the Great Depression. It is the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who is discriminated while growing up, for the dark colour of her skin. Consequently she comes to desire blue eyes which to her mind, are associated with being white and hence, being beautiful, according to the social standards.

Pecola Breedlove, is a young girl living as a foster child with two other young girls, Frieda and Claudia MacTeer, along with their parents. Due to widespread racism, she is constantly reminded of her ugliness and even her parents have a hard time surviving in a largely white community. Even her father Cholly rapes her twice and flees, which makes not just racism but gender a conflicting theme in the narrative. The rape triggers a delusional state in which Pecola finally imagines her wish for the blue eyes to have been granted as everyone has grown more sympathetic towards her. It is only made clear in Claudia s last narration that, strange as it may seem, her father might have been the only person to have shown her any kind of love or have coveted her, and hence she goes insane.

Black Girlhood or Double Marginalization: account of race and gender. Black Girlhood or Double Marginalization: on Internalized whiteness represent society's standard of beauty, which has destructive consequences for the protagonists. Internalized Racism Racism:constant images of African 194 could either get married and have children, and work for white families, or were sexually abused and left uncared for. African- -American Female experience in the Late 1940s: These women had limited options and American Female experience in the Late

Class and Race Lorain in the novel, are working-class people who toil away in coal mines or as domestic servants for white families. The class divide being overwhelming, even the racial discrimination and prejudice is seen at its peak. Class and Race: The African-American citizens of Desire for Love and most importantly, Pecola Breedlove, desire, is love, care and acceptance. Pecola wants blue eyes, which she thinks will make people love her and not despise her. This desire makes her delusional following her assault by her own father and she finds a sort of fulfillment even in her mistreatment. Desire for Love: Ultimately what all the characters,

Pecola Pecola is presented always from a third person narrative point of view, either by the omniscient narrator or by the first person narrator, Claudia, until the last chapter of the novel, when she is given voice in a first person dialogue with her imaginary friend. Pecola Breedlove: Breedlove: As an eleven year old girl, she is the weakest member of her family and her society. She cannot act to end the domestic violence of her household, she cannot speak up to stop it, she can only try to disappear by an effort of the imagination. She is surrounded by a group of boys in her school taunting her by calling her ugly because she is black which generates a low self-esteem and causes her to desire blue eyes so someone may love her. This has a lot to do with how she is seen by others. Her final image, wandering around town talking to her imaginary friend, is piercingly sad. Her only concerns are praising her blue eyes and pushing down the image of her father raping her and her mother disbelieving her story. She is tragically destroyed by taking the community s internalized racism.

Claudia The narrator of parts of the novel, Claudia is a strong-willed and passionate nine-year-old black girl. She has not experienced overt racism and cruelty to the extent many of the other characters have. She is compassionate toward Pecola, and rebels against the black community's worship of white beauty. Claudia MacTeer MacTeer: : From her mature point of view, she recognizes how the Black community rejects the beauty of its own children, encouraging them to recognize the beauty standard of the dominant media-the blonde and blue-eyed privileged image-as the standard of beauty. Blackness is regarded as ugly; the blacker a person is, the more ugly. Claudia resists this color ideology, this internalized racism, vehemently. She is intensely curious about what makes the white doll so precious and investigates by tearing her dolls apart. Claudia senses that what happens to Pecola has happened on a symbolic level to all the African American children of her community.

Cholly Toni Morrison is careful not to portray Cholly as a simple villain. By giving his traumatic experience with racism during his first sexual exploration, Morrison enables the reader to see how Cholly has been hurt. Cholly Breedlove: Breedlove: He and his wife, Pauline brutally fight one another and in his first scene, he is knocked unconscious by his wife and his son wishes he was dead. Morrison quickly informs the reader of Cholly s beginnings thereby humanizing the demonized image of the dysfunctional black man. He is a victim of a chain reaction. His hatred of the weak and powerless- African American women and children-resulted from the cycle of oppression. He was oppressed as a child and, never having found a way out of the system of oppression, he began to oppress those weaker than he. His rape of his daughter is depicted oddly as a failed return to tenderness. He sees her scratching the back of her leg with the toe of her other foot, a gesture just like the one her mother performed which initiated his love for her.

Pauline Breedlove: Pauline is Pecola's mother. She is regularly beaten by her abusive and alcoholic husband, Cholly. When Cholly burns down their house, Pauline is forced to move in with the Fishers, the wealthy white family for whom she works. She adapts to their white ways and becomes the ideal servant. Pauline Breedlove: She treats Pecola in a cold and cruel manner, as she is ashamed of her daughter's ugliness. Pauline herself, as a black woman, also believes that she is ugly. The last picture of Pauline returns to the degraded version, a woman who is so psychically damaged by internalized racism that she severely physically abuses her daughter when she finds out her daughter has been raped. Her early adolescence was spent fantasizing about a vaguely kind man who would take her by the hand and lead her to happiness. This fantasy was evoked by the songs sung in her church depicting Christ as a sort of lover who leads the lost and lonely to wholeness and happiness.

Soaphead He is not as such a major character, but has a very significant role at the end of the novel. His birth name is Elihue Micah Whitcomb. He is a nasty old mystic who hates to be around people, but has a disgusting fondness for little girls. Soaphead Church: Church: Pecola sees him because he is a healer, a teller of visions, a decoder of dreams, and a wish-fulfiller. She hopes that he can make her wish of having blue eyes come true. Soaphead fools Pecola into thinking that he made her wish come true, and she descends into a state of madness because of it. He is the real demonized African-American character in the novel. The source of his this diseased state is in his family s long history of internalized racism. Since its inception, the Whitcomb family practiced racial exclusivism in marriage practices, marrying only light skinned African Americans.

The oppression or violation of children, especially poor children, including Pecola is intertwined in the novel with a general problem of racism. Morrison focuses on the problem of internalized racism as if affects children. Pecola is born into this ideology of racialized beauty. Her mother has internalized the message that black is ugly and white is beautiful to such an extent that she sees Pecola as an ugly ball of black hair when she is born. Even the mother had to face such discrimination in her childhood. In the case of MacTeer family, the younger daughter, Frieda is sexually molested by Mr. Henry, an older man. Her parents believe her story and act on it by punishing Mr. Henry. But rather than dealing with the psychological impact on the young child, they leave her to draw her own conclusions about what it meant. The MacTeer family seems to represent the mainstream African- American family in Lorain. The poor treatment of children was the norm, but the violation of children s innocence was done ideologically more than physically.

A very interesting thing happens in the world of the novel in which the oppressors are not just the dominant whites but also the black adults who have survived the same harshness of racism and have taken up those qualities to oppress those weaker than them. In other words, the oppressed have become the oppressors. The meek oppressed child is taught to react to injustice and hurts with responses such as silent acceptance, self-abuse, depression, rage. When the child grows up in this oppressive system, her/his position often shifts and s/he assumes the role of the oppressor. Thus, a cycle of oppression is formed. The oppressors of Pecola have themselves been hurt by oppressive adults and racist ideology. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Pauline Breedlove. As a child, she is rejected by the women in the Lorain community because of her dark skin tone, her Southern accent and the way she dresses. Pauline responds by adopting the oppressor s ideology, particularly the discourse on physical beauty. That is how she comes to look upon her own children with disgust and her angst makes her very unfair in her treatment of her family. Similarly the MacTeers see their children more like a burden, a responsibility that must be taken care of, than any sense of real belongingness. Although they are not physically oppressive as the Breedloves, they nevertheless impose idealised standards of beauty learnt from following Hollywood examples.

Morrison also exposes the inability of the Christian religion to include all people in the society. Much of Pecola's story suggests the insufficiency of Christian beliefs for minorities who exist in a predominantly white society. The existence of evil, despite the religious claims and morals of the society and the suffering of the innocent are clearly called into question. Pauline, who fully accepts Christianity and spends her time caring for a white family as opposed to her own, ends up damaging not only her family but makes her own daughter delusional. The image of a more human God represents a traditional African view of deities, better suited to the lives of the African-American characters.

Toni Morrison combines the concerns of two main themes in the novel. She explores the tragedy of the oppression of children, as she explores a problem specific to groups targeted by racism, that of internalized racism. She wanted to remind readers "how hurtful racism is" and that people are "apologetic about the fact that their skin [is] so dark. Morrison elaborated that she "wanted to speak on behalf of those who didn't catch that [they were beautiful] right away. [She] was deeply concerned about the feelings of ugliness. Through Pecola's characterization, Morrison seeks to demonstrate the negative impact racism can have on one's self-confidence and worth. As she concludes in one of her interviews, she "wanted people to understand what it was like to be treated that way." I felt compelled to write this mostly because in the 1960s, black male authors published powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or nonfiction, and they had positive racially uplifting rhetoric with them that were stimulating and I thought they would skip over something and thought no one would remember that it wasn't always beautiful. I was deeply concerned about the feelings of being ugly. You ve got the most vulnerable people in the world which are children, female children, female black children who have never held centre stage in anything. If they appear in a book, they re a joke or just some local colour, or a little walk on part - the least important. I wanted to have a little, hurt black girl at the centre of the story. (Quotations are courtesy to National Visionary Leadership Project s Database) http://www.visionaryproject.org/morrisontoni/