Toni Morrison
1931-

(Born Chloe Anthony Wofford) American novelist, nonfiction writer, essayist, editor, playwright, young adult nonfiction writer, and author of picture books.

The following entry presents an overview of Morrison's career through 2004.

INTRODUCTION

Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature, making her the first African American to win this honor. Her novels explore issues of African American female identity in stories that integrate elements of oral tradition, postmodern literary techniques, and magic realism in giving voice to the experiences of women living on the margins of white American society. Though most of Morrison's writing has been embraced by primarily adult audiences, her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) has attracted a wealth of young adult and high school readers, partially due to the work's focus on developing adolescence and its youthful narrator. The Bluest Eye examines the tragic effects of imposing white, middle-class American ideals of beauty on the developing female identity of a young African American girl during the early 1940s. Inspired by a conversation Morrison once had with an elementary school classmate who wished for blue eyes, the novel poignantly shows the psychological devastation of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who searches for love and acceptance in a world that denies and devalues people of her own race. In addition to The Bluest Eye, Morrison has also released a series of picture books targeted at young children, written in collaboration with her son Slade.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, where her father worked as a ship-welder. She was encouraged by her family to read and spent much of her childhood at the local library. Morrison graduated with a B.A. from Howard University in 1953 and went on to complete

an M.A. in English literature at Cornell University in 1955. She was married in 1958 and had two sons, but divorced in 1964, leaving her to raise her children as a single mother. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Morrison worked as an instructor at both Texas Southern University in Houston and Howard University in Washington, D.C. She later became an editor for Random House, where she worked from 1965 to 1983. Although her first novel, The Bluest Eye, received scant critical attention, Morrison's career as a nationally recognized author was launched with the success of her second novel, Sula (1973). She has since become one of the most recognized and popular female novelists of the past half-century. Morrison was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomon (1977), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved (1987), and the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. While continuing to write novels and children's books, as well as editing essay collections on issues of race in America, Morrison has taught as a guest professor in English and humanities at several colleges and universities, including the State University of New York at Albany, Yale University, Bard College, Harvard University, and Trinity College at Cambridge University in England. Since 1989, Morrison has maintained a post as professor of humanities at Princeton University.

MAJOR WORKS

Ignoring strict narrative chronology, The Bluest Eye opens with three excerpts from the common 1940s American elementary school primer that features the All-American, white family of Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane. The first excerpt is a faithful reproduction, the second lacks all capitalization and punctuation marks, and the third dissolves into linguistic chaos by abandoning its spacing and alignment. This section is interrupted by an italicized fragment representing the memories of Claudia MacTeer, the principal narrator of The Bluest Eye. As an adult, Claudia recalls incidents from late 1941 when she was nine years old living in Lorain, Ohio, with her poor but loving parents and her ten-year-old sister, Frieda. Claudia's friend, Pecola Breedlove, is an emotionally impaired African American girl who comes from a broken home. The rest of The Bluest Eye divides into four separate time sequences, each named for a season of the year and each narrated by Claudia. Interspersed throughout the text are fragments in the voice of an omniscient narrator that discuss Pecola's obsessive desire for blue eyes and her parents, Pauline and Cholly; each fragment is introduced with different lines from the Dick-and-Jane primer. In "Autumn," Claudia begins her narrative as the MacTeers take in a boarder, Mr. Henry Washington. At the same time, Pecola comes to live with the MacTeer family after Cholly burns down his family's house. Recounting their typical girlhood adventures, Claudia particularly remembers the onset of Pecola's first menses. The omniscient narrator intermittently interrupts with descriptions of the Breedlove's household, noting how the parents are unable to hide the violence of their relationship in the presence of Pecola and her brother Sammy. In the midst of the hostilities, Pecola constantly prays for blue eyes, believing that if she only had blue eyes, life would be better. In "Winter," Claudia recalls the arrival at school of Maureen Peale, a lighter-skinned, wealthy black girl with green eyes whom the girls both hate and admire. When a group of boys harasses Pecola, Maureen temporarily befriends Pecola, but eventually turns on her, calling the darker-skinned and deeply hurt Pecola "ugly." The omniscient narrator again interrupts and describes an incident involving Pecola and Geraldine, a socially mobile middle-class African American woman who loves her blue-eyed cat more than she loves her own son, Louis Junior. When Pecola is wrongly blamed for the cat's death, Geraldine quietly calls her a "nasty little black bitch."

Claudia opens the "Spring" sequence of The Bluest Eye with disparate memories about Henry Washington fondling Frieda's breasts, his subsequent beating and eviction by Mr. MacTeer, and a visit to Pecola's apartment. The omniscient narrator's descriptions of Pauline and Cholly's history predominate the rest of this section. The narrator relates events from Pauline's early life, her marriage, and how she became a maid for an affluent, white family. The narrator next recounts Cholly's traumatic childhood and adolescence. Abandoned almost at birth, he is rescued by his beloved Aunt Jimmy, who later dies when he is sixteen. After her burial, Cholly is humiliated by two white hunters who interrupt his first sexual encounter with a girl named Darlene. He flees to Macon, Georgia, in search of his father who is miserably mean and wants nothing to do with his son. Crushed by this encounter, Cholly eventually meets and marries Pauline and fathers her children. Years later, in Lorain, a drunken Cholly staggers into his kitchen, and overcome with lust, brutally rapes and impregnates Pecola. "Spring" concludes with a story about Soaphead Church, a self-proclaimed psychic and mystic, who counsels an unattractive black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. In "Summer," Claudia resumes her narration, recalling how the gossip spreads regarding Pecola being pregnant with Cholly's baby. Near the end of the novel, Pecola finally narrates a story about her conversation with an imaginary companion concerning her new blue eyes and whether they are "the bluest eyes" in the world. In the last section of The Bluest Eye Claudia remembers meeting Pecola after Cholly's baby is delivered stillborn and accounts for the whereabouts of Sammy, Cholly, and Pauline.

In 1999 Morrison embarked on a new venture—writing picture books for young children in collaboration with her son Slade. The first of these picture books, The Big Box (1999), is based on a story Slade composed when he was nine years old. The plot revolves around three children who are forced to live in a big brown box with three heavy locks because they are high-spirited and imaginative children who "can't handle their freedom." Their parents visit once a week, bringing them gifts, but the door opens only one way. At the end of the book, the children break free and claim their individual freedom. The Book of Mean People (2002) is constructed as a child's catalogue of people who are not nice—people who shout, classmates who whisper and giggle, parents who make children eat disgusting food, and teachers who criticize their students. In 2003 the Morrisons began publishing a new line of picture books known as the "Who's Got Game" series. The four books in the series—Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003), Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? (2003), Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? (2003), and Who's Got Game? The Mirror or the Glass? (2004)—are all loosely based on Aesop's fables. Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? tells the classic story of the hardworking ant and the lazy grasshopper, but the Morrisons set the tale in a modern city, utilizing rhythmic street talk and lingo for the dialogue. The book is a morality tale, asking the question of whether or not it was right for the ant to deny charity to the grasshopper who provided music for him. Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? recounts the relationship between a Bayou-dwelling grandfather named Poppy and a snake who, despite overtures of friendship, eventually succumbs to his true nature and bites Poppy. In 2004 Morrison released Remember: The Journey to School Integration, a work of young adult history that combines text with photographs in a remembrance of the controversy surrounding the forced racial integration of American schools during the 1950s.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Regarded by modern literary critics as perhaps one of the first contemporary female bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narratives, The Bluest Eye initially received modest reviews upon its publication in 1970. Commentators later claimed that they neglected the work because Morrison was unknown at the time. A recurring discussion has focused on the novel's ability to replicate African American vernacular patterns and musical rhythms. Many critics have approached the novel in the context of the rise of African American writers, assigning significance to their revision of American history with their own cultural materials and folk traditions. Since then, however, The Bluest Eye has become a classroom staple, and scholarship on the novel has flourished from a number of perspectives. Acknowledging Morrison's achievement in the novel, critics have generally acclaimed The Bluest Eye for deconstructing a number of literary taboos with its honest portrayals of American girlhood, its frank descriptions of intraracial racism or "colorism" in the African American community, and its thoughtful treatment of the emotional precocity of prepubescent girls. Morrison's picture books—particularly the "Who's Got Game" series—have received mixed assessments from reviewers. While some have complimented Morrison's skillful dialogue and lyric speech rhythms in such works as Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, others have found the quality of the stories in the "Who's Got Game" series to be uneven. Critics have also been divided in their opinions on the effectiveness of the morality tales in Morrison's picture books, with some finding the messages powerful and engaging, while others regard them as preachy and unfocused.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Bluest Eye (novel) 1970

Sula (novel) 1973

The Black Book [editor] (nonfiction) 1974

Song of Solomon (novel) 1977

Tar Baby (novel) 1981

*Dreaming Emmett (play) 1986

Beloved (novel) 1987

Jazz (novel) 1992

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (essays) 1992

Raceing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality [editor and author of introduction] (essays) 1992

The Dancing Mind (speech) 1997

Paradise (novel) 1998

The Big Box [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Giselle Potter] (picture book) 1999

I See You, I See Myself: The Young Life of Jacob Lawrence [with Deba Foxley Leach, Suzanne Wright, and Deborah J. Leach] (young adult biography) 2001

The Book of Mean People [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (picture book) 2002

Love (novel) 2003

Remember: The Journey to School Integration (young adult history) 2004

"Who's Got Game?" Series

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] 2003

Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (picture book) 2003

Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (picture book) 2003

Who's Got Game? The Mirror or the Glass? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (picture book) 2004

*Dreaming Emmett is an unpublished play, first performed at the Marketplace Capitol Repertory Theater of Albany.

AUTHOR COMMENTARY

Toni Morrison and B. Denise Hawkins (essay date 18 April 1996)

SOURCE: Morrison, Toni, and B. Denise Hawkins. "Marvelous Morrison." Black Issues in Higher Education 13, no. 4 (18 April 1996): 8.

[In the following essay, Hawkins reprints excerpts from Morrison's 1996 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities titled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations."]

The past can be a comfortable and happy place to escape. But Nobel Prize-winning author and professor Toni Morrison warned an army of admirers not to linger there long.

"What is infinite, it appears, what is always imaginable, always subject to analysis, adventure and creation is past time," said Morrison, who delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The lectureship, which carries an honorarium of $10,000, is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"Time, it seems, has no future," Morrison said. "That is, time no longer seems to be an endless stream through which the human species moves with confidence in its own increasing breadth or sweep or even the fascination of its past …. Twenty or 40 years into the 21st century appears to be all there is of the 'real time' available to our imagination," said Morrison, whose 70-minute journey through time and back forced a packed audience at times to laugh with abandon and at other times to wince and murmur under the weight of gloomy discourse.

"Seen through the selectively sifted grains of past time, the future thins out, is dumbed down, limited to the duration of a 30-year Treasury bond," she said. While the future may appear ephemeral it is time for humanity to abandon its reliance on the past. Not all history is treated or presented accurately, she said. She offered the 1960s as an example.

"Killing the '60s, turning that decade into an aberration, an exotic malady ripe with excess, drugs and disobedience, is designed to bury its central features—emancipation, generosity, acute political awareness and a sense of shared and mutually responsible society," said Morrison to one of the few bursts of applause.

But don't be misled, said the author. "Current discourse isn't fixated on the past and indifferent to the future. In the present, the social and natural sciences are offering promising glimpses and even warnings into a future filled with possibilities."

Morrison titled her lecture "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations."

She said that there are "scientific applications to erase hunger, annihilate pain … communications technology is already making sure that virtually everyone on earth can 'interact' with each other and be entertained."

Toni Morrison and Valerie Boyd (interview date January-February 2003)

SOURCE: Morrison, Toni, and Valerie Boyd. "Black and Blue: An Unforgettable Literary Debut." Book (January-February 2003): 27.

[In the following interview, Morrison discusses the inspiration behind and the dominant themes of The Bluest Eye.]

In The Bluest Eye, her first book, Toni Morrison tells an ugly story beautifully. Published in 1970, the slender, spare novel explores the impact of racism on young black girls. The protagonist is Pecola Breed-love, an eleven-year-old black girl who is convinced she is "relentlessly and aggressively ugly" and thus yearns for blue eyes—and for the society-approved beauty she believes they will give her.

Morrison started writing the novel in the mid-1960s, when large numbers of African-Americans began asserting that blackness is beautiful. But the idea for The Bluest Eye lodged itself in her brain twenty years earlier. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a small town about thirty miles west of Cleveland. When Morrison was eleven or twelve, one of her classmates revealed a sorrowful secret: She had been imploring God to give her blue eyes. The girl "had apparently been praying for two years and brought up the question of the existence of God because he had not answered her prayer," Morrison said in a discussion on American Online in May 2000, soon after Oprah Winfrey chose The Bluest Eye as a selection for her book club. (Before Winfrey made the pick, the book sold poorly. According to Morrison, "The initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola's life: dismissed, trivialized, misread.")

In a 1993 essay that appears as an afterword in current editions of the book, Morrison writes that even as a child she knew that "racial self-loathing" skulked behind her classmate's twisted wish. "And twenty years later I was still wondering about how one learns that," she writes. " … Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was?"

In 1962, Morrison wrote a short story that explored these questions, and she read the story in front of a small group of other novice writers. But soon after reading it to the group, she set the work aside. At the time, she was a divorced mother of two sons who was writing in fits and starts while earning her living as an English professor at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, her undergraduate alma mater. She had a master's degree in English from Cornell but she was unconvinced of her own talent. "I had always been complimented and praised for my writing abilities in school," she has said. "But I did not believe or trust the teachers and other people who told me I wrote well."

Morrison returned to the story in 1965 and began expanding it into a novel, inspired by the larger civil rights struggle and by the efforts of blacks to reclaim what she calls their "racial beauty." The civil rights movement was in full force that year: Malcolm X was assassinated, Selma marchers were beaten by Alabama state troopers and Los Angeles suffered terrible race riots. The novel is set in Lorain in 1941. Morrison has said that Pecola Breedlove is a composite of several girls she knew when she was a child.

Morrison was also inspired by something that wasn't happening much in 1965: the publication of novels by black women. Such books were few and far between—or out of print, as was the case with the works of Zora Neale Hurston, the most prominent black female writer of the first half of the twentieth century. In an interview in the 1983 collection Black Women Writers at Work, Morrison explained that she wrote The Bluest Eye and Sula —a National Book Award nominee in 1974—because "they were books I had wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so I wrote them."

In writing The Bluest Eye, Morrison has said, she was confronting "a certain kind of despair that exists in young girls." She had witnessed that despair in the eyes of many of her childhood friends, and she had known it for herself: "When I was growing up, my grandmother, because she had to, worked for a white family. … She would come home and whip me, chastise me. But every time she would ever talk about those white children … there would be this sort of glow inside her. … And that was when I … first got it that you are better if you're white. You can be loved more if you are white. If only I were white, she would love me more."

Like the rest of the members of the Breedlove family, Pecola is cursed with a certain problem. "You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source," Morrison writes. "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. 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."

Ignored by her teachers, despised by other adults, reviled by her classmates and ultimately raped by her own father, Pecola experiences ugliness in all its forms, retreating finally into her mad yearning to be the opposite of herself—that is, a white child, like the universally beloved Shirley Temple, with the blondest hair and the bluest eyes.

Yet the novel is not all tragedy and pathos. There is beauty in the telling. Morrison's extraordinary characters, controlled delivery and lush language made The Bluest Eye a triumphant—and indelible—debut.

TITLE COMMENTARY

THE BLUEST EYE (1970)

Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 August 1970)

SOURCE: Review of The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. Kirkus Reviews 38, no. 16 (15 August 1970): 902.

"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garotted innocence [The Bluest Eye ], "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed girls are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.

Patricia H. Marvin (review date 1 November 1970)

SOURCE: Marvin, Patricia H. Review of The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. Library Journal 95, no. 19 (1 November 1970): 3806.

This first novel of the black experience in the U.S. during the early 1940's [The Bluest Eye ], written in an acid prose pungent with metaphor, covers a year in the lives of two young Negro girls and their pathetic young friend, Pecola, who is raped and impregnated by her drunken violent father, Cholly Breedlove. Morrison has an acute memory for the sights, sounds, and smells which give piquancy to childhood: Vaseline and Black Draught for colds, hatred of white dolls, longing for blue eyes. She is also adept in the presentation of character types: cackling, crass black whores; thin brown proper wives whose houses are as clean and barren as their loveless souls; the violent, depraved black male, whose antisocial acts culminate a life without love, identity, or human purpose. The dialogue is well paced and rhythmically authentic, although one section depicting the imaginary conversation of the now-maddened and schizoid child, delivered of a dead baby at 12, weakens the structure and adds little to the story. This novel by a new and considerable talent has substance. It embodies a reality—for those who wish to understand it. Of particular interest to young adults and social caseworkers, and for most public libraries.

Booklist (review date 1 May 1971)

SOURCE: Review of The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. Booklist 67, no. 17 (1 May 1971): 729.

Perceptivity and authentic dialog combine to make of a first novel [The Bluest Eye ] an exercise in some of the realities of today. The emotions of black girls entering adolescence, a young husband and wife seeking economic relief in a midwestern city, and the hopelessness of tardy recognition that one has already obtained as much personal fulfillment as the circumstances allow are precisely drawn. There are detailed scenes of an incestuous assault and the psychological harm it inflicts and of the fantasies of a child molester. Well-written and believable, the story portrays through a small segment of a black community conditions and problems present in a larger area of society.

Ruth Rosenberg (essay date winter 1987)

SOURCE: Rosenberg, Ruth. "Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye." MELUS 21, no. 4 (winter 1987): 435-45.

[In the following essay, Rosenberg discusses several aspects of The Bluest Eye that differentiate Morrison's novel from earlier fictional accounts of African American girl-hood, including descriptions of first menses and mother-daughter interactions, "colorism," and the emotional precocity of pre-adolescent girls.]

Little black girls learned their lessons in self-authentication from autobiographies of such artists as Mahalia Jackson, Maya Angelou, and Bessie Smith, which explained how, in spite of immense obstacles, one might fashion a self.¹ When Sherley Anne Williams was a troubled twelve-year-old in the fifties, she searched, in vain, through the shelves of her junior high school library for some fictionalized depiction of her own problems. Because she found nothing there that would speak to her difficulties, she says, she "was led, almost inevitably … to the autobiographies of women entertainers—Eartha Kitt, Katherine Dunham, Ethel Waters. The material circumstances of their childhood were so much worse than mine; they too had had to cope with early and forced sex and sexuality, with mothers who could not express love in the terms that they so desperately needed. Yet they had risen above this, turned their difference into something that was respected in the world beyond their homes. I, in the free North, could do no less than endure" (196).

Black girls did not exist as far as the publishers of school anthologies were concerned. Barbara Dodds Stanford writes that "'Whites Only' could have been stamped on almost every literature series for high school students published before 1965" (3). Nancy Larrick, who studied 5,206 children's books published between 1962 and 1964, claims that only 349 of those thousands of books include even one black child either in the illustrations or the text. Of that 6.7 percent which do show a black child, all but a small fraction are "set outside the United States or before World War II. Quite clearly, the books used in American schools were primarily by and about white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class people" (84-85).

It was this absence of fictionalized characters with whom she could identify that started Sherley Anne Williams "on the road to being a writer" (195). At some point, in virtually every interview with a black woman writer, comes a similar admission. The consistent response to the question of why she became an author is that she could not find the books that she needed. Alice Walker has said that she was forced "to write all the things I should have read" ("Saving the Life That Is Your Own" 157).

Toni Morrison was a precocious reader as a child, but it was not until she discovered the Russian novelists that she found herself spoken to. Otherwise, she felt herself shunted to the sidelines. She mourned for "'the people who in all literature were always peripheral—little black girls who were props, background, those people were never center stage, and those people were me'" (Strouse 54). Asked why she had written The Bluest Eye (1970), she responded, "'I was interested in reading a kind of book that I had never read before. I didn't know if such a book existed, but I had just never read it in 1964 when I started writing The Bluest Eye '" (Parker 252).

Working out of her memory of what Lorain, Ohio, had been like in 1940, she reconstructed her own childhood. Placed center stage are three little girls: the book's narrator, Claudia Macteer, 9; her sister Frieda, 10; and their friend Pecola Breedlove, 11. It is an initiation story so unlike any other that had been done before that Toni Cade Bambara says her students have difficulty dealing with it. Among other things they fail to appreciate the traumatic aspects of the first menses because the onset of menstruation is not something that is valued in our culture. As Bambara notes, "The initiation or rites of passage of the young girl is not one of the darlings of American literature. The coming of age for the young boy is certainly much more the classic case. I wonder if it all means that we don't put a value on our process of womanhood" (Guy-Sheftall 247).²

Morrison renders not only the terror and the mystery of that initial bleeding, but also the older sister's competence in handling it. As Pecola stands with the blood trickling down her legs, her eyes rimmed with fear, asking if she's going to die, Frieda explains, "'That's ministratin"" (25), and dispatches Claudia for some water to clean the steps. The younger sister's resentment at missing whatever important things are going on in the bushes with a white rectangle of cotton is vented against the prying girl from next door who then screams out that they are "'playing nasty'" (27). Mrs. Macteer runs out, pulling a switch from the bush and whipping Frieda with four stinging cuts on the leg. About to punish Pecola, too, she notices "the white tail" and the "little-girl-gone-to-woman pants" (28) and hugs them both. That Claudia still does not comprehend what is happening becomes evident in her panic as she listens outside the bathroom and hears the water gushing into the tub. When she asks if Pecola is being drowned, Frieda answers, "'Oh, Claudia. You so dumb. She's just going to wash her clothes and all'" (28). Later that night as they sleep together, they "were full of awe and respect for Pecola. Lying next to a real person who was really ministratin' was somehow sacred" (28). Claudia needs her sister to interpret her experience for her. The children are forced to rely on each other for information, since adults make themselves so inaccessible.

The child's intense curiosity is not responded to verbally. Adults demand deference and fend off questions. They maintain a social distance between themselves and their children through non-reciprocal conversations. Claudia says, "Adults do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information" (12). Communication is a hierarchically structured, one-way transmission. Claudia observes that "we didn't initiate talk with grownups; we answered their questions" (22). Another strictly enforced rule, in the forties at least, was the insistence upon terms of respect. A child had to address her mother as "Ma'am."

A new boarder's arrival in the Macteer household provides another occasion to instruct the children about their place. Their status, it is impressed upon them, is a little lower than that of the furniture: "Frieda and I were not introduced to him—merely pointed out. Like, here is the bathroom; the clothes closet is here; and these are my kids" (16).

Parents express their concern through the strict annihilation of any vestige of impropriety, through lashing out. Each season brings a change in whipping style for the Macteer girls: "They beat us differently in the spring. Instead of the dull pain of a winter strap, there were these new green switches that lost their sting long after the whipping was over. There was a nervous meanness in these long twigs that made us long for the steady stroke of a strap or the firm but honest slap of a hairbrush" (78).

Since parental concern manifests itself in this way, an act of translation is required to read the love latent in it. Claudia shows her ability to realize that she is loved during an illness—the vehicle of her under-standing being the pair of rough hands that smear salve on her chest. In an interview with Robert Stepto, Morrison confirms this belated realization, so beautifully inscribed in her first novel: "'And when they punished us or hollered at us, it was, at the time, we thought, so inhibiting and so cruel, and it's only much later that you realize that they were interested in you,'" that "'they cared'" (214). Claudia's recognition that she is loved must come through her other senses because it is never told to her. Expressions of maternal concern are seldom verbalized in The Bluest Eye ; rather, they are beaten into the child, inscribed on her skin. It was this maternal attitude that Sherley Anne Williams had, as a girl, hoped to find expressed in fiction by black women and whose absence fixed her determination to write about the issue. Only in black women's autobiographies did she find how others coped "with mothers who could not express love in the terms … [children] so desperately needed."³

Certainly nine-year-old Claudia does not feel coddled, and her claims for attention are never overtly acknowledged: " … if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of consideration" (12-13). Put to bed with a cough, Claudia is scolded and begins to cry because "my mother's anger humiliates me; her words chafe my cheeks" (14). She is not reassured verbally: "No one speaks to me or asks how I feel" (13). Only later does she realize that the rough hands that rub salve on her chest are expressing concern; that love, even when it cannot be heard, can be smelled and tasted. Having made that recognition, she learns to inhale the love that coats her chest, along with the salve (14).

How important a service Toni Morrison rendered in this depiction becomes evident when one contrasts it with Richard Wright's fictionalization of the mother-child interaction in Black Boy. As Ralph Ellison has explained, Wright mistook "gestures of protection" for "blows of oppression." He failed retroactively to interpret his mother's whippings as does the girl who narrates Morrison's novel. "One of the Southern Negro family's methods of protecting the child," writes Ellison, "is the severe beating—a homeopathic dose of the violence generated by black and white relationships. Such beatings as Wright's were administered for the child's own good … by the mother. … the cruelty is also an expression of concern, of love" (85-86, 91).

Wright's Richard needed Ellison to reinterpret what might be construed as "maternal sadism" as "an expression of concern." Morrison's Claudia is able to effect this translation for herself because she internalizes an image of what it means to be a mother. As Alice Walker has argued metaphorically in another context, black women need to know both history and "herstory," because "to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names" (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 276).

Another aspect of The Bluest Eye that differentiates it from earlier fictional representations of little black girls is the novel's radical repudiation of "colorism."⁴ Afro-American fiction is rife with light-skinned heroines. The protagonist of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), for example, is a mulatto. William Wells Brown's Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine (1867) is about a quadroon whose appearance gives no evidence "that a drop of African blood coursed through her veins." Emma Dunham Kelly's Megda (1891) has a white-skinned Afro-American heroine, as does Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola LeRoy, or Shadows Uplifted (1893). Even Janie, in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is described as having light skin.

Nothing was more damaging to a dark-skinned girl than such valorization of what she could never be.

Among the devastating passages in Afro-American autobiographies that testify to the irreparable damage done is Maya Angelou's recollection in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) of a persistent childhood fantasy that she might one day wake up blonde and blue-eyed, not ugly and black. Gwendolyn Brooks's Report from Part One (1972) tells how she came to feel that she was of less worth than a "high-yellow" child, a theme that Brooks had presented earlier in her novel Maud Martha (1951). Because being dark meant never being considered beautiful, being other became a canonical part of black women's literature. "In almost every novel or autobiography written by a black woman," writes Mary Helen Washington, "there is at least one incident in which the dark-skinned girl wishes to be either white or light-skinned with good hair" (xv). So inherent is this "colorism" that one critic of children's literature has asserted that differentiations of skin color are what distinguish "culturally conscious" books from "inauthentic" ones: "Gradations in skin color," observes Rudine Sims, "are almost automatically part of an Afro-American's description of another Afro-American" (70).⁵

Thematically, The Bluest Eye consists of a stipulative definition which radically redefines beauty. The Macteer sisters hate Maureen, a new girl in school to whom everyone else defers reverentially. Claudia wants "to kick her" and plots "accidental slammings of locker doors on her hand" (54). Described by Morrison as "a high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes" (52), Maureen has a hair style which underscores the "sinister quality of such beauty, at the same time acknowledging the white ancestor responsible for those ropes" (de Weever 406).

Claudia's ability to survive intact and to consolidate an identity derives from her vigorous opposition to the colorist attitudes of her community. She fights "to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals" (148). In marked contrast to Pecola Breedlove's surrender to Western values, Claudia refuses to be tamed into conventional behavior and smashes the Shirley Temple doll that is imposed on her at Christmas. Allowing Pecola's submission to the messages transmitted by her culture to be presented from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old who energetically resents them permits Morrison to expose their insidiousness. The socialization patterns thoughtlessly transmitted from mother to daughter, from Pauline Breedlove to Pecola, are fatal to that child's self-esteem, but Claudia, who is bent on self-definition, will mature into someone who has control of her destiny.⁶

The process of bequeathing self-hatred is symbolized in the name Mrs. Breedlove has given her daughter. As Maureen Peal explains to Pecola, it came, like Mrs. Breedlove's "education in self-contempt" (97), from the movies:

"Pecola? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?"

"I don't know. What is that?"

"The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother 'cause she is black and ugly."

     (57)

The point being made in this onomastic interplay is that Mrs. Breedlove learned to devalue herself through commercialized fantasies and is teaching her daughter a similar sense of unworthiness. Alice Walker quotes an article from The Black Scholar which calls this "psychic annihilation," letting "whites turn blacks on themselves."⁷

Ineluctably, the implications of Pecola's name work themselves out in her stunted imitation of a life. Acting on her conviction that her teachers ignore her, her schoolmates despise her, and her parents quarrel because she is ugly, she decides to transform herself. "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed" (40). She ingests penny candy to become the picture on the wrapper, the smiling white face with its "blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. … Toeat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane" (43). She consumes the blue eyes on the Shirley Temple mug with her gaze, drinking in three quarts of milk to swallow its whiteness. Pecola's mother impresses on her daughter the fact that she prefers the pink-and-white, blue-eyed Fisher girl to her own child. Determined to change her eyes so that she too will be lovable, Pecola finds a faithhealer, Soaphead Church, who promises them to her because he is "wholly convinced that if black people were more like white people they would be better off."⁸ The price she pays for them is her own sanity: She wanders through the town dump, babbling about how blue the eyes are that no one else can see.

Pecola's childhood is cancelled one Saturday afternoon when, at the age of twelve, she is raped by her father and left unconscious on the kitchen floor. Such things were not much mentioned in the fifties, when Sherley Anne Williams had looked in vain for a book about "forced sex" and had been too embarrassed to ask the librarian,⁹ but Toni Morrison portrays the pedophiles that prey on little girls: Henry Washington, the boarder who is thrown out of the Macteers' house for "fingering" Frieda, and Soaphead Church, who is notorious for his sexual molestations. While Pecola retreats into delusion, those with the toughness and resiliency to defend themselves develop the inner strength needed to survive. As Claudia says, "We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody" (149).

Frieda's coping skills are demonstrated when she disperses the gang of boys taunting Pecola in the schoolyard. She threatens Woodrow Cain with some information she has stored up from overheard adult conversations, and he slinks away, not wanting to be exposed as a bed wetter. This success in rescuing their friend emboldens the Macteer girls to try another strategy to save Pecola's unborn baby—"We did not think of the fact that Pecola was not married; lots of girls had babies who were not married. And we did not dwell on the fact that the baby's father was Pecola's father too; the process of having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to us—at least she knew her father. We thought only of this over-whelming hatred for the unborn baby" (148). But the marigold seeds they plant on behalf of Pecola's baby fail to sprout, and because they fail to save the baby's life, they avoid Pecola.

The girls' guilty self-recriminations form the prologue and the epilogue, for it has not occurred to them that the earth itself might have been "unyielding." It is this "hard ground" that the novel explores—a world that permits the foreclosure of childhood, that imposes a premature adulthood. The sociologist Joyce A. Ladner calls the pubescent black girl "emotionally precocious" because she has had either vicarious or personal experience of violence. Having been either a victim or a witness of aggression, she learns strategies of defending herself more vigorously than someone who has never been so vulnerable. Although these preadolescents have encountered harshness and cruelty, they "develop survival skills enabling them to cope with the world."¹⁰

In centering her story on an ordinary girl who is taught by her colorist culture that she is ugly, Toni Morrison portrays the cruel ground which forecloses Pecola's longing to be loved. The passage from the school primer which opens The Bluest Eye represents the "all-white world of children's books" which the novel challenges. The little Macteer sisters, who tell Pecola's story, raise their voices in defense of what is black. Their penetrating vision sees, in Pecola's womb, "the baby that everybody wanted dead, and s[ee] it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with great O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin" (148).

Defiantly alone in their protective impulses toward the unborn baby, they assume a maternal role toward it which is far beyond their capacities to fulfill. Their touching efforts to make a miracle on its behalf and their celebration of its blackness, which no one in their "unyielding" community shares, enhance the book's poignancy.

The protagonist, Pecola, seen through the eyes of a fastidious, middle-class neighbor, seems "dirty." The neighbor's gaze reveals the girl's

torn dress, the plaits sticking out on her head, hair matted where the plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the wad of gum peeping out from between the cheap soles, the soiled socks, one of which had been walked down into the heel of the shoe. She saw the safety pin holding the hem of the dress up. … Shehad seen this little girl all her life …. Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt.

     (75)

Toni Morrison's gaze reveals to the reader that Pecola is a little girl who has always been on the periphery. She presents us with Pecola's innocence and tragedy. The authorial stance of The Bluest Eye is epitomized in the disingenuous voices of its narrators: "We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt" (9).

Notes

1. To assess the importance of autobiography as a genre in Afro-American letters, see Brignano. Stephen Butterfield explains how autobiography can be "both an arsenal and a battleground": " … if you are never able to take who you are for granted, and the social order around you seems deliberately designed to rub you out, stuff your head with little cartoon symbols of what it wants or fears you to be, and mock you with parodies of your highest hopes, then discovering who you really are takes on the dimensions of an epic battle with the social order" (284, emphasis added).
2. Bambara's own "The Girl's Story" also deals with this issue. "In almost every household that I can think of when I was growing up," says Bambara, "the onset of the menstrual period was mysterious and frightening, and totally without information and totally without support from the immediate household" (Guy-Sheftall 246).
3. Morrison would probe this painful problem again in her second novel, Sula (1974). When Hannah Peace asks her mother Eva if she has ever loved her, even the question is repudiated by the mother as "an evil wondering." Critic Mary Helen Washington provides useful insights into this incident: "Eva's plain, hostile answer is, 'No. I don't reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin',' and she accuses Hannah of thinking evil for even asking such a question. Later, she feels the need to explain that 'No,' but the rest of her answer is so brutal that the love behind it is almost unrecognizable: ' … what you talkin" bout did I love you girl. I stayed alive for you can't you get that through your thick head or what is that between your ears heifer? [sic]' This is the love of a woman who battled her way through life in order to keep her kids from starving. … She did not have anything left over to play around with them or teach them games or be silly with them and so her strength actually seems like a kind of cold indifference. … Eva takes care of her children, but she does so without physical affection or tenderness" (xxii).
4. "Colorism," according to Alice Walker, is a form of self-hatred, manifested in celebrations over "the birth of a 'golden' child" or the urgings to marry a "high-yellow" in order "to lighten up the race" (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 290, 311). "The structured colorism of the black middle class … is camouflaged by the promise of 'upward mobility,' i.e., proximity to, imitation of, and eventual merger with (or, as Chestnutt wrote, 'absorption into') the white middle class" (310).
5. Sims also notes that, in an effort to evoke positive associations, these color descriptions are often presented in food-related imagery.
6. Some of the best contemporary criticism of Afro-American letters is coming from Germany. Berndt Ostendorf says that the function of black art is "to put people in control of their personal destinies. Black art is a form of externalizing the wounds of historically conditioned socialization patterns. These have to be objectified and isolated as art before they can be successfully transcended" (32). That Alice Walker, for one, has assumed this Blakean task is evident throughout her interview with Claudia Tate, particularly in her remarks on the responsibilities of her black readership.
7. "' … certainly every Afro-American is descended from a black black woman. What then can be the destiny of a people that pampers and cherishes the blood of the white slaveholder who maimed and degraded their female ancestor? What can be the future of a class of descendants of slaves that implicitly gives slave-holders greater honor than the African women they enslaved?'" (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 295).
8. Toni Morrison told Robert Stepto that, "with Soaphead, I wanted, needed someone to give the child her blue eyes. Now she was asking for something that was just awful—she wanted to have blue eyes and she wanted to be Shirley Temple, I mean, she wanted to do that white trip because of the society in which she lived and, very importantly, because of the black people who helped her want to be that. (The responsibilities are ours. It's our responsibility for helping her believe, helping her come to the point where she wanted that.) I had to have someone—her mother, of course, made her want that in the first place—who would give her the blue eyes … wholly convinced that if black people were more like white people they would be better off" (223).
9. What, asks Williams, did the white writers whose works she encountered in the library "know about being black, being on welfare, being solicited for sex by older black men in the neighborhood …?" (195). Sonia Sanchez, too, has observed that, when she was twelve or thirteen, she had "mostly read white writers. No one gave me any literary work by black writers to read …. That's really a terrible commentary on education" (Tate interview 147). In the same interview, Sanchez recounts how she had to defend herself against sexual molestation in the corner store in Harlem when she was nine (138-39). Maya Angelou tells in Caged Bird of her rape at the age of eight. Mary Burger calls black adolescents "Child-Women": "The Black woman's need to grow up fast, bypassing a leisurely childhood, emanates from harsh environmental conditions" (111).
10. Ladner 62, 65. "An eight-year-old girl has a good chance of being exposed to rape and violence and her parents will be powerless to protect her" (62).

Works Cited

Bambara, Toni Cade. "The Girl's Story." The Sea Birds are Still Alive. New York: Random, 1977. 152-65.

Brignano, Russell C. Black Americans in Autobiography: An Annotated Bibliography of Autobiographies and Autobiographical Books Written since the Civil War. Durham: Duke UP, 1974.

Burger, Mary. "Images of Self and Race in the Autobiographies of Black Women." Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City: Anchor, 1979. 107-22.

Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1974.

de Weever, Jacqueline. "The Inverted World of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula." CLA Journal 22 (1979): 402-14.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1964.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. "Commitment: Toni Cade Bambara Speaks." Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City: Anchor, 1979. 230-49.

Ladner, Joyce A. Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman. New York: Anchor, 1971.

Larrick, Nancy. "The All-White World of Children's Books." Saturday Review 11 Sept. 1965: 63-65, 84-85.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1970.

Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America: Studies in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Totowa: Barnes, 1982.

Parker, Bettye J. "Complexity: Toni Morrison's Women—An Interview Essay." Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City: Anchor, 1979. 251-57.

Sims, Rudine. Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction. Urbana: NCTE, 1983.

Stanford, Barbara Dodds, and Karima Amin. Black Literature for High School Students. Urbana: NCTE, 1978.

Stepto, Robert B. "Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison." Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. 213-29.

Strouse, Jean. "Toni Morrison's Black Magic." Newsweek 30 Mar. 1981: 52-57.

Tate, Claudia. "Alice Walker." Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. 175-87.

——. "Sonia Sanchez." Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. 132-48.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

——. "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life." The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests, Lifestyles. Ed. Edith Blicksilver. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1979.

Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women. Garden City: Anchor, 1975.

Williams, Sherley Anne. "In Honor of Free Women." Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers. Ed. Mary Helen Washington. Garden City: Anchor, 1980. 193-98.

John Bishop (essay date summer 1993)

SOURCE: Bishop, John. "Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Explicator 51, no. 4 (summer 1993): 252-54.

[In the following essay, Bishop explores the relationship between The Bluest Eye and the film Imitation of Life, which supposedly provides the inspiration for Pecola's name.]

Many writers have noted the importance of names (and the act of naming) in Toni Morrison's novels but, surprisingly, no one in print has noted the ironies surrounding the name of Pecola Breedlove, the central character of The Bluest Eye. ¹

"I just moved here. My name is Maureen Peal. What's yours?"

"Pecola."

"Pecola? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?"

"I don't know. What is that?"

"The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother 'cause she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral. It was real sad. Everybody cries in it. Claudette Colbert too."

"Oh." Pecola's voice was no more than a sigh.

"Anyway, her name was Pecola too. She was so pretty. When it comes back, I'm going to see it again."

     (56-57)²

As many have remarked, white cinematic icons—blue-eyed, pale-skinned Shirley Temple is their main representative—shape the self-images of the novel's black community in general and the Breedlove family in particular. The book's single reference to a specific film, then, invites comparison between the story in the novel and the story on the screen. (Since the novel is set seven years after the movie's 1934 release, the twelve-year-old Pecola could not have been named for the girl in the film.) Maureen's accurate but incomplete summary of the film, based on Fannie Hurst's 1933 bestseller, illustrates her—and her community's—adoption of Hollywood's image of beauty: "black" is "ugly," "mulatto" is "pretty," and, by extension, Shirley Temple is prettier still. Maureen's reference to the film illustrates how white cultural values shape the black community's idea of physical beauty—an idea that Morrison's narrator deems one of "the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought" (97).

More telling is the connection between Aunt Delilah, the mother in the film, and Pecola's mother Pauline. Like Delilah, Pauline—herself a credulous consumer of Hollywood images—is a domestic servant for a white family, a woman for whom "[a]ll the meaningfulness of her life was in her work" (102). By invoking Imitation of Life, Morrison registers Pauline's fantasy of the good life as it is lived by her cinematic counterpart: to be loved by, and to live with, the white family that employs her; to have a beautiful (i.e., light-skinned) daughter; to enrich the family by her skill in cookery (pancakes, in the film); and to be martyred by her ungrateful child. Some of these things she manages to accomplish, working for an "affectionate, appreciative, and generous" family whose patriarch remarks, "I would rather sell her blueberry cobblers than real estate," and cultivating a sense of her own persecution, bearing her husband "like a crown of thorns and her children like a cross" (100-01). But Pauline's life falls short of her fantasy, and her awareness of the discrepancy exacts a tragic price:

She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs. … More and more she neglected her own house, her children, her man—they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, … the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. Here she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows …. Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private world, and never introduced it into her storefront, or to her children.

     (100-02)

It is in relation to her daughter that the contrast between Pauline and Delilah is most telling. Once an avid movie-goer, Pauline has imbibed Hollywood's implicitly white version of beauty: "[s]he 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" (97). Far from being the light-skinned and "so pretty" daughter who "passes" for white in the film, Pecola is repeatedly described as "black" and "ugly" or both at once (34; 39; 61; 75; 140-43; 159). Her own mother, to whom she is "like a black ball of hair," puts it flatly: "Lord she was ugly" (99; 100). By invoking the film, Morrison thus indicates Pecola's failure to measure up—in the eyes of Hollywood, of Maureen Peal, and her own mother—to the "so pretty" mulatto daughter of the film.

Most significant, however, is the hitherto unnoticed discrepancy in Maureen Peal's account of the film: the name of "the girl in Imitation of Life" is not, in fact, "Pecola," but "Peola."³ The irregularity is appropriate because it denotes Pecola's failure to be like her cinematic double: she spends "long hours looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness that made her ignored and despised at school …" (39). Maureen Peal's mistake has a larger relevance as well, for in Morrison's novels the act of (mis) naming signifies the community's power to deny individual autonomy and to use people for its own ends. The appropriation of her name is another token that Pecola is the novel's scapegoat, raped by her father and blamed by the community. The misnaming puts her in company with the book's other outcasts: the prostitute Miss Marie, known to all (save Pecola) as "The Maginot Line," and the quack mystic Elihue Whitcomb, dubbed "Soaphead Church."

Finally, one must note the phonic play created by the missing c of "Peola." The book's very title, as others have observed, is a pun: Pecola's consciousness disintegrates (she becomes the "bluest I") because she wishes in vain for those "bluest eyes" that would make her face—and her life—like one in the movies.⁴ Pecola has inscribed in her name the discrepancy that makes that dream impossible. Morrison makes clear that the community has failed to save Pecola, and this failure is figured as blindness:

The gray head of Mr. Yacobowski looms up over the counter … [H]e looks toward her … [H]is eyes draw back … [H]e senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, … see a little black girl? Nothing in his life suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.

     (41-42; Morrison's emphasis)

They cannot see Pecola because only the pretty, pale Peola is deemed worthy of notice—they do not c the real girl. Pecola's final madness, marked by an interior dialogue between two halves of her fractured consciousness, one with blue eyes and one without, is the final marker of the damage done by her (and her mother's) vain wish to reconcile the "black and ugly" Pecola with her impossible fantasy self, the Peola of the silver screen.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Karen F. Stein, "'I Didn't Even Know His Name': Names and Naming in Toni Morrison's Sula," Names: Journal of the American Name Society 28.3 (September 1980): 226-29; Lucinda K. MacKethon, "Names to Bear Witness: The Theme and Tradition of Naming in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," CEA Critic 49 (winter 1986-summer 1987) 199-207; Linda Buck Myers, "Perception and Power through Naming: Characters in Search of a Self in the Fiction of Toni Morrison," Explorations in Ethnic Studies 7.1 (1984): 39-55; and Ruth Rosenberg, "'And the Children May Know Their Names': Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," Literary Onomastic Studies 8 (1981): 195-219.
2. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1970). Subsequent page references are to this edition.
3. Thomas H. Fick, in "Movies, Consumption, and Platonic Realism in The Bluest Eye" (MMLA 22 [spring 1989]: 10-22), mentions Imitation of Life in passing, but repeats Maureen Peal's mistake—calling the daughter in the film "Pecola."
4. The pun is made more evident by the jacket copy for the book's first edition in 1970, in which each i is dotted in blue ink. I am indebted to C. O. Ogunyemi ("Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye," Critique 19.1[1977]: 113) for this observation.

Jane Kuenz (essay date fall 1993)

SOURCE: Kuenz, Jane. "The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity." African American Review 27, no. 3 (fall 1993): 421-30.

[In the following essay, Kuenz examines how The Bluest Eye addresses the aspects of cultural identification that American culture assigns to African American women, particularly within the African American community.]

In Toni Morrison's 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 else-where—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 the terrain on which is mapped the encroachment and colonization of African-American experiences, particularly those of its women, by a seemingly hegemonic white culture. The Bluest Eye as a whole documents this invasion—and its concomitant erasure of specific local bodies, histories, and cultural productions—in terms of sexuality as it intersects with commodity culture. Furthermore, this mass culture and, more generally, the commodity capitalism that gave rise to it, is in large part responsible—through its capacity to efface history—for the "disinterestedness" that Morrison condemns throughout the novel. Beyond exemplifying this, Morrison's project is to rewrite the specific bodies and histories of the black Americans whose positive images and stories have been eradicated by commodity culture. She does this formally by shifting the novel's perspective and point of view, a narrative tactic that enables her, in the process, to represent black female subjectivity as a layered, shifting, and complex reality.

The disallowance of the specific cultures and histories of African-Americans and black women especially is figured in The Bluest Eye primarily as a consequence of or sideline to the more general annihilation of popular forms and images by an ever more all-pervasive and insidious mass culture industry. This industry increasingly disallows the representation of any image not premised on consumption or the production of normative values conducive to it. These values are often rigidly tied to gender and are race-specific to the extent that racial and ethnic differences are not allowed to be represented. One lesson from history, as Susan Willis reiterates, is that "in mass culture many of the social contradictions of capitalism appear to us as if those very contradictions had been resolved" ("I Shop" 183). Among these contradictions we might include those antagonisms continuing, in spite of capitalism's benevolent influence, along the axes of economic privilege and racial difference. According to Willis, it is because "all the models [in mass cultural representation] are white"—either in fact or by virtue of their status as "replicants … devoid of cultural integrity"—that the differences in race or ethnicity (and class, we might add) and the continued problems for which these differences are a convenient excuse appear to be erased or made equal "at the level of consumption" ("I Shop" 184). In other words, economic, racial, and ethnic difference is erased and replaced by a purportedly equal ability to consume, even though what is consumed are more or less competing versions of the same white image.

There is evidence of the presence and influence of this process of erasure and replacement throughout The Bluest Eye. For example, the grade school reader that prefaces the text was (and in many places still is) a ubiquitous, mass-produced presence in schools across the country. Its widespread use made learning the pleasures of Dick and Jane's commodified life dangerously synonymous with learning itself. Its placement first in the novel makes it the pretext for what is presented after: As the seeming given of contemporary life, it stands as the only visible model for happiness and thus implicitly accuses those whose lives do not match up. In 1941, and no less so today, this would include a lot of people. Even so, white lower-class children can at least more easily imagine themselves posited within the story's realm of possibility. For black children this possibility might require a double reversal or negation: Where the poor white child is encouraged to forget the particulars of her present life and look forward to a future of prosperity—the result, no doubt, of forty years in Lorain's steel mills—a black child like Pecola must, in addition, see herself, in a process repeated throughout The Bluest Eye, in (or as) the body of a white little girl. In other words, she must not see herself at all. The effort required to do this and the damaging results of it are illustrated typographically in the repetition of the Dick-and-Jane story first without punctuation or capitalization, and then without punctuation, capitalization, or spacing.

Perhaps one function of the mass deployment of these stories was in fact to raise hopes for a better future in order to counteract the oppressiveness of the present and, in the process, to delimit the chance of dissatisfaction or unrest and encourage unquestioning labor at the same time. If so, it also tempts, as these tactics always do, the opposite conclusion: The comparison of their lives to Dick and Jane's seemingly idyllic ones will breed, among those unaccounted for in mass culture's representations, resentment and class consciousness instead. That this is not the result for most of the characters in The Bluest Eye, as it is not for most people in general, bespeaks the extent to which mass culture has made the process of self-denial a pleasurable experience.¹ Indeed, as I hope to show later, this process is explicitly sexual in The Bluest Eye and offers, particularly for women, the only occasion for sexual pleasure in the novel.

As noted above, interaction with mass culture for anyone not represented therein, and especially for African-Americans, frequently requires abdication of self or the ability to see oneself in the body of another. The novel's most obvious and pervasive instance of this is in the seemingly endless reproduction of images of feminine beauty in everyday objects and consumer goods: white baby dolls with their inhumanly hard bodies and uncanny blue eyes, Shirley Temple cups, Mary Jane Candies, even the clothes of "dream child" Maureen Peal, which are stylish precisely because they suggest Shirley Temple cuteness and because Claudia and Frieda recognize them as such. But Claudia and her sister can recognize "the Thing that made [Maureen] beautiful and not [them]" (62) only in terms of its effects on other people. Despite knowing that they are "nicer, brighter," they cannot ignore how "the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of [their] peers, the slippery light in the eyes of [their] teachers" (61-62) all pour out to the Maureen Peals of the world and not to them. From the responses of other people to girls like Maureen and others for whom Shirley Temple is the model, the sisters learn the fact of their own lack, variously identified as ugliness or "unworthiness," if not the essence of it. "What was the secret?" Claudia asks, "What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?" (62)

Claudia's body, much more so than her sister's, has yet to be completely socialized in the process Frigga Haug calls "female sexualization." By this, Haug means both the production of femininity through the competent performance of feminine skills (including how to hold, move, and dress the body) and the reproduction of subordination within and on women's bodies as evidenced in the gradual "sexualization" of various body parts (for example, hair or legs) as girls mature. This process—inevitably modified, as The Bluest Eye indicates, by both race and class—results in bodies that are always the site of multiple discourses circling around and ultimately comprising what we call "femininity" or, as it is generally construed, "the sexual." Claudia's confusion about the source of her failure to arouse "honey voices" and "slippery light" indicates that, though she is catching on quickly, she has yet to experience her body as the alienated entity Haug describes. She is still at the level of sensation, not prohibition or enforced definition: Instead of "asking the right questions" about her sister's near molestation, for example, Claudia wants to know what it feels like to have breasts worth touching and to have them touched (79).

The innocence of this question parallels the delight with which Claudia revels in her own body's myriad substances and smells. While women like Geraldine are quick to dispatch with "funk" wherever it "crusts" (68), Claudia is fascinated with her own body's sometimes graphically nauseating materiality: She is captivated by the menstrual blood her sister hurries to wash away; she studies her own vomit, admires the way it "[clings] to its own mass, refusing to break up and be removed" (13); she abhors the "dreadful and humiliating absence of dirt [and] the irritable, unimaginative cleanliness" (21) that accompanies it; she remembers the year recounted in the novel as a time when she and Frieda "were still in love with [themselves and] … felt comfortable in [their] skins, enjoyed the news that [their] senses released to [them], admired [their] dirt, cultivated [their] scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness" (62) that distinguishes them from Maureen and is already overwhelming Pecola.

The older Claudia attributes this ease with her body to her youth and admits that she eventually succumbs to the pleasures of dominant discourse and its definitions of "femininity." Speaking of Shirley Temple, she says, "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" (19). She goes on explicitly to equate "worshiping" Shirley Temple with "delighting" in cleanliness (22). The Bluest Eye suggests that this "development"—the sexualization of Claudia's body (changes both in it and in how she experiences it) and the simultaneous transformation of her psyche is learned and achieved through commodities like the Shirley Temple cups that proscribe appearance and behavior in accordance with the images they project. Claudia learns to "love" Shirley Temple when she learns to identify herself as Shirley Temple, as a complete person—limited as that is for women in our culture to some variation of "the sexual." Moreover, femininity and "the sexual" can be produced and reproduced as commodities, as Pecola's belief that she can simply acquire blue eyes indicates. The mass dissemination of these images of femininity in American society was and is among the primary mechanisms by which women are socialized and sexualized in this country. It is no accident that Morrison links many of these images of properly sexualized white women to the medium of film which, in 1941, was increasingly enabled technologically to represent them and, because of the growth of the Hollywood film industry, more likely to limit the production of alternate images.

The effect of the constant circulation of the faces of, for example, Ginger Rogers, Gretta Garbo, Jean Harlow, and, again, Shirley Temple is to reintroduce and exaggerate, as it does for Pauline Breedlove, "the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought" (97)—romantic love and physical beauty, each defined according to what they exclude and each destructive to the extent that they are made definitionally unavailable. After waiting out two pregnancies in the dark shadows of the silver screen, Pauline "was never able … [again] to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty" which she had "absorbed in full" from the movies (97). Among these faces to which she can't help but assign a pre-determined value is her own, ironically made less acceptable by her Jean Harlow hairstyle because of the rotten tooth that contradicts it. In spite of the hope implicit in naming her after a fair character in a movie itself called Imitation of Life,² Pecola, too, is, according to her mother and apparently everyone else, "'ugly'" (100). The consequences of this estimation, repeated as it is continually throughout Pecola's life, are, of course, obvious: When others—Mr. Yacobowski, her teachers, etc.— cannot or will not see her, then she ceases to be seen at all or sees herself in the iconographic images she can attain only in madness.

The horror of the industry responsible for generating and continuing these repeated, static, and unattainable images is not just that, in the process of appropriating standards of beauty and femininity for white women, it does not allow alternate images and standards to coincide—though such is certainly horrible—but that in so doing it also co-opts and transforms a history of communal and familial relationships it cannot otherwise accommodate. This co-optation was facilitated by the migration of African-Americans in the first half of this century and the end of the last to Northern, usually industrial, towns like Lorain, a process that accelerated the separation of families and friends as it removed them farther from whatever common culture existed in the rural South (Willis, Specifying 83-109). In the absence of a network of community members ready to step in—as Aunt Jimmy's family and friends do—and make it their business to look after each other, blacks up north who feel isolated from their past and alienated in their present are more likely to look elsewhere for self-affirming context.

As Pauline Breedlove's history bears out, the culture industry is always quick to provide its notion of what this context should be and thus assure the dependence necessary for its own continued existence, even, indeed especially, at the expense of alternate cultural forms. Although she has few fond memories of her childhood, it is her early married life in Lorain that Pauline remembers as the "'lonesomest time of my life.'" She is simply not prepared for the kinds of changes wrought by her transplantation north:

"I don't know what all happened. Everything changed. It was hard to get to know folks up here, and I missed my people. I weren't used to so much white folks. The ones I seed before was something hateful, but they didn't come around too much. … Up north they was everywhere—nextdoor, downstairs, all over the streets—and colored folks few and far between. Northern colored folk was different too. Dicty-like. No better than whites for meanness. They could make you feel just as no-count, 'cept I didn't expect it from them."

     (93)

From this seemingly fragmented and hostile community, Pauline turns to day jobs in the homes of "nervous, pretentious" people and to the movies. Her attachment to the former is due in part to the fact that at the Fishers she can exercise the artistic sensibility that otherwise cannot find expression. As a child in Alabama and especially Kentucky, Pauline "liked, most of all, to arrange things. To line things up in rows—jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step, sticks, stones, leaves. … She missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons" (88-89). But it is not until her job at the Fishers that Pauline can again "arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows …. [At the Fisher's] shefound beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise. … Itwas her pleasure to stand in her kitchen at the end of a day and survey her handiwork" (101). Moreover, her job with the Fishers provides her with the semblance of acceptance and community she cannot find or create in her own home and neighborhood. They have given her the nickname she never had as a child and tell small anecdotes about her. Mr. Fisher says, "'I would rather sell her blueberry cobblers than real estate'" (101). Finally, it is easier for Pauline to ignore the fact that both the name and the anecdotes are condescending and exemplative of her subordinate, and ultimately outsider, status in the Fisher household (as evidenced when Claudia feels "the familiar violence" rise at the little pink girl's question "'Where's Polly?'" [86]) than to do without the "power, praise, and luxury" (101) she finds there.

The other place she finds this "power, praise, and luxury" is, of course, the movies, and, unfortunately, it is to them that Pauline turns for help and validation rather than the few black women she has met in Lorain who, "with their goading glances and private snickers," were merely "amused" by her and her loneliness (94).³ It is at the movies that Pauline learns to equate "physical beauty and virtue," where she "stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap." As she watches "'white men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses'" (97), Pauline finds it increasingly difficult to return to her own life and, as a result, "more and more … neglected her house, her children, her man" (101). Like the Dick-and-Jane story, Pauline's movies continuously present her with a life, again presumably ideal, which she does not now have and which she has little, if any, chance of ever enjoying in any capacity other than that of "the ideal servant" (101).⁴ In the absence of alternate images which might validate and endorse a kind of virtue not tied to physical beauty or ones offering competing definitions of beauty itself, and in the absence of a network of family and friends, especially women friends, whose own lives would provide a differing model and the context in which to erect her own, Pauline succumbs to the "simple pleasure" of "black-and-white images projected through a ray of light" and "curtailing freedom in every way" (97).

Images projected on the screen and mass-produced items curtail freedom in other, less obvious and brutal ways as well, although the effects can be due as much to what is not seen or experienced as to what is. Claudia, for example, fosters a brutal hatred for her white baby dolls not just because they don't look like her but because the gift of them is supposed to replace and somehow improve upon what she would really prefer for Christmas: the experience of sitting "on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with [her] lap full of lilacs and [listening] to Big Papa play his violin for [her] alone" (21). Instead of family interaction—and the touching, playing, and ritual storytelling that might accompany it—Claudia is supposed to pretend to be the mother of this "thing" dressed in "starched gauze or lace" and sporting a "bone-cold head" (20).

Similarly, Claudia hates Shirley Temple well enough because her socks stay up, but what really gets her is the presence in the films of Bojangles. This is the outrage: the rewriting of either a historical moment (the Civil War) or interpersonal relationship (an orphaned child and benevolent older friend) with her part edited or bleached out so that those few images of African-American life afforded space on the big screen are put there not as evidence or proof of the experience itself, but as a tactic for further erasure, denial, or revisioning of just that experience. Instead of the ideologically opportune sight of an older black man "soft-shoeing it and chuckling" harmlessly, aimlessly, with a little white girl, the world should be seeing her, Claudia, socks around her ankles, "enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing" (19) with her friend, uncle, daddy Bojangles.

It does not, however, and Morrison signals the effects of these oversights—of supplanting or having supplanted both one's appearance and one's history and culture—repeatedly in The Bluest Eye in details of sexuality, especially women's but, as the life-stories of Cholly and Soaphead indicate, not exclusively so. Mr. Henry, for example, when first moving into the MacTeers' home, greets Claudia and Frieda with, "'You must be Greta Garbo, and you must be Ginger Rogers'" (17), thus reducing them to type in a kind of objectification which, in part, will make it easier for him later to molest Frieda. He follows this greeting with a gift of money, a gesture repeated later when he wants them out of the house so he can entertain two of the more colorful "members of [his] Bible class" (65), China and the Maginot Line. The exchange of money and the objectification of women as types converge here in such a way as to align his interaction with the two women and with Frieda and Claudia under the heading of prostitution.

The incident with Mr. Henry suggests one way the mass circulation of images of "femininity" negatively affects women in the area of sexuality by negatively affecting the attitudes and thus behavior of the people with whom they interact. The Bluest Eye, however, documents further the effect of those images on women themselves on the level of the body and in terms of how they understand and experience their own sexuality. For Pauline, for example, sexual pleasure depends entirely on the ability to "'feel a power'" (103) that comes from a sense of herself as desirable. In bed with Cholly, she thinks,

"I know he wants me to come first. But I can't. Not until he does. Not until I feel him loving me. Just me. … Not until I know that my flesh is all that be on his mind. … Not until he has let goof all he has, and give it to me …. When he does, I feel a power …. I be strong enough, pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me come."

     (103)

Unfortunately, Pauline defines strength, beauty, and youth solely in the terms she's learned from film; thus, as the possibility of ever attaining them is fore-closed, so too is sexual pleasure. Confident that "'my Maker will take care of me,'" (104), Pauline reassures herself that "' … it don't make no difference about this old earth,'" (104), thus hoping to cash in on one dream in exchange for relinquishing another.

Sexual pleasure is no longer even a consideration for Geraldine and the other "sugar-brown girls" who have lost "the dreadful funkiness of passion … of nature … of the wide range of human emotions" (68) almost as a consequence of moving north and away from family and towns like Mobile, Aiken, and Nagadoches, whose names "make you think of love" (67) if the girls themselves do not. Geraldine's desire to eschew inappropriate manifestations of black American culture by maintaining the "line between colored and nigger" (71) and thus to effect a bland respectability is connected in her portrait with a body that can give itself only "sparingly and partially": "She stiffens when she feels one of her paper curlers coming undone from the activity of love. … She hopes he will not sweat—the damp may get into her hair" (69).

Geraldine's concern is focused on her hair, that part of her appearance which, along with her fair skin, she can control and adapt most easily to standards of white beauty. One is reminded at this point of Pauline and her Jean Harlow hairstyle or China who, with a flick of the wrist, converts herself from one feminine type to another: One minute she has the "surprised eyebrows" and "cupid-bow mouth" of a starlet, the next the "Oriental eyebrows" and "evilly slashed mouth" (49) of a femme fatale. Pecola, however, whose ugliness "came from conviction," has no such physical qualities capable of altering and thus redeeming what she and her family perceive as her "relentlessly and aggressively" ugly appearance (34). Pecola, in fact, is all sign: To see her body is to know already everything about her or at least everything her culture deems important about her.

The depiction of her sexuality is thus correspondingly total: Pecola gets off eating candy—nothing new here, except that, for her, orgasm takes the form of a curious transubstantiation and, ultimately, transformation: "To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane" (43). Unlike Claudia who cannot yet, in the words of Susan Willis, "imagine herself miraculously translated into the body of Shirley Temple so as to vicariously live white experience as a negation of blackness" ("I Shop" 174), Pecola not only can, but, from this denial of self and substitution of the store-bought image, actually gets in the process "nine lovely orgasms with Mary Jane" (43). Whatever pleasurable resources Pecola's own body may harbor are available to her now—and this at the early age of eleven—only to the extent that, like her mother, she can experience them as the alienated effects of another woman's body.

Most of the time, however, she cannot do this and, rather than reconcile herself, as her mother has, to the prospect of greater glory and bigger rainbows in the next world, Pecola opts instead to make a life of her own erasure and annihilation. As her parents and brother fight in the next room, she prays to God to "'make me disappear'" and then performs the meditation to do so:

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. … The legs all at once. It washardest 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.

     (39)

The inability to make her eyes go away prompts Pecola's final disappearing act: The ugliness of her entire body is dissolved in and absolved by the blue eyes only she and her new "friend" can see. Her breakdown at the end of the novel is the last in a series of instances in which boundaries marking the space between inside and outside, self and other, sense and nonsense are broken, removed, or simply no longer perform their tasks. As the novel's prefatory Dick-and-Jane story turns from order to chaos with the gradual removal of punctuation and spacing, so too does the erasure of Pecola's body and sexuality lead to her madness and isolation.

It seems to me that it is at this point that we can begin to make sense of Morrison's notion of "disinterested violence" which she introduces first with Claudia and elaborates upon in her depiction of the three prostitutes, Cholly, and, by implication, the black community in Lorain, Ohio. After systematically destroying her baby dolls in order to "discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped [her]" (20) and then, finding this tactic unproductive, transferring "the same impulses to little white girls," Claudia "learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested" (22). Michael Awkward argues that what Claudia feels is "repulsive" here is her own "failure to accept without question the standards of white America" (72), a reading which, while it has a lot of general application in the novel, seems to mis-direct the focus of this passage. Claudia's self-incrimination is, it seems to me, more in response to her failure to feel enough for her white victims, to have the interest that would make her actions meaningful. Willis claims that Claudia's realization "that violence against whites runs the risk of being 'disinterested' … suggests that white people are little more than abstractions … [that] all are reified subjects" ("I Shop" 174). What Claudia realizes is that her violence cannot help but be disinterested, since even the little girls she thinks she wants to dismember are finally only representatives to her of the system she resents and wants to dismantle. "Disinterestedness," then, is the result of not seeing individual people and how their actions combine in ways affecting you; "disinterested violence," the prelude to "adjustment without improvement" (22), is possible precisely when the specificity of bodies, places, and histories is erased, as it is by commodity culture and those living under its aegis.

Though charming in their own way, China, Poland, and the Maginot Line are also condemned in The Bluest Eye for just this kind of refusal to take into account difference and history:

Except for Marie's fabled love for Dewey Prince, these women hated men, all men, without shame, apology, or discrimination. They abused their visitors with scorn grown mechanical from use. Black men, white men, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Jews, Poles, whatever—all were inadequate and weak, all came under jaundiced eyes and were the recipients of their disinterested wrath.

     (47-48; emphasis added)

Neither their hatred for men and the "mechanical" violence it spawns⁵ nor Marie's love for Pecola, however, has much effect on either their own standing in the community or Pecola's life. Any power moves they think they are making by indiscriminately hating all men are probably negated by the fact that they do not take into account differences in race and class, factors supremely affecting their position vis à vis men, especially in their profession. Their kindness to Pecola is similarly disinterested in that, by failing to see her and her situation clearly, the three, in the words of Michele Wallace, "fail to understand victimization or the fact that [she] is in danger" (65).⁶

This failure is finally the community's as a whole, a fact Morrison repeatedly suggests by illustrating the extent to which as a group it too has "absorbed in full" dominant standards of value and beauty with little or no inspection of or reflection on the effects to itself or to its individual members. In her conversation with friends, Mrs. MacTeer jokes about "'Aunt Julia … still trotting up and down Sixteenth Street talking to herself'" (15). The significance of this remark is not really apparent until the depiction of Pecola's breakdown is complete, and we are presented with a similar image of Pecola "walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear" (158). Lorain sees Aunt Julia as "'that old hag floating by in that bonnet'" whom the County will not "'take'" and whom the sight of will "'scare the living shit out of you'" (15). One of the women attributes Aunt Julia's fate to senility, but the designation "still trotting" implies she has been out there a while. Their inability or refusal to make sense of her actions, to put them in context, foreshadows their eventual scapegoating of Pecola and suggests that the town has an undiagnosed and unexamined history of producing women like Pecola, that her experience—and the extremity of it—is not an isolated instance.

Morrison characterizes Cholly's disinterestedness as the condition of being "dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent" (125). Her depiction of him traces the source of this freedom to his loss of mother, father, community, and home and to the feeling that the history of people and events extends as far as his interest in them:

… Cholly was truly free. Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him.

     (126)

Paradoxically, this is a state that allows him to see Pecola more clearly than probably anyone else in the book (with the exception of the adult Claudia) and to love her in spite of what he sees, but does not allow him to interact with her in any form other than "reactions based on what he felt at the moment." Cholly sees his daughter washing dishes and sees also, in her stooped frame, "an accusation" against him. Unlike others in town, though, he sees "her young, helpless, hopeless presence" (127) and "loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her" (159) where no one else would.

In the four examples cited above, disinterestedness is occasioned specifically by the inability to place people and events into contexts that would flesh out experience and thus make obvious the limitations of present actions or beliefs. It becomes steadily more difficult for characters in The Bluest Eye to do this because they are either separated from the supportive networks that would encourage it and (or as a result) because their placement in American culture does not sanction accurate representations of what that context would be. The result is a community of individuals who are, at times, painfully alienated from each other as each is divided within him- or herself. Pecola's split consciousness at the end of the novel is a literal representation of this doubleness⁷; it affects other characters also as distortions or denials of self, but denials and distortions approved and fostered in popular iconographic representation.

An explicit formal project of The Bluest Eye, then, is to rewrite the specific stories, histories, and bodies of African-Americans which are quickly being made invisible in commodity culture and which, if written, will make disinterestedness and its unproductive or damaging results impossible. Morrison acknowledges this project in so many words when she says she wrote The Bluest Eye because she wanted to read the story it would tell. The novel's shifting focus and point of view, its willingness to let different people speak and not to reconcile contradictory explanations and claims where they arise is indicative of Morrison's preference for telling all sides of Pecola's story rather than hammering home one of them. In this, she is like other black women writers who, according to Mae Henderson, "through their intimacy with the discourses of other(s) … weave into their work competing and complementary discourses—that seek to adjudicate competing claims and witness concerns" (23). It would be to miss the point, then, to read The Bluest Eye looking to assign blame. One of the great virtues of the book is its capacity to empathize and to allow its readers to empathize—something not possible in the absence of history and context—with all of its characters, perhaps especially those who seem most irredeemable: Cholly, Soaphead Church, Pauline.

Finally, though, since The Bluest Eye and this project of representing African-Americans focuses most specifically on the histories and bodies of black women, the novel's alternating perspective reproduces formally their complicated subjectivity in particular. As she shifts from young girl to older woman to black man to omniscient narrator, Morrison seems to move her examination of Pecola's life back and forth from the axis of race to that of gender. This process allows her in turn to move through the story as both insider and outsider in what Mae Henderson calls a "contestorial dialogue" involving "the hegemonic dominant and subdominant or [after Rachel Blau Du Plessis] 'ambiguously (non) hegemonic' discourses" (20). At one point Morrison writes as a black person among other black people speaking to a white audience, at others as a woman among women speaking to men. The movement between these positions allows Morrison to "see the other, but also to see what the other cannot see, and to use this insight to enrich both our own and the other's understanding" (36). Of course these categories can be separated only artificially since, as Valerie Smith notes, "the meaning of blackness in this country shapes profoundly the experience of gender, just as the conditions of womanhood affect ineluctably the experience of race" (47). By doing so here, however, Toni Morrison enables the reader to witness structurally the complexity of black female subjectivity as she writes it back into a culture whose social and economic mechanisms would otherwise try to write it out.

Notes

1. For more on this analysis of mass culture see, among many others, Adorno and Horkheimer's work in Arato and Gebhardt, Fredrick Jameson, or Tonia Modleski.
2. I take it, then, that Maureen's guess is correct, that Pauline does name Pecola after the movie's black daughter and even then getting it wrong: The daughter's name is Peola, not Pecola.
3. It is not the case, however, that the kind of community support Pauline needs is simply unavailable in Lorain. When Cholly burns their apartment, for example, Pauline's own daughter Pecola is taken in immediately by the MacTeers and, in spite of Mrs. MacTeer's raving about the amount of milk Pecola drinks, is cared for as a matter of course.
4. Morrison's reference to Imitation of Life, then, is quite specific and damning: Both versions of the film finally take as a given the black woman's status as servant in the white woman's household. A recent television screening of the original version was introduced optimistically as the story of two women who must "hide their friendship" by masquerading as mistress and maid. While Sirk's version problematizes as it foregrounds the story's racial thematics, it counteracts much of its own insightfulness by concluding with an image of the fair-skinned black daughter being reincorporated into the white family, sans mama and the "problems" her definite blackness presented.
5. "On one occasion the town well knew, they lured a Jew up the stairs, pounced on him, all three, held him up by the heels, shook everything out of his pants pockets, and threw him out of the window" (48).
6. Wallace also argues that "in distinct contrast to the variety of maternal images in the book, these women neither nurture nor protect children" and that, by including them in the text, Morrison "seems to question the self-involvement of traditional modes of black female creativity, as well as [pose] a general critique of more recent feminist strategies of 'manhating' and 'self-love'" (65). I am not sure what exactly she means by "the self-involvement of traditional modes of black female creativity," but I think the characterization of the three prostitutes is more complex and ultimately more endearing than Wallace admits. When it comes time to name who "loves" Pecola, for example, the narrator—now definitively Claudia—cites Cholly and the Maginot Line.
7. Awkward argues that Pecola's "schizophrenia" is a "coded intertext of W. E. B. Du Bois's discussion of a Black 'double consciousness' in The Souls of Black Folk" (12).

Works Cited

Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1982.

Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Haug, Frigga, ed. Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. Trans. Erica Carter. London: Verso, 1987.

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Wall 16-37.

Jameson, Fredric. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text 1 (1979): 135-48.

Modleski, Tonya. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge, 1984.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square, 1970.

Smith, Valerie. "Black Feminist Theory and Other Representations of the Other." Wall 38-57.

Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.

Wallace, Michele. "Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity." Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 52-67.

Willis, Susan. "I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?" Wall 173-95.

——. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Patrice Cormier-Hamilton (essay date winter 1994)

SOURCE: Cormier-Hamilton, Patrice. "Black Naturalism and Toni Morrison: The Journey Away from Self-Love in The Bluest Eye." MELUS 19, no. 4 (winter 1994): 109-26.

[In the following essay, Cormier-Hamilton utilizes Morrison's text in The Bluest Eye to exemplify the theory of "black naturalism."]

We have the record of kings and gentlemen ad nauseam and in stupid detail; but of the common run of human beings, and particularly of the half or wholly submerged working group, the world has saved all too little of authentic record and tried to forget or ignore even the little saved.

W. E. B. DuBois

As an English instructor using a multi-cultural reader that questions many of the foundations of American society, including equal opportunity, I have sometimes heard the rumblings of students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who have become weary of reading about a minority "that would rather complain about conditions rather than work sincerely for the American Dream." During class one African American student offered this response to "Symbiosis," an excerpt from a play [The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe] dealing with the problems of assimilation and the different roles black Americans assume in our society: "At first this book really irritated me. I mean, I get tired of hearing how blacks are victimized and oppressed all the time. I just get sick of it, y'know? But after I read this I started to think, yeah, he's right. I mean, this stuff is still happening. Minorities still feel they've got to deny their identities in order to get ahead. So yeah, sometimes I get a little sick of it, but I guess we still need to deal with it."

Although my students were unaware of it, in a sense what they were questioning from the standpoint of literary criticism is not only the theory of postmodernism with its emphasis on race, class and gender, but the theory of naturalism as well: the idea that one's social and physical environments can drastically affect one's nature and potential for surviving and succeeding in this world. In this article, I will explore Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye from a naturalistic perspective; however, while doing so I will propose that because Morrison's novels are distinctly black and examine distinctly black issues, we must expand or deconstruct the traditional theory of naturalism to deal adequately with the African American experience: a theory I refer to as "black naturalism."

But before I do this I think it is important to discuss why it is worth our while to "dig up" naturalism once again to explore not only earlier black novels but contemporary works as well. In Max's stirring defense of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son, he warns us to "remember that men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread! And they can murder for it, too!" (366). As the riots in Los Angeles and in cities across the country indicate, men and women are still forced to struggle for self-realization and one's environment remains a key factor in influencing and limiting an individual's potentials and aspirations. Is the cycle of poverty, hopelessness, and violence in South Central today significantly different from the ghetto streets of Harlem Ann Petry described in The Street? Throughout her naturalistic novel 116th Street is a living, breathing, menacing force that attempts to reduce Min to a whispering shadow and to twist Jones into a crazed wolf who has lived in basements too long; for Petry, filthy tenement-lined streets such as these are more than symbols of oppression, inequality and racism—they are the instruments themselves.

Does this mean that by focusing on the influences of environment in literature we are labeling our main characters helpless victims? Absolutely not. In The Street Lutie Johnson fights the ghetto with a determination that can only be called heroic; her tragedy is that she loses her battle against her surroundings, but her triumph consists of her willingness to break the boundaries that both white and black society had created for African American women in the 1940s. In Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson," though Silvia is deeply affected by Miss Moore's lesson of "where we are is who we are," she remains undaunted and vows "ain't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin" (94,96).

During an interview of Alice Childress and Toni Morrison conducted by Black Creation magazine, Childress claims "that all black writers, whether they intended to or not have been writing about not being free. Always—from the beginning of American right up to now" (Walker and Weathers 92). The theory of naturalism is also about the primal struggle for freedom—freedom to develop and realize all of the possibilities of our souls and intellects within a societal framework. One cannot think of African Americans without considering society's insidious racist attempts to retain black men and women as cheap sources of labor, whether enslaved or ostensibly "free."

A universal characteristic of Morrison's published novels has been her depiction of male and female protagonists failing or succeeding on the difficult journey to freedom through self-awareness. Of course, the struggle to realize one's identity has surfaced repeatedly in literature; however, Morrison's steadfast concentration on the importance of the past indicates that for her, self-realization for African Americans can only be achieved through an active acknowledgement of one's cultural past. Only by understanding and accepting the past can African Americans achieve a psychological wholeness in the present and strengthen their power as a race in the future.

In Specifying, Susan Willis captures very well the importance of Morrison's themes and the highly charged atmosphere of her novels:

There is a sense of urgency in Morrison's writing, produced by the realization that a great deal is at stake. The novels may focus on individual characters like Milkman and Jadine, but the salvation of individuals is not the point. Rather, these individuals struggling to reclaim or redefine themselves, are portrayed as epiphenomenal to community and culture, and it is the strength and continuity of the black cultural heritage as a whole that is at stake and being tested.

     (93-94)

What is "at stake" in Morrison's novels and in black fiction in general is a consistent emphasis on the need to resist forces stemming from society which may serve to destroy "continuity of the black cultural heritage" by a conscious embracing of the past combined with a concurrent quest for identity. When analyzing this pattern of creative resistance of outside forces and rebuilding of the self in Morrison's novels, one can perceive a distinct echo of naturalism. The word "echo" is significant because Morrison's novels are not strictly naturalistic. While Morrison's works do exhibit naturalistic tendencies, she presents them in a new way, illustrating different challenges specific to minorities and offering alternate ways of dealing with these challenges. Morrison's protagonists face a world that is more complex, oppressive, and destructive than either Theodore Dreiser's Carrie or John Steinbeck's Tom Joad because Morrison's protagonists must battle against intraracism and interracism as well as poverty and sexism.

In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction, Keith E. Byerman claims that historically African American writers have not adopted an existing European or American literary form without significantly changing it to correspond to the black experience:

From Phillis Wheatley's early verses through the moralistic style of the slave narratives and Wright's naturalism to Ellison's symbolic and experimental novel, black writers have consistently turned European and white American forms and techniques to their own purposes, just as blacks in general have changed the religious and social institutions of the dominant culture to meet their special needs.

     (41)

Furthermore, this "adapting of nonblack forms to black materials" is not always a conscious or even a voluntary act, but an inevitable one rising from the differing life experiences of African Americans due not only to the existence of racism throughout the history of this country, but to African American cultural heritage, folklore, and mores (Byerman 41). In his comprehensive text, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Bernard Bell argues that dating back to W. E. B. DuBois there has been a history of African American fiction that can be identified as naturalistic. Bell also clearly supports an ethnic deconstruction of the traditional theory when he claims that when naturalism appears in black fiction it has been "refracted through the double-consciousness and double vision of black American novelists" (81).

However, although Bell does use the term "black naturalism" once when describing the naturalism of the 1940s, he does not appear to propose a new genre with this title. Moreover, my definition of naturalism in African American fiction is more liberal than the naturalism Bell describes and includes literature that could also be characterized as having strong pastoral, romantic, mythic or folkloric elements. In the following analysis of The Bluest Eye, I will attempt to illustrate that the naturalism in African American fiction has been "adapted" and altered to such a significant extent to justify a new literary genre that includes the following themes: the importance of cultural heritage or what Bell calls "ancestralism," the problem of assimilation, the conflict between self and community, the psychological and economical barriers created by racism and the resulting quest for wholeness that is essential for overcoming these obstacles.

Before exploring black naturalism in Toni Morrison's novel, it would perhaps be appropriate to briefly review the existing theory of naturalism in general. As many critics of naturalism, including Charles Walcutt, have noted, naturalism is an elusive genre, difficult to define. In his dissertation, Paul Baker Civello states that while naturalism has experienced significant transformations in its modern and postmodern forms, the root causes of the emergence of naturalism remain consistent:

[naturalism] arises from the collapse of man's conception of an order in the material world—an order that had formerly imbued that world with meaning. As a result, a rift opens between the self and the material world, now perceived as one of meaningless, indifferent force. Naturalism depicts this rift, and points toward a resolution of it.

     (2)

As Civello and others have noted, for early American naturalists such as Norris, Crane and Drieser, the dissolution of "man's conception of order" was a reaction to Darwin's theory of evolution and the questions it raised concerning the existence of an ordered universe created by a benevolent God. This new perception of the world as "indifferent" and amoral created a psychological conflict between the self and nature, dramatized by Vandover's eventual insanity in Norris's naturalistic novel Vandover and the Brute. Intellectuals of the late nineteenth century could no longer view nature as a reflection of one's spiritual and rational being, could no longer feel secure in an inherent biological, and therefore moral, superiority to the other creatures inhabiting earth, thus creating the "rift" Civello refers to between man and an impersonal nature of indiscriminate force. For Civello, later naturalists like Hemingway also felt isolated from the environment, but the cause of the rift was World War I rather than Darwinism.

Like Civello, Donald Pizer also focuses on how naturalism has evolved as society has changed and grown. Yet, despite its transformations, Pizer claims that some naturalistic themes from the 1890s to the 1950s remain essentially the same: (1) the idea of the individual thwarted by natural or societal forces, (2) the emergence of the "common man" as hero, (3) the benefits of community as protection against repressive societal influences, and (4) the ability to gain knowledge about oneself and one's world. Generally, perhaps the most well-known tenet of naturalism is its focus on the waste of an individual's potential due to "conditioning forces" from the environment. At last the struggles of common men and women who are propelled into a life of poverty were seen as not merely unfortunate, but as a tragedy. Another familiar theme of naturalism concerns the problem of knowledge. Although the Aristotelian tragic hero may fail to understand himself or his condition during his descent, he does in the end ascertain who he is and what has caused his fall; in contrast, early naturalistic fiction indicates that writers came to doubt that knowledge of oneself and one's reality was even possible (Pizer 6-7).

According to Pizer, in the 1930s the concept of wasted human potential evolved into a focus on the relationship between the mores of society and the individual. The perception of individuals being thwarted and oppressed by an elite group also included its opposite—that is, that a group, united together to protect their collective interests, can prevail. Naturalistic fiction in the 1930s such as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath included, then, a transformation from an inherent protection of oneself and one's family to an increased awareness of a responsibility to others, demonstrated when Rose of Sharon shares her mother's milk with a starving stranger (15). In the early twentieth century, characters in naturalistic fiction are not only prevented from realizing their capabilities, they are also frequently "wrenched by their desires or by other uncontrollable circumstances from their grooved but satisfying paths into the chaos of life 'outside'" (7). As naturalism evolved, writers also came to regard the issue of knowledge of the self differently, believing that knowledge of oneself and one's world was difficult but not impossible. In the 1940s and 1950s there arose a distinct distrust of society-formed groups—whether it be the army, the family, or the citizen committee. Largely in response to World War II, many traditional naturalistic authors believed that although the common man or woman is still thwarted by forces beyond control, the only protection or validation he or she can find lies not in the community but in the individual. If knowledge was at all possible, it could only be found through individual experience, though it may be self-destructive in nature (87).

It seems, then, that naturalism evolved from an exclusive reliance on community to an equally exclusive reliance on the self. It is in this breach between these two extremes that the theory and its evolution prove inadequate in dealing with black fiction. Black naturalism in Morrison's novels explores the challenges African Americans experience as they contend with the conflicting responsibilities to the self and the community that arise to a great extent due to racism. In order to gain a better understanding of the complex psychological struggles minorities experience as they attempt to resist influences from a dominant society, it might prove helpful to consider Elaine Showalter's discussion of the three phases that subcultures go through in their search for independence and cultural identity. In "The Female Tradition," Showalter describes the first phase a subculture or minority experiences as an extended period of "imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of art and its views on social roles" (1108). As a subculture values the unique characteristics of its identity and gains a better sense of its power, it progresses collectively into a second phase that includes a "protest against these standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights," while she describes a third phase as a period of "self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity" (1108). Although Showalter is discussing female "literary subcultures" in her article, I think we can profitably apply her phases of development to subcultures in general. Her analysis is perhaps especially helpful for those of us who are members of the dominant society and do not have a direct experience with the psychological pressures inherent in being a minority.

It is no coincidence, then, that all of Morrison's novels present characters striving with these same issues: the danger of indiscriminate internalization of white Western mores, the need for advocacy of African American values, and the importance of self-discovery. The first two stages Showalter describes elucidate the psychological barriers African Americans must travel through before they can acknowledge the past and consequently achieve self-identity. Thus a character like Paul D in Morrison's Beloved must unlock the steel box of memories in his chest before he is able to reap the benefits of self-love. For all minorities, the journey to self-realization is a journey of survival for the individual and for the race. When analyzing Morrison's characters, therefore, it is important to remember that along with combatting prejudice and injustice stemming from society, they are also overcoming inner struggles that are unique to a member of a minority. And because Morrison suggests a healing, vital process to freedom and selfawareness, her novels go beyond protest literature and well into the realms of art and black naturalism.

Morrison incorporates the naturalistic theme of the "waste of individual potential" due to environmental circumstances in many of her novels and most emphatically in the character of Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye. As many critics have noted, Pecola is victimized by a society that conditions her to believe that she is ugly and therefore worthless, because she doesn't epitomize white Western culture's idea of beauty. In her book Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, Barbara Christian seems to support a naturalistic interpretation with her claim that "Pecola's destiny is ultimately determined by the myth of beauty and goodness one culture has foisted on another" (153, emphasis added).

In both fiction and poetry in Western culture, outward beauty has often been an indication of inner virtue. Pecola believes that if her eyes were blue she would be pretty, virtuous, and loved: friends would play with her at recess, teachers would smile at Pecola the same way they smile at Maureen Peel, and even her parents might stop fighting because they would not want to "do bad things in front of those pretty eyes" (TBE [The Bluest Eye ] 40). For Pecola, beauty equals happiness, and it is difficult to fault a young girl for the misperception; certainly both white and black communities in her world seem to support the idea. Maureen Peel, "a high yellow dream child," is treated with respect and awe by students and teachers alike not only because of her economical superiority, but because of her light skin, her brown hair, her green eyes, her "whiteness" (TBE 52). For African Americans there is a direct relationship between economic gain and light skin: a black individual's chances of achieving both social and economic advantages is in direct correlation to his/her ability to correspond more closely to the images of beauty and common ideologies of the dominant society.

Morrison indicates how damaging careless adoption of Western values can be for African Americans in two memorable incidents. The first incident occurs when neighborhood boys dance "a macabre ballet" around Pecola, berating her for the darkness of her skin, singing "Black e mo. Black e mo" (TBE 55). In describing the episode, Claudia remarks that "it was the contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth" (TBE 55). In Pecola's clash with the group of boys, Morrison is demonstrating "how these ideas can invert the natural order of an entire culture," creating young men who feel an awful contempt for the color of their skin and, by implication, their culture (Christian 152-53, emphasis added). By subscribing to a false white standard of beauty, African Americans assist the repressive efforts of the majority culture and bury their identities, following an unhealthy path of self-hatred rather than self-love.

When the young black boys chant "Yadaddsleepsnekked" they chide Pecola for not being "civilized" according to Western standards, again indicating an unnatural inversion of values and an unwillingness to take pride in one's own culture in the black community. As Claudia listens to the boys, she recalls accidently glimpsing her own daddy naked one night as he passed her bedroom: "we had seen our own father naked and didn't care to be reminded of it and feel the shame brought on by the absence of shame" (TBE 59, emphasis added). Therefore, unlike some critics, I do not view the fact that Pecola saw Cholly nude as a foreshadowing of his later molestation. As Claudia and her sister lie with wide-open eyes in the dark after seeing their father, his nakedness remains in the room as a soothing "friendly-like" presence. Furthermore, Morrison herself indicates that even while the boys were harassing Pecola "their own father[s] had similarly relaxed habits" around the house—in ostracizing Pecola for looking black and having a black family with black mores, the boys censure their own cultural identities.

Pecola is an easy victim, responding with tears rather than insults because, like her mother, she has completely assimilated the values the majority culture presents in billboards, advertisements, and motion pictures. In studying Pecola from a psychological perspective, one can say that Pecola and much of her community are trapped in Showalter's first phase of growth for a subculture—"imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of art and its views on social roles" (1108, emphasis added).

Another incident Morrison provides to illustrate the debilitating effects of the infiltration of Western ideas on African Americans is the scene in which Pecola is expelled from the neat, orderly, and sterile house of Geraldine. By straightening their hair, clothespinning their noses and suppressing "the dreadful funkiness of passion" (TBE 64), these brown women from Mobile and Meridian have groomed away their identities with the hot comb of self-hatred. Although Junior tells his mother that Pecola killed the cat, Geraldine's strong reaction against Pecola goes far deeper than her cat's death. Geraldine calls Pecola a "nasty little black bitch" because Pecola reeks with the funkiness and the poverty Geraldine has so stridently avoided. As Geraldine stares at Pecola over the silky black back of her dead cat, she notes Pecola's soiled clothes, muddy shoes, slipping socks, and loosely plaited hair, despising the little girl for being poor and too black: "She had seen this little girl all of her life …. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. … And this one had settled in her house" (TBE 75).

As critics such as Otten and Willis have noted, young women like Geraldine who forever strive to expunge their blackness and "creep singly up into the major folds" (TBE 18) of mainstream white society continue the corruption of the white community by spawning a brown race that revers white standards indiscriminately, denying their ancestral heritage and denying their passionate natures, believing the myth broadcast by white society that black skin represents inferiority and bestiality.

In her novel, Morrison also demonstrates the forces in white society that eat away at Pecola's self-esteem and sense of self-worth with her encounter with Mr. Yacobowski. Pecola visits Mr. Yacobowski's store eagerly willing to spend her pennies on a handful of Mary Jane candies. Although Pecola is a paying customer, Mr. Yacobowski's glazed eyes betray a "total absence of human recognition" while his hand gingerly takes the pennies from the little girl's fist, careful not to brush her black skin (TBE 43). When Pecola leaves the candy store, she once again sees herself as ugly, and meaningless as a weed straining through a crack in the sidewalk. It is interesting to note that Gwendolyn Brooks's autobiographical character, Maud Martha, also envisions herself as a plain dandelion due to her too-dark skin: "it was hard to believe that a thing of only ordinary allurements—if the allurements of any flower could be said to be ordinary—was as easy to love as a thing of heart catching beauty" (qtd. in Washington 389). In Maud Martha's world, the "thing of heartcatching beauty" is represented by her sister Helen, a light-skinned girl.

As other critics have noted, Pecola's next gesture of eating the Mary Janes indicates her strong desire to lose her black identity in a transporting ecstasy of chewy caramel delight:

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane …. Smiling whiteface. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. … Toeatthe candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

     (TBE 43)

Therefore, in black naturalistic fiction, minority characters begin their struggle with the outside forces of society with the additional handicaps Showalter's stages of progression indicate. Although characters like Tom Joad were often compelled to fight malicious stereotypes such as "hick" and "Okie," they were never denied personhood, never overpowered by the vacuum of acknowledgement that Pecola experiences with Mr. Yacobowski or that Richard Wright experiences as a bellboy in a Southern hotel or as a worker who is forced to fight another "Black Boy" for the amusement of white managers. Tragically, both black and white communities unwittingly join forces to extinguish Pecola Breedlove's fledgling sense of self-worth, driving this little girl to her ultimate destination: the garbage heaps on the outskirts of town.

In The Bluest Eye there is a palpable condemnation for African Americans who sacrifice vulnerable members of their community to attain the benefits of assimilation into white society. In Down from the Mountaintop, Melissa Walker discusses the tragic waste of people like Pecola Breedlove and the communities who fail them:

Claudia acknowledges that she and others like her who have managed to rise above their origins use the Pecolas of the world to bolster their own sense of belonging in the mainstream. … The culpritsin the crimes against Pecola, then, are not just the social conditions that destroyed first her parents and then Pecola herself, but those within the black community who use the less fortunate to facilitate their own success in a racist society.

     (58)

Thus the white majority culture is both a direct and indirect suppressor, withholding money, power and prestige to turn blacks against blacks, creating an inverted and aberrant community, whose little boys and girls sing songs of self-hatred: "Black e mo! Black e mo!"

Not only is Pecola prevented from developing her nature and growing to her fullest potential, she is also wrested from existence "into the chaos of life" first when she is "put outdoors" and forced to live with Claudia and Frieda, and second when her father, Cholly Breedlove, rapes her. In the opening pages of the novel, Claudia describes the significance and horror of Pecola's plight: "Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror in life …. There is a difference between being put out and being put out doors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go …. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact" (TBE 18).

In The Bluest Eye Morrison does not exonerate Cholly Breedlove from committing his family to the outdoors or violating his daughter. Instead she presents some possible explanations of circumstances stemming from his environment that may have contributed to his actions and his nature. First, as previously stated, both black and white society have become aberrant; as long as one culture is allowed to dominate and exploit another, there will be unnatural acts such as Sethe killing her "already crawling" baby in Beloved and Cholly showing his confused love in the incestuous act of rape. When Cholly sees his daughter standing in the kitchen cleaning a frying pan, "her head to one side as though crouching from a permanent and unrelieved blow," he is filled with pity, rage and helplessness (TBE 127). Cholly feels pity because his daughter should be enjoying the freedom and innocence of childhood and cannot, largely due to racism; he feels rage because he unconsciously senses that economic disadvantages (a given in most African American experience at this time) and a life in a rundown storefront amongst battling parents have contributed to the "permanent and unrelieved blow" exhibited in her demeanor; he feels helpless because as an illiterate black man too long estranged from his family and his responsibilities, he does not know how to assuage Pecola's broken, "crouching" spirit. In a drunken, confused state, Cholly gropes for something to give his daughter to demonstrate his love and tenderness and return to himself a sense of self-respect. Therefore, like Bigger Thomas and many of the "grotesques" in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Cholly remains mute, helpless, and in turmoil, unable to communicate his changing feelings of tenderness and hatred.

In part, then, Cholly rapes Pecola to demonstrate his love: "He wanted to fuck her—tenderly" (TBE 128). But Cholly also does it because like many early naturalistic protagonists, he is driven by an inner force almost against his desires, a force he does not fully comprehend in his drunken, muddled brain to do this "wild and forbidden thing" that "excited him" (128). Two circumstances in Cholly's youth succeed in severing him from a connection with the rest of human nature and human morality: his mother's desertion prompted by strained economic conditions and the exploitation and humiliation he experienced at the hands of the two white hunters. The inner forces governing Cholly's behavior with his daughter are born from this dangerous disconnection and the corresponding rage and helplessness it has produced in Cholly Breedlove. When Pauline finds Pecola lying on the kitchen floor with her dingy underwear still hovering about her ankles, she beats Pecola, almost killing her. Thus Cholly's deranged act of love produces yet another terrifying, brutal blow in Pecola's young life, finally compelling her into madness.

It is worth noting that unlike naturalistic tragic figures, when Pecola is thrown "into the chaos of life 'outside,'" she does not fall from "midway"; her life is not on a "grooved but satisfying" path. Living in a grubby storefront, taunted and alienated by her classmates and either beaten or ignored by her parents, Pecola is a tragic figure who begins life at the bottom the moment her mother, brainwashed by the white movie industry, decides her daughter is irretrievably ugly: Pauline Breedlove "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" (TBE 97).

Sitting in the local cinema day after day, Pauline Breedlove dreams of looking like Jean Harlow, parting her hair on the side and pulling a curly lock over her forehead. When Pauline looses her front tooth, she realizes how terribly impossible and foolish her dream was. Pauline begins to hate herself, unconsciously believing the messages paraded on the silver screen—that only beautiful women like Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer deserve love and happiness. And when her daughter is born, regardless of Pecola's pretty head of hair and soft wet eyes, she sees Pecola as ugly too. Not only is Pauline's awful sense of self-worth passed on to her child, her impossible dream of blond blue-eyed beauty is passed on as well.

Samuels and Hudson-Weems claim that readers must not overlook Pecola's own responsibility for her abdication of freedom and descent into madness. The authors compare Pecola's passive reactions to situations of repression (such as the cruel attacks on Pecola's dark skin color by Maureen Peel and the neighborhood black boys) with Claudia, who welcomes an occasion to express her anger and scream insults. Samuels and Hudson-Weems argue that even children "must consider the direction of their lives" (22). The authors are correct when they claim that unlike Pecola, Claudia "is determined to overcome any definition of self that is externally ascribed" from the white or black community (22).

However, can one ignore the roots of Claudia's survival? Claudia was raised in a house where "love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup" coated her childhood (TBE 14). Claudia has never experienced being put "outdoors" or, that we know of, watched violent fights between her mother and father. Claudia does not live in a squalid storefront and her mother is not absent for much of the day, working as a maid. Claudia has been equipped with the shield of self-love to combat negative influences from black and white society—Pecola has not. Therefore, because she has developed in a less debilitating environment than Pecola Breedlove, an environment that encouraged Claudia to feel pride for herself, while still a young girl, Claudia has been able to move beyond Show-alter's stage one into a protest against the mores of the dominant society. And the adult Claudia we hear throughout the novel has progressed beyond stage two to the quest for identity indicated in stage three. When Claudia destroys her white doll with its glassy blue eyes, she demonstrates pride in her identity and the ability to understand, to some degree, the repressive values pervading her black community.

Samuels and Hudson-Weems are correct, however, in asserting that Pecola participates in her own destruction; Pecola is passive, folding into herself because she lacks the strength that love of oneself and one's identity provide to "stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets" as Claudia does (61). Yet it remains difficult to fault Pecola for a destructive lack of self-awareness and self-love. Pecola lives in a brutal world of rejection, deprived of even parental affection. When Pecola accidently topples a pan of blueberry pie she is forced to suffer as berry juice scalds her legs while her mother dispels the tears of the little white girl delicately dressed in pink and yellow: "In one gallop she was on Pecola, and with the back of her hand knocked her to the floor. Pecola slid in the pie juice, one leg folding under her" (TBE 86). The relationship between mother and daughter is so distant that Pecola invariably thinks of her mother as "Mrs. Breedlove," while the little white girl affectionately refers to Pauline Breedlove as "Polly." Pecola behaves like a victim because she has been victimized on three debilitating fronts from the moment of her birth: by the majority white society, by the black community, and later by herself.

Consequently, this cringing, retreating, alienated little girl never attains knowledge of herself or comprehends the complex forces that manipulate her reverence for blond-haired blue-eyed Shirley Temple figures. Pecola's final step into madness described by Claudia indicates the extent of Morrison's tragedy: "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (TBE 158). In desperation, then, Pecola creates a friend out of her imagination who will love her and assure her that she has the bluest eyes in all the world, bluer than the blue sky, bluer than "Alice-and-Jerry Story-book" eyes. With the demise of Pecola Breedlove, Morrison issues a direct and clear warning of the importance of self-love for African Americans.

Many critics have noted Claudia's reflection on the inability of some seeds to grow and bear fruit in the soil of her community: "The soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live" (TBE 160). What too many critics inevitably fail to print is Claudia's next sentence: "We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter." In her novel Morrison is claiming that the soil—or the societal environment—should not fail in nurturing flowers like Pecola Breedlove. The seed of Pecola was not planted too deeply—Pecola's soul was denied nourishment. Affection was never showered on Pecola's forlorn, yearning soul; therefore, the fruit of self-love was never realized. Without the strength of love for one's cultural identity, vulnerable members of minorities are in real danger of being starved by both black and white environments. Black naturalism encompasses this demand of the societal environment to nurture rather than starve African Americans, allowing them to flower to their fullest potentials.

Unfortunately, Morrison's message is still much needed for today's generation of African Americans. The preference among black children for white, blond, blue-eyed dolls is still all too prevalent; according to a study conducted by Hopson and Hopson of black preschoolers, 76 percent of the children selected a black doll as "bad," and 60 to 78 percent still chose a white doll over a black one. It seems, then, that little has changed since 1941 and Pecola's dreadful visit to Soaphead Church for the blessing of blue eyes: many African Americans still suffer from a dangerously low sense of self-esteem originating from their internalization of the prejudices of white culture. According to a survey conducted by the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center, "African Americans are more likely than whites to hold negative opinions of their fellow blacks' innate capabilities" (Mabry and Rogers 33). Morrison's novel reflects this dangerous internalization of racist values and the cycle of self-hatred passed on from parents to children it produces. By calling our attention to this self-perpetuating cycle in her first novel, Morrison is trying to eliminate the devastation of dandelions like Pecola Breedlove. Consequently, one significant tenet of black naturalism that does not exist in traditional naturalism includes this prevalent ringing call of warning concerning the dangers of internalization and the need for balance between self and society. Not only does this tenet function as a diagnosis of society's problems, it also serves as both a challenge and a stimulus for psychological and political change.

Having explored both the direct and indirect societal forces that serve to thwart characters like Pecola Breedlove, we are left with a few questions: what exactly is black naturalism, how is it significantly different from the existing theory, and how do earlier black naturalistic novels such as The Street and Native Son differ from the black naturalism we see in Morrison's novels? First, I think it is worth noting that writers of black naturalistic fiction were not responding to the same "root causes" Civello describes in his dissertation. Early African American naturalistic writers such as DuBois were more than likely not reacting to the rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century that so rocked the white American man's idea of an ordered universe. Although the Christian religion was highly important in many black households in the late nineteenth century, the crisis that influenced black novelists of this period was the idea of slavery and the continued oppression of the black race during Reconstruction. I think the injustices of white supremacy and racism served to alienate African Americans from their conceptual ideas of an ordered material world far more drastically than the theory of evolution and its affect on the Christian doctrine of creation. Moreover, while both African American and white characters may suffer psychologically in naturalistic fiction, the causes of their conditions are very different. As Civello notes, in Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute, having learned of his biological affinity with the animal kingdom and being unable to rely on the Bible for guidance, Vandover cannot reconcile his spiritual and moral ideals with his physical instinct, thus creating a psychological split between his physical and rational self that results in madness. However, as I have illustrated previously, in black naturalistic fiction, the source of psychological conflict for African Americans is interracism and intraracism. Therefore, although characters like Vandover and Pecola Breed-love both become insane, the foundations that motivate their falls are unrelated.

Furthermore, black novelists from the Harlem Renaissance were not responding to the devastating effects of World War I in the same ways as their white contemporaries. When blacks joined the fight to save democracy, many hoped that the freedom they were fighting for in Europe would become realized in the United States. Instead, in the 1920s there was a resurgence of Klan activity, lynching, and according to annual reports from the attorney general, peonage still existed "to a shocking extent" (Aptheker 193). Black soldiers returned to a country that sought to deemphasize the heroic roles African Americans played in Europe and "deprive them of gains in jobs and housing made during the war" (Bell 93). Therefore, because black naturalistic writers were responding to a very different "wasteland" devoid of racial justice, they created a significantly different literary form.

It is also worth noting that in African American fiction many black characters display a significantly different perception of nature than is exhibited in the traditional theory of naturalism. As Morrison indicates in her novels, nature is not merely an oppressive, indifferent force that seeks "to undermine [one's] dignity and against which [one] therefore had to struggle" (Civello 13). In Morrison's novels nature serves as both a reflector of humanity and as an indicator of future happiness and despair. Dead birds falling from the sky in Sula not only announce Sula's arrival but seem to indicate the approaching of hard times and the existence of disorder in "The Bottom." In addition, the intolerance of Pecola's community is reflected in the intolerance of the soil for growing marigolds that year. Black novelists perceive nature as neither benevolent and ordered, as viewed by the Romantics, nor as callous or objective as perceived by white naturalistic novelists like Jack London, because their perceptions arise from a different cultural background containing African myths, legends, spirituals, blues and tales.

A second important difference between black naturalism and the traditional theory concerns the issue of knowledge of the self and the nature of reality. In naturalistic fiction, the idea of knowledge was at first perceived as impossible and later perceived as possible but difficult to achieve. In black naturalism, however, knowledge is not only possible, it is essential for the physical and cultural survival of the race. For African Americans, self-knowledge and a strong sense of self-identity is the only protection against the various forms of both intraracism and interracism that still pervade our society. Unlike characters in traditional naturalism, in black naturalistic fiction this important sense of identity can only be achieved by embracing the past, as demonstrated by characters like Tar Baby 's Jadine Childs and Song of Solomon 's Milkman Dead. Until characters can travel beyond the first two stages of Showalter's study of subcultures—imitation and protest of the dominant society's mores—to a quest for identity, like Pecola Breedlove, they remain psychologically trapped and whipped by their societal environment. We have, therefore, a consistent pattern of the importance of the past for understanding the present and redefining the future not only in Morrison's novels, but in modern black fiction and poetry in general. The importance of embracing one's cultural heritage does not appear in traditional naturalism mainly because it is not essential for members of a dominant society to make an effort to embrace an identity or a past: first, because quite often their collective past is not filled with a sanctioned, long-term pattern of persecution; and second, because society has not made a concerted effort to appropriate or annihilate their cultures and collective histories.

This necessary embracing of the past in black naturalism presents an interesting question: Can black novels that fail to offer this solution be considered as members of the black naturalism genre? When analyzing Native Son Bell states that although Wright provided a great service in bringing the harsh light of naturalism to the problems facing blacks in the 1930s, he fails to indicate the importance of "black folk culture as a way of maintaining or changing arrangements of status, power, and identity in a hostile environment" (165). According to Bell, many black readers including James Baldwin "apparently knew that white oppression, even during slavery, was never absolute in its control over the intragroup lives of black Americans, who, from the slave quarters to the urban ghettos, have carried with them a system of values and rituals that has enabled them to sustain their humanity" (165). Therefore, do earlier naturalistic novels like Native Son and The Street fit into this new genre I have outlined? I think we can say that these novels do qualify as part of black naturalism but with the stipulation that they exhibit characters (and perhaps authors) who are trapped in Showalter's second stage of protest against the dominant society.

One can also ask the same question about novels from authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Although Bell does not label these novels as naturalistic, he uses the rhetoric of naturalism to describe a common quest shared by novels of the New Negro: "[the quest] was for the resolution of the psychological and social dilemma of the modern black American, for an affirmation of the human spirit over the forces that threatened its integrity and development" (115, emphasis added). Furthermore, when discussing the idea of ancestralism in romantic fiction, Bell also uses the language of naturalism—writers look to the past when their souls are "under siege by destructive forces" (114). I would argue that due to the extensive influence of societal environments on African Americans due largely to racism, although many black novels may be categorized as romantic, folkloric, or pastoral, they can also be categorized as examples of black naturalism as long as characters are striving against conditions that threaten their "integrity" while seeking to gain self-awareness as a "modern black American."

In black naturalism we are also confronted with the problem of assimilation with characters like Helen Wright, Geraldine, and Jadine Childs, who, by denying their black ancestral culture, have risen both socially and economically in mainstream society. In introducing members of the black bourgeoisie, Morrison explores two challenges African Americans face: first, the inherent difficulty all minorities have in assimilating into a dominant society without betraying one's race; and second, the danger of alienation from oneself and one's past due to this betrayal. For all minorities, a certain amount of assimilation is important: one must learn the language and the customs of an adopted society in order to function successfully within it. The difficulty occurs when individuals over-assimilate to ride the road to material success, power or societal acceptance. This is distinctly a minority issue and cannot be found in traditional naturalism. And unlike other minorities, blacks often experience a greater desire to assimilate because of a stronger sense of alienation instilled in them by white society due to the color line.

In an interview with Judith Paterson, Maya Angelou sounds remarkably like the fictional, young, courageous Sylvia from "The Lesson" when she states, "I will not allow anybody to minimize my life, not anybody, not a living soul—nobody, no lover, no mother, no son, no boss, no President, nobody" (119). Judging from her many accomplishments indicated in her autobiographical novels, Angelou seems to have provided ample proof to support her statement. Yet, as she affirms in an interview with Bill Moyers, struggling for one's freedom is a "difficult" and "perpetual" effort (19). One cannot rise above the forces that seek to "minimize" our lives—whether it be our lover or our President—unless one makes a conscious effort to understand and acknowledge them. For all races and for all individuals, it is critical to fully comprehend how society influences our values and beliefs—only after fully understanding the influences (both positive and negative) that touch and shape our lives can we strive to combat them and grow to our fullest potential.

Works Cited

Aptheker, Herbert. Afro-American History: The Modern Era. Secaucus: Citadel, 1971.

Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love. New York: Random House, 1972.

Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: Massachusetts U P, 1987.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. "The Courtship and Motherhood of Maud Martha" from Maud Martha (1953). Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960. Ed. Mary Helen Washington. New York: Doubleday, 1987. 406-28.

Byerman, Keith E. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.

Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport: Greenwood, 1980.

Civello, Paul Baker. "American Literary Naturalism and Its Modern and Postmodern Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, and Don DeLillo." Diss. U of California, Los Angeles, 1991.

Mabry, Marcus, and Patrick Rogers. "Bias Begins at Home." Newsweek 5 Aug. 1991: 33.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1987.

——. The Bluest Eye. New York: Pocket Books, 1970.

——. "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

Moyers, Bill. "A Conversation with Maya Angelou." Conversations with Maya Angelou. Ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot. Jackson: Mississippi U P, 1989.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.

Patterson, Judith. "Interview: Maya Angelou." Conversations with Maya Angelou. Ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1989.

Pizer, Donald. Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois, 1982.

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Showalter, Elaine. "The Female Tradition." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.

Walker, Jim, and Diane Weathers, eds. "Conversations with Alice Childress and Toni Morrison." Black Creation (1974-75): 90-92.

Walker, Melissa. Down from the Mountaintop. New Haven: Yale U P, 1991.

Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women: 1860-1960. New York: Anchor, 1987.

Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1940.

James Buchan (essay date 1 January 1994)

SOURCE: Buchan, James. "The Blues and the Bluest." Spectator 272, no. 8634 (1 January 1994): 20-1.

[In the following essay, Buchan offers a critical reading of Morrison's oeuvre, paying particular attention to The Bluest Eye.]

In her first novel, which was published in the United States in 1970, Toni Morrison sets out her store. The book, which is very good, is called The Bluest Eye and tells the story of a young black girl who goes to a quack magician for blue eyes:

Of all the wishes people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.

In this novel, which is set in Toni Morrison's home-town of Lorain, just west of Cleveland, Ohio, the characters are never labelled as black except in their longing for whiteness; or in a sort of ugliness or deformity which they seem to have inherited not from God—there is no God in Ms Morrison's fiction, only church—but from an obscure and unfortunate history.

In the six novels Ms Morrison has published since 1970, the characters are always fussing with their blackness, the exact colour of their skin, or the crinkliness or straightness of their hair: cosmetics of various sorts play a large role in her fiction. Ms Morrison, who even quotes Gobineau at one point, is the most racially conscious writer I have ever encountered.

To be black in a northern US city is for her a fallen condition, perplexing, violent, mad, desperate and bad. The origins of this condition lie some distance to the south and at some moment in the past: all her books include some form of journey to the South and into history, most memorably in Sula, where a genteel Ohio lady, returning to visit her dying grandmother in New Orleans by train in 1920, discovers the southern restroom:

At Meridian the women got out with their children. While Helene looked about the tiny stationhouse for a door that said COLORED WOMEN, the other woman stalked off to a field of high grass on the far side of the track.

These southern journeys, actual or in what Sethe in Beloved calls 'rememory', always start as back eddies in the narrative stream but eventually engulf it. At the risk of sounding high-falutin', I'd say that United States literature has an east-west orientation: either westwards to a receding frontier (Turner, Parkman, Steinbeck) or eastwards to Europe (late Hawthorne, Henry James). Toni Morrison, like the blues singers and jazz musicians she admires, works on a north-south axis. This is an innovation and was presumably the reason why the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. The politically correct have no notion of art except as consolation but we should demand more. I read these books in their handsome new British edition to see whether Toni Morrison was not simply worthy, but good.

Already, in The Bluest Eye, you can see Ms Morrison's strengths and weaknesses: wonderful dialogue, which if it wasn't the authentic speech of blacks in lakeside Ohio in the 1940s, damn well ought to have been; a domesticity so full of conviction it never slips into genre; a feeling for American nature both romantic and precise; and a tendency to flashiness, bombast, spaciness and, very occasionally, incoherence.

In Sula, published in 1973, we are already running into problems. The location has lost its precision, and there are passages of that portentous whimsy known to its admirers as magic realism: plagues of robins, spells, dreams, birthmarks, identical children, and a resolution of the narrative nicked from The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is true that Toni Morrison is only a generation away from the most acute superstition, but she herself is a professor at Princeton and it shows. Also, and more seriously, she is starting to preach: that is, to propel the novel through assertion rather than the dynamics of narrative.

By Song of Solomon (1977), this preachiness has become tedious. There are two passages, quite close together, which reveal what is going wrong to the reader though the author has not quite grasped it:

But now he was doing it again, with his son, and every detail of the land was clear in his mind: the well, the apple orchard, President Lincoln; her foal, Mary Todd; Ulysses S. Grant, their cow; General Lee, their hog.

and:

'They say Till had a knife,' Freddie said.

'They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they'd swear it was a hand grenade.'

'South's bad,' Porter said. 'Bad. Don't nothing change in the good old U.S. of A.'

The first is authentic history, as it exists in the memory of poor people. The second is a botched attempt at documentary or newspaper history; if I were interested in race, which I ain't, I'd say a white history; and in gender, which ditto, a male history. Young men play large roles in Song of Solomon and Ms Morrison has some difficulty handling them: one, for example, is a sort of pasteboard terrorist. The book ends with people flying, always a sign of narrative defeat.

Toni Morrison seems to have recognised something was wrong, and tackles the problem in different ways in her next two books. Tar Baby, which was published in 1981, opens not in a black household in the US, but the modern Caribbean retreat of a retired white Philadelphia candy manufacturer, who has all but adopted a beautiful and intelligent black girl called Jadine, the niece of his butler and cook. Into this disturbed and corrupt paradise, a young black man breaks in, having jumped ship, and rapidly demolishes the fragile hierarchies of colour, wealth and sex. In language both repellent and unconvincing, he captures Jadine. The young man—ignorant, wounded, nameless, desperate—is Toni Morrison's trademark on a borrowed Conradian tale. The lovers fly to New York, and then to the young man's hometown in the Florida sticks, where, I am sorry to say, I left them.

Tar Baby is the only Morrison book I was unable to finish, apart from her essay on the Anita Hill affair, Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power, which I was unable to start.

Beloved (1987) is Toni Morrison's most ambitious novel, for it at last approaches the unspoken goal of all these southern journeys and the source of all those black deformities: plantation slavery. We are back, with some relief, in Ohio, this time on the outskirts of Cincinnati in the era of the Civil War. The past, in the form of the Sweet Home plantation, is just across the river in Kentucky: a place of heart-breaking beauty, amenity and horror in the memories of the escaped slaves: 'It made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.'

When the plantation's new owner crosses the river with a posse, Sethe dashes her child's brains out against a post. Later she says, 'If I hadn't killed her, she would have died.' This extraordinary sentence—the best Ms Morrison has ever written—actually makes sense: though, oddly, it is Ms Morrison's acute understanding of the slave economy, rather than various lurid scenes of brutality, that gives the sentence its tremendous meaning. Her world has expanded, too, and her white characters have gained greatly in persuasiveness and humanity. One, a little girl called Amy, helps deliver Sethe's baby on the banks of the Ohio; and this is more convincing than the regular assertions that, for example, 'there is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks'. For me, Beloved is still inferior to The Bluest Eye ; but it is longer, bigger, more 'important' and American: a Pulitzer and Nobel book.

Returning to The Bluest Eye, there is, towards the end, a passage where Toni Morrison seems to despair of literature and suggest that only music can make sense of a black man's biography: black music, race music, the blues and jazz and, presumably, soul and rap which have overrun the world in successive waves like Muslim armies:

Only they [jazz musicians] would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final and pervading ache of freedom.

In her latest book, Jazz (1992), she returns to this notion and expands it into a whole novel. We are in the Harlem of the Jazz Age, and there is an exuberance and freedom about the book which is quite new; also some thrilling hymns to New York City in all its beauty. Though there is some incoherence, it arises from a striving not for flash but for a precision in description and character; and though there is the usual hopeless violence, her characters achieve what might almost be described as happiness. One senses, for the first time, that emancipation may be possible and without imaginary blue eyes.

A good writer, then, with a project of incomparable interest, the will to experiment and the intelligence to learn from mistakes. As for the Nobel, the best American writers never won it (Hawthorne, Henry James, Nabokov) and the list of those that did is not impressive. If one excludes for a moment the expatriates (Eliot, Pearl Buck), the playwright (O'Neill), and the Poles who wrote in other languages (Milosz, Singer), we are left with Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Bellow. Her novels are way beyond Steinbeck, better than Lewis's and better than anything Hemingway did at length. And I suspect there is more and better to come from her.

Edmund A. Napieralski (essay date fall 1994)

SOURCE: Napieralski, Edmund A. "Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Explicator 53, no. 1 (fall 1994): 59-61.

[In the following essay, Napieralski draws parallels between classical mythology and The Bluest Eye, commenting that Morrison uses "myth to grieve over American society in general and black American experience in particular."]

In addition to the popular myths that she uses in The Bluest Eye to criticize society—the Dick and Jane Story and Pauline Breedlove's Dreamland Theatre—Toni Morrison also incorporates characters, incidents, and themes that recall classical myth. In her article, "Lady Sings the Blues," Madonne M. Miner has explained how Pecola's rape by her father recalls Philomela's by Tereus and Persephone's by Pluto (176). Pecola's story—her tragic failure to find her truth, to find her happiness in knowing who she is and her worth to herself and others—recalls also the tragedy of Oedipus the King. In The Bluest Eye, however, the myth appears in a peculiar and distorted fashion. Raymond Hedin has pointed out that central elements of the Dick and Jane world—"house, family, cat, Mother, Father, dog, and friend"—become "inverted to fit the realities of Pecola's world" (50). Much the same can be said about the myth of Oedipus and the world of The Bluest Eye .

First, the novel's setting recalls Sophocles' play. Barrenness envelops Lorain, Ohio, in 1941: Claudia, a choral character, says, "We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow … seeds shriveled and died" (3). Although not, on the surface at least, as serious as the plague gripping Thebes, it is a barrenness nonetheless—metaphorical as well as literal—that is somehow connected to incest, a sin that from the beginning of humankind has been thought to pollute the earth. Moreover, the novel progresses through chapters or episodes named after the seasons—Autumn through Summer—that provide the backdrop of a planting and harvesting cycle appropriate to the sacrifice of a scapegoat.

The Oedipus story takes further shape in the lives of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. As Jocasta mocked the truth of oracles, Pauline also rejects facts of her life, first for the fantasy of the Dreamland Theatre, and then for the imitation of life she lives with her white employers, the Fishers. As Jocasta had originally abandoned Oedipus as a child and had virtually denied his existence, Pauline denies and ultimately deserts her own daughter.

Abandonment has also crippled the life of Cholly Breedlove: "When Cholly was four days old, his mother wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad" (103). Cholly is rejected a second time, as a teenager, when he travels to Macon in search of his father. Samson Fuller resents this strange boy's intrusion on his dice game and brutally turns him away, leaving Cholly to soil himself and weep like a baby. Cholly's virtual denial of his relationship to his daughter in his rape of Pecola becomes understandable—though certainly not excusable—against this background. Cholly, the victim of a mother and father's rejection, becomes the victimizer in a worse abandonment.

Valerie Smith in The Southern Review noted that throughout her fiction Morrison demonstrates the "interconnectedness of past and present" (723). In The Bluest Eye, that interconnectedness appears as a family curse, a relentless and recurring pattern or design characteristic of Greek tragedy generally and of Oedipus the King in particular. Pieces of this pattern reach an awful climax in Cholly's rape of Pecola, an act that follows immediately the flashback to his own rejection by his father. Overcome by conflicting emotions of guilt, pity, love, revulsion, and fury, Cholly watches Pecola standing at the sink, "one foot scratching the back of her calf with her toe" (127).

The gesture reminds him of that time in the past in Kentucky when he saw his wife-to-be for the first time—Pauline, with one foot pierced as a result of a childhood accident. In short order, abandonment, betrayal, and a crippling both figurative and literal from the past and the present gather in a fate-filled moment to destroy Pecola. After the rape she awakes from a faint, "trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her" (129).

Although Oedipus at first appears to belong to a family and to Thebes, he is, like Pecola, an outsider, alienated and apart—someone, as Claudia explains, who is a "case," "outdoors." Oedipus seeks answers about his identity from oracles, family, and servants; Pecola looks for her place too, but in her case from a variety of inadequate models and helpers: Shirley Temple, Mary Janes, Maureen Peal, Geraldine, a trio of whores. None provides helpful answers or even clues to who she is or should become. After the rape by her father, however, Pecola does seek out her own seer, her own Teiresias—Soaphead Church.

Morrison devotes considerable space in the novel to describing the background, personality, and theology of Soaphead Church—"Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams." As adviser and interpreter he appears to perform functions similar to those Teiresias did for the people of Thebes: "People came to him in dread, whispered in dread, wept and pleaded in dread" (136).

Soaphead Church, however, whose real name—Elihue Micah Whitcomb—mocks the Jewish prophets, mocks in his behavior as well the seer of Sophocles' tragedy. Instead of the piety of Teiresias, he exhibits arrogance and disrespect in the letter he addresses "TO HE WHO GREATLY ENNOBLED HUMAN NATURE BY CREATING IT." Instead of exercising power to do good as Teiresias tries to, he abuses his position to lead Pecola not to salvation but to damnation. Teiresias tries to dispel Oedipus' illusion and to lead him to see truth and to experience self-knowledge. Soaphead Church, on the other hand, leads Pecola to lies, self-delusion, and madness. "I, I have caused a miracle," he boasts in his letter to God. "I gave her the eyes. I gave her blue, blue, two blue eyes. … No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever after" (144). Unlike Teiresias who is physically blind but spiritually enlightened, Soaphead Church is spiritually blind and even self-deluded.

Differences in the behavior and experiences of Oedipus and Pecola are also striking. On the one hand, Oedipus blinds himself in a fit of grief and guilt. He laments his condition, but sees the truth, claims an identity. He also gains stature by bravely accepting the exile he had decreed as further punishment for himself. On the other hand, Pecola who sees with what she believes to be blue eyes is really blind. She has no claim to an identity and wholeness but has instead been divided in two, inside and outside the mirror. Pecola also becomes an exile: "walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear" (162). For Pecola, no victory, only defeat. No plague is lifted.

Several critics of her fiction have remarked on Morrison's use of myth and on the tension her writing explores between universal myths and the unique experience of black people. Terry Otten, for example, notes that "For Morrison, the artistic struggle involves achieving the balance between writing a truly black literature and producing a fiction that in Faulkner's phrase 'grieves on universal bones'" (2). In her study of The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, Cynthia Davis claims that these works testify to Morrison's developing use of mythic structure and to her attempt "to combine existential concerns compatible with a mythic presentation with an analysis of American society" (334)

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison seems less interested in depicting universal experience than in using myth to grieve over American society in general and black American experience in particular. The plague that ravages the landscape and infects people in the world of the novel and generation after generation is racism. Racism denies truth, freedom, justice, and the opportunity to experience identity and dignity. The tragic victim is neither a king nor even one little girl but an entire people. The question of responsibility, of fate and free will, hovers over Sophocles' play. At the end of The Bluest Eye the question of responsibility also remains to challenge us. Who or what is, after all, responsible for the soil that is bad for certain kinds of flowers, for seeds it will not nurture, for fruit it will not bear?

Works Cited

Davis, Cynthia A. "Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction." Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 323-342.

Hedin, Raymond. "The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction." Novel 16 (1982): 35-54.

Miner, Madonne M. "Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye." Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 176-191.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri P, 1989.

Smith, Valerie. "The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon." The Southern Review 21 (1985): 721-732.

James A. Wren (essay date spring 1997)

SOURCE: Wren, James A. "Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Explicator 55, no. 3 (spring 1997): 172-74.

[In the following essay, Wren discusses the theme of illness in The Bluest Eye and notes that Morrison's "approach to illness represents a radical departure from traditional attitudes."]

"A threnody of nostalgia about pain," Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye builds upon "the memories of illnesses" in a world populated by characters who "licked their lips and clucked their tongues in fond remembrance of pains they had endured—childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles."¹ The one illness sufficiently elaborated upon, however, ends not with forbearance but in death.

In the spring when Cholly was fourteen years old "Aunt Jimmy … went to a camp meeting that took place after a rainstorm, and the damp wood of the benches was bad for her. Four or five days afterward, she felt poorly …." When the advice from her neighbors proved ineffective in treating her malaise, M'Dear was brought in. A woman who "loomed taller than the preacher who accompanied her" and "seemed to need her hickory stick not for support but for communication," she is venerated as "a competent midwife and decisive diagnostician."² Supported as much by a deductive methodology based upon observance and verification as by her walking stick, it is her skills that set her apart from those neighbors whose lives are governed by "prolific, if contradictory" superstitions.

When she arrives, M'Dear quickly sets about deducing a medical history of her patient by making full use of all the available clues. The acute onset of illness, "the foul odor of an old woman's stools," and the delirium as "Miss Alice, her closest friend, read the Bible to her," in addition to an easily recognizable source of infection (for example, a contaminated water supply following a flood) and the expected seasonality for enteric diseases, immediately implicate a gastroenteritis, an umbrella term including dysentery and other diarrheal diseases. A number of pathogens are possible causes (Salmonella, Shigellosis, Campylobacter, or Vibrio cholera), but to make a good differential diagnosis, M'Dear must examine her patient first (106-9).

She begins by searching for any external signs of disease (for instance, ulcerations, rash, or tenderness); she runs "her left … [hand] … over Aunt Jimmy's body." Finding none, she places the backs of her long fingers "on the patient's cheek, then place[s] her palm on the forehead." Finding no fever, she can quickly rule out Salmonella infections in general (cf. Gurney and Malone 143). That the patient is prostrate and stuporous suggests typhoid fever (cf. Christie 97), but M'Dear is able to eliminate this possibility because Aunt Jimmy lacks intermittent fever and rose-colored spots on the skin.

To rule out either parasitic infestation as an underlying source of infection or possible dehydration,³M'Dear runs "her fingers through the sick woman's hair, lightly scratching the scalp then looking at what the fingernails revealed." She immediately lifts "Aunt Jimmy's hand and look[s] closely at it—fingernails, back skin, the flesh of the palm she pressed with three fingertips." That M'Dear specifically examines for impairments in the elasticity of the skin and for the presence of cyanosis (a characteristic "blueing" of the skin and nail beds) hints that she has found evidence of dehydration, but because cyanosis may suggest concomitant respiratory illness—severe asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, or tuberculosis—she "put[s] her ear on Aunt Jimmy's chest." From there, she moves quickly "to the stomach to listen."

Lacking the necessary equipment to conduct a microscopic examination, M'Dear then considers the only other evidence available: "at [her] request, the women pulled the slop jar from under the bed to show the stools." The absence of blood or mucus, together with an absence of fever, excludes Shigellosis and Campylobacter.⁴ Consistent with the evidence that M'Dear has uncovered, the remaining possibility, Vibrio cholera, can on occasion be found in the Gulf Coast states during pandemics (Bonner et al. 464; Johnston et al. 523). Occurring during the warm months of the year (cf. Sakamoto-Momoyama 15), primary symptoms usually appear within five days and include watery diarrhea with no blood in the stool, a drop in body temperature, and cyanosis. After considering all of the evidence, M'Dear orders Cholly to "bury the slop jar and everything in it." Her concern readily suggests that she suspects cholera.⁵

Nor does M'Dear's explanation to Aunt Jimmy, "You done caught cold in your womb," suggest a different diagnosis.⁶ In fact, by labeling the illness as "feminine" and therefore "personal," she shrewdly gives the neighbors something to gossip about, but more to the point, her naming prevents them from speaking openly about it, and hence she avoids widespread panic. But perhaps most telling of the nature of her diagnosis is her prescription, "drink pot liquor and nothing else." Thus, "that evening the women brought bowls of pot liquor from black-eyed peas, from mustards, from cabbage, from kale, from collards, from turnips, from beets, from green beans. Even the juice from a boiling hog jowl." Her insistence upon rehydration with fluid and electrolytes, arising from her rational understanding that the elderly are far less able to tolerate the loss of body fluids, is wholly consistent with the treatment of cholera (cf. Sangster 151; Gurney and Malone 140).

Her advice obviously proves effective, for "two evenings later Aunt Jimmy had gained much strength." Unfortunately, however, "on a wet Saturday night before Aunt Jimmy felt strong enough to get out of the bed, Essie Foster brought her a peach cobbler." Ignoring the warning of her physician, "the old lady ate a piece, and the next morning when Cholly went to empty the slop jar, she was dead."

I suggest that the importance of M'Dear's diagnosis to the larger concerns of the novel as a whole, however, lies not in her having named a disease but in having demonstrated the methodology by which she does so. Put differently, her approach to illness represents a radical departure from traditional attitudes, as well as a rationale by which we as diagnosticians may confront a horribly contagious, often pathological, at times maddening concern with physical beauty. Already provided with a good differential diagnosis, it is our challenge as readers to write the appropriate prescription for a cure.

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Picador, 1994), 107.
2. In fact, as her name suggests, M'Dear serves on a metaphorical level as a bridge between different worlds. On the one hand, her bedside manner appears completely in keeping with her role as the village "shaman." Her hickory stick in this sense is a "shaman tree" through which she communicates with the deities. On the other hand, her approach to treating illness is quite Cartesian.
3. Specifically, the presence of dandruff is suggestive of dehydration, and further examination is required for verification. The presence of ticks might suggest the possibility of rickettsial infection (such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever); the presence of head lice, "epidemic typhus" (Fiennes 84). Furthermore, because the etiologies of typhus fever and typhoid fever were not understood until the early twentieth century (and, as a result, the terms were often used interchangeably), M'Dear's actions ostensibly underscore her recognition that two separate categories of illness exist and demonstrate just how contemporary and radical her approach is for the times.
4. Shigellosis and Campylobacter are infectious enteritises characterized by the presence of fever, malaise, crampy abdominal pain, and bloody diarrhea.
5. Although Vibrio cholera is a highly virulent and unpredictable disease, environmental factors and living standards play major roles in both its propagation and transmission. Because water supply and waste disposal systems before the Second World War were usually locally organized (and this was especially true for rural communities in the South), it was not uncommon for one area to be severely strike by disease while another nearby remained unaffected. As well, most cases of cholera are subclinical; they are indistinguishable from other infectious diarrheas, although in the absence of micro-scopic evidence, a good differential diagnosis can be made by the presence or absence of associated cases. And some four days later we have one, after Cholly sets off for Macon. As he recalls the incident years later, "he felt something in his legs give way … his bowels suddenly opened up, and before he could realize what he knew, liquid stools were running down his legs … he had soiled himself like a baby" (124-25).
6. My personal experience gained from working in medical settings in the American South bears out this observation. Frequently, older black patients came forward with illnesses with such names as "white liver" and "fallen palate." The medical establishment as a whole was quick to dismiss these as culturally bound illnesses, as psychosomatic curiosities with neither larger nor pressing significance, although individual physicians knew better. The former, characterized by intense abdominal pain and caused by having been terrified or brutalized by a white (or group of whites, or group of men in white robes), as patients consistently explained, is often another name for cirrhosis of the liver concomitant with (stress-related) alcohol abuse. The latter is likely what the establishment recognizes as an acute pharyngitis.

Works Cited

Bonner, J. R., et al. "Spectrum of Vibrio Infections in a Gulf Coast Community." Annals of Internal Medicine 99 (1983): 464.

Christie, A. B. Infectious Diseases: Epidemiology and Clinical Practice. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingston, 1974.

Fiennes, Richard N. Zoonoses and the Origins and Ecology of Human Disease. London: Academic Press, 1978.

Gurney, Michael S., and John D. Malone. "Vibrio Cholera." Handbook of Gastrointestinal Drug Therapy. 2nd ed. Michael M. Van Ness et al., eds. Boston: Little, 1995.

Johnston, J. M., et al. "Cholera on a Gulf Coast Oil Rig." New England Journal of Medicine 309 (1983):523.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. London: Picador, 1994.

Sakamoto-Momoyama, Masako. Seasonality in Human Mortality. Tokyo: U of Tokyo P, 1977.

Sangster, G. "Diarrheal Diseases." A World Geography of Human Diseases. G. Melvyn Howe, ed. London: Academic Press, 1977. 145-74.

Allen Alexander (essay date summer 1998)

SOURCE: Alexander, Allen. "The Fourth Face: The Image of God in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." African American Review 32, no. 2 (summer 1998): 293-302.

[In the following essay, Alexander evaluates the religious imagery and the theology of the characters in The Bluest Eye.]

Religious references, both from Western and African sources, abound in Toni Morrison's fiction, but nowhere are they more intriguing or perplexing than inThe Bluest Eye . And of the many fascinating religious references in this novel, the most complex—and perhaps, therefore, the richest—are her representations of and allusions to God. In Morrison's fictional world, God's characteristics are not limited to those represented by the traditional Western notion of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Instead, God possesses a fourth face, one that is an explanation for all those things—the existence of evil, the suffering of the innocent and just—that seem so inexplicable in the face of a religious tradition that preaches the omnipotence of a benevolent God.

Is Morrison's introduction of this fourth face into her fiction, then, a means of depicting evil, a redesigned Satan, if you will? It is true that in Morrison's fiction the fourth face at times is portrayed as a reservoir of evil—for example, when the people of the Bottom in Sula believe "that the fourth explained Sula" (118), who for them is a manifestation of evil—but the fourth face is much more than a rationalization for all that ails humanity. When Morrison's references to God are taken in their totality, it becomes quite clear that her depiction of the deity is an attempt to humanize God, to demonstrate how God for her characters is not the characteristically ethereal God of traditional Western religion but a God who, while retaining certain Western characteristics, has much in common with the deities of traditional African religion and legend.¹

Though Morrison's model of God owes much to African tradition, a major part of her portrait is dedicated to exposing how traditional Western notions about God affect her characters. If The Bluest Eye can in any way be characterized as an initiation story, then a major portion of a character's initiation involves discovering the inadequacy of Western theological models for those who have been marginalized by the dominant white culture. But many of Morrison's characters, unlike Richard Wright in Black Boy and James Baldwin's John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain, fail to follow Baldwin's admonition in The Fire Next Time to recognize the religion of the white majority for what it is and to "divorce [themselves] from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church" (67). In Morrison's oeuvre, the characters who blatantly attack the norms of white society—for example, Guitar Bains in Song of Solomon —often seem ridiculously ignorant of their own heritage (Guitar does not know the reasoning behind Malcolm X's choice of last name [160]), and consequently their philosophy retains some of white culture's worst characteristics—witness the violence and genocidal hatred of the Seven Days. Sula is a character who certainly rejects the norms of society, but it is not clear exactly which society—white or black, or both—she is rejecting. And then in The Bluest Eye there is the sad case of Pecola Breed-love, who falls prey to the false notions of white superiority espoused not only by the white community but also by her mother and Soaphead Church.

Though the traditional theological models of white society may adversely affect others of Morrison's characters, Pecola is by far the one character whose life seems most vulnerable to the whims of those who have bought into the Western tradition. At every turn Pecola is confronted with attitudes and images based on the myth of white superiority that reinforce her tendency toward self-hatred. When Pecola encounters Mr. Yacobowski, a white man whose religious sensibility, "honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary," is alien to the world she inhabits, she is struck by "the total absence of human recognition" on his face (42). But such blatant expressions of racial inequality are not limited to the white characters, who are noticeably few and far between. Geraldine, a black woman who is said to have suppressed her racial identity by getting rid of "the dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions" in order to appease the white man's "blunted soul" (68), treats Pecola as not only a nuisance or blight, as does Mr. Yacobowski, but as a threat to the "sanitized"—i.e., anti-black—environment that she has constructed around her son. As Pecola is thrown out of Geraldine's house, she sees a portrait of an Anglicized Jesus "looking down at her with sad and unsurprised eyes" (76), an image of a God who seems either incapable of helping her or complicit in her suffering.

With this portrait of Jesus, Morrison introduces us to one of the shortcomings of the Western model of God, namely the problem of how a supposedly omnipotent and loving God can allow the existence of evil and suffering. Morrison reintroduces this model of an inadequate God, of a deity incapable of alleviating or unwilling to rectify the injustices of human society, as she recounts Cholly Breedlove's childhood. At a church picnic, Cholly watches the father of a family raise a watermelon over his head to smash it on the ground and is impressed with the man's god-like stance, which he sees as the opposite of the unimpressive white image of God: "a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes that looked sad when people died and mean when they were bad" (106). Although this white image of God is woefully inadequate for Cholly, who, at least during this period of his life, embraces his African heritage, it is an image to which Pauline Breedlove clings, even at the expense of her daughter's psychic well-being. Pauline, though she has not enjoyed the quasimiddle-class lifestyle that Geraldine believes is the result of having suppressed her racial identity, still looks to white society—through films produced for and religion constructed around the tastes of the white majority—to provide the guidelines for her manner of living. Her acceptance of her poverty and suffering, reflected in her belief that "'it don't make no difference about this old earth'" because "'there is sure to be a glory'" (104), echoes the teachings of slave masters, who manipulated biblical passages to stifle dissatisfaction among those they oppressed. Pauline has bought into the Western notion of linear history, an outlook that emphasizes the future and belittles the past.²

Pauline has also adopted the Western theological tradition of either-or thinking, of believing that the differences between good and evil, righteous and unrighteous, believer and nonbeliever, are clearly demarcated. This ethical orientation is reflected in her belief that she is "an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish" (37),³ and she rationalizes that her antipathy toward Cholly is sanctified by her God, for "Christ the Judge" demands that she make her husband pay for his transgression. Yet Pauline cannot think of "Christ the Judge" and "Christ the Redeemer" simultaneously because such a linkage does not fit the severely drawn categories of good and evil that she has inherited from the dominant white culture. To her way of thinking, "Cholly was beyond redemption" (37). Pauline's religion, built upon such a rigid and unforgiving foundation, cannot tolerate the notion that a man like Cholly could be a blend of both good and bad, that he, quite simply, could be human. Consequently, she never recognizes God's fourth face. She remains as detached from this concept as she does from her family and heritage. Pauline's belief system, whose either-or design requires its adherents to judge others, often by impossible standards, leads her to leave behind those persons, including her family members, whom she feels fail to measure up to her standards. She thus becomes an extreme individualist, a person cut loose from her cultural moorings.⁴

Though Pauline is not the only African American character in Morrison's fiction to try to mold herself in an image that she thinks will be more acceptable to white society (Jadine from Tar Baby and Ruth Foster from Song of Solomon are two obvious examples, as are Soaphead Church and Pecola in The Bluest Eye and Helene Wright in Sula ), her name, which may be a direct reference to Pauline theology, and her central role in the psychological disintegration of Pecola make her perhaps Morrison's most identifiable example of this type. And one chief reason that she so aptly fills this role is her vision of God, which is so antithetical to the fourth-face image that is more central to her heritage. Pauline's adoption of the white society's notion of an ethereal God who judges humans from an alien perspective contrasts with a strain in African American thought that has sought to put a human face on God. As Major J. Jones points out in his study The Color of God, this African-influenced theological outlook envisions God as "neither threat nor rival" to humans. Instead, "God is … the very basis or ground of the creature's fullest possible self-realization …. Black religious experience … is about being and becoming more human under God" (22).

Since this outlook suggests that one's humanity is inextricably linked to God, it follows that such an orientation would lead one to believe that perhaps the connection runs both ways, that God cannot be fully God, or at least a God to humanity, without also being in some sense human. This concept is not completely alien to Western theology, for the Christian faith itself depends on the notion of God becoming a man in the form of Jesus, but, as Jones concludes, and as Morrison suggests in her fiction, the West has lost its connection—through various factors, including, no doubt, Pauline influences on Christian theology—to this fundamental idea of a link between God and humanity. Consequently, in white society God has been molded into an otherworldly presence who, despite Christ's role as redeemer of fallen humanity, regards human weakness, in the form of sin, as something disconnected from the divine.

Within the African tradition we see a substantially different representation of God. In African folklore God is often depicted as having very human-like qualities, not only regarding his appearance but also his personality and abilities. Whereas the Western tradition pictures God as a stoical figure who demands perfection from his creation because of his own perfection, African storytellers have given God a human face, portraying him as a lovable character with a sense of humor and a streak of fallibility. Julius Lester in his renditions of traditional African folk tales characterizes God as "an amateur" (13) who is trying his best "to make the world look a little prettier" (3) but who doesn't "know what he's doing half the time" (23). This folksy God, a God who is seen not only as the creator but also as the ancestor of humanity and who consequently possesses many of the characteristics of his imperfect creation (Sawyerr 95), is a far cry from the West's omnipotent, infallible God who despises human frailty.

There is little doubt, given Morrison's characterization of Pauline, that the author sees the values of white religion as inappropriate and ultimately self-defeating guides for her African American characters. Though she does not present us with a character in The Bluest Eye who, like Baldwin's John Grimes, is suspicious of the trappings of white religion, including those characteristics that have been absorbed by African American Christianity, she does portray characters who embrace these trappings, such as Pauline and Geraldine, as less than admirable figures. In contrast to John Grimes, who senses that his parents' church has lost something of value because it has moved too far away from its African roots, Pauline chooses her church precisely because it is a place "where shouting [i]s frowned upon" (100), a sanctuary from the passion that she so despises. But ultimately both John and Pauline suffer from their association with these churches. John comes to regard the church as a source of darkness and oppression and thinks of God as a "monstrous heart" (217) that consumes his joy and stunts his passion for life. Pauline divorces herself from her African American heritage and in the process loses the closest manifestation of that tradition: her family. Obviously neither Baldwin nor Morrison sees a movement from an African to a Western sensibility as an appropriate step for a productive and authentic life.

The question, then, arises: How does Morrison demonstrate the qualities of an African-inspired vision of God in her fiction? Of course, no serious reader of Morrison's work would begin an analysis with the assumption that there is a simple, clear-cut answer to any question regarding her richly complex work, and her portrayal of an African religious sensibility offers no exception. Her selection of the fourth face of God image underscores her commitment to demonstrating that this sensibility is inherently attuned to the notion that God is much larger than the image to which the divine has been confined by Western theology. And a significant part of that largeness is built on the belief that God is in some way responsible—either as an active participant or a willing spectator—in the tragedies that befall human beings.

Such an idea is certainly not foreign to the Western theological tradition, which is constructed on the foundation of a Judaic faith that sees God as many things, from protector to the engine behind catastrophe. But in the Judaic tradition, there is typically a reason behind God's decision to punish humans—namely, their defiance of divine laws. In contrast to this belief that tragedy can ultimately be explained by human transgression, traditional African religions tend to understand tragedy as something that happens regardless of what humans have or have not done.

This association of God with the existence of evil is a common element among several of the many variations of traditional African religions.⁵ E. Thomas Lawson notes that within the Zulu tradition evil is not seen as "an independent, autonomous power" but as a force that draws its strength from three positive powers: the God of the Sky, the ancestors, and medicine (27). K. A. Busia finds a similar belief among the Ashanti, for whom nature is populated by the "malignant spirits of fairies and forest monsters" who "are subservient to the Supreme Being, from whom ultimately they all derive their power" (qtd. in Sawyerr 100).

Within the belief systems of many African peoples God's kinship to evil far surpasses that of a source of origin. Evil not only derives its power from God but is allowed to flourish by God. Harry Sawyerr, who in the preface to his study God: Ancestor or Creator? stresses the difficulty of studying the African concept of God because of the vastness of the continent and the diversity of its population, nevertheless feels comfortable asserting that within African belief systems "the general well-being of man, as well as his distress, are freely attributed to God" (ix). He supports this contention with evidence from his study of the Yoruba, for whom "evil forces seem to be more subject to the ultimate control of God. They can and often do destroy human life, but not without the permission of God" (49). This notion that evil exists because God allows it to was noted over two hundred years ago by Olaudah Equiano. In his autobiography, published in 1789, Equiano recalls traditions he learned as a child in Africa, and he writes that his people believed that God "governs events, especially our deaths or captivity" (27). This same idea can be found in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who introduced into her fiction characters like Janie and Tea Cake of Their Eyes Were Watching God who combine an African sensibility with a belief that "all gods dispense suffering without reason" (138). Janie and Tea Cake, caught in the destructive path of a hurricane, wonder if God "meant to measure their puny might against His" (151). And later as she watches Tea Cake suffer from a rabid dog's bite, Janie concludes that "God would do less than He had in His heart" (169).

However, there is also a strain of African belief that sees God not as the source or master of evil but as a participant in the universe's struggle against malignant forces. According to J. B. Danquah, the Akan—a cultural group which includes the Ashanti—believe that "Nana, the principle that makes for good, is himself or itself participator in the life of the whole, and is not only head" (88). Since God (Nana) is thus viewed by the Akan as a part of creation rather than as a being apart from it, they see "physical pain and evil … as natural forces which the Nana, in common with others of the group, has to master, dominate and sublimate" (88-89). Within this framework of belief, God and humans are part of the same community, working together, like the people of the Bottom in Sula, against evil, not in a futile effort to eliminate it but in order to outlast it (118).

African perspectives on the existence of evil are multiple and varied, but one idea that seems to link them is that an explanation for the presence of evil is unnecessary. Evil is a real presence in the lives of African peoples, yet it is precisely because of the weight of evil on them that they steer away from metaphysical speculations about it. As James Cone, writing from an African American Christian perspective, contends, " … black reflections about suffering have not been removed from life but involved in life, that is, the struggle to affirm humanity despite the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and oppression" (183).

One African folk tale that illustrates this African belief that evil is not a riddle to be solved but a reality with which one must deal is the story of a woman who, after her family has died, goes in search of God in order to find an explanation for the tragedy that has beset her. As she searches the world for God, she encounters people who question her motives, for they contend that "'Shikakunamo [the Besetting One] sits on the back of everyone of us and we cannot shake him off!'" She ultimately fails in her quest, "'and from that day to this, say the Africans, no man or woman has solved the riddle of this painful earth'" (McVeigh 48-49).

Morrison deftly works a similar sense of tragedy into The Bluest Eye, though one could well argue that in her fiction it is based as much on the inadequacy of the Western model of God as on African traditions. Though there is no shortage of suffering characters in the novel, the Breedloves, like the woman troubled by Shikakunamo, or like Job in the Old Testament, seem uniquely chosen to wear the mantle of divine retribution: "It was as though some mysterious allknowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear …." The fact that they see support for the cloak "leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance" is an indication of just how much what white society values has distorted their own self-image, so much so that each accepts the ugliness "without question" (34). But even though the Breedloves' pitiful circumstances seem to be largely attributable to human action, both in the form of a racist society and their own personal shortcomings, the odds are so great against them that it appears that the hands of "some mysterious all-knowing master" are holding them back, or perhaps choking the life out of them in the same way that those hands strangle the life from "a tuft of grass [that] had forced its way up through a crack in the sidewalk, only to meet a raw October wind" (48). In the world of the Breed-loves, it seems that much more than human forces are working against them, that, in fact, "the earth itself might have been unyielding" to their survival (9).

If, then, God is, in Morrison's cosmology, the agent behind much human suffering, do her characters' attitudes suggest that they respond to their plight in a way reflective of the African sensibility toward tragedy reflected in the tale of the woman seeking Shikakunamo? This is not the case with Pauline and Pecola, both of whom approach their pain in ways more in line with the values of white culture. Pauline molds her lifestyle to correspond to what the dominant culture applauds. And Pecola withdraws into herself, "peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask" (35), which she puts aside only after believing she has acquired a feature—blue eyes—that she identifies with the happiness that eludes her. Pauline and Pecola, in effect, attempt to deal with their circumstances by altering their sense of reality, not by attempting to maintain their authenticity as meaningful members of a larger community. They seem willing to exchange their personhood, and consequently their heritage, for models of themselves that only strengthen in their minds the cultural norms that make them hate their true selves.

In contrast to Pauline and Pecola, Cholly, though he is in many ways as tragic a figure as they are, seems to see the life-affirming values of his heritage, an insight that he discovers most memorably while thinking about the image of God while watching the man smash the watermelon at the church picnic:

It must be the devil who looks like that—holding the world in his hands, ready to dash it to the ground and spill the red guts so niggers could eat the sweet, warm insides. If the devil did look like that, Cholly preferred him. He never felt anything thinking about God, but just the idea of the devil excited him. And now the strong, black devil was blotting out the sun and getting ready to split open the world.

     (107)

The image that Cholly relishes is one that embraces the fourth face, one that portrays God as much more than the pallid, antiseptic God envisioned by white society. Cholly's God is dynamic, complex, unpredictable, exciting, dangerous.⁶

The notion that God can be dangerous, something other than the benevolent grandfather figure that has been pre-eminent in the Western mind, might be unsettling, but Cholly appears to welcome the idea, perhaps because such an image seems much more realistic in a world that does not give the impression of being controlled by an omnipotent and loving deity. He sees this representation of God reaffirmed at his Aunt Jimmy's funeral, where "there was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard" (113). Here, the concept of evil, of pain and suffering and those things that appear to contradict that which affirms goodness and life, is not an alien thought, nor is it something that overwhelms the funeralgoers and forces them into a state of nihilistic apathy.⁷ In contrast to the Western approach to the existence of evil, which has been marked by attempts to sequester or destroy it, these people, drawing from their African heritage, feel, as Morrison herself has said about African Americans in general, "that evil has a natural place in the universe" and consequently "they are not surprised at its existence or horrified or outraged" (Parker 253).

Is there, then, no limit to the amount of evil one can tolerate without lashing out? Is not what happens to Pecola, particularly at the hands of her father and Soaphead Church, so horrific and outrageous that some response against it is necessary? For Pecola, unfortunately, there is no one to respond but herself, and her lack of response—what some might call her acceptance of her situation—cannot be attributed to the African sensibility of which Morrison has spoken.

Pecola has become so disconnected from her heritage that her movement toward insanity is instead an indictment of the white cultural framework that has become her guidepost for living.

But Morrison does not intend for us to conclude that the African sensibility toward tragedy is one of complacent and powerless acceptance. To the contrary, she suggests that the correct stance for one to take with regard to tragedy is not passively to give in to its inevitability but, like the people of the Bottom in Sula, to be actively engaged with it so that it can be "dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over" (118). Yet Pecola is ill-equipped to outwit and triumph over her tragic situation. She lacks the cultural rootedness or the intestinal fortitude to outlast the forces that work to annihilate her personhood. And in the end she accepts as her destiny the destruction of her true being in favor of an insanity-induced self-image that validates in her mind the inherent inferiority of her heritage.

The instrument that finally pushes Pecola over the edge is Soaphead Church, a character who not only rejects his African heritage but who also relinquishes his identity as a human being in favor of the self-generated delusion that he is in some sense a god. He is a hater of humanity, a self-professed misanthrope whose "disdain for people" ironically "led him into a profession designed to serve them," that of a "Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams" (130). However, he "serves" others not out of a spirit of generosity but because of a selfish desire to assert his power over the innocent and weak. Into the lair of this preyer on humanity walks Pecola, who stands little chance of withstanding Soaphead. Instead of sexually molesting her, as he has been fond of doing to other girls, Soaphead assaults her psyche, taking from her any knowledge of her true identity.

But is Soaphead totally to blame for Pecola's demise? From his seemingly peculiar perspective he is not, but is his view of the world really all that unique? It would be easy to conclude, given Morrison's consistently negative appraisal of Western theological models, that Soaphead, who is easily Morrison's most detestable character in a novel that is replete with them, represents the worst side of white religion. Such a conclusion makes even more sense when one considers how Soaphead, following the path the West has laid down for God, severs himself from humanity. In this sense he could be seen as an allegorical figure. But Morrison is much too complex a writer to introduce such an obviously allegorical character into her work, and there is evidence in the text that suggests that Soaphead, far from being solely a human likeness of the white God, actually embraces a theological perspective that is not far removed from that of the fourth-face notion of African tradition. Like the people of the Bottom, he believes that, "since decay, vice, filth, and disorder were pervasive, they must be in the Nature of Things," that "evil exist[s] because God had created it." But he also departs from the African perspective, rejecting the notion that evil is part of God's nature and instead believing that the deity "made a sloven and unforgivable error in judgment: designing an imperfect universe" (136). His adoption of this idea suggests that he still embraces the Western notion of dualism, the belief that good and evil exist as separate forces. His explanation for the existence of evil, then, is not far removed from that of Western theologians who have struggled with the apparently contradictory notion that evil exists in spite of the presence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. Yet Morrison, ever conscious of complicating Soaphead's character, once again undercuts any idea that we might have regarding his one-to-one connection to any theological tradition, revealing that he sees God as something less than omnipotent, as a power so weak and incompetent that "Soaphead suspected that he himself could have done better" (136).

In the final analysis Soaphead's theology is schizophrenic, leaping back and forth between Western and African traditions, between different notions of the physical and metaphysical. His perspective is thus an anticipation of what will happen to Pecola, whose idea of self will teeter on the edge between reality and a reality-induced fantasy, a delusion that may have been locked into place by Soaphead but one for which the community surrounding her—her family and friends and the messages thrust at her by white society—is also culpable. Pecola becomes the ultimate tragic figure, who, in the words of Claudia MacTeer, took "all of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed" (159). In this sense she becomes a Christ figure, one who takes on the ugliness (sin) of the world around her and consequently absolves others of their feelings of inferiority (guilt). But Morrison's final image of God is an aborted one: Unlike Christ, there is no resurrection for Pecola. In her world, "it's much, much, much too late" to keep hope alive (160).⁸

Although there is no clear affirmation of life in The Bluest Eye, the possibility of hope, though it seems far removed from the lives of the characters, remains for those who can rediscover the value of their heritage and reject the notion that they can succeed only if they adopt the norms of white society. The experiences of Pauline and Pecola suggest that it is impossible for a character to adapt to white society without also sacrificing one's true self. In order to adapt, both Pauline and Pecola have to embrace the Western concept of dualism—of believing that life is divisible, that good is distinguishable from evil, that the past, present, and future are disconnected. The failure of these two characters to retain their authenticity, to be who they truly are, suggests "that half a reality is insufficient for anyone" (Lepow 364).

In contrast to the efforts of Pauline and Pecola to separate themselves from their heritage, there are characters who seem to have an understanding that their lives in the past and the present have value. For example, the three prostitutes—China, Poland, and Miss Marie—who live above the Breedloves offer a counterpoint to Pauline, showing Pecola that their lives, no matter how much they are despised by others, have meaning because the women define themselves rather than relying on the judgments of outsiders. They make no pretensions about being anything other than "whores in whores' clothing" (48) and thus provide Pecola with a contrast to her mother, who tries to change who she is in order to fit white society's dictates. Whereas Pauline has done her best to squelch her own and her daughter's taste for the passion of life, the prostitutes, with their large appetites for the sensual, whether it be in the form of sex or food, show Pecola that the physical is a realm to be embraced rather than shunned. Marie makes even the disgusting seem beautiful to Pecola, who witnesses her belching "softly, purringly, lovingly" (49). That love might be associated with such physical crudeness is an idea that Pecola could never have gotten from her mother. And it is Pecola's failure to embrace the image Marie provides that ultimately makes her susceptible to Soaphead's trap, for he exploits her tendency to divorce physical reality from her identity.

Much like the prostitutes, Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer seem largely unconcerned with fulfilling any roles prescribed by outside influences. They do not pamper their children the way that Pauline, trying to emulate the whites for whom she works, pampers "the little girl in pink" (87). Mrs. MacTeer often speaks harshly to her daughters, but Claudia realizes that "love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup" (14), fills her home. Their father also proves his love through actions rather than words, standing as "Vulcan guarding the flames" of the home fires (52). Though Claudia and Frieda do not always understand the words of their parents, they understand "the edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions" (16). Unlike Pecola, who must face Pauline's and Soaphead's acts of deception, Claudia and Frieda have the advantage of living with adult role models who place more value on action than image. Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer are soundly grounded in reality. Consequently, they are not drawn to the false ideals peddled by Hollywood and Madison Avenue which so distort Pauline's self-image.

Cholly, though there are aspects of his character that put him "beyond the reaches of human consideration" (18), has experienced and appreciated the value of his heritage through individuals like Aunt Jimmy. He provides Pecola with yet another alternative to her mother, acting as a physical foil to Pauline's movement toward an image-driven existence. When Pecola recalls the sound of her parents making love, she remembers being appalled by Cholly's groans, yet as "terrible as his noises were, they were not nearly as bad as the no noise at all from her mother" (48-49). As imperfect as Cholly is, he is still more genuine than Pauline. His rape of Pecola is reprehensible, but he does not rape her mind the way that Pauline and Soaphead do. Claudia senses that Cholly really loves Pecola: "He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her" (159). The fact that this one gift given to Pecola is in reality a sexual assault on her body underscores just how horribly brutal her life is.

But perhaps the character who holds the most promise for living an authentic existence is Claudia, whose telling of the story is a sign in itself that she has come to recognize the value of rediscovering the past. It is Claudia, after all, who seems to be most in touch with reality, for she is the one who reconstructs it for the reader. Claudia understands that those who try to measure their world with black-and-white scales and to find easy solutions to the drudgery of daily life are doomed to lose not only their grounding in their heritage but also their grounding in reality. Ultimately, the price such a person pays is the loss of one's self. When Claudia observes her parents, she recognizes that their authenticity is not based on the literal meaning of the words they speak but in the way they are spoken: "Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly" (16). The story she gives us is not one that allows us to march straight toward the truth, for such a path would oversimplify a world that is so full of evil and so far beyond explanation that it need not be explained—it can only be "dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over" (Sula 118). Claudia's narrative, which has a circular and, some might say, elusive quality to it, is in itself a reflection of the image that is so central to her heritage: the fourth face of God.

Notes

1. Any serious student of Western and African religions knows that the conceptualizations of God within fairly similar theological traditions can differ dramatically. My intent in this essay is not to examine the competing models within closely related traditions but to explore how Morrison presents the differences between general models of two distinctly different traditions: the Western and the African.
2. Though my study is limited to the images of God present in The Bluest Eye, other studies have dealt with this topic in relation to some of Morrison's other novels. See Vashti Crutcher Lewis for a comparison of Shadrack's role in Sula to that of "a divine river spirit" or "a West African Water priest who represents and speaks for a river god" (92). See Janice M. Sokoloff for an examination of Eva Peace's god-like role in Sula. And see Lauren Lepow for an exploration of Valerian's role in Tar Baby as "the image of a white man's god" (368) and an analysis of the religious connotations of Son's name.
3. Maxine Lavon Montgomery has made this same point with regard to the people of the Bottom in Sula, arguing that "Western linear history" is "a distorted version of reality that keeps the townsfolk reaching out in vain for a future that persistently eludes their grasp" (128).
4. Patricia Hunt discusses Sula's parabolic qualities, which she sees as part of Morrison's critique of either-or thinking.
5. As Trudier Harris has pointed out, Pauline's separation from the African American community is underscored by her "attachment to the rich white family for which she works in Ohio when they assign her a nickname—Polly" (20). Harris contends that Pauline's acceptance of the nickname is a subversion of the tradition of nicknaming that has been a central feature of the African American community.
6. Though most scholars argue that African traditional religions tend to associate evil with God in some way, at least one writer, Gwinyai H. Muzorewa, concludes that "African traditional religion holds that all good comes from God and that evil was not created by God" (19).
7. The contrasting images of a white and a black God envisioned by Cholly are part of a larger pattern of inversion present throughout the novel. See Jacqueline de Weever for a discussion of this pattern in The Bluest Eye and Sula.
8. According to John S. Mbiti, in many African religions God "is brought into the picture primarily as an attempt to explain what is otherwise difficult for the human mind" (45). In contrast to Western religious traditions, within which the existence of evil is typically blamed on the sinful nature of humans and a spiritual being who stands in conflict with a benevolent God, practitioners of African religions tend not to divorce God from the problem of evil.
9. Pecola's symbolic connection to Christ and her failure to triumph over her circumstances is illustrative of Morrison's drive to stress the failure of white theological models for her African American characters. Deborah Guth has uncovered this same theme in Beloved, in which "the hostile dialogic interaction between" Christian symbols and the circumstances of African American characters "leads to a total polarization that exposes the terrible inadequacy of the Christological model to contain or clarify the teleology of black historic reality" (90).

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. 1953. New York: Dell, 1985.

——. The Fire Next Time. 1962. New York: Dell, 1988.

Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed. San Francisco: Harper, 1975.

Danquah, J. B. The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion. 2nd ed. London: Frank Cass, 1968.

de Weever, Jacqueline. "The Inverted World of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula." CLA Journal 22 (1979): 402-14.

Equiano, Olaudah. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. 1789. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969.

Guth, Deborah. "'Wonder What God Had in Mind': Beloved's Dialogue with Christianity." Journal of Narrative Technique 24.2 (1994): 83-97.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Hunt, Patricia. "War and Peace: Transfigured Categories and the Politics of Sula." African American Review 27 (1993): 443-59.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper, 1990.

Jones, Major J. The Color of God: The Concept of God in Afro-American Thought. Macon: Mercer UP, 1987.

Lawson, E. Thomas. Religions of Africa: Traditions in Transformation. San Francisco: Harper, 1984.

Lepow, Lauren. "Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby." Contemporary Literature 28 (1987): 363-77.

Lester, Julius. Black Folktales. New York: Grove, 1969.

Lewis, Vashti Crutcher. "African Tradition in Toni Morrison's Sula." Phylon 48 (1987): 91-97.

Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989.

McVeigh, Malcolm J. God in Africa: Conceptions of God in African Traditional Religion and Christianity. Cape Cod: Claude Stark, 1974.

Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. "A Pilgrimage to the Origins: The Apocalypse as Structure and Theme in Toni Morrison's Sula." Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 127-37.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Washington Square P, 1972.

——. Song of Solomon. 1977. New York: Plume, 1987.

——. Sula. 1973. New York: Plume, 1982.

Muzorewa, Gwinyai H. The Origins and Development of African Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985.

Parker, Bettye J. "Complexity: Toni Morrison's Women—An Interview Essay." Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed. Roseann P. Bell, Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Anchor, 1979. 251-57.

Sawyerr, Harry. God: Ancestor or Creator? London: Longman, 1970.

Sokoloff, Janice M. "Intimations of Matriarchal Age: Notes on the Mythical Eva in Toni Morrison's Sula." Journal of Black Studies 16 (1986): 429-34.

Carl D. Malmgren (essay date spring 2000)

SOURCE: Malmgren, Carl D. "Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Critique 41, no. 3 (spring 2000): 251-60.

[In the following essay, Malmgren deconstructs the structural composition of The Bluest Eye, analyzing the three separate and distinct forms of "textuality" throughout the novel.]

The Bluest Eye represents a remarkable undertaking, especially for a first novel. In terms of formal features, it might be described as a kind of narratological compendium. For one thing, the novel incorporates several different forms of textuality. It opens with three different versions of its epigraphic "master" text, several lines drawn from an elementary school primer. That is followed by an italicized "overture," introducing the primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, and the dominant motifs of the work—victimization and its causes:

It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame.

     (5)

The body of the novel is composed of two related kinds of texts, variously interspersed: four seasonal sections, narrated in the first person by Claudia MacTeer; and seven primer sections (employing various narrational situations), so named because each section is set off by an epigraph taken from the master primer. The end is a kind of coda, beginning "So it was" (204), in which Claudia reviews the outcomes of the narrative and rehearses its lessons. Linda Dittmar praises the architectonics of the novel as "a brilliant orchestration of a complex multiformed narrative" (140).

Texts and Voices

The novel is not only multitextual; it is also polyphonic. The seasonal sections are in the first person, but even they are double-voiced, aware of the difference between the experiencing "I" and the narrating "I." In places Claudia speaks as the nine-year old girl going through the experience, ignorant, for example, as to what "ministratin" is (28). Elsewhere, she switches to an adult perspective on the incident being narrated: "We trooped in, Frieda sobbing quietly, Pecola carrying a white tail, me carrying the little-girl-gone-to-woman pants" (31). And sometimes she speaks from the moment of the enunciation itself: "But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly" (12).

The primer sections are, if anything, even more ambitious, in that they eventually make use of the full spectrum of what Stanzel terms "narrative situations."¹ The narrator assumes authorial position and privilege when she gives the reader a lecture on the lifestyles and values of the "sugar-brown Mobile girls" (82):

They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn to do the white man's work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave.

     (83)

From the same position, she reviews the history of the Breedlove's storefront apartment (33-37); in the following primer section, she moves successively through the minds of the members of the Breedlove family during a violent morning confrontation (39-46).

The primer sections devoted to Pauline and Cholly Breedlove and to Soaphead Church are, in large part, narrated figurally, with Pauline, Cholly, and Soap-head as the centers of consciousness. Those sections focus on the what and how of their featured protagonists' experiences. But even those sections are multivocal. Those figural presentations are frequently qualified by authorial interpolations or commentary; the Pauline section, for example, begins with the following explanation of her feeling of unworthiness:

The easiest thing to do would be to build a case out of her foot. This is what she herself did. But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer. The end of her lovely beginning was probably the cavity in one of her front teeth. She preferred, however, to think always of her foot.

     (110)²

What follows is figural narration, a recounting of Pauline's perspective on the events of her life. To make that experience even more immediate, however, the narration shifts several times to quoted and italicized first-person dramatic monologue. Pauline speaks aloud, apparently to a Lorain neighbor, deputy for the reader:

That was the last time I seen real June bugs. These things up here ain't june bugs. They's something else. Folks here call them fireflies, Down home they was different. But I recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well.

     (112)

In the space of a few pages, the narration shifts from authorial to figural to first person. In addition, the Soaphead Church primer section contains, in entirety, a formal and pedantic letter that Soaphead writes to God after his encounter with Pecola. And the last primer section consists of a schizoid dramatic dialogue between Pecola and her imaginary second self in which the two of them rhapsodize about the blueness of Pecola's eyes.

A number of critics have called attention to the multiple narrations (and multiple narrators) in the novel. Arguing that "the possibility of a bystander really being able to tell the whole story is implicitly obviated by the novel's shift in narrators," Demetrakopoulos stipulates at least three narrators: Claudia, "the omniscient point of view," and Pecola (35). Samuels says that Claudia "retells the story with the assistance of other, external narrators" (25). Dittmar argues that "Claudia covers a lot of ground, but she is not the novel's pivotal consciousness. She is a narrator, not the narrator" (143). The critical consensus seems to be that there are two main speakers, Claudia in the seasonal sections, and an authorial persona elsewhere. The authorial persona supplies the master primer text and uses it epigraphically and assumes the privilege of rendering the dramatic monologues of Pauline and Pecola in the primer sections (Gibson 21, 25, 30; Holloway 40; Byerman 450). In her afterword to the novel, Morrison herself refers derogatorily to her narrational doubleness, saying that it made a "shambles" of her text: "I resorted to two voices, […] both of which are extremely unsatisfactory to me" (215).

I argue (pace Morrison) that strong evidence, textual and biographical, exists to suggest that a single narrator, Claudia MacTeer, has composed the texts and created the voices and that my reading adds an important dimension to the meaning of the text.³ As noted above, Claudia's first person seasonal sections are double-voiced, shifting back and forth between the perspective of the nine-year-old and that of an older and wiser adult. The passage in which Claudia discusses her evolving relationship to white baby girls indicates the distance between these two perspectives:

If I pinched them, their eyes—unlike the crazed hint of the baby doll's eyes—would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion 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.

     (23)

Here is a discerning adult making nuanced discriminations. We know that she is significantly removed from the time of the events she recounts because her narration rehearses and implicitly repudiates (and therefore comes after) a love for Shirley Temple that itself came "much later" than her original hatred and sadism.

The text gives us no way to date Claudia's enunciation or to specify her adult age, but she has the mature voice and perspective of someone looking back from a distance, someone, say, in her mid-to-late thirties. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, when Morrison was thirty-nine years old. Like Claudia, Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio; like Claudia, she would have been nine years old in 1940-41, the year in which the events of the novel take place. Those similarities suggest that Claudia MacTeer is Morrison's persona in the novel, her fictional "second self." Indeed, Morrison states in the afterword that the novel had a autobiographical origin, that Pecola was based on a real-life elementary school classmate who, out of the blue as it were, confided that she wanted blue eyes (209).

That is the (suspect) argument from biography, the old mimetic shibboleth about Art and Life being intimately related. But no substantial textual evidence supports that connection. As the passage above suggests, Claudia's seasonal sections demonstrate that she has the talent and insight to make the kind of discriminations that characterize the text as a whole and that she has the stylistic resources to rise to the lyricism found in various places in the novel.⁴ Most important, the Claudia sections articulate an ideological project that is carried out in great detail elsewhere in the novel: the critique of cultural stereo-types imposed by the dominant white culture. In terms of theme, then, the novel is seamless, univocal.⁵ In addition, Claudia is singled out as the MacTeer sister blessed with Imagination (just as Frieda is marked as the Executive, the one who makes decisions). In the Autumn section, for example, the girls are bored, and Claudia supplies an extensive list of possible activities for them: looking at Mr. Henry's girlie magazines or Bible, threading needles for the blind lady, searching through trash cans, making fudge, or eavesdropping at the Greek hotel (26-27). When the sisters are afraid that Frieda is "ruined" after she has been molested by Henry the roomer, Claudia comes up with the solution to their problem by concocting a highly fanciful line of "reasoning" that includes fat people, the three prostitutes, whiskey, and Cholly Breedlove (101-02). Those episodes reinforce the connection between Morrison and Claudia by suggesting that Claudia has the imaginative resources to invent alternatives, to impersonate various characters, to create fictional worlds.

The novel begins with Claudia's voice: "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow." The second paragraph specifies that "we" comprises "my sister and I" (5). The novel ends with Claudia speaking for a more generalized "we": "We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (206). Occam's razor should dictate that what comes between the beginning and end belongs to her as well.

The problem is that the primer sections, which make up about two-thirds of the novel, refuse to say "I." They contain almost no reference to the speaker's person,⁶ certainly no explicit identification of that authorial speaker as the grown-up Claudia MacTeer; therefore, no apparent linkage is evident between the primer sections and the seasonal sections. In addition to the thematic continuity I have mentioned there are other connections. For example, the substance, rhetoric, and syntax of part of Soaphead Church's letter to God is echoed in Claudia's coda to the novel. Soap-head indites (and indicts):

In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. Consequently we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious; we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

     (177)

Claudia reprises (and embellishes):

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 habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it the truth.

     (205-06)

It is as if Claudia took the condemnation of African Americans she voiced in the persona of Soaphead Church and brought it to bear on the victimization of Pecola Breedlove.

More convincing than the rhetorical and stylistic echo is the explicit repetition of substantive commentary. In the cat primer section, Geraldine returns to her tidy home to find Pecola there and sees in the little girl only anathema:

She had seen this little girl all of her life. […] Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. [Little girls like this] had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.

     (91-92)

In the coda, Claudia repeats that summary view of Pecola, but with a significant addition; she speaks elegiacly of Pecola wandering on the edge of town, "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" (205).

But the most compelling evidence of linkage connects the primer section devoted to Cholly Breedlove with Claudia's coda. Having rehearsed Cholly's history, the primer section asserts that it would take a jazz musician to render the essence of Cholly's being, "its final and pervading ache of freedom. Only a musician would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity" (159). The speaker continues for some lines detailing the contours and extent of Cholly's freedom and then links the "godlike state" of freedom Cholly enjoys to both his marriage to Pauline and his rape of his daughter. In her coda to the novel, Claudia insists that, despite what he did to her, Cholly loved his daughter, but that his touch was fatal because "love is never any better than the lover," and "the love of a free man is never safe" (206). By using that epithet for Cholly and connecting it to his crime against his daughter, Claudia rehearses the argument spelled out in Cholly's primer section and makes it her own. Because we can link Claudia directly to the cat, Soaphead, and Cholly sections, it is possible to conclude that The Bluest Eye is entirely her composition, her achievement. Indeed, we can say that the eye in the title contains a multiple pun: it is at once the eye longed for by Pecola Breedlove, and the "I" that authorizes the novel as a whole, the "bluest I" that witnesses Pecola's fate, Claudia MacTeer.

Primers and Voices

At the very beginning of her narration, Claudia spells out why she is composing The Bluest Eye ; she wants to figure out what happened to the marigolds she and her sister planted in the fall of 1941: "It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame" (5). The marigolds are, of course, metonymically and metaphorically connected to Pecola, so Claudia is asking "who is to blame" for what happened to Pecola, for her tragic fate. The end of the overture acknowledges that this is not an easy question to answer: "There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is diffcult to handle, one must take refuge in how" (5). What follows is the first seasonal section, "Autumn."

Claudia tells us that she must begin with how in order to get at why.⁷ Can we link those basic narrative questions with the shape her narrative takes? I have noted that the seasonal sections, narrated by a fore-grounded first person, Claudia MacTeer, are quite different from the primer sections. She begins each section with a present tense epitomization of the season being recalled: "Nuns go by quiet as lust" (9); "My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there" (61); "The first twigs are thin, green, and supple" (97); "I only have to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer" (187). In each section, she then relates in detail one or two of her experiences during that season, partly from the perspective of a nine-year-old, who believes, for example, that drinking alcohol will keep her sister Frieda from being "ruined". These sections have irregular margins.⁸ The entire set-up—a first-person narrator, entries keyed to a particular time of year, the present tense, the perspective of the experiencing "I," and irregular margins—suggests a particular narrative form, the diary.

The diary is a "primitive" narrative form, specifically intended to recount the how of experience. A diarist is someone who records events and is at the mercy of the seasons, the times, time. The seasonal sections, or diary entries, tell us what happened at that particular time. That Claudia uses seasons and not dates to identify the entries indicates, however, that the entries are retrospective, and therefore both selective and shapely. They are selective in that each of them focuses on encounters between the MacTeer sisters and Pecola Breedlove during that fateful year; shapely insofar as each encounter involves some kind of violence—verbal, emotional, physical—perpetrated against Pecola. The seasonal sections give us, in sum, an intimate, personal view of the how of Pecola's victimization.

The novel's epigraph consists of three versions of lines from the Dick-and-Jane primer—one regular, one without capitals or punctuation, and one without capitals, punctuation, or spacing. The standard critical reading of the three versions is that the first represents the life of white families, orderly and "readable"; the second, that of the MacTeer family, confused but still readable; and the last, that of the Breedlove family, incoherent and unintelligible.⁹ The primer sections of the novel use portions of that third version as "titles," lines keyed to material presented in that section. The first primer section, for example, dealing with the history and condition of the Breed-love's seedy storefront apartment, begins

HEREISTHEHOUSEITISGREENANDWHITEITHASAREDDOORITISVERYPRETTYITISVERYPRETTYPRETTYPRETTYP

     (33)

Subsequent sections use as epigraphs primer lines describing Dick and Jane's family, the cat, Mother, Father, the dog, and a friend of Jane's. The section following the epigraph focuses on that figure in Pecola's life but relates tales of misery that are an ironic counterpoint to the fairy-tale world depicted in the primer itself. Cumulatively the sections render in great detail the loveless "Breedlove version" of the primer text.

In terms of voice, however, the primer sections are very different from the seasonal sections. The authorial narrator here refuses to say "I," except when impersonating one of her characters. She keeps her material at a distance from herself. The Soaphead Church section, for example, begins "Once there was an old man" (164)—as if to signal her objectivity and control. From a magisterial position, she reviews and highlights the biographies of Geraldine, Pauline, Cholly, and Soaphead. Narrationally, she ranges from authorial commentary to figural presentation to dramatic monologue. She even supplies the text of Soap-head's letter to God and the script of Pecola's schizoid "dialogue" with herself. She employs a wide spectrum of novelistic techniques and practices—including justified right-hand margins—to explain what happened to the members of the Breedlove family. The conclusion would seem to be that diaries can tell us how or what, but only novels, and the narrative resources belonging to them, can tell us why.¹⁰ Diaries render the experience of victimization; novels explain it. The absence of "I" in the primer sections can be taken as a sign of the unwillingness of the magisterial authorial persona to call undue attention to herself. To answer the question why, the novelist must go beyond the personal and diaristic. She must become impersonal if she is to rise to true impersonation. To make sense of what happened to Pecola, Claudia MacTeer has to call upon all her talents as a novelist.

The novelistic primer sections treat extensively those in Pecola's immediate family or those who come into immediate contact with her (Geraldine, Soaphead). They dwell upon the members of the African American community who act directly on her, implying that they are responsible for her fate, because they have embraced and internalized a set of values and ideas imposed upon them by the dominant white culture.¹¹ Accepting an essentialist view of beauty that consigns them to invisibility and condemns them to self-hatred, they become the "instruments of [their] own oppression" (Gibson 21). Claudia very clearly makes that indictment of her race at several places in her narrative. An early example is her summary remarks about the Breedlove family:

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. 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."

     (39)¹²

Leveling the same charge against Pecola's classmates (65), Maureen Peal (73-74), Geraldine (83-87), Pauline (122), Soaphead (168), and others, Claudia suggests that almost no one in the black community is able to resist that particular interpellation by the dominant white culture.

This near-total capitulation to white values, in combination with Pecola's awful victimization, leads many critics to see the novel as terribly bleak—in the words of Demetrakopoulos, "one of the darkest works I have ever read" (31). Commenting in the afterword on Claudia's conspiratorial opening words—"Quiet as it's kept"—Morrison herself says that the novel involves the "disclosure of secrets," that "something grim is about to be divulged," namely "a terrible story about things one would rather not know anything about" (212, 213). Dittmar worries that "the microcosm Morrison locates in her Ohio town includes few venues for anger directed beyond the black community and almost no potential for regeneration within it," and concludes that the novel "does indeed seem overwhelmingly pessimistic, given its relentless piling up of abuses and betrayals" (140). Byerman argues that the "ideological hegemony of whiteness is simply too overwhelming to be successfully resisted" and specifies that even "Claudia, the strongest character in the book, cannot defy the myth" (449, 450).¹³

But if Claudia is the single narrator and the narrative is entirely her composition, then she has indeed resisted the power of "white mythology."¹⁴ In the first seasonal section, Claudia relates how, when she was a little girl, she dismembered white dolls to find out what made them beautiful and therefore lovable—to discover the essence of Beauty. All she found was sawdust (21). The text composed by the adult Claudia, The Bluest Eye, carries on the same discovery procedure on a grander scale; it undertakes the deconstruction and demystification of the ideology that makes those dolls beautiful: "And 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" (74, emphasis in original).

In that respect, Claudia's use of the Dick-and-Jane primer as master text represents a brilliant choice, for a primer is a basic tool of ideological indoctrination; it introduces readers to and inculcates the correct values.¹⁵ As one critic notes, "the act of learning to read or write means exposure to the values of the culture from which the reading material emanates. […] One cannot simply learn to read without being subjected to the values engraved in the text" (Gibson 20). The same logic adheres, of course, to reading the text that is The Bluest Eye ; one cannot read it without being subjected to Claudia's discovery of "the unreality or emptiness behind the facade of [the white] construction of femininity" (Munafo 8). In that respect, her text constitutes a counterprimer, designed "to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals" (The Bluest Eye 190); it critiques and thus dismembers the values and iconography fostering that love.

Claudia suggests in the coda that her narrative originates partly in guilt and betrayal, that she and the other members of the black community "assassinated" Pecola by scapegoating her or by turning their backs on her. Her narrative tries to make up for that betrayal. If we compare the lines from the primer mastertext to the epigraphs for the primer sections, we discover that a silencing has taken place; there is no primer section for the following epitext lines: "See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane?" Jane (Pecola) has been effectively eliminated, erased, silenced. The eye is proverbially the window to the soul, to all that is unique, irreplaceable, essential, but Pecola's eye/I is not her own; it belongs to the dominant culture. As a result, she identifies herself with a lack, with what she has not. She is, in effect, self-less and invisible. As one critic notes, "Morrison's novel contains repeated instances of Pecola's negation as other characters refuse to see her" (Miner 187). Because she cannot speak for or defend herself, she is literally and figuratively silenced almost throughout the text, condemned to an "imitation of life." As Morrison suggests in her afterword, the novel is built on a "silence as its center: the void that is Pecola's 'unbeing'" (215).

The Bluest Eye is itself the text that counterpoints the missing primer lines. It makes "Jane" visible and gives her a kind of being; it is the attempt of Claudia/Morrison to make the silence speak, to give voice to the voiceless. As a child, Claudia herself is silenced: she notes that adults do not talk to children; they give them orders (10). Growing up means acquiring a voice, joining the world of discourse, something that Pecola is prohibited from doing. In a sense, then, Claudia makes up for her betrayal by lending her voice to Pecola, by speaking her through her story. In so doing, by giving a present to the absent, Claudia makes the absent present.

That line of argument recalls a basic idea that the narrative calls into question, the idea that beauty is an essence, that it is present to itself (Walther 777). Morrison's novel not only critiques that idea, but it also transvalues it. Claudia invites readers to imagine the very real beauty of Pecola's unborn baby, with "its head covered with great O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin" (190). As Munafo notes, "[t]his affirming vision of Pecola's unborn baby asserts black presence and reinscribes blackness as beautiful" (9). More important, Claudia insists over and over that we acknowledge Pecola's own beauty. At one point Claudia notes the pleasure that Pecola's smile gives her (106); elsewhere she frets that Pecola would never know her own beauty (46-47).¹⁶ Claudia's narrative exists, the coda informs us, to reveal "all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she [Pecola] 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" (205). The Bluest Eye renders both the waste and the beauty.

Notes

1. I am referring, in traditional terms, to point of view. I use Stanzel's nomenclature because it is more exact (e. g., "authorial" is better than "omniscient) and less flawed (e.g., it does not rely on oxymorons such as "limited omniscience").
2. Insofar as the implied author assumes the right to insert this kind of commentary throughout the primer sections, we can say that their narrational dominant is authorial.
3. Klotman notes in passing that Claudia is the sole narrator, but she does not develop that line of argument (123-24). Smith claims that Claudia narrates "the preschool primer with which the novel begins," but that an "ostensibly omniscient narrator" recounts the subsequent primer sections (124). She does not explain why Claudia narrates one but not the others. Harris begins by suggesting that Claudia is the single narrator: "As storyteller, it is Claudia's job to shape the past so that it provides coherent meaning for the present audience" (16); "[a]s multi-voiced narrator, Claudia must make sense of what has ravaged the community" (22). Later, she retreats from that position, referring casually to "the parts of the novel Claudia narrates" (24) and saying that Claudia "occasionally gets help from some of the members of her community" (23).
4. Claudia's memory of being ill in the Autumn section: "But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it—taste it—sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in the house. […] And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die" (12).
5. Klotman says that "education by school and society is the dominant theme of The Bluest Eye" (123).
6. I could find only one use of first-person pro-nominal forms in the primer sections (other than in direct discourse). It occurs in the Pauline section: "So she became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours" (126). The speaker is also clearly present in the following passage, which serves to date her enunciation in a way similar to Claudia's: "So fluid has the population in that area been, that probably no one remembers longer, longer ago, before the time of the gypsies and the time of the teenagers when the Breedloves lived there, nestled together in the storefront" (34). Like Claudia, the speaker remembers that time very well.
7. Smith argues that both Claudia and the novel dodge the question why: "The Bluest Eye does not undertake to explain, for example, why black Americans aspire to an unattainable standard of beauty; why they displace their self-hatred onto a communal scapegoat; how Pecola's fate might have been avoided" (124). I argue that Claudia and her book answer all these questions.
8. Dittmar is the only critic who notes the uneven margins, connecting them with orality, but not with a specific narrative form: "While such margins may serve to suggest the text's informal, possibly spoken origins, the mere use of this unusual device is attention-getting, especially given its recurrent suspension and reintroduction" (141).
9. See Ogunyemi 112, Klotman 123, Wong 472. Wong argues that the primer lines depict each character as "maintain(ing) himself in a self-enclosed unity" and thus enact "the very conditions of alienated self-containment which underlie [white bourgeois] values" (471, 472).
10. Structurally, the number of primer sections increases in the latter half of the novel, as if, having made the how of Pecola's victimization clear, the narrative chooses to focus on the why.
11. The argument that "by acting in 'Bad Faith,' Pecola remains responsible, in the final analysis, for what happens to her" (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 15) is, therefore, flat-out wrong.
12. In her afterword, Morrison warns specifically "against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze" (210). See, in this regard, Guerrero; and Miner, 184-88.
13. Cf. Dittmar: "Individual characters may not participate in [positive] change; certainly Claudia, for all her adult retrospection, provides no empowerment" (142).
14. Cf. Rosenberg: "Claudia's ability to survive intact and to consolidate an identity derives from her vigorous opposition to the colorist attitudes of her community" (440); and Munafo: "Claudia says no [to the idea of whiteness], and in so doing she retains a sense of self-affirmation" (9).
15. Powell also argues that the primer is "a highly significant beginning," but for a different reason: "it points to the fact that all Afro-American writers have, willingly or not, been forced to begin with the Master's language. The Dick-and-Jane reader comes to symbolize the institutionalized ethnocentrism of the white logos" (749).
16. In her afterword, Morrison describes her response to the classmate who wanted blue eyes as follows: "although I had certainly used the word 'beautiful,' I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one else recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it" (209).

Works Cited

Byerman, Keith E. "Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva's Man." College Language Association Journal 25.4 (June 1982): 447-57.

Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. "Bleak Beginnings: The Bluest Eye." Holloway and Demetrakopoulos 31-36.

Dittmar, Linda. "'Will the Circle Be Unbroken?': The Politics of Form in The Bluest Eye." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 23.2 (Winter 1990): 137-55.

Gibson, Donald. "Text and Countertext in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 1.1-2 (1989): 19-32.

Guerrero, Edward. "Tracking 'The Look' in the Novels of Toni Morrison." Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990): 761-73.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Holloway, Karla F. C. "The Language and Music of Survival." Holloway and Demetrakopoulos 37-47.

Holloway, Karla F. C. and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Contributions in Women's Studies, Number 84. New York: Greenwood, 1987.

Klotman, Phyllis. "Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye." Black American Literature Forum 13.4 (Winter 1979): 123-25.

Miner, Madonne M. "Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye." Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 176-91.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970; rpt. New York: Plume, 1994.

Munafo, Giavanna. "'No Sign of Life': Marble-Blue Eyes and Lakefront Houses in The Bluest Eye." LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6.1-2 (1995): 1-19.

Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. "Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Critique 19.1 (1977): 112-20.

Powell, Timothy B. "Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page." Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990): 747-60.

Rosenberg, Ruth. "Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girl-hood in The Bluest Eye." Black American Literature Forum 21.4 (Winter 1987): 435-45.

Samuels, Wilfred D. and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Stanzel, Franz. Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Trans. James P. Pusack. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971.

Walther, Malin LaVon. "Out of Sight: Toni Morrison's Revision of Beauty." Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990): 775-89.

Wong, Shelley. "Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye." Callaloo 13 (1990): 471-81.

Margaret Delashmit (essay date spring 2001)

SOURCE: Delashmit, Margaret. "The Bluest Eye: An Indictment." Griot 20, no. 1 (spring 2001): 12-17.

[In the following essay, Delashmit explores how The Bluest Eye portrays the breakdown of community and family support in mid-twentieth-century African American society.]

In writing about literature written by African Americans in general, Ralph Ellison stated that, "the peculiar blend of possibility and denial faced by the Negro provides a kind of heightened metaphor for the American experiment and indeed for the human condition" (Olney 1). Henry Gates is more specific when he writes that Toni Morrison's lyrical narratives make the African American experience "the basis for a representation of humanity …. Her novels are never'about' the Black community of Lorain, Ohio, in the thirties and forties, even when they are apparently set there." Rather, her novels are always "symbolic of the shared human condition, both engaging with and transcending lines of gender, race, and class" (Gatesxi). Therefore, although Toni Morrison's novels are set within the African American community with its unique sorts of denials caused by the suppression and inequity which that race has suffered, as well as its tremendous potential for possibilities, readers of all races—for who has not suffered some denials and who has not faced some possibilities—can draw parallels between some of her characters and their own lives, especially when she deals with families and the rearing of children.

Morrison often addresses the problems of displacement and the resulting loss of identity that often occurred in much of American culture as a whole as families began to leave familiar surroundings to follow paths to greater economic security throughout the twentieth century. Her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), deals with the isolation of one family in particular and of several individuals who for one reason or another live on the margins of their society. The Breedlove family has moved from the south to the north, but the black sisterhood fails to accept the wife Pauline into their circle. Therefore, the family does not become a part of the extended family of the neighborhood, in large part because she does not measure up to their standards of beauty—she does not look like them or talk like them. As a result of their isolation, Pauline, Cholly the husband, Sammy the son, and Pecola the daughter in varying degrees lose their black identity, and Pecola loses her mental equilibrium.

In an interview with Bonnie Angelo in 1989, Toni Morrison said that the nuclear family "is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units—people need a larger unit." Until the Industrial Revolution sent people away from the farms, both black and white people in America lived within the parameters of the large ethnic family and community, such as is still found in Africa, for example. Although it is not usually wise to make generalizations about the cultures of peoples inhabiting the countries of such a large and varied continent as Africa, various nations and ethnic groups did share commonalities, one of which was that of ethnic kinship. The sociologist Monica McGoldrick interprets: "In contrast to the European premise 'I think, therefore, I am,' the prevailing African philosophy is, 'We are, therefore, I am." In effect," she says, "individuals owed their existence to the [ethnic community]" (68). During the period of slavery in America, however, when families were separated and even dissolved, slaves formed extended family relationships with fellow sufferers. Continuing until the present time, the African American "kinship" network is a source of strength to its members. In The Psychology of Blacks: An African-American Perspective (1990), Dr. Joseph White explains this kinship network:

[I]ndividual households are part of a social-familial network that functions like a mini-community. The members band together to share information, resources, and communal concerns … Decisions are made on an equalitarian model with input and outcomes determined by who is available at a given time, who has expertise with reference to a given problem, and who has prior experience and a track record in decision-making. This is likely to give some edge to family elders. They are looked up to within the extended family network as resource people and advisors because they have the life experience that is highly valued in the Black community. As in the past, the family has held together over time and geographical space by a shared experience frame and a common set of values.

     (32)

While European Americans do not now usually enjoy such a wealth of concerned relatives and friends as most African Americans do, most derive from ethnic backgrounds that were once rich with family and friends of family and a community that took an interest in its members. Unlike today's nomadic nuclear families, being an accepted member of the community and possessing knowledge of the history and the ancestors helped to ground individuals and give them identity. These individuals would then establish stable families within and supported emotionally by the community.

The Bluest Eye illustrates every individual's need to be accepted and nurtured by the family and every family's need to be nurtured and accepted by an extended family, the community at large. Pauline and Cholly Breedlove love each other when they marry and move from the South to Lorain, Ohio, where economic possibilities are greater and where they will supposedly better themselves. Like so many other American families who have left behind everything familiar, they do not realize that, like plants, they need to establish a strong root system if they are to be successfully transplanted into alien sod. A good job and money are not enough to validate Pauline and Cholly to themselves. Both lack that confidence in Self they need if they are to be comfortable enough outside their southern culture to adapt to new ways, make new friends, and establish new roots within the new community. They need help. In Pauline's own words:

Everything changed. It was hard to get to know folks up here, and I missed my people. I weren't used to so much white folks. … Up north they was everywhere … and colored folks few and far between. Northern colored folk was different too … No better than whites for meanness. They could make you feel just as no-count, 'cept I didn't expect it from them. That was the lone-somest time of my life.

     (93)

Instead of accepting and helping her, the black women Pauline encounters ridicule her lack of sophistication, further distancing her from members of her own race. Pauline, from the rural South, does not straighten her hair, wear high heels, or use makeup as they do, and her southern dialect causes "snickers" among them. Thus, she is denied the almost sacred sisterhood of other black women who should take her into their circle and serve as concerned family for her and later for her children. Of this sisterhood, Toni Morrison says, "The term sister … has a deep old meaning—it was valid, never secondary. Black women had to be real and genuine to each other, there was no one else. In pre-agency days they took care of the sick, the elderly, the children. There was a profound and real need there, for physical as well as psychological survival" (Russell 22-24). It is this sisterhood in Morrison's later novel Beloved that exorcizes that ghost and gives Sethe a new life; in her novel Tar Baby the sisterhood appears in a dream/vision to Jadine to indict her for betraying them, and therefore, her race, and to attempt to persuade her to assume her innate role as a nurturer. This sisterhood is not there for Pauline. Instead of nurturing her, the sisters turn from her in derision.

Because she has nowhere else to turn, Pauline begins to depend solely on her husband Cholly for the companionship and the reassurance women friends and the community would have provided her had the Breedloves remained within their own southern culture. Like many adults responding to the demands of another adult, Cholly resists such a burden and the two begin to drift apart. Lonely in her isolation, Pauline begins to spend her afternoons at the picture show where she internalizes white European concepts of beauty and order, which she can never realize. As she struggles to look like Jean Harlow, the epitome of blonde beauty at that time, and day dreams about the imaginary glamour she views on the screen, she becomes even more dissatisfied with her own home and her own life. She explains, "Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard" (97). When her baby girl Pecola is born, she realizes that "Lord she was ugly" (100).

Because the black culture does not embrace Pauline and strengthen her black identity, the prevalent white ideals of beauty, order, and general "rightness" assume a dominant role in Pauline's life, and later in Pecola's. It is not that others in the black community have not also internalized the white ideal because they have, as is evidenced by the white, blue-eyed baby dolls little girls such as Claudia, the narrator of the story, are given for Christmas. Claudia, however, who comes from a stable home where she is cherished and accepted, cannot understand why these dolls are considered pretty and tears them apart looking for the secret of their beauty. She never finds it. Later she blames the community's seduction by "a white standard of beauty [that made] Pecola its scapegoat: 'All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness … We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength … (Furman 21; Morrison 159).

When Pauline embraces the white family she works for, especially the little white girl with blue eyes, to the extent that she neglects her own family, blue eyes become for Pecola a metaphor for her mother's love. In her attempts to mirror the part of the Caucasian world that she believes will cause her mother to love her, Pecola becomes obsessive to the point of insanity. Her incipient descent into madness accelerates as the family deteriorates. After her father Cholly retreats into drink and loses his job and Pauline takes her day job as a maid in a white home, the Breedlove family lives in squalid poverty. At this point in the story, Cholly and Pauline communicate through fighting "with a dark brutal formalism … They fight each other with the same, or greater, intensity that they had once loved each other. Their young son Sammy responds to the atmosphere in the home by running away, and their daughter responds by alternately wishing one or the other of her parents would die or that she herself would die, She often prays that God will make her disappear. Then, closing her eyes, she imagines that the various parts of her body gradually vanish. She successfully erases every part of herself except her eyes, reasoning that the "[the eyes] were everything. Everything was there, in them. All of those pictures, all of those faces" (39). This is the stipulative end of her self-induced psychic fragmentation.

Convinced she is ugly, Pecola begins to think that perhaps the secret of her ugliness resides in her eyes, the last part of her fragmented self visible to herself. Perhaps if her eyes were beautiful, then she would be beautiful and her family would change. Maybe her parents would say, "Why look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn't do bad things in front of those pretty eyes" (40). So Pecola prays for blue eyes, but not just blue eyes. She wants the bluest of the blue, bluer that those of the little white girl in whose home her mother works every day, the little girl who has taken Pecola's place in her mother's affections. Then perhaps her mother will love her even more than she loves the little white girl.

The only adults who accept Pecola, three prostitutes who live in an apartment over the Breedloves, might seem to be a parody of the sisterhood but, ironically, they behave more sisterly toward Pecola than do some of the self-righteous "Christian" women of the community. Their names suggest symbolic betrayal and defeat. Marie, the French form of Mary, chaste mother of Jesus, is known in the community as the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line was an eighty-seven mile long underground string of forts built to defend France from invaders. The French thought it was impenetrable. During World War II, however, Germany took it within days. No doubt the community calls her this because of her size—she is described as "a mountain of flesh" (82)—and because she is "easy" to penetrate. But Pecola calls her Miss Marie. The other two are named Poland and China. The country Poland fell to Germany during the same war in which the Maginot Line fell, and during the Sino-Japanese War during World War II, Japan conquered a large portion of China's territories, raping and pillaging the land, killing more than three million people, 300,000 in Nanjing alone during a six to eight week period, and forcing countless others into lives of involuntary labor and sexual slavery (Alliance 1). Life has defeated these women long ago, and they are most definitely outside the sisterhood. Yet they form a more valid sisterhood than the Christian women whom they admire, many of the same ones who had earlier rejected Pauline.

Described as "merry gargoyles," they accept themselves as they are. There is no evidence in the text that they have been seduced by standards of white beauty. Quick to laugh, quick to sing, these women are described as "whores in whores' clothing, whores who had never been young and had no word for innocence" (48). The three form a tightly knit family unit, a sisterhood that dwells on the periphery of the black community, generally tolerated but not accepted in respectable society. The reader learns from Claudia and her sister Frieda that these women are "ruined," and the girls are not allowed to enter their home. Claudia says that Marie is "the one church women never allowed their eyes to rest on. That was the one who had killed people, set them on fire, poisoned them, cooked them in lye" (64). These probable fictions no doubt were used to discourage the young from associating with them or following their life style. Although these women befriend Pecola, take time to talk to her, call her fond names, "do not despise her" (43), they are on the fringes of society and cannot help her when her father Cholly rapes her and she bears his child. As Trudier Harris notes:

As haters of 'all men,' scorners of most women, 'whores in whores' clothing,' China, Poland, and Marie are too hardened as human beings and too committed to prostitution to provide anything more than a temporary respite from the ugliness of the community they share with Pecola.

     (37)

During this especially traumatic time, Pecola at the very least needs a friend, but her mother retreats even farther into her white world. Neither she nor anyone else in the community shows Pecola compassion. Pecola's friends Claudia and Frieda hear the neighborhood talk and are bewildered by people's reactions to Pecola's tragedy. Claudia says:

We were embarrassed for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally we just felt sorry for her … [O]ur sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it. 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.

     (148)

Once more the community's censorious attitude, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls "the Look," condemns (239). As Cynthia Davis explains, "[H]uman relations revolve around the experience of 'the Look,' for [how one is seen by others] both confirms one's reality and threatens one's sense of freedom" (324). How we think we are viewed by others, determines in large part how we view ourselves. The book ends with a schizophrenic Pecola conversing with an imaginary friend, a fragmented portion of her own disjointed self, about Pecola's newly acquired beautiful blue eyes. According to Pecola, her mother now looks "drop-eyed" at her. She tells her new friend, 'Ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me all of the time. Do you suppose she's jealous, too?" To which her imaginary friend replies, "Could be. They are pretty, you know" (151).

If the black sisterhood, acting as Pauline's extended family, had accepted Pauline as one of them when she first moved up north, then Pecola's tragedy might not have happened. Pauline would have spent time with other black women instead of at the movies watching glamorized depictions of the white culture. Had Pauline been happy, Cholly might have remained stable, might have kept his job and abstained from excessive drinking; then their children might have grown up in an entirely different sort of home. However, because of the uncharitable views of their society, first Pauline and then Pecola internalize an imaginary white other and nothing positive is certain for this family; indeed, the Breedloves simply cannot live up to their last names.

In this book Morrison makes several statements about black culture that can be extended to the American culture at large. First, personal values should not be determined by the physical beauty that seems to preoccupy Americans today; and second, we as a people should examine the definition of beauty. If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, then why do so many beholders in Pecola's world appreciate only fair skin and blue eyes? They, like Pauline, have internalized the archetypes of the white ideals of beauty, which were the only ideals actively promoted at the time. These ideals assumed the status of truth because they were the ideals of the majority who were doing the advertising. Just as Pecola learned from billboards, movies, and baby dolls that blue eyes were the preferred choice, the symbol of beauty, so today our young girls learn from television, movies, and Barbie that beauty is symbolized by diminishing pounds and sharp angles. In their frenzied search to be beautiful—a concept they equate with personal worth—many of the white Pecolas of our day become tragic victims of anorexia and bulimia. "Studies indicate that by their first year of college, 4.5 to 18 percent of women … have [sic] a history of bulimia and that as many as one in 100 females between the ages of 12 and 18 have anorexia" (Farley 4). And all because these young women have internalized the media's concept of beauty as well as the unspoken but powerful notion that physical beauty is the criterion that determines a woman's human worth. But simply to be beautiful is not enough. These girls want to be the slenderest of the slender, just as Pecola's eyes had to be the bluest of the blue. Sadly, many of these girls, like Pecola, will never see their true beauty and true worth, and they will be lost to us.

Unfortunately, for varied reasons, the white races do not experience the same sort of sisterhood that the black race experiences. For one thing, black women have been forced to come to each other's aid because of the oppression their race has suffered since the days of slavery; another reason is that as people become more economically independent, they tend to devalue their need for family. For several generations now the white races have prospered economically, and many have gradually turned away from the extended family. Morrison suggests that the black races can also lose their realization of their need for extended family. Her character Jadine in Tar Baby is in danger of becoming isolated from her own family because she is so successful financially she no longer needs their help, and even tends to be somewhat ashamed of her people. At the end of the book, she tells Ondine, the aunt who raised her, "There are other ways to be a woman … Your way is one, I guess it is, but it's not my way. I don't want to be … like you … I don't want to be that kind of woman" (281-82). The kind of woman she is gravitating toward becoming is an isolated white woman. Morrison implies here that embracing the values of the dominant culture may produce a weakening of the strength of the extended family within the African-American community as members of that ethnic group become more financially secure.

The Bluest Eye presents a sobering view of the damage possible to those persons—regardless of race—who are rejected by their own culture and subjected to the censorious gaze of their communities. One of the greatest psychological aids a society can give to its daughters is a network of extended family members to accept them, to nurture, guide, and guard them, and to help them realize their intrinsic worth and beauty.

Works Cited

Angelo, Bonnie. "The Pain of Being Black." Time, 22 May 1989: 122.

Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino. "Japan in Denial." Online. http://www.sjwar.org/voverview.shtml, 1.

Davis, Cynthia. "Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction." Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 323-42.

Farley, Dixie. "Eating Disorders: When Thinness Becomes an Obsession." FDA Consumer. May 1986: 4

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison's Fiction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

McGoldrick, Monica, Joe Giordano, and John K. Pearce. Ethnicity and Family Therapy. 2^nd ed. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.

Morrison, Toni. Interview with Bonnie Angelo. Time. 22 May 1989: 122.

——. Tar Baby. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.

——. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970.

Olney, James, ed. Afro-American Writing Today: An Anniversary Issue of the Southern Review. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Russell, Sandi. "It's OK to Say OK." Women's Review. London, 5 March 1986; 22-24; Rpt. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Ed. Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1988.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Bames. New York: Citadel Press, 1966.

White, Joseph L., and Thomas A. Parham. The Psychology of Blacks: An African-American Perspective. 2^nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990.

James Mayo (essay date summer 2002)

SOURCE: Mayo, James. "Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Explicator 60, no. 4 (summer 2002): 231-34.

[In the following essay, Mayo observes that Claudia, the narrator of The Bluest Eye, exerts a noticeably subjective emotional influence on her retelling of Pecola's life story.]

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye presents readers with a variety of thematic concerns, including dealing with or repressing guilt, shame, and violence; coming to terms with society's image of ideal beauty (both feminine and masculine); racial self-loathing; and, in a narrative sense, dealing with memories of the past that correspond to those themes. Claudia, the novel's narrator, reflects on one summer of her childhood, relating to readers her sense of shame and guilt over the incestuous rape of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Although most criticism of the novel focuses on Pecola's life, as filtered through Claudia's memory-narrative, Morrison gives readers a subtle clue that Claudia herself is a victim of rape and has repressed the memory. Readers should thus consider Claudia's sense of guilt over the death of Pecola's child in a different light.

After her rape, Pecola eventually makes her way to Soaphead Church, a West Indian mystic/prophet. Angry at God for ignoring the wishes of this small, "pitifully unattractive" child (173), anger that he directly expresses in a letter to God, Soaphead Church grants Pecola's wish, giving her the blue eyes she longs for, even though "[n]o one else will see her blue eyes" (182). Soaphead Church is a self-admitted child molester, a man abandoned by his wife years before his arrival in Lorain and his encounter with Pecola. Morrison describes Church as a man who "[a]ll his life had a fondness for things" (165). At some point, perhaps after his wife deserts him, Church's "attentions […] gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive—children" (166), specifically the bodies of "little girls," whom he finds "usually manageable and frequently seductive" (166).

The hints that Morrison gives readers that Claudia may in fact be one of the "little girls" that Church finds attractive appear in Church's letter to God and in the beginning of the following chapter (the first chapter of the "Summer" section). Church writes in his letter to God, "I couldn't […] keep my hands, my mouth, off them. Salt-sweet. Like not quite ripe strawberries covered with the light salt sweat of running days and hopping, skipping, jumping hours" (179). In the following chapter, as the narrative voice again becomes Claudia's, the sexual symbol of the strawberries is revisited. The chapter begins with Claudia's reminiscing about summer, and she relates that she only has "to break into the tightness of a strawberry" (187) to see summer. Morrison then mixes the symbol to further suggest that Claudia, like many other young girls in Lorain, was a victim of Soaphead Church's pedophilia, as Claudia links strawberries and summer to "dust and lowering skies" (187). Claudia explains that, for her, summer is "a season of storms. The parched days and sticky nights are undistinguished in my mind, but the storms, the violent sudden storms, both frightened and quenched me" (187). The language here is clear: "strawberry," "tightness," and "quenched" offer sexual imagery, whereas "violent," "sudden," "storms," and "frightened" suggest the violence and trauma that a victim of pedophilia would experience.

Morrison also gives readers a subtle clue as to how Claudia may have fallen victim to Soaphead Church. Church, in his confessional, yet blasphemous, letter to God, describes his method of luring the girls into his lair: "I gave them mints, money, and they'd eat ice cream with their legs open while I played with them. It was like a party" (181). Throughout the novel Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, as would any child growing up poor, long for candy and ice cream. Mr. Henry, who boards with Claudia's family, uses the promise of candy and ice cream as an enticement to keep the girls from telling their parents that he has brought the "whores" into the home while the family is away, thus establishing the relationship between material gifts and sex. Claudia also relates to readers that she and her sister sold seeds throughout the summer of Pecola's pregnancy, ignoring their mother's advice to go only to the homes of people they knew and going, instead, from door to door (188). Again, the sexual reference in the language ("seeds") is clear, and Claudia and Frieda could have, like Pecola, found their way to the door of Soaphead Church.

All of this may lead readers to question why, if she or her sister had indeed been raped by Soaphead Church, Claudia does not reveal that fact in the course of her narration. Two explanations are possible. Claudia, after describing the relationship between strawberries and summer, goes on to say in the same paragraph that her "memory is uncertain" (187). Claudia remembers a story her mother told her of a tornado that struck Lorain in 1929. Over the years, Claudia's and her mother's separate stories have blended, and she states, "I mix up her summer with my own" (187). Naturally, this could be offered as an explanation for Claudia's failure to mention her own rape. Perhaps Claudia has chosen not to remember or accept her ordeal, as Pecola does after she "receives" blue eyes. As Pecola descends into insanity, she has completely repressed the memory of her own rape, and Claudia could have done the same.

Another possibility concerning the omission points to a theme of the novel that many critics have noted, the keeping of secrets. Pecola keeps the secret of her rape; Pecola's mother does not make public the fact that her daughter was raped by her own father; Pecola's mother also chooses not to make public the fact that her husband beats her. J. Brooks Bouson argues that Morrison protects readers from the "traumatic, shame-laden subject matter of her novel" by making them part of the conspiracy, by "invoking the 'back fence' world of 'illicit gossip'" (Bouson 26). "Conspiracy" implies that the characters, indeed the victims, are committed to keeping the traumatic events of their lives secret, only revealing them in an intimate, trusting manner with the reader. The fact that they would want to keep such traumatic events secret only makes sense. The self-loathing they feel could be made worse if their secrets were revealed.

Claudia expresses the feelings of guilt that she and her sister experience over the death of Pecola's child and Pecola's insanity. Claudia feels that the fact that the seeds they planted do not grow somehow implicates her in the death of the child. She and her sister, like the other members of the community, do not do enough to save Pecola, but perhaps Claudia's feelings should be viewed in a different light. It is possible that, as a victim of rape herself, Claudia shares in Pecola's trauma and shame in a more direct manner.

Works Cited

Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet as It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994.

THE BIG BOX (1999)

Hazel Rochman (review date August 1999)

SOURCE: Rochman, Hazel. Review of The Big Box, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Giselle Potter. Booklist 95, no. 22 (August 1999): 2067.

"Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy." Wordsworth's famous line could be the theme of Morrison's first picture book [The Big Box ], coauthored by her son, who "devised" the story when he was nine. It's about three contemporary kids imprisoned because their imagination and spontaneity threaten the conformist adult world. Patty's a rebel in the classroom; she makes the heavy-browed, therapeutic grown-ups nervous. Mickey upsets his city neighborhood. Liza frees the animals on the farm. So, for their own good, the three children must be locked away in a big, brown box. The box is comfortable, even pretty, filled with cool consumer stuff, but there are three locks on the door, which opens only one way. Although the sing-song, rhyming narrative suffers from a didactic refrain about the joyful natural world outside, where animals scream, rabbits hop, and "beavers chew trees when they need 'em," [Giselle] Potter's large-size double-spread illustrations in naive style effectively contrast the stiff, luxurious details of the human prison with the openness and color of the primitive wilderness to which the triumphant rebellious trio escape and run with the animals in the light. Disobedience, nonconformity, and imaginative play are at the heart of many great children's books, from Maurice Sendak's 1963 classic, Where the Wild Things Are, to Rosemary Wells' subversive Timothy Goes to School (1981); in contrast, Morrison's story is simplistic and sentimental. Older kids may want to talk about the sinister prison images of dystopia, but the message about individual freedom is too heavily spelled out, three times in fact. The story will appeal most to adults who cherish images of childhood innocence in a fallen world.

Ellen Fader (review date September 1999)

SOURCE: Fader, Ellen. Review of The Big Box, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Giselle Potter. School Library Journal 45, no. 9 (September 1999): 227.

Morrison sets to rhyme a story her son created when he was nine years old [in The Big Box ]. When three children make their parents, neighbors, or teachers nervous—Patty talks in the library, Mickey plays handball where he shouldn't, and Liza Sue lets the chickens on her farm keep their eggs—the adults decide that the youngsters can't handle their freedom and so choose to have them confined. A literal reading of the text says that they put them in a big box, but some will infer that they were institutionalized. Their parents visit on Wednesday nights and provide plenty of material gifts, but "the door only opens one way." [Giselle] Potter's moody, quirky, sombercolored illustrations, similar to those she created for Candace Fleming's Gabriella's Song (1997), interpret the story quite literally, picturing nearly every object mentioned in the text, leaving little to readers' imaginations. The box varies between a furnished room with the three locks on the door referred to in the text, to the cardboard box on the cover, from which, at the end of the story, the three break free to recapture their personal freedom. This is a book that will have a hard time finding an audience: it looks like a picture book for younger children, yet the theme and images require some sophistication and a desire to explore life's boundaries. What children of any age will make of parents who decided to lock up their own children for relatively minor infractions remains to be seen.

Horn Book Magazine (review date September-October 1999)

SOURCE: Review of The Big Box, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Giselle Potter. Horn Book Magazine 75, no. 5 (September-October 1999): 598.

The Morrisons' long poem [The Big Box ] about the need to let children be "free" relies on a heavy-handed irony ("So they gave little Patty an understanding hug / And put her in a big brown box. / It has carpets and curtains and bean bag chairs / But the door has three big locks") that is predictably countered by a clichéd voice of childhood wisdom ("I know you are smart and I know that you think / You are doing what is best for me. / But if freedom is handled just your way / Then it's not my freedom or free.") This scenario is repeated for a number of children (and stanzas), and the lack of either thematic or narrative development makes the book tedious. [Giselle] Potter's pictures are big and nice, but they just don't have a lot of work to do beyond showing glum-eyed children in locked rooms (oddly, the locks are on the inside, subverting the entire thrust of the text), or happy-faced children gamboling in nature. Kids faced with reading this book might be well advised to take its advice and go out and play instead.

Janice M. Del Negro (review date February 2000)

SOURCE: Del Negro, Janice M. Review of The Big Box, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Giselle Potter. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 53, no. 6 (February 2000): 216.

In this rhyming tale [The Big Box ], Patty, Mickey, and Liza Sue are a trial to their elders because "they just can't handle their freedom" and as a result they are shut up inside a big box that has a door with "three big locks" that "only opens one way." The children defend their actions ("Even sparrows scream / And rabbits hop / And beavers chew trees when they need 'em") claiming they are only the natural activities of active children, but into the box (sort of a designer prison) they go. Slade Morrison, son of Pulitzer prize winner Toni Morrison, "devised" this lengthy story when he was nine years old and let his mother "impose" the rhyme. While the story shows some imagination and philosophical precociousness, it has little internal logic, pace, or closure, and the rhyme scheme is labored. This title achieves grace through the watercolor illustrations of Giselle Potter, whose light-handed visual interpretation offsets the heavy contrivance of the text. Patty, Mickey, and Liza Sue are depicted as spirited children surrounded by adults with pinched sour faces (the kind that would give the class clown Ritalin instead of an opportunity to shine). Clean, unmuddy colors give a sense of walls infused with light, and off-kilter perspectives and askew horizons reflect the innocent energy of the well-meaning if messagey text. This is an interesting product that will have definite appeal for adults but an uncertain appeal for children.

Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (review date May 2002)

SOURCE: Review of The Big Box, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Giselle Potter. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 45, no. 8 (May 2002): 795.

This seemingly humorous book [The Big Box ] has a haunting message about children who don't fit the accepted definitions of what it means to be "normal." In poetic form, the authors tell the stories of Patty, Mickey, and Liza Sue, who live in a big brown box. Because of the children's behavior, the adults who are responsible for them have concluded that the three just can't handle freedom and must be locked away. Although they have lots of toys and fun items like beanbag chairs and bubble gum, the children are portrayed as prisoners separated from families and peers. The story is reminiscent of children who are pulled out of regular education classes and segregated in special education classes because they don't meet the standard definition of what children at a specific age should be able to do.

THE BOOK OF MEAN PEOPLE (2002)

Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 September 2002)

SOURCE: Review of The Book of Mean People, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 17 (1 September 2002):1316.

A fretful child catalogs affronts [in The Book of Mean People ]: people who shout at you, or those who whisper and giggle just out of earshot; parents who try to make you eat something nasty-looking; the teacher who tells you that your work is sloppy, and so on. The Morrisons (Big Box, 1999, illustrated by Giselle Potter) address meanies as well as their victims, repeatedly asserting that screamers disappear behind their yells, and noting that "big people are little when they are mean. But little people are not big when they are mean." [Pascal] Le Maître complements this simply phrased plaint with long-eared, Matt Groening-style rabbits suspended in cream-colored space with a minimum of surrounding detail. Children who know just what the young narrator is talking about may take to heart the closing advice to smile in the face of frowns.

Publishers Weekly (review date 9 September 2002)

SOURCE: Review of The Book of Mean People, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Publishers Weekly 249, no. 36 (9 September 2002): 68.

"This is a book about mean people," opens [The Book of Mean People, ] the mother-son team's second collaboration (after The Big Box ). The narrative begins as a series of statements about cruelty, but [Pascal] Lemaître (Emily the Giraffe) cleverly fashions the declaratives as thoughts belonging to an intelligent bunny narrator with a diminutive canine side-kick. For "Some mean people are big. Some little people are mean," a spread shows a huge bunny towering above the overalls-clad hero; in the next, a diapered bunny ties the narrator's long ears in knots. The book soon turns from general truisms about "mean" people into a lament about the incomprehensible demands of grown-ups. Lemaître, however, never ceases to see the humor in the situation. "My grandmother tells me to sit down. My grandfather tells me to sit up," appears on a spread depicting the bunny, one ear down, one ear up, looking torn between the two. The next spread ("How can I sit down and sit up at the same time?") portrays the bunny lying wide-eyed, tipped backwards in his chair, while his dog hides behind a table leg. Others scenarios are chilling, as when the bunny's mother screams ("Do you hear me?"), blasting the hero and his puppy clear across the room. "Frowning people scare me when they smile," the rabbit says at the end, surrounded by his family, all grinning evilly; but he has the last word: "I will smile anyway! How about that!" This bittersweet volume takes meanness in stride and advocates kindness as the antidote.

Hazel Rochman (review date 15 October 2002)

SOURCE: Rochman, Hazel. Review of The Book of Mean People, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Booklist 99, no. 4 (15 October 2002): 412-13.

The Morrisons' first picture book, The Big Box (2000), was heavy and messagy about the scariness of adults. This time [in The Book of Mean People ] the authors do a better job of showing a small child's viewpoint, and [Pascal] Lemaître's cartoon-style bunny characters in ink and cheerful watercolors make the grown-ups look silly as well as ugly and mean. In the first dramatic picture, the stiff, frowning father rabbit looms across a double-page spread, his necktie like a weapon swinging at the child in the lower left-hand corner. Shouting is printed in huge letters across two pages that show the child trying to close his ears to his parents' scary standoff. Then there are grown-ups who smile when they are mean, bullies who whisper, and a teacher, a big brother, and a babysitter who are huge and overbearing. Of course, children's books long ago moved away from idyllic views of childhood innocence and bliss, so this idea isn't new. But small kids will recognize the angry scenarios, and they will enjoy talking about the pictures with adults who listen.

Judith Constantinides (review date November 2002)

SOURCE: Constantinides, Judith. Review of The Book of Mean People, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. School Library Journal 48, no. 11 (November 2002): 132.

Accompanied by whimsical pen-and-ink cartoon illustrations in the style of William Steig or Shel Silverstein, this book [The Book of Mean People ] catalogs "mean people" from a child's point of view: "Some mean people are big. Some little people are mean. … My mother is mean. She says I don't listen. She says, 'DO YOU HEAR ME?'" The illustrations feature a little bunny with big ears and a worried expression as she reacts to various unkind people in her family, before deciding to smile anyway and go play. The bunny's definition of "mean" includes a baby in diapers pulling the narrator's ears, her grandmother telling her to sit down, and her mother trying to get her to eat her peas—not instances of deliberate or intentional meanness. The book could be used as a springboard to discuss anger and shouting, etc., but it does not give any reassurance that any of these people are ever caring and loving.

WHO'S GOT GAME? THE ANT OR THE GRASSHOPPER? (2003)

Francisca Goldsmith (review date 15 May 2003)

SOURCE: Goldsmith, Francisca. Review of Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Booklist 99, no. 18 (15 May 2003): 1660.

Novelist Morrison and her son, a professional painter, team up again with the illustrator of their previous joint project. The Book of Mean People (2002). This time [in Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grass-hopper? ], Aesop's fable about the organized ant and the live-for-today grasshopper provides the picture book story line, which is illustrated in highly colored and textured cartoon panels. The setting is urban contemporary, and the dialogue is heavily spiced with street talk and basketball references. The characters, Foxy G and Kid A, are depicted quickly and surely in both text and image as the story unfolds with its classic message. The final pages present a moral question usually ignored by Aesop's adaptors. Did the ant do the right thing by withholding charity from one who gave him aesthetic pleasure? The idea won't mean much to younger children, but it's exactly the right question to open discussion among older ones, who are becoming aware of the notion of strength of character.

Publishers Weekly (review date 2 June 2003)

SOURCE: Review of Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 22 (2 June 2003): 50.

Aesop's freewheeling Grasshopper and industrious Ant become "Foxy C and his ace Kid A" in [Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? ] this witty, hip-hop-inspired update by the Morrisons and [Pascal] Lemaître (who previously teamed up in The Book of Mean People ). In comic-book panels and voice bubbles, snazzily hand-lettered by the illustrator, the friends rhyme and loaf in a Brooklynesque bug city. Kid A, a slouchy orange insect, loves hanging out and shooting hoops with Foxy G, a talented singer who rubs his gray wings to make music. But "one hot day / as they lay in the shade / Kid A turned to his friend and said: / Got to split, Foxy. The summer's been fun. / Time to dump this place, get back in the race. / There's a lot of work to be done." Foxy thinks creativity is more important. "I have to groove, move, prove, disprove," he brags as Kid A leaves. Kid A dances to Foxy's tunes while he does his chores, but when winter comes, he munches a doughnut while Foxy begs for a crumb. "I quenched your thirst! and fed your soul! you can't spare me / a doughnut hole?" Foxy asks in disbelief. He makes a case for the artist's role in society, but at the ambiguous conclusion, he still shivers in the snow. The authors wisely leave it to readers to answer the title question. Similarly, in the revised fable Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse?, a boastful king of beasts gets a thorn in his paw and lets a timid mouse pull it. Afterward, the two reverse roles; the lion learns humility, but the mouse becomes a power-mad bully. Once again the audience must decide "who's got game," or who's in the right. Both retellings—especially the shrewd portrait of the musician—score slam dunks.

Steven Engelfried (review date September 2003)

SOURCE: Engelfried, Steven. Review of Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. School Library Journal 49, no. 9 (September 2003): 204.

Rhythmic verse, comic-strip panels, and a bugpopulated city are the main elements in this modern twist on an Aesop fable [Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? ]. Kid A, an ant, leaves his grass-hopper friend, Foxy G, to return to work: "Got to split. Foxy. The summer's been fun. Time to dump this place, get back in the race. There's a lot of work to be done." Foxy stays on the streets ("I have to GROOVE. MOVE, PROVE, DISPROVE …") to play music clear and wild. When the grasshopper's wings freeze, he shamefully goes to the ant's door. Recalling Leo Lionni's Frederick (1967), Foxy argues that "ART IS WORK / It just looks like play," but his friend rejects him. Strong rhythms and occasional use of slang match the jazzy world depicted in the artwork. Some rhymes seem forced, but in general the poetry is effective, flowing through narration and dialogue. The handwritten cursive text may be challenging for younger readers. [Pascal] Lemaître's cartoons help with the story's pace, and the switch from small panels to full-page scenes effectively accentuates dramatic moments. The book ends with two wordless illustrations, one showing a not so-sure-of-himself ant opposite a look at the grasshopper trudging through the snow. A final scene repeats the grasshopper view, this time depicted as a snow globe, with the phrase "Who's Got Game?" underneath. Readers drawn into the initially lighthearted tale are neatly led to a conclusion that encourages them to ponder and discuss the value and importance of art.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Bush, Elizabeth. Review of Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake?, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 57, no. 8 (April 2004): 344.

Commends Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? for creating a "snappy" and entertaining morality tale.

Goldsmith, Francisca. Review of Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake?, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Booklist 100, no. 12 (15 February 2004): 1077.

Notes that, though the "Who's Got Game?" series has been uneven in quality, Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? "is particularly well done."

Review of Remember: The Journey to School Integration, by Toni Morrison. Kirkus Reviews 72, no. 8 (15 April 2004): 398.

Argues that the format and layout of Remember: The Journey to School Integration might be confusing to young readers.

Moses, Cat. "The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." African American Review 33, no. 4 (winter 1999): 623-36.

Identifies the themes and rhetorical structures of The Bluest Eye with the conventions of blues music, discerning a female subjectivity in the character of Claudia that relates to the African American oral tradition of "testimony" in the blues aesthetic.

Munafo, Giavanna. "'No Sign of Life'—Marble-Blue Eyes and Lakefront Houses in The Bluest Eye." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 6, nos. 1-2 (April 1995): 1-19.

Illuminates the racial, gender, and economic implications of Morrison's deconstruction of "whiteness" in The Bluest Eye.

Portales, Marco. "Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye: Shirley Temple and Cholly." Centennial Review 30, no. 4 (fall 1986): 496-506.

Examines Morrison's characterizations of Pecola and Cholly in The Bluest Eye, focusing on the cultural forces that shape their respective identities.

Porter, Evette. Review of The Book of Mean People, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Black Issues Book Review 4, no. 6 (November-December 2002): 39.

Praises The Book of Mean People for constructing a "witty yet candid look at anger from the perspective of a child."

Rochman, Hazel. Review of Remember: The Journey to School Integration, by Toni Morrison. Booklist 100, no. 16 (15 April 2004): 1436.

Compliments the "electrifying" photography in Remember: The Journey to School Integration but notes that Morrison's text is overly "intrusive."

Stevenson, Deborah. Review of The Book of Mean People, by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison, illustrated by Pascal Lemaître. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 56, no. 5 (January 2003): 206-07.

Asserts that The Book of Mean People takes an unclear and unfocused approach to its subject material.

Yancy, George. "The Black Self within a Semiotic Space of Whiteness: Reflections on the Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." CLA Journal 43, no. 3 (March 2000): 299-319.

Explores the symbolic values of "whiteness" as it functions within the life of Pecola in The Bluest Eye, focusing on both the character's psychological and bodily "ugliness" and the inherent distortions of "whiteness" itself.

Additional coverage of Morrison's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: African American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; American Writers: The Classics, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 1, 22; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 3; Black Writers, Eds. 2, 3; Concise Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1968-1988; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 29-32R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 27, 42, 67, 113, 124; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 4, 10, 22, 55, 81, 87, 173; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 6, 33, 143; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1981; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied, Multicultural, Novelists, Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Feminist Writers; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 2, 4; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Ed. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vols. 1, 6, 8, 14; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Something about the Author, Vols. 57, 144; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 5; Twayne's United States Authors; and Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers .