TONI MORRISON: TITLE COMMENTARY

The Bluest Eye

PIN-CHIA FENG (ESSAY DATE 1998)

SOURCE: Feng, Pin-chia. "The Gaze of The Bluest Eye." In The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading, pp. 51-75. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Feng discusses Morrison's treatment of race, power, and black conformity to white beauty standards in The Bluest Eye, noting the novel's anti-Bildungsroman properties.

The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the content of The Bluest Eye.

—Toni Morrison, "Memory, Creation, and Writing"

The Bluest Eye tells a story of a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wants blue eyes and is raped by her own father. Haunted by the memory of Pecola's tragedy, the first-person narrator, Claudia MacTeer, attempts to make sense of the incident in retrospect. The novel is not only Pecola's story but Claudia's as well. It is also a story for girls growing up without positive images of themselves reflected in the mirror held up by mainstream society, and constantly under the gaze of the blue eye of dominant ideology. And the reader is the one to piece together the fragments of the girls' personal, cultural, and racial experiences to understand the political message Morrison has inscribed in her haunting novel.

The Bluest Eye can be read as a double Bildungsroman, in which Claudia's narrative of Bildung is deployed as a contrast to Pecola's.¹ The idea of a "double Bildungsroman" is first suggested in Jerome Buckley's reading of The Mill on the Floss entitled "George Eliot—Double Life."² Charlotte Goodman coins the term "male-female double Bildungsroman" for the developmental plot of a male-female pair.³ This double form, Goodman contends, is able to emphasize the way in which rigid gender roles restrict the full development of women and men alike (31). Susan Fraiman's model of "counternarratives" in the novel of development by British women writers further diverts from Goodman's androgynous vision and underscores the rifts and incongruities between the coveted male model of development and the female counter one. Central to both Goodman's and Fraiman's theoretical models is a critique of the gender dichotomy imposed by society.

In the fictional world of The Bluest Eye, however, Toni Morrison focuses instead on racial dichotomy. She weaves the contrasts and comparisons around a pair of black girls to highlight the compounding work of racism as well as sexism and classism on the Bildung of black girls. Claudia grows up to tell the story, while Pecola "grows down" and sinks into madness.⁴ The novel proper records the intersection of Pecola's and Claudia's narratives of Bildung: a single year of their lives which marks both girls' "coming of age"—from the autumn of 1940 to the "fall" of 1941—the year in which Pecola's incestuous rape takes place. What happens in that year are not isolated events but events closely connected to the racial and cultural memories of black Americans. Whether the two girls' development is "successful" is measured against the degree of assimilation to white ideology of the Bildung they achieve. But contrary to the prototypical plot of the male Bildungsroman, Claudia survives to tell the story by resisting social and racial conformity. Pecola fails the test precisely because of her unconditional internalization of the dominant ideology. Thus even in her first attempt at the novel form Morrison not only highlights the racial factor in Afro-American developmental plot but also deconstructs the plot of social integration inherent in the male Bildungsroman.

Furthermore, this novel challenges the developmental patterns of the typical Bildungsroman that Buckley has specified. From the outset Morrison creates a pseudo-chronological framework based on the natural transition of four seasons. This simulacrum of lineality is nevertheless constantly interrupted by the emergence of broken pieces of past experiences. This kind of narrative fragmentation reflects a characteristic discursive discontinuity of modernist and postmodernist writing. This mode of fragmentary writing, what Susan Willis identifies as "the four-page formula" for black women writers, also embodies the storytelling tradition in Afro-American culture (Specifying 14). The intrusion of past experiences into the present signifies a return of the repressed that the two protagonists are forced to reckon with.

Morrison achieves the effect of narrative fragmentation in The Bluest Eye through the use of multiple narrative voices. Even within Claudia's first-person narrative the voice is divided between different perspectives of Claudia-as-a-child and of a somewhat "mature" Claudia. The outer framework of the novel inscribes a "mature" Claudia who looks backward at one of the most significant years of her childhood and attempts to exorcize the experience of pain by reconstructing the nature of this pain that lives in her memory. This outer frame is further deconstructed by Morrison's use of a third-person omniscient narrator. As Valerie Smith points out, the apparently objective omniscient narrator fills in for the reader information that the characters have no access to (125). The omniscient narrator also vicariously acts out Claudia's, even Morrison's, desire for revenge on the dominant society. In her television interview with Bill Moyers, Morrison assigns one of the reasons for Pecola's tragedy to her unconditional acceptance of the "master narrative"—the dominant discourse represented by the Dick-and-Jane primer at the beginning of the novel. The primer, which can be regarded as one of Barthes's cultural codes, functions as the standard discourse of Bildung provided by the mainstream culture. Susan Fraiman observes the attraction of the standard Bildungsroman to women in her theory of counternarratives. In The Bluest Eye Morrison both portrays the attractiveness of the Dick-and-Jane narrative to the black community and deconstructs element by element the false ideology of this white, middle-class discourse. By allowing the narrator to dissect the primer into fragments, Morrison enacts Claudia's desire to dismember the white dolls and partially releases the pressure of discursive violence and racial confrontation.

Neither Claudia nor the narrator, nevertheless, can get to the how of Pecola's story. The narrative stance of the "mature" Claudia is still repressive since she could not bear to look into the why of Pecola's tragedy. And the narrator also chooses to "show" how the tragedy occurs rather than to "tell" why. Only the reader attentive to the heteroglossic narrative voices can start the analytical process of breaking the resistance and come to the why through piecing together the narrative of how.

The role of the reader is of great importance in Morrison's literary creation. The text is "the map" for the reader's participation, as Morrison proclaims in "Memory, Creation, and Writing" (389). And the writer's duty is to provide the places and spaces for the reader to participate in ("Rootedness" 341). The emphasis on the "reader's response" is further underlined in Morrison's analysis of her own works. In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," Morrison indicates that the purposeful simplicity of the opening line of The Bluest Eye, coming directly from black women's language of gossip, is meant to establish a conspiratorial relationship between the narrator and the reader, and a sudden and instant intimacy between the reader and the page. This aura of conspiracy and familiarity, however, is immediately undermined by the question of reliability provoked by Claudia's child-like logic in linking Pecola's rape to the nonappearance of marigolds in 1941. Claudia and Frieda have attempted to find a logical explanation for the unnaturalness they have witnessed. If they have any success, as Morrison points out, it will be "in transferring the problem of fathoming to the presumable adult reader, to the inner circle of listeners" (19-22). This careful design on Morrison's part to engage the reader indicates that the reader must be the final "private eye" to ferret out the why of Pecola's tragedy.

In Claudia's haunting story there is also an immanent sense of guilt for failing to save Pecola's baby and the hapless mother. This kind of guilt originates in female bonding and empathy. In Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy the protagonist Tashi's analyst Raye, an Afro-American woman herself, mutilates her gum in order to understand Tashi's pain of genital castration. Tashi sees Raye's action as "intuitively practicing an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy" (131). In this guise, the healer Raye becomes for the resisting Tashi someone she can bond with and one who can release her repressed memory. That kind of female bonding happens in The Bluest Eye, too. Claudia and Frieda, while trying to save Pecola's unborn baby by burying the seeds and their hard-earned money, practice the same kind of magical ritual of empathy. The MacTeer sisters' sacrifice creates a bond between them and the unhappy Pecola. By implication, Morrison suggests that in order to work for the possibility of social healing, the reader, too, needs to practice this emphathetic magic. The only saving grace for Pecola, perhaps, is the reader's attentiveness to the voice within the silence, as Kogawa has suggested in Obasan. What follows is this reader's attempt to work the magic of empathy and piece together the splintered mirror in the novel to trace the why of one black girl's tragic end and another's narrow escape.

I. Pecola Breedlove

Pecola Breedlove's story builds upon Morrison's specific recollection of how she felt upon hearing that a black girl in her neighborhood prayed for blue eyes ("Memory" 388). Pecola is the narrative embodiment of this prayer; and as Claudia states, "the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (158). In her schizophrenic state Pecola imagines herself with the bluest eyes of all. It is not difficult to see her as a victim of the external society. Patrice Cormier-Hamilton, for instance, claims that The Bluest Eye serves as an example of "black naturalism" and in the character of Pecola Morrison most emphatically "incorpoartes the naturalist theme of the 'waste of individual potential' due to environmental circumstances" (115). Some critics, however, regard Pecola's end as a triumph. For example, Chiwenye Ogunyemi, arguing from a "womanist" position, maintains that Pecola's madness allows her to acquire "an interior spiritual beauty symbolized by the bluest eye." "Madness," contends Ogunyemi, "becomes a temporary aberration preceding spiritual growth, healing, and integration." (74).

It is hard to chime in with Ogunyemi's optimistic tone since she fails to analyze the ideological connotation behind the bluest eye. Pecola is the ultimate victim of "the bluest eye." In spite of the fact that her insanity reverses her previous invisibility and forces her presence on her community, Pecola's final appearance in the novel is metaphorically "a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of the mind" (158, italics mine). This "blue void" represents a "lack" inside Pecola that has grounded her fledgling development—a desire that is impossible to fulfill because it originates in an external standard imposed by the dominant society and impossible to forget since Pecola has fully internalized her own deficiency. Not unlike her slave fore-mothers who have been judged as morally deficient because of their supposed "lack" of (white) True Womanhood,⁵ Pecola suffers this psychological lack because her biological difference is designated as inferior in the hegemonic discourse of white supremacy.

This "blue void" also represents the monolithic bluest eye of the external world that has consumed Pecola. The bluest eye of the title signifies the monovision of American society that perceives minority people as the "Other" and privileges only a white physical standard. From Pecola's prayer for "blue eyes" to the one final irreducible eyeball of "the bluest eye" like a gigantic social monitor, Morrison suggests an accentuating movement of the closing-in of dominant society on the self-definition of the non-white. This monolithic bluest eye represents what bell hooks calls "the imperial gaze—the look that seeks to dominate, subjugate, and colonize" generated from a white supremacist culture (Black Looks 7). The "void" in Pecola's life reflects what hooks calls the "gaps" in the psyche of black people—the gaps "where mindless complicity, self-destructive rage, hatred, and paralyzing despair enter"—conditioned by this relentless monovision (Black Looks 4).

This "void" is also created by an experience of "mirror stage," in Lacanian terms. While looking into the mirror that a white society holds up to her, Pecola cannot see "the ideal image," that is, one with blue eyes, in her own reflection. Pecola has internalized the dominant ideology of ideal beauty, the Law of the White Fathers, so deeply that the unbridgeable difference between her and the objectified image of standard beauty obliterates what little self image she has, thus creating a paradoxically invisible yet imprisoning "blue void" around her. Hence Pecola's entrance into the Symbolic order ironically marks her mental and physical destruction.

The central trope of Pecola's narrative is indeed the eye, as Wilfred Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems contend (17). Pecola is completely reified by what Jean-Paul Sartre calls le regard (the Look), the gaze of the dominant definition of her as an "Other." In their critical assessment of The Bluest Eye, Samuels and Hudson-Weems use Sartre's notion of le regard to explicate the self-objectification of Pecola and her family. The Breedloves are characters who "use others to escape their own responsibility to define themselves" (8) and try to live up to an external image imposed on them by mainstream society. Pecola's self-abnegation is an especially castrating act of "Bad Faith" because she objectifies herself into a "being-for-the-other" instead of being a subjective "being-for-self" (18). From wanting blue eyes to being overwhelmed by the bluest eye, Pecola becomes the protagonist of an anti-Bildungsroman that illustrates how a mentally colonized black girl fails to negotiate her personal, cultural and racial experiences and finally resorts to the protection of madness.⁶

Pecola's narrative of (anti-) Bildung is modeled after Greek tragedy, yet rooted in Afro-American community. Like Hurston who writes about the inner world of black life, Morrison situates her first novel in the black community with a very limited appearance of white characters. Morrison stages the descent into madness of this Afro-American anti-heroine in a way similar to a predestined Greek "hero." For instance, Pecola's story is outlined at the very beginning by the "mature" Claudia. This unconventional narrative technique locks Pecola in an unbreakable discursive prison and creates a sense of the overdetermination of Pecola's fate. After providing the reader with this plot summary, Morrison then upstages Pecola through the side door in the narrative proper as a "case"—a girl who has been put outdoors by her reckless father—which establishes Pecola's status as a marginal figure even in her own community. All these theatrical devices contribute to make Pecola an object of the gaze for the reader and reflect upon Pecola's self-objectification, yet curiously make her remain invisible to characters around her at the same time.

Two factors contribute to Pecola's theatrical "invisible presence" in the novel. One is that Morrison renders Pecola consistently silent, even in her own narrative of (anti-) Bildung. Another is Pecola's parental heritage of racial neurosis introduced in the two embedded stories of Pauline and Cholly Breedlove. Coming right before Pecola's rape, these two pieces of stories appear to be direct causes of Pecola's tragedy. Appearing at almost the end of the novel, Pauline's and Cholly's narratives serve as a discursive return of the repressed past to show how the parents' traumatic experiences with a racist society are visited upon the children. To understand fully how Pecola "grows down," therefore, we must reverse the process of narrative repression and look at her parents' stories first.

From her mother, Pecola learns to love and internalize white ideology. What characterizes Pauline Breedlove as a mother is her lack of maternal affection. The section about Pauline comes right after an episode in which she humiliates and neglects the burned Pecola to comfort "the little pink-and-yellow" Fisher girl. Yet by allowing Pauline to have her own voice in the novel, Morrison shows that Pauline was once full of dreams and feelings. Her lack of love, as represented by the loss of her "rainbow," is not natural but emerges out of her "education" in a society saturated with class and racial inequality.

Pauline's story is an embedded narrative of anti-Bildung within Pecola's story. After separating from her own folks and migrating to the North with Cholly, Pauline has her first "education" in the movies, from which she refreshes her dreams of romantic love and becomes initiated to the standard of physical beauty represented by the white visual icons on the silver screen. As the narrator comments, the notions of romantic love and physical beauty are "[p]robably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion" (97). The ray of light coming from the projector, as Madonne M. Miner points out, resembles a gigantic eyeball that reflects white male vision (186). Being black and female render Pauline totally insignificant within this visual scope. Lacking other alternatives, Pauline is forced to identify with this blinding gaze.

Pauline is seduced by glamorous illusions produced by the Hollywood film industry into a figural identification with the white ideology of beauty. In Alice Doesn't, Teresa de Lauretis focuses on the centrality of "the look" in cinema and dissects the process of the double figural identification to seduce the female spectator into acceptance of femininity. The woman in a narrative cinema, de Lauretis contends, "is framed by the look of the camera as icon, or object of gaze: an image made to be looked at by the spectator, whose look is relayed by the look of the male character(s)" (139). By seeing through the eye of the hero,

the female spectator identifies with both the subject and the space of the narrative movement, with the figure of movement and the figure of its closure, the narrative image. Both are figural identifications, and both are possible at once; more, they are concurrently borne and mutually implicated by the process of narrativity. This manner of identification would uphold both positionalities of desire, both active and passive aims: desire for the other, and the desire to be desired by the other. This is in fact the operation by which narrative and cinema solicit the spectators' consent and seduce women into femininity: by a double identification, a surplus of pleasure produced by the spectators themselves for cinema and for society's benefit.

(143)

From de Lauretis's theory of identification we may infer that for an ethnic woman, the seduction into "white femininity" is a process of "triple identification" which allows her to identify with not only the gaze, the subject of the movement (white male hero) and the narrative image (white heroine) but also with the power and privilege represented by the white skin. Pauline's figural identification with the white visual icons is exemplified in her attempt to dress her hair like Jean Harlow (97). Her disappointment brought on by her lost tooth alone breaks her illusion of this figural identification. But the spell of Hollywood is still on her, which only makes her sink lower and into acceptance of her own ugliness. Pauline is a black female spectator who fails to cultivate what bell hooks calls a decolonizing "oppositional gaze" (Black Looks 116).

Another part of Pauline's education is the "denigrification" of her mind. Pauline Breedlove is the very example of mental colonization that Franz Fanon has analyzed in his Black Skin, White Masks. In his interpretation of the psychological and existential alienation of black people, Fanon argues that black people's "inferiority complex" is the outcome of "a double process." The black feel inferior in a white hegemonic society primarily because of their economic disadvantage. This sense of materialist incompetence leads to a severe damage of the psyche when black people internalize, even epidermalize, this inferiority (11). In an oversimplified fashion, Fanon claims that all black women want to be white "because the Negress feels inferior that she aspires to win admittance into the white world" (60). "In this endeavor," Fanon writes, "she will seek help of a phenomenon that we shall call affective erethism" (60). Pauline's identification with the power of her white employers while dealing with the creditors and service people who looked down upon her when she went to them on her own behalf shows her racial inferiority complex. And her contentment over the nickname they have assigned her does reveal a symptom that is close to affective erethism.⁷ These symptoms of Pauline's mental colonization and her willing submission to the seductive power of the white look illustrate the overwhelming power of dominant ideology and testify to the difficult Bildung of an ethnic woman. Pauline's process of denigrification prefigures Pecola's subjugation to the white gaze.

At the end of her "process of becoming" Pauline enters faithfully into the role of "an ideal servant," a female Uncle Tom so to speak, and alienates her own family. She is finally suffering from what Fanon calls "a collapse of the ego" (154).⁸ Before her education in the movies, Pauline has refused to give up her husband for her white mistress. As she says in her first-person voice, "it didn't seem none too bright for a black woman to leave a black man for a white woman" (95). But when racial ideology sinks in, Pauline is sadly transformed. By giving up her family and retreating into the private world of snow-white beauty and order in the Fisher household, Pauline cuts the final link to her racial identity. Worst of all, she passes on these symptoms of racial neurosis to Pecola, into whom she beats "a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life" (102).

The paternal influence on Pecola also contributes to her invisibility. Cholly Breedlove's story is another version of the return of the repressed past to haunt people in the present. Cholly has been educated by racism to assert his manhood on the defenseless. His mentality comes very close to what Paulo Freire has illustrated in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire studies the "adhesion" of the oppressed to the oppressor:

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or "sub-oppressors." The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.

(29-30)

Nowhere is this model more revealing than in Cholly's traumatic sexual initiation. The narrator actually tells the story twice—of Cholly being surprised by two white hunters with flashlights during his first sexual act, and how he transfers his shame and hatred onto his helpless partner. The narrator first mentions this episode in the bushes passingly (37). Later, however, the narrator examines Cholly's consciousness thoroughly:

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless.…For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one who he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight. The hee-hee-hee's.

(119)

By telling Cholly's story twice the narrator simulates the nature of his mental repression. She also implicitly comments on what underlies Cholly's pathetic mental measurement of his size, color and power against his real enemy, which again reminds us of Fanon's "inferiority complex." Cholly's transference of anger onto the helpless Darlene also illustrates his desperate clinging to the shred of manhood under the threat of racial emasculation. Even when he has learned to hate those "big" white men, Cholly continues to inflict his own frustration on his fellow oppressed. This is typical in his relation with Pauline in the declining stage of their marriage. He treats her with violence since "[s]he was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires" (37). Using the same mentality he also hurts and pours out his desire onto his own daughter.

Cholly commits the rape of Pecola based on his reaction to his own sense of guilt and impotence faced with Pecola's "young, helpless, hopeless presence" (127). Parentless from his birth, Cholly has difficulty committing himself to family responsibility. Rejected at fourteen by his supposed father, Cholly turns dangerously "free," free in a negative sense that he is uprooted from his own community, as represented by his Aunt Jimmy and old man Blue. Without positive parental role models and sufficient contact with the healthy influence of his agrarian community, Cholly is ill prepared for his paternal role. His financial frustration with work and emotional tumult with Pauline after his northern migration further contribute to Cholly's inability to keep his family "indoors."

The rape of Pecola is directly caused by this rootlessness. In his drunken state Cholly identifies Pecola with Pauline in the gesture of scratching her leg, which triggers his violent tenderness. The young Pecola evokes Cholly's tenderness because he sees her both as an image of young Pauline, his first love, and his unprotected daughter. This conflation of familial roles (mother and daughter) and paradoxical emotions (protectiveness and destruction) characterizes the entire episode of the rape and underlines the confusion of kinship within the Breedlove family.⁹ Some critics contend that Pecola may not simply be a victim but a participant in the rape (Gibson 171). But Pecola's ambiguous reaction speaks to her extreme hunger for love and again underscores the disruption of familial structure. Morrison's surrealist style in this rape episode creates a dream-like sensation that is grotesquely "romantic." Maybe Pecola needs to "breed love" so much that she momentarily suspends her moral sensibility and turns to respond to Cholly's sexual violation, which makes her incestuous story even more gruesome. Whether Morrison is actually writing an intertextual revision of the "Trueblood episode" in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, as Michael Awkward contends or not (62), her undertaking of this taboo subject in conjunction with symptoms of racial neurosis shows her determination to uncover the repressed historical and social memory of the Afro-American community through her writing.

What intrigues me, and is overlooked almost by all critics, is the missing narrative about Pecola's brother. In the primer, brother Dick appears only once, which may explain Sammy's absence. Still, this runaway boy's "escape" from narrative confinement remains a mystery. The only line he has in the novel is to urge his mother to kill Cholly, which provides another twist to the Freudian Oedipus complex but most of all highlights the prevailing element of violence in the Breed-love household (39). His appearance/disappearance therefore deconstructs the happy "normative" family structure in the Dick-and-Jane mode. Moreover, Sammy's disappearance represents a loose thread in Pecola's narrative of (anti-) Bildung. It even subtly suggests a possible repetition of the fate of Cholly Breedlove—another homeless, parentless "free" black boy on the run, and another future family tragedy looming on the horizon.

Besides her parental heritage, what also makes Pecola invisible in her own story is her passivity and most of all, her silence. Except for her conversation with the three prostitutes and final schizophrenic soliloquy, the reader only catches a few glimpses of her inner consciousness mediated by a third-person narrator. Each of these momentary revelations of Pecola's thoughts marks a traumatic experience. The first of these moments is Pecola's reaction to the brutal fight between her parents. The second one records her racial encounter with a white store owner. The last one appears in Pecola's admiration of Geraldine's gold-and-green house right before she was expelled from this "paradise." Morrison provides us with these three moments of entrance into Pecola's mind as specimens of her personal, racial, and cultural experiences.

Pecola's personal experience is marked by violence and lovelessness, as represented by the brutal but darkly formal "battle" between her parents in their storefront home. Here Morrison is recording the derogatory impact of family violence on young children through Sammy's and Pecola's reactions to the fight. While her brother Sammy escapes their violent home by running away, Pecola's reaction is "restricted by youth and sex" (38). Here Morrison reiterates a common theme in women's fiction about the lack of physical mobility for a heroine. Confined by her immobility, Pecola resorts to passively praying for disappearance. But her eyes would not go away. For the first time in the novel Pecola's intense desire for blue eyes, which is implicit in her insatiable consumption of milk from the Shirley Temple cup, and her rationalization for this desire are revealed: she wants blue eyes so she can be beautiful and her family will be transformed miraculously into a loving one. But her hope for the miracle built upon a childish logic only leads to self-objectification. The omniscient narrator observes, "She would see only what there was to see, the eyes of other people" (40). Pecola merely manages to objectify herself by the gaze of the Look.

The obstacles to Pecola's development are not only youth and sex but also racism. The reader's second entrance into Pecola's consciousness follows right after the fight between the Breedloves and Pecola's prayer for disappearance. Pecola's encounter with Mr. Yacobowski echoes the discourse of invisibility in Ellison's Invisible Man. Like Ellison's anonymous hero, Pecola is unseen because people refuse to see her. Pecola's invisibility is an evidence of her lack of self image when facing the dominant white society. But whereas Ellison's hero blames his invisibility to the construction of white people's "inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality" (7), Pecola's locates the source of "the vacuum" and "absence of human recognition" of Yacobowski's eyes in her own blackness:

It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So, The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes.

(42)

The vacancy in Yacobowski's blear-dropped blue eyes foretells the "blue void" that is going to consume Pecola at the end. Morrison points out in a Time interview with Bonnie Angelo that white European immigrants gain their entrance into American society by sharing a common contempt for black people and "becoming American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me" (120). Bearing this brunt of racial contempt, Pecola becomes nonexistent to the middle-aged white immigrant storekeeper. Sensing this personal threat, Pecola reacts to the white distaste by trashing the dandelions as "ugly" and "weeds," with which she just has had one of her rare moments of intimacy. She also consumes the Mary Jane candy purchased from the white man's store, more for the smiling white face, blond hair and blue eyes on the wrapping than for the taste of caramel and peanut butter. "To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane," (43) the narrator reveals Pecola's inner consciousness. This double reaction again reflects Pecola's parental heritage—transferring anger to the defenseless and the internalization of white ideology.

Pecola's humiliation in Geraldine's house provides the reader a glimpse of the derogatory side of Afro-American culture in the name of "uplifting the race." Zora Neale Hurston delineates the psychology of the black middle class who have internalized white ideology and snubbed their own people in "My People! My People!":

the well-bred Negro has looked around and seen America with his eyes. He or she has set himself to measure up to what he thinks of as the white standard of living. He is conscious of the fact that the Negro in America needs more respect if he expects to get any acceptance at all. Therefore, after straining every nerve to get an education, maintain an attractive home, dress decently, and otherwise conform, he is dismayed at the sight of other Negroes tearing down what he is trying to build up. It is said everyday, "And that good-for-nothing, trashy Negro is the one the white people judge us all by. They think we're all just alike. My people! My people!"

(23)

This looking up to white standard and looking down upon "trashy" blacks manifest another kind of mental colonization and develop a tension of mutual distrust between the black middle class and the poor black. Geraldine represents this false sense of racial uplifting. Here Morrison openly criticizes black women like Geraldine who attained middle-class status through learning "how to do white man's work with refinement" and "how to get rid of funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions" (68). The "funkiness," as Susan Willis contends, originates in the discontinuity between past and present (Specifying 84)—the past of an agrarian South that needs to be kept out in this Northern industrial town. Pecola's appearance in Geraldine's house is like a return of the repressed funkiness. And Geraldine's hysteria is triggered by an instinctive sense of how easily her simulacrum of a bourgeois urbanity can be shattered and turned to waste. In view of her loveless relationship with her husband and child, the light-skinned Geraldine is the crystallization of this proper but passionless, unnatural and emotionless "colored" bourgeoisie. Through Geraldine's education of Junior about the difference between "colored people and niggers," Morrison also criticizes the falsity of a caste system based on skin color and the danger of over-assimilation. "The line between colored and nigger was not always clear;" the narrator speaks in the tone of all the Geraldines, "subtle and telltale signs threatened to erode it, and the watch had to be constant" (71). These subtle and telltale signs, Morrison implies, are the threat of return of the repressed Afro-American experiences that will disrupt the false facade of bourgeois respectability at any minute.

Pecola's encounter with this "colored" respectability is as devastating as her experience of racism. Even after her humiliating "false spring" experience with the high-yellow dream-child Maureen Peal, Pecola remains dominated by the ideology of the Look. Inside Geraldine's house we see Pecola's unrestrained admiration of the appearance of middle-class respectability represented by the Bible, lace dollies, the decorated picture of Jesus, and potted plants. In spite of her misery after being bullied by Junior she finds consolation in the cat's "blue eyes." Her exile from the gold-and-green "paradise" is under the full gaze of Jesus's "sad and unsurprised eyes" (76). In both cases Morrison underscores Pecola's self-objectification through stressing the influence of alien "eyes" on her. As Ho Wen-ching aptly argues, since she is trapped in "the bifurcate situation of 'I' versus 'them,' Pecola in her endeavour to transcend the I/them bifurcation has come to equate 'I' with 'eye'" (4). She pays for this mistaken identification with her own sanity.

Right before her final breakdown, Pecola, desperately trying to save her world by getting the bluest eyes, visits the self-claimed spiritual adviser Soaphead Church. The atrocity of Soaphead's tricking Pecola into poisoning an old dog is comparable only to Cholly's rape of Pecola. Both Soaphead and Cholly act out of oxymoronic feelings of sympathetic tenderness and destructive violence. Moreover, Soaphead's West Indian past as a mulatto descendant of an English nobleman at once suggests the heterogenous experiences of black diaspora and an implied colonial discourse that has not been fully developed in The Bluest Eye. In Soaphead we observe how an offspring and victim of colonization turns into a victimizer. Soaphead transfers his legacy of misery of being a colonized into Pecola. An act which, like Cholly's transference of anger unto Darlene and Pauline, intensifies the sense of multiple jeopardy of being, black, being female, and being a social underclass in the text.

Ugly to herself, invisible to the white, and funky to the "colored," Pecola remains undeveloped and a victim to the labyrinth of her multiple experiences. In her madness Pecola becomes a fixture around the garbage heap, which bleakly reflects on another of her paternal heritages since as a newborn Cholly was abandoned in a dumpster. The difference between the father and daughter is that there is no Aunt Jimmy, as in the case of Cholly Breedlove, to rescue Pecola.

II. Claudia Macteer

In "Lady No Longer Sings the Blues," Madonne M. Miner compares the rape of Pecola to the archetypal rape story of Philomela. Unlike the rape victim in the classical myth, however, silent Pecola does not find her "voice" in her insanity. Claudia, and her creator Morrison, are the ones who weave the telling tapestry. Claudia's first-person narrative serves as counter-discourse to Pecola's story of silent victimization. Her narrative voices function as "choral note" in Greek tragedy, as Morrison herself contends ("Rootedness" 341.) Claudia is also a would-be Afro-American "griot" figure who passes on wisdom through storytelling. As Janie reveals the story of her growth with "that oldest human longing—self revelation" in Their Eyes Were Watching God (18), Claudia consciously retells the story that changes herself and her community permanently. In her storytelling Claudia is also reminiscent of the compulsive storyteller in Coleridge's supernatural narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Claudia's sense of guilt for not saving Pecola and her child is the albatross around her neck that propels her to repeat the story. She actually undergoes a process of self-healing when retelling this painful experience of her past. The self-division in her narrative reveals the construction of her personal Bildungsroman even as she is apparently telling Pecola's story. Claudia herself, like the reader, becomes sadder but wiser once the unspeakable tale is spoken.

Claudia starts her story, as Morrison herself identifies, with mimicking adult black women on the porch or in the back yard and trying to be grown-up about the shocking information of Pecola's incestuous rape ("Unspeakable" 21). Although she appears to be still childish in believing the rape as the cause of the disappearance of marigolds, there is a marked difference between Claudia's behavior before and after the rape. The heaviness of her language is one evidence. In the prologue Claudia states, "What is clear now is that all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth" (9). With this note marking an aura of postlapsarian sterility, the "mature" Claudia proposes to tell why but immediately takes refuge in how. Clearly Claudia's own sense of guilt still prevents her from looking into the real reasons for Pecola's tragedy. But Claudia cannot reach a certain maturity without first coming to terms with the disintegration of Pecola, and moreover, her own helplessness to revoke Pecola's tragic fate.

The narrative of prelapsarian Claudia is in direct contrast to Pecola's in the aspects of personal, racial, and cultural experiences. Although Claudia is of the same class as Pecola, her family works hard to keep themselves "indoors." Unlike Pecola, Claudia learns love, self-respect, and a sense of security from her parents. The MacTeer house resembles what bell hooks terms "home-place," the site of resistance to white supremacy and the space for renewal and self-recovery (Yearning 41). Claudia describes her parents in the "Autumn" and "Winter" sections of the novel. But the temper of the weather only reflects the stress that the MacTeers have to endure in the face of poverty and depression. Inside, Claudia's parents are fighters who lovingly guard their family.

Mrs. MacTeer's unselfish maternal love is the very opposite of the barrenness and self-righteousness of Pauline. Claudia's memory of her sickness during the autumn is oxymoronically "a productive and fructifying pain." Mrs. MacTeer's sustaining "thick and dark" love is the medicine that helps her daughter to fight for her health. Hence in spite of the bitter weather Claudia confesses that "when I think of autumn I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die" (14). Mrs. MacTeer's maternity also extends to Pecola, whom she dutifully takes in as a case. Significantly, it is Mrs. MacTeer who assumes the maternal role and helps Pecola to adjust to the "horror" of her first menstruation. Mrs. MacTeer is also closely connected to her Afro-American roots, as exemplified in her constant singing of the blues, which are songs that channel personal suffering and forge "a communal consciousness" for the Afro-American, as Angela Davis observes (12).

Unlike Cholly who only inflicts pain on the helpless, Claudia's father functions as his family's guardian. Claudia describes her father in the epithets of winter:

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie, hiding currents of gelid thoughts that eddy in darkness. Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, he worked night and day to keep one from the door and the other from under the windowsills.

(52)

But next in Claudia's portrayal he suddenly turns into the very opposite of wintriness and becomes a "Vulcan guarding the flames" to keep his family warm. From Claudia's poetic illustration we detect a strong sense of security in the MacTeer household. Just like the healing power of the mother's hands, Mr. MacTeer battles to keep his family from harm. So when the tenant Mr. Henry sexually molested Frieda, Mr. MacTeer threw the girls' tricycle at his head, knocked him off the porch, and tried to gun him down. This incident with Mr. Henry has a realistic equivalence in Morrison's own life. In an interview with Rosemarie K. Lester, Morrison describes her first racial encounter as the time when her father pushed a white stalker downstairs and threw a bike at him (50). By transferring this sense of racial triumph onto MacTeer, Morrison creates a strong, responsible father figure who serves as a sharp contrast to the "free" Cholly Breedlove.

But most importantly, Claudia has a sister. Unlike Pecola's nonexistent brother, Claudia is closely bonded with Frieda. Together the MacTeer sisters combat adversity. For example, they always did their Candy Dance to make their white neighbor jealous (63). Claudia even starts her storytelling with a plural "we" to signify the experiences she and her sister have shared together. Therefore, when Frieda is molested, Claudia is empathic to her fear of being "ruined" (81). We might smile at the sisters' naivete about sexuality, but Frieda's molestation puts the MacTeer girls in the similar position with Pecola as potential victims. What differentiates Claudia's from Pecola's narrative of victimization, however, is the father's protection and Claudia's resistance.

Claudia escapes victimization partially because she resists the racial ideology of white physical supremacy, although as a child she could not articulate exactly the work of mental colonization around her. Her hatred of the mass media icon Shirley Temple and her desire to dismember white baby dolls, even white girls, manifest this resistance which takes a destructive channel:

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see what it was made [of], to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that has escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

(20)

Claudia's ignorance of this "desirability" is what keeps her from racial neurosis. In her state of innocence, she is immune from the inferiority complex that Fanon has diagnosed. So when she encounters Maureen Peal, a "colored" embodiment of the white doll, Claudia is just curious about what "the Thing" is that makes Maureen beautiful. At this stage Claudia is still in love with her self image and feels comfortable in her skin, as the narrator informs us (62). Claudia's desire to understand "the Thing" appears to be a positive act of exposing a racist unconsciousness that dominant society has hammered into the minds of minority people. However, the intensity of Claudia's reaction to the dolls and the Maureen Peals make the reader pause. In her violent response we see the backfire of racism which in real life becomes hurtful racial uprisings. Then again, what other channels do black people have to express their frustration and anger? In Claudia's childish reaction we detect a tragic reality that violence generates violence.

In time, Claudia, too, will experience the same kind of racial vertigo as Pecola does. She will sense the same kind of "blue void" that has consumed Pecola. Only the gaze of the bluest eye is reflected in the brown eyes around her:

Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world.

(61-2)

And she, too, will be educated by this sense of racial "lack" through a mirror stage of racial inferiority into unconditional admiration of white beauty once she reaches "the turning point" in the development of her psyche. Here Morrison injects a pessimistic note into Claudia's and all minority girls' narratives of Bildung. None can escape mental contamination and colonization as long as minority people see through the "eye" of mainstream ideology.

But before Claudia's racial innocence is "ruined" by commodified racial ideology, she feels closely connected to her blackness. For instance, her simple wish for Christmas is to indulge her senses in Big Mama's kitchen with Big Papa playing the violin (21). That is, Claudia would rather have close bonding to her own cultural community on the most special day of the year. Unlike Pecola, who is practically an outsider, Claudia is rooted within the context of her Afro-American community. Claudia's rootedness is represented by the MacTeer girls' sifting through the gossip they overheard to learn practical, though often discredited, wisdom. Claudia describes the dances of gossiping voices around her:

sound meets sound, curtsies shimmers, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. 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 combination of music, visual effects, and taste in the description of gossip provides an immediacy of the abundant sensuality, as in Paule Marshall's kitchen table conversations. In the orality, musicality and imaginativeness of gossip Morrison finds the real metaphor for a "black quality" that she is striving for in her writing, as she has indicated in an interview with Nellie McKay (427). In The Bluest Eye Morrison creates her own "speakerly text," in the term of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

But gossip, like the community itself, is double-edged. They can both be sustaining and devastating. The feelings of disgust, shock, outrage, even excitement, but total lack of compassion in the gossip about Pecola and the rape represent the negative side of gossip and the community. Claudia voices a disappointment in her community in this regard: when she and Frida try to look for "eyes creased with concern" about the unfortunate Pecola, they see "only veils" (148). The contrast between an omnipresent gaze of the blue eyes and the veiled apathy of the brown eyes further highlights the hostile environment to the growth of a black girl. In "Trajectories of Self-Definition," Barbara Christian classifies Morrison's The Bluest Eye as belonging to the second phase of contemporary Afro-American women's writing in which "the black community itself becomes a major threat to the survival and empowerment of women" (24). The unsympathetic community, therefore, also contributes to the general sterility in the fall of 1941.

So by the end of her narrative Claudia learns her lesson about racial ideology and her own community as an accomplice in upholding this ideological construct:

This soil is bad for certain kind of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.

(160)

Claudia's marigolds may not live; but she survives to tell the stories of two black girls. Claudia's fall, in a sense, is a fortunate fall (felix culpa) since innocence is a sign of "degenerate acquiesce," as Terry Otten contends (4). By dividing Claudia into an innocent child and an older and wiser person, Morrison inscribes Claudia's Bildung into the novel which counterpoints Pecola's decline.

Morrison sees a weakness of form in her first novel. The combination of seasonal cycles and fragments of the primer, Morrison observes in retrospect, does not sufficiently handle the silence at its center: "The void that is Pecola's 'unbeing'." ("Unspeakable Things Unspoken" 22, italic mine). But Morrison does represent the void in the shape of a consuming vortex, with the intersection of Claudia and Pecola's lives at the center. Pecola is drawn into the abyss because of her passivity; Claudia surfaces because she resists the pull. Furthermore, by transferring Pecola from "unbeing" to a "being" in her schizophrenic hallucination, Morrison makes a political inquiry into the nature of Bildung for black girls—How come a black girl can only see herself with imagined blue eyes? In The Bluest Eye Morrison reveals the detriment of oppression through the tragedy of one black girl. She also explores the role that the ideology of "whiteness" plays in the imagination and real life of black people.¹⁰ While political activists campaign for civil rights and power for black people, Morrison locates the source of black powerlessness in white racism and black acquiescence. But she also implies that neither racial whitewash nor chanting the slogan of "Black is Beautiful" is enough to counteract the Look. The former only intensifies the neurotic symptoms of racial inferiority complex; the latter is just a reversal of the mainstream ideology of "White is Beautiful." Morrison writes to challenge the reader's literary imagination and social consciousness. She also writes to open the eyes of both dominant and minority communities. Thus Morrison, even in her first attempt, fulfills her self-assigned mission for the novelist, to write a fiction that is both political and beautiful ("Rootedness" 345).

Notes

1. Elliott Butler-Evans has a similar reading of the novel. He sees Morrison develop dominant themes through the interplay of two narratives: Claudia's rite of passage and Pecola's disintegration (66). Joanne Frye and Linda Krumholz also argue that Claudia narrates not only the destruction of Pecola but also her own self-formation.
2. Buckley not only compares the development between Maggie and her brother but also draws a parallel of this competing double plot with the real-life sibling disagreement between Eliot and her brother.
3. Out of her analysis of Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, My Antonia, The Mountain Lion, and them, Goodman deduces that the structure of the "male-female double Bildungsroman" is circular, tripartite. Its typical plot starts from the shared prelapsarian childhood experience of a male and a female protagonist, to the separation in adolescence and young adulthood, and ends with a final reunion with a reaffirmation of androgynous wholeness (30).
4. I borrow the term of "growing down" from Annis Pratt and Barbara White's "The Novel of Development" to illustrate Pecola's anti-Bildung. Pratt and White identify a generic double bind in female Bildungsroman that the female protagonists oftentimes regress from full participation in adult life rather than progressing towards maturity (36).
5. See Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood (20).
6. bell hooks gives a vivid portrayal of the damaged psyche of black people faced with the Look: "for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not colonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identity. Often it leaves us ravaged by repressed rage, feeling weary, dispirited, and sometimes just plain old brokenhearted. These are the gaps in our psyche that are the spaces where mindless complicity, self-destructive rage, hatred, and paralyzing despair enter" (Black Looks 3-4).
7. Nicknaming functions as personal recognition in black communities. Pauline's attachment to the Fisher family, as Trudier Harris points out, is guided by a perversion of this function (20). Ironically, the Fishers give her this generic nickname not out of intimacy but out of convenience, as the plantation masters used to treat their slaves, which explains Claudia's antagonism when the Fisher girl calls Pauline by her nickname while even Pauline's family call her Mrs. Breedlove (86).
8. Fanon points out, "When the Negro makes contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. The goal of his behaviour will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for the Other alone can give him worth" (154).
9. Madonne M. Miner sees this breaking down of familial boundaries as archetypal. She argues that "the female must fear a loss of identity as the family loses it boundaries—or, more accurately, as the male transgresses these boundaries" (178).
10. In her analytical essay Playing in the Dark Morrison explores the other end of the question—how racial ideology and "blackness" influence the literary imagination of the white masters.

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