Article on The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Jimoh,, A Yęmisi, PhD

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

Jimoh,, A Yemisi, PhD

University of Massachusetts AmherstScholarWorks@UMass AmherstAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series Afro-American Studies2003Toni Morrison: The Bluest EyeA Yemisi Jimoh, PhDUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, jimoh@afroam.umass.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubsPart of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, and the OtherAmerican Studies CommonsThis is brought to you for free and open access by the Afro-American Studies at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion inAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, pleasecontact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.Recommended CitationJimoh,, A Yemisi PhD, "Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye" (2003). The Literary Encyclopedia. 93.Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubs/934/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format1/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425The Bluest EyeSend to printerMorrison, Toni(1970)A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst)Genre: Novel. Country: United States.Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye,was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winstonin 1970 while Morrison was an editor forRandom House in New York City. Sheremained at Random House until 1983, theyear after the publication of her fifthnovel Beloved. Morrison's inaugural novelreceived faint praise from most, though not all,reviewers, primarily because few of thereviewers for the well-known nationalpublications understood the book. Reviews insmall circulation publications such as BlackWorld and Freedomways were notableexceptions. Nevertheless, as a first-timenovelist Toni Morrison's notices in the New4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format2/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425York Times Book Review and The NewYorker gave her national recognition that wasinvaluable for even the moderate success of herinnovative novel. Morrison had embarkedupon the task of writing what she has said arethe novels that she would want to read yet thatwere not available to her; she was thirty-nineyears of age when The Bluest Eye waspublished.The provenance of Morrison's The BluestEye is in her participation in a writers' groupat Howard University during the years that shetaught there. Morrison quickly wrote a shortstory for a meeting of this group. Morrison hassaid that she based the story, which was laterto become the novel, on her response to achildhood classmate's expressed wish for blueeyes, an idea that struck Morrison as a form ofviolence—that is, her perception of itssuggestion of mutilation.During the politically charged second half ofthe 1960s, Morrison worked as an editor inNew York, and while there, she returned, in1965, to her story of the little black girl whowanted blue eyes. And in so doing, ToniMorrison initiated her examination inliterature of the issues of beauty, love, family,4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format3/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425community, and class within African Americanculture, as she began revising her short storyinto the novel that would be published fiveyears later.Morrison's The Bluest Eye is stronglyinfluenced by the 1960s BlackPower/Liberation era and the Black ArtsAesthetics Movement (BAAM) in the UnitedStates, especially their questioning ofhegemonic constructions of Western culturalideas and ideals. They were particularlyconcerned with concepts, ideals, and systemicstructures that worked to diminish blackpeople. This novel further operates as aresponse to the challenge among BlackAesthetic artists to question and resist suchdelimiting influences. Morrison's The BluestEye is one example of the numerous efforts atthe time toward reconstructing a culturalcontext out of which African American peoplecould operate and toward making possible areconstituted identity. By the time ToniMorrison's The Bluest Eye was published, theBlack Arts Aesthetics Movement, the literarycohort of the Black Power/Liberation era, waswell underway. And many of its varied conceptsand ideas in relation to cultural aestheticslikely were influences on Toni Morrison's4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format4/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425writing of her first novel, although her writingin this novel does not demonstrate a wholesaleacceptance of any specific line of thoughtbesides her own.Toni Morrison's writing style and a number ofher prevalent themes to date are set forthin The Bluest Eye, her initial foray into theliterary world. Some of Morrison's recurrentthemes include the possibility of femaleautonomy in an African American culturalcontext, the operations of a women's domain,motherhood, love, the household in relation tothe community, beauty, and reconstructinghistory, heritage, and personal identity. Interms of her style, the ease andappropriateness with which Morrison, in herfirst novel, employs African American as wellas Midwestern American vernacular speechand her carefully selected idiomatic phrasesfrom African American culture allow her topresent the particularities of these specificcultural speech patterns without at the sametime suggesting that the language is anaberration or a type of linguistic violation,which had been the burden under which manyof her predecessors had operated; rather, thesense that Morrison gives her readers in TheBluest Eye and in subsequent novels is that she4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format5/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425has reconstructed the language of a place.Another particularly noteworthy aspect ofMorrison's first novel as well as of later books—Sula, Beloved, and Jazz in particular—is herapperceptive, insider narrative voice or voices.Among the three narrators that Morrisonemploys in The Bluest Eye, Claudia MacTeer, aprecocious youth of intuitive wisdom, is hermost compelling, as she presents aretrospective view on the malefic events of1940-1941 in Lorain, Ohio. Through Claudia'sfirst person account of events, Morrison'sreaders gain intimate knowledge of the beliefsand mores of the people presented in thisbook. Her readers further observe howMorrison's youthful characters perceive andmisperceive this knowledge as they areacculturated into it. In addition to Claudia'sfirst-person narrative, Morrison provides herreaders with a third-person narrator to fill inimportant gaps that are outside of Claudia'ssphere of knowledge. Morrison's final narrativevoice in The Bluest Eye is that of the subjectiveconsciousness of Pauline Breedlove, themother of the central character in the novel,Pecola. Morrison has critiqued this narrativepoint-of-view as a technical flaw in the novel.In The Bluest Eye, Morrison's apperceptive4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format6/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425insider narrator is Claudia and her third-person narrator complements Claudia byproviding depth to her insights.Toni Morrison's lamentable story of PecolaBreedlove's utter susceptibility and of thepurblind, cruel destruction of her is dividedinto four chapters that bear the names of theseasons and that are organized on the life cycleof school children in the United States—whichoccurs from autumn through summer—insteadof on the traditional seasonal cycle of birth anddeath, spring through winter. The main text ofthe novel is preceded by two untitledprologues, which provide contexts forunderstanding the events that will occurthroughout the book. The first prologuerecapitulates the family romance that is thetypical story found in the Dick and Janeprimary readers that children encountered inschool up through the 1970s. Morrisonpresents the story three times, with each re-telling becoming increasingly more difficult toread, as the font and punctuation in the textare altered in each iteration after the first,although the exact words do not change.Morrison uses fragments from the Dick andJane reader as epigraphs to selected sectionswithin her seasonally named chapters. By her4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format7/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425use of this innovative technique, Morrisonpresents an explicit critique of the dominantdiscourse on family.Morrison's first prologue is followed by anitalicized second prologue that presents aconcise summary of the tragic events of PecolaBreedlove's life within the context of ametaphor of planting and growing flowers.Morrison's narrative voice in this prologue,and the primary narrator throughout hernovel, Claudia MacTeer, also meditates on theproblems of flowers that don't grow: “Quiet asit's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of1941”. Claudia also introduces herself, herolder sister Frieda, and Pecola to readers.The events in The Bluest Eye occur over a one-year period beginning the autumn of 1940 andcoinciding with the onset of Pecola's menses ateleven years of age. When the novel opens,Pecola Breedlove is living briefly with theMacTeers after her father burned down theirhouse. The novel ends during the impendingwartime years of the summer of 1941 whenPecola, an impoverished, Depression era youngblack girl, goes insane and believes that she hasreceived the blue eyes that she has asked Godto give her, but which she gains only in her4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format8/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425mind and solely through the derangedmachinations of Elihue Micah Whitcomb.Whitcomb is the neighbourhood charlatan whoposes as a spiritualist and psychic reader andwhose own perverse predilections and racialpsychosis allow him to find Pecola's request—rather than grotesque—the most keenlyrational and superlative, even if impossible,that he has ever received.During that pivotal autumn in 1940, Pecolareturns to her family who now live in aconverted storefront. Throughout her firstchapter in The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrisonestablishes the harsh environment of Pecola'sfamily life. She also presents the moregenerally shared deleterious social narrativesof romance and ideal beauty that pervade,primarily through media images, the culture inwhich Pecola Breedlove lives. These imagesand ideas clearly affect the lives of Morrison'sother characters in this novel, includingClaudia who raises objections to theunquestioning acceptance of these receivednotions of beauty and love. In Morrison's“Winter” and “Spring” chapters, she illustratesPecola's alienation from other children in herneighbourhood, except Claudia and her sisterFrieda, and demonstrates how Pecola's light-4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format9/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425skinned African American classmate MaureenPeal as well as her mother's blond-haired, blue-eyed charge in the house where Mrs. Breedloveworks both garner social privileges based solelyin their proximity to an arbitrary beauty ideal.In these chapters Morrison also delineates thebackgrounds of Pecola's parents, describesvarious social classes among AfricanAmericans, and introduces the unhingedmisanthrope Elihue Micah Whitcomb. ToniMorrison ends The Bluest Eye with thenarrative voice of Claudia MacTeer presentinga final meditation on the events of 1940-1941and with Pecola's summer insanity, as thispsychologically ravaged young girl discussesher supposed, newly-acquired blue eyes withan imagined friend.Toni Morrison's Pecola Breedlove wantsdesperately to be loved, although herunderstanding of love is limited to corruptversions of it, including the romantic idealsthat she finds within the media culture of theUnited States. Through Morrison's frequentreferences to movie actors and actresses,including the child actresses Shirley Templeand Jane Withers as well as media idols suchas Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, ClaudetteColbert, Betty Grable, Hedy Lamarr, Clark4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format10/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425Gable, and Jean Harlow, this writer points tothe way in which Pecola's environment issaturated with media images that present falseideals of beauty and romantic love. Morrisonthen critiques these concepts as her narratorstates that romantic love and physical beautyare “Probably the most destructive ideas in thehistory of human thought. Both originated inenvy, thrived in insecurity, and ended indisillusion”. Pecola, however, not only wantslove she also wants to be beautiful, as shebelieves that if she is beautiful someone willlove her. Morrison’s Pecola, unfortunately,does not find love inside or outside her home.In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison initiates herpractice of presenting the specific locations ofthe houses of her major characters along with aprecise description of the atmosphere withintheir homes. The location and the internalenvironment of Morrison's households revealcrucial components of her characters. Pecolalives in a storefront that has been convertedinto a living space located “on the southeastcorner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street” inLorain, Ohio. This young girl lives in anenvironment in which love is compromised bymoney, violence, betrayal, and societalalienation. Three prostitutes—Poland, China,4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format11/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425and Marie, also referred to as the Maginot Line—live in an apartment above the Breedloves'.Pecola is the second child and the only girl in afamily where, unfortunately, love is no longer aconsideration and where they have acceptedthe conviction of their supposed ugliness. TheBreedloves—Cholly, the father, Pauline, themother, Sammy, the older brother, and Pecola—are a poor family. They have been singled outby others in their small community ofEuropean immigrants and black migrants fromthe South as ugly, yet Morrison's description ofthe physical features of the Breedloves defiesany objective assignment of ugliness, except inthe case of Cholly whose behaviour is ugly.Morrison's writing in The Bluest Eye, as wouldbe the case in many of her later novels, isirrevocably beautiful while her subject isdisturbing. Her probing investigation into thedamaging effects of arbitrary, fanciful, anduncritical thinking that could produce idealbeauty forces all of her readers to examinetheir own complicity in giving power to themonolith suggested in Morrison's title. Thesingular eye of this book’s title does not refer toPecola's desired eyes but to the power investedin the constricting social narrative—which hasno basis in logical reason—that disparages4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format12/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425Pecola while declaring someone else ideal.Morrison's title, then, refers to “the Thing thatmade [others] beautiful” and Pecola ugly. ToniMorrison tells a story that illustrates how suchillogic happens.Because of the increased stature andprominence that Toni Morrison has acquiredas a writer, her provocative first novel hasundergone a critical rebirth in recent years,after finding moderate success and qualifiedrecognition upon its first publication. A Yemisi Jimoh (University of MassachusettsAmherst)First published 11 September 2003, last revised2012-03-20Citation: Jimoh, A Yemisi. "The Bluest Eye". TheLiterary Encyclopedia. 11 September 2003.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1425, accessed 14 April 2012.]This article is copyright to ©The Literary Encyclopedia.For information on making internet links to this page andelectronic or print reproduction, please read Linking andReproducing.4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format13/13www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=1425All entries, data and software copyright © The LiteraryDictionary Company LimitedISSN 1747-678X

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Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

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