The Bluest Eye: Internalized Racism and the Destruction of Innocence
The Bluest Eye
In the Afterword
In the Afterword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes that the novel came out of a childhood conversation she could never forget. She remembers a young black girl she knew who wanted blue eyes, and how, like Claudia MacTeer in the novel, this confession made her really angry. Surrounded by the “Black Is Beautiful” movement of late 1960s African-American culture, Morrison decided to write a novel about how internalized racism affects black girls.
Setting
Set in 1941 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison’s novel centers on a particularly difficult year in the life of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola comes from a poor and dysfunctional black family. Pecola feels ugly and unaccepted by the world around her and longs for blue eyes—Shirley Temple eyes—which she believes will make her beautiful, happy, and finally accepted.
Historical Context
- The effects of poverty felt by so many families, especially poor black families during the Depression.
- The effects of racism and segregation.
- Distortion of self-image encouraged by media depictions of beauty and happiness.
- The struggles of rural families who moved north to find work in industrial areas.
Themes
Whiteness as the Standard of Beauty
The Bluest Eye provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Consider the effects this has on the characters in the novel and the overall societal result of such a standard.
Literary Traditions
1. Abolitionist Narratives
(19th century 40s, 50s, and 60s, before the American Civil War) Provide black characters with humanity.
2. Naturalistic Novel
The late 19th-century novel. A kind of realism but with a difference, it emphasized the importance of the environment. The fate of a character depends on how destructive and dangerous the environment is. Jack London’s The Law of Life. In The Bluest Eye, the environment is really important. Let’s just take a look at the beginning of the story. ‘School has started…’ at the end.
Modernist Literature
Features that are introduced are the collage, non-chronological order, importance of the reader, title of the chapters, presence of flashbacks, presence of different (multiple) narrators (Claudia as a child and Claudia as a mature woman, Pecola’s when she talks to herself, 3rd person narrator, Colleen, Soap… Church), disjointed narrative. She uses a Modernist technique, she was influenced by the experimental writing of Virginia Woolf and Faulkner (multiple narrators). And echoes of an important novel by Faulkner ‘Sanctuary’ in which a girl is raped and it is told from several perspectives, from hers, from two witnesses, and from the various aggressors. ‘male/female double Bildungsroman.
Dichotomies of Race and Gender
Instead of centering on the dichotomies of gender in the development process, Toni Morrison focuses on the dichotomy of black and white. She shows the contrast between two black girls to highlight the effect of racism as well as sexism and classism. Claudia survives the environment because she tells the story, but Pecola does not, she goes down to madness. It depends on the assimilation of white standards. Pecola has been whitewashed, mind-washed; she has believed in racism and accepted it.
Postmodernism and the Grand Narrative
It’s a Postmodern novel, the idea that she uses the grand narrative. The grand narrative here is white standards, something that everybody takes for granted.
Religious Significance and the Metanarrative
Toni Morrison shows that at the beginning of the 40s they used the metanarrative which had religious significance, like the letter to God. I made her, A sacramental story.
Internalization of White Standards
Her mother Pauline accepted the standards without any resistance. So for Pecola, the ground was already prepared to grow up accepting it too. ‘Imitation of Life’ – a movie about a black girl that believes that she is white that she even rejects her own mother.
The Power of Literature
What made Toni Morrison in 1970 sit down to write a novel instead of a political essay? When she believed in justice values passionately. Why is literature the chosen way? Toni Morrison made us connect with the black characters too, which was not a normal standard. She made it in a way that we even connect with Cholly, because despite his acts, and with the given context she showed us how to sympathize with him. The sense of the black slave humanity depends on the Christian values. Reading and being raped is a weird connection.
The Resisting Reader
If you are a writer how do you consider reading or writing as a kind of poison? The idea of the reader is the ‘resisting reader’. To judge what you read and not to believe everything that you read. Claudia is a resisting reader. She doesn’t like Shirley Temple. She doesn’t like Maureen.
The Role of the Four Seasons
She uses them to organize it. How does that compare with Summer? It is a spring that never fructifies because of the hostile world. Nothing blooms in the story. Same in Daisy Miller and in Summer. In there, it is predictable, whereas in this novel, it isn’t predictable. Who would have said that raping will come in Spring and madness in Summer? The flowers are important. Pecola loses the baby in Spring.
Symbols
These symbols are embedded with layers of meaning, some which contain an intentional duality. Consider their developing meanings as we progress throughout the text. (The House; The Bluest Eye(s); Marigolds).
Metaphors
There are two major metaphors in The Bluest Eye, one of marigolds and one of dandelions. Claudia, looking back as an adult, says in the beginning of the novel, “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941”. She and her sister plant marigold seeds with the belief that if the marigolds would grow and survive, so would Pecola’s baby. Morrison unpacks the metaphor throughout the book, and on the last page broadens its scope to all African-Americans. The implication is that Pecola, like so many other African-Americans, never had a chance to grow because she lived in a society (“soil”) that would not nurture her.