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'The Bluest Eye':
notes on history, community, and black female subjectivity
by Jane Kuenz
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 elsewhere--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
exempting 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 "ricer, 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 feminity
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
83109). 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--next
door, 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] she
found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise.... It was 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 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 drinks,
"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 go of 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 foreclosed, 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 c sequence 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 was hardest 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 sexies 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
misdirect 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
spawns(5) 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 a 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 way 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 doubleness(7); 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 Africa-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
7he 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
oorrect, that Pauline does name Pecola after the movie' 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 unavail in Lorain. When Cholly bums
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
oourse. (4.) Morrison's referenco to Imitation of Life, then, is quite
specific and damning: Both versions o 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 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 insight 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 know, they lured a Jew up the stairs,
pounced on him, all three, held him up by the heels, shook everything
out of hi3 pants pockets, and threw him out of the window (6.) Wallace
also argues that "in district 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 questlon
the self-involvement of traditional modes of black female creativity,
as well as [pose] a general critique of more recent feminist strategies
of |man-hating' and |self-love'" (65). 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 ultimatel 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 discus of a Black |double oonsciousness' 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
Blues 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.
Walace, 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 Cultu Wall 173-95.--. Specifying:
Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,
1987.
Jane Kuenz is a doctoral
candidate in the Department of English at Duke University. In addition
to her work on Toni Morrison, she has published and presented papers on
theories of cultural identification at Walt Disney World and women's
poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.
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