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We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making.
Suzanne Langer
LANGER'S statement describes well many of the undergraduates I teach at Michigan State University. Most are from public high schools and—quite often—very small towns, homogeneous towns. These students are ovens of potential: give them something and it rises and expands like bread in their minds. In every class, I try to provide literature that lets them glimpse the period and relevant issues and techniques, but also material that will work toward their own self-understanding, their place in the 1980s culture. Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye is wonderfully versatile: it fits remarkably well into my American Modernism class, into Contemporary Literature, into Introduction to Fiction or Literature, and into Women's Literature. One reason it does so is that it is itself a wonderful work—rich, comic, deftly imaged, sophisticated, and important.
Admittedly, as an American modernist critic, I've always been especially interested in matters of craft, technique, design, and structure. All four of Morrison's novels fascinate me partly because of their variety in these areas, but the most compelling of them is The Bluest Eye . Just as the superlative form appears in the title, so Morrison's postmodern structure creates its own superlatives: the fastest epigraphs, the most jarringly juxtaposed segments, the most humorous dialogue set against the most poignant revelations, the most tragic happenings.
The Bluest Eye is, simply, the story of two black families: the McTeers, whose two daughters tell the story, and the Breedloves, whose daughter is the victim of it. Morrison's omnipresent irony begins with the name of the crucial family, one almost completely lacking in love. While we eventually come to know the disastrous histories of both Breedlove parents, our attention—through Morrison's—is focused from the first on the fragile child of that union, Pecola Breedlove, Pecola parallels the two McTeer children, Frieda and Claudia, normal girls who act as narrators, trying to grow up in a world alternately hostile and nurturing.
Even though this is a novel of incest, it is much more, and Morrison succeeds in making it much more partly through her enforced use of the children's perspective. Claudia and Frieda provide both the voice and the understanding consciousness for Pecola's “story,” a narrative that would have been vastly different if it had been told by other kinds of observers. The aptness of having the young black girl's story told by her peers, other children for whom life—sexual, political, economic, social—is as much a mystery as it is for Pecola, becomes clear as Morrison closes a masterful early scene with the sleepy dialogue between Pecola and Frieda, with the younger Claudia listening in.
After a long while she spoke very softly. “Is it true that I can have a baby now?”
“Sure,” said Frieda drowsily. “Sure you can.”
“But … how?” Her voice was hollow with wonder.
“Oh,” said Frieda, “somebody has to love you.” …
Then Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind. “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?” But Frieda was asleep. And I didn't know.
Claudia, the I in this passage, is even more like Pecola than Freida is; the older sister is wiser and more caustic. So it is truly through Claudia that we come to know Pecola's consciousness, a mind that surfaces finally toward the end of the novel but otherwise remains portrayed objectively, or through its parallel, Claudia's mind. Morrison chooses an elaborate structure to prevent the novel from becoming just another first-person, child-as-innocent account, even though—somewhat ironically— The Bluest Eye derives its power from being exactly that.
The tragedy of incest is at least partly its victimization of the young. Morrison's narrative design keeps the perceptions, concerns, and characters of the children squarely before us (see closing extract). The novel opens with the repetitions of the Dick-and-Jane primer, a passage emphasizing home, family, pets, friends. In some fantasy land, white children live happily with two parents, in a nice house, playing with pets and friends. In the Breedlove world, where housing is macabre if it exists at all, parents engage in physical battle, intentionally harm their children, and as readily abuse pets. Morrison builds the novel on these almost unspeakable contrasts, but her strategy is to show the contrasts—always ironically and nearly always through the eyes of the children.
The chronology of events, too, occurs in an order a child might consider important. The preface to the novel is Claudia's account of selling seeds, she and Frieda hoping to win a bicycle: the death of Pecola's child, Pecola's loss of sanity, and the end of the Breedlove family are all imaged through the unfertile seeds. “The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too.” And once the novel proper begins, Morrison gives us impressions that reflect the girls' concerns: a stuck-up child, the opening of school, Claudia's being sick and her mother's caring for her. We do not hear about Germany's attack on Poland, though the novel takes place in 1941, because the children would not have understood that (although one of the prostitutes is called Maginot Line). All characterization occurs through the childlike recounting of events crucial to the girls' maturing: Pecola's menstruation, Pecola's greedily drinking the McTeer milk (so that she can enjoy the Shirley Temple cup), Pecola's coming to stay with Claudia and Frieda because her parents have lost their housing. These are the monumental events in the early part of the novel.
Through what might seem a limited means of narration, Morrison achieves many aims. We see the McTeer family as unified and protective, practical enough to take in a boarder, sensible enough to run him out when he tries to abuse Frieda. We see a loving family, whose values surface in their daughters in the scenes of boys taunting Pecola and of the wealthy Maureen Peale taking advantage of her. And Morrison's great condemnation of even the best of these families, unable to stand the test of genuine horror, Pecola's pregnancy. “They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, ‘Poor little girl,’ or ‘Poor baby,’ but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.”
In the implicit contrast between the ideal schoolbook society and the lives the McTeers and Breedloves live, and in the further contrast between the families proper, Morrison creates levels of values that could easily confuse Frieda, Claudia, and Pecola. In fact, much of their dialogue early in the novel occurs in the shape of questions. Morrison achieves that aim of modernist writers, reader involvement, by not supplying answers. The reader does. The reader also sorts through the families, situations, meanings, and trappings of plot to create from the mosaic of pieces a “story” that seems to elude the girls who are the ostensible narrators.
But Morrison does more, and in her additions of characters and plot segments that are seemingly disconnected from the McTeer-Breedlove nexus, she takes her greatest risk. The Bluest Eye is not a long novel, but it is filled with important, and volatile, social issues and concerns. From the girls' fascination with physical beauty (they yearn for the blue eyes and blond hair of the white culture, of its dolls, actresses, and beauty queens) to their enduring blatant racial and economic prejudice, to the miserable treatment Pecola endures from her father and her mother (who prefers the white child she cares for to her own daughter), Morrison gives us material enough for two weeks of class discussion. Yet such classes might dwindle into the obvious—the learned reader patting himself or herself on the back for an enlightened stand on the issues—were it not for the texture of the impression, the rich ambivalence that Morrison creates through the sheer versatility of the novel's sequences. For the structure of The Bluest Eye is made to expand so that the book can include much of the community as well as the McTeer and Breedlove families, the community of the past as well as the present.
Within each of the four seasonal divisions (the book begins, ironically, with “Autumn” and moves to the blighted, death-delivering “Summer,” with Pecola's insanity and stillbirth), Morrison provides a primary chapter that focuses on the McTeer family, but on the McTeers as they relate to the Breedloves. In the primary chapters of “Autumn” and “Winter,” Frieda and Claudia are protecting Pecola; the atmosphere is heavy with threats, for all the girls. In the first, Mr. Henry comes to board with the McTeers; in the second, he entertains two of the local prostitutes, after bribing Frieda and Claudia to leave the house. In the primary chapter of “Spring,” Mr. Henry attacks Frieda, only to find that her parents attack him vehemently. Seeking solace, the McTeer girls go with Pecola to Polly Breedlove's workplace, where they witness Mrs. Breedlove's shameful abandonment of her daughter. In “Summer,” the primary chapter summarizes Pecola's state—violated, pregnant, mad—and the lines of the families are parallel once more as the reader sees that, but for the McTeers' interference, the mad girl might be Frieda.
These chapters, however, comprise less than half the novel. After each of them, lines from the Dick-and-Jane epigraph serve as titles for the same kind of interchapters that Steinbeck uses in Grapes of Wrath , narratives sometimes obviously related to the primary story line, sometimes not. In these secondary chapters, Morrison accomplishes the following:
For all the intricacies of Morrison's structure and the sometimes remote episodes that eventually shape Pecola's life and sanity, The Bluest Eye remains an active narrative. Readers must work to follow the structural disjunctions, and what they discover through good reading angers them. Because Pecola cannot understand that she should be angry, Morrison makes readers feel anger—the anger of bleak recognition, of injustice unremedied, of social deprivation for which there is no answer, no alleviation, and, worse, no understanding. Even the community of women, finally, turn their faces from Pecola. Claudia says:
We saw her sometimes, Frieda and I—after the baby came too soon and died. After the gossip and the slow wagging of heads. She was so sad to see. Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright. The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, 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.
A common pattern—the bildungsroman, the novel of education—but in women's novels of this type the process of growing up usually becomes the process of growing down. The only way to exist in a community is to become stifled, crippled, to live below one's potential. The Bluest Eye , in a strange way, almost avoids this stereotype; Morrision succeeds in making us think of Pecola as the exception, and Claudia and Frieda as the norm. For all the aberrant adults in the novel, Mrs. McTeer remains central—brusque but loving, as in this comic early monologue:
Three quarts of milk. That's what was in that icebox yesterday. Three whole quarts. Now they ain't none. Not a drop. I don't mind folks coming in and getting what they want, but three quarts of milk! … I got about as much business with another mouth to feed as a cat has with side pockets. As if I don't have trouble enough trying to feed my own and keep out the poorhouse, now I got something else in here that's just going to drink me on in there. Well, naw, she ain't. Not long as I got strength in my body and a tongue in my head. There's limit to everything. I ain't got nothing to just throw away . Don't no body need three quarts of milk. Henry Ford don't need three quarts of milk… .
Morrison's rapid-tire montage of soliloquy, description, deft figures (“Sundays were lonesome, fussy, soapy days. Second in misery only to those tight, starchy, cough-drop Sundays, so full of ‘don'ts’ and ‘set'cha self downs’ ”), and character interaction produces poignant images like this one of Mr. McTeer:
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… . A Vulcan guarding the flames, he gives us instructions about which doors to keep closed or opened for proper distribution of heat, lays kindling by, discusses the qualities of coal, and teaches us how to rake, feed, and bank the fire. And he will not unrazor his lips until spring.
Or like this one of Pecola after a playmate's affront:
Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.
Through images, scenes, character, and layers of narrative, Morrison gives us Pecola's story—which is also, fortunately, the McTeer story as well. It is easy to see the kinds of thematic correspondences possible. Teach The Bluest Eye with Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury , both studies of loveless mothers and broken children that result from parents' selfish lives. Or teach it with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Hemingway's In Our Time or Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima , to contrast the maturing experiences of male characters and those of Pecola. Read in the company of Wharton's Summer or Glasgow's Virginia or Chopin's Awakening, The Bluest Eye presents the dimmest possible angle of reflection, a portrait of stunted growth without redemption. And the contrast is even greater when The Bluest Eye is read in conjunction with Walker's Color Purple , Atwood's Edible Woman , or Rita Mae Brown's Ruby-fruit Jungle —more affirmative depictions of women's lives in the making. For all its correspondences with these and other important American fictions, The Bluest Eye is an experience not to be duplicated. It is a powerful, important fiction, central to our students' lives, and probably to our own.
Extracts from The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square, 1970)
The author is Professor of English at Michigan State University. This paper was presented during the Celebrated Teachers, Celebrated Texts session at the 1984 MLA convention in Washington, DC.
© 1986 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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