Bluest Eye - Paper 2 Revision

Genre

This is a polyphonic coming-of-age novel that uses first and third person from the perspective of a range of different characters.

On a deeper level it can also be seen as a piece of modernist African-American literature. Can be seen in how her novel features the multiple perspectives and stream-of-consciousness so typical of modernist works.

Purpose/context

The novel also takes up some of Modernism's thematic concerns, including the breakdown of the modern family, the dissolving of community, and an increasing scepticism about religion.

At the same time, however, Morrison combined the Modernist form and content with distinctly African-American elements, such as old blues lyrics, black southern dialect, and narration from the point of view of African-American characters.

Structure (narrators)

There are two narrators:

- Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child's perspective and an adult's perspective looking back

- An omniscient narrator who allows us insight into other characters in the novel, exploring them through a series of vignettes

Structure (why)

Morrison built a 'shattered world' to complement Pecola's experiences. She changes narrators and focal points within and between the four sections, and the events are narrated mostly non-chronologically. Her use of point of view is deliberately fragmented to give a sense of the character' experiences of dislocation.

Structure (vingettes)

Morrison also uses vignettes to show things from Cholly, Pauline's, and other characters' points of view. Crucially, by shifting the point of view Morrison effectively avoids dehumanising the black characters who 'trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.' Instead, she emphasises the systemic nature of the problem. She shows the reader how the racial issues of the distant and not-so-distant past continue to affect her characters in the present, thereby explaining (not justifying) many of their actions.

Message

Using Pecola's story as a focal point, The Bluest Eye reveals the destructive and insidious impact of racism, exploring the impact of this on individuals and on the community as a whole.

On a more positive note, this novel could also be seen as a celebration of blackness - note how often Morrison reframes blackness as something beautiful 'kissing thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin.'

Told in analepsis - retroactive story telling technique.

By using analepsis, Morrison is able to show the reader how the racial issues of the distant and not-so-distant past continue to affect her characters in the present, thereby explaining (not justifying) many of their actions. Essentially, the analepsis emphasises the systemic nature of the problem, as well as creating a tone of foreboding and a sense of tragic inevitability from the offset.

Vignettes

The story is told in multiple vignettes, allowing us to understand perspectives of different characters (Cholly, Geraldine, Soaphead and Pecola)

Mimicking of African-American ways of speech

Morrison mimics the language of black Americans in the South. This shows how their voices are worthy of being remembered in Literature as well. She does this through the use of:

- Phonetic spelling

- Dropped letters

- Syntactic changes

- AAVE grammar

- Colloquialisms and idioms

Temporal setting

The novel is divided into four seasons, but pointedly refuses to meet the expectations of these seasons. For example, spring, the traditional time of rebirth and renewal, reminds Claudia of being whipped with new switches, and it is the season when Pecola's is raped. Pecola's baby dies in autumn, the season of harvesting. Morrison uses natural cycles to underline the unnaturalness and misery of her characters' experiences.

The use of primers

The narrative commences with a passage from a primer, a children's instructional series in the United States that was produced between 1930 and 1960. The three renditions of the same sections symbolically represent three distinct lifestyles:

- The initial rendition symbolises a meticulously structured and contented family comprising a father and mother, used to reflect perceptions of white lives.

- The second iteration of the text exhibits the absence of capitalization, a narrow spacing between words, and the absence of punctuation, which serves as a symbolic representation of the MacTeer family.

- The third version, devoid of capitalization, punctuation, and space between words, represents the dysfunctional, disorderly, and anarchic nature of the Breedlove family.

Primers are used later on as well, to foreshadow the content of the chapter. For example, in the chapter where we are introduced to Geraldine and her son Junior, the chapter begins with a broken down extract from a primer focusing on a cat. This foreshadows the significance of the cat in this chapter, which symbolises the human tendency to redirect hate to people or things weaker than us.

Motif of Names

The family named "Breedlove" is ironic due to both the destructive manner in which its members express love towards one other and the fact that their destructive behaviour is an expression of self-hatred.

Pauline also forces her children to call her 'Ms Breedlove' whilst allowing the little white girl to call her 'Polly'.

Juxtaposing language

Morrison's conjoining of seemingly opposite ideas creates the tension between The Bluest Eye's opening line, "Nuns go by quiet as lust," and the narrator's statement near the end of the text that describes the incestuous rape of Pecola by her father, "he ****ed her tenderly". By conjoining jarring language, Morrison is commenting on the unnatural nature of racism and its effects. She is also deifying categories with her language, showing again how what she is discussing cannot be oversimplified - e.g. by labelling some people as villains and others as victims.

Juxtaposing characters

Claudia's statement in the first chapter, "I destroyed white baby dolls" demonstrates her strong aversion to white supremacy. In juxtaposition to Pecola, Claudia exhibits resistance towards the notion of white superiority and expresses dissent with the concept of white beauty.

Italics

Italics are used in the novel to convey a character's innermost desires. Pecola conveys her inward need through the use of italicised words in the final chapter, and Pauline Breedlove uses it to depict her fantasies and fantastical reinterpretations of her life.

Motif of silence

Children are presented as silent - or not listened to - in this novel. The perfect example of this is Pecola. Not only is she a child, she is a black girl - the epitome of everything society wants to silence. We see this in how this is a novel in some ways about Pecola, yet she speaks very little in the novel.

Indeed, we are shown the vignettes of several characters before we have one from the perspective of Pecola. This vignette takes the form of a dialogue between her and her 'friend'. Finally, Pecola is given a voice - it is a tragedy that it is a mad one.

Motif of silence (quotes)

'Pecola's voice was no more than a sigh.'

'...the only sound she made - a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon.'

Motif of houses

Houses are the first thing mentioned, so their importance is hinted at from the get go. They are used to symbolise the emotions and values of the characters who inhabit them.

Motif of songs

Songs are used several times in this novel, their use varying for each character.

Motif of whiteness and colour

In the novel, whiteness is associated with beauty and cleanliness (particularly according to Geraldine and Mrs. Breedlove), but also with sterility. In contrast, colour is associated with happiness, most clearly in the rainbow of yellow, green, and purple memories Pauline Breedlove sees when making love with Cholly. Morrison uses this imagery to emphasise the destructiveness of the Black community's privileging of whiteness and to suggest that vibrant colour, rather than the pure absence of colour, is a stronger image of happiness and freedom.

Motif of eyes

Pecola's internalisation of racism is symbolises through blue eyes. She believes that if she, like Shirley Temple, has blue eyes, then she will be loved and her life will be bearable. To Pecola, blue eyes symbolise the beauty and happiness that she associates with the white, middle-class world. They also come to symbolise her own blindness, for she gains blue eyes only at the cost of her sanity. The "bluest" eye could also mean the saddest eye. Furthermore, eye puns on I, in the sense that the novel's title uses the singular form of the noun (instead of The Bluest Eyes) to express many of the characters' sad isolation.

Motif of eyes (quote)

'she could never get her eyes to disappear. [...] They were everything.'

Motif of Pecola's question (quote)

Again and again, Pecola asks the same question:

'How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?'

Symbol of the Shirley Temple cup

Pecola is obsessed with the Shirley Temple cup as she wants to be just like the little white girl on it. She also consumes milk from the cup in an attempt to 'become white'. This foreshadows her ultimate obsession with blue eyes, and highlights her tragic naivety.

Symbol of the Mary Jane sweets

The candy provides Pecola with an artificial respite from her misery at how Mr Yacobowski treated her. Consuming the Mary Janes becomes for her a fleeting opportunity to imagine herself to be the little girl depicted on the wrapper, a girl who is desirable enough to be consumed. This respite is, like the sweets, artificial and fleeting.

Symbol of the Mary Jane sweets (quote)

''To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. be Mary Jane"

Symbol of the dandelions

The dandelions are used to symbolise Pecola's internalisation of societal values. She initially does not see the dandelions as ugly, which introduces the idea that beauty might be a matter of one's perception. However, when she is treated horribly by Mr Yacobowksi she emerges from the shop and begins to see the dandelions as ugly at the same time as she feels shame for how she was treated. This symbolises how she has internalised society's view, and automatically trusts that if someone views her as ugly, it means she is ugly, rather than questioning the beholder.

The 'yellow heads' of the dandelions also connect symbolically to the blonde haired girls, who represent the white beauty standard, and explains Pecola's confusion as to why the black women throw them away

The symbol of the marigolds

As a child, the narrator believed she could change the outcome of Pecola's pregnancy, but as a woman, she comes to understand her own powerlessness. The marigolds are a symbol of the innocence and potential of these children, with the unyielding earth symbolising the unyielding nature of society against black children.

Ultimately, the narrator and her sister were completely powerless over the conditions that allowed this atrocity to happen, and had no control over the outcome. The marigold seeds were never going to grow because of the soil they were in, just as Pecola was never going to flourish because of the 'soil' she was in.

The insidious nature of racism (Theme)

Alice Walker calls the perpetuation of racism by black people "psychic annihilation," letting "whites turn blacks on themselves." Morrison shows this in a myriad of different ways, including:

The gifting of white dolls to black children. By giving their children white dolls, Morrison shows how socialisation patterns thoughtlessly transmit from parent to child.

Note how the Breedloves are not actually ugly - they just believe they are. They are described as having 'high cheekbones' and 'shapely lips'. Morrison states that people would look at them and 'wonder why they were so ugly'. The answer? Self-hatred.

Important quotes can be found on pages 36-37.

The powerlessness of children (Theme)

Key Quotes:

- 'Adults do not talk to us-they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information'

- 'We didn't initiate talk with grownups; we answered their questions'

- 'Frieda and I were not introduced to him-merely pointed out. Like, here is the bathroom; the clothes closet is here; and these are my kids"

Rejection of societal beauty standards (Theme)

Morrison uses the her primary narrator, Claudia, to critique society's obsession with whiteness, evidenced by:

- Her destruction of her white doll

- Her hatred of the light-skinned Maureen, who everyone else adores. Morrison describes her plaits as 'lynch ropes', underscoring the sinister quality of her beauty

- Her myriad descriptions of whiteness in an unflattering way e.g. Rosemary's 'dough-white face'

The failure of community (theme)

It is the community's abandonment of the protagonist Pecola Breedlove and her family that ultimately results in her psychological destruction.

The power of stories - positive (theme)

Characters tell stories to make sense of their lives, and these stories have tremendous power for both good and evil. Morrison shows the importance of stories in many different ways:

- The novel is, in part, the adult Claudia's desire to come to terms with her helplessness and, perhaps, to do the only thing she possibly can for Pecola: tell her story.

- When the adults describe Pecola's pregnancy and hope that the baby dies, Claudia and Frieda attempt to rewrite this story as a hopeful one, casting themselves as saviours.

- Claudia resists the premise of white superiority, writing her own story about the beauty of blackness.

The power of stories - negative (theme)

Stories are not always constructive, however - they are actually often destructive to both themselves and others.

- The story Pauline Breedlove tells herself about her own ugliness reinforces her self-hatred, and the story she tells herself about her own martyrdom reinforces her cruelty toward her family.

- Soaphead Church's personal narratives about his good intentions and his special relationship with God are pure hypocrisy.

Stories are as likely to distort the truth as they are to reveal it. While Morrison apparently believes that stories can be redeeming, she is no blind optimist and refuses to let us rest comfortably in any one version of what happens.

(JUST LIKE THEW NEWS/NEWESPAPERS IN PERSEPOLIS - representing both the turth, manipulation and how we percieve the truth)

Satisfying appetites versus suppressing them - denial (theme)

A number of characters in The Bluest Eye define their lives through a denial of their bodily needs:

- Geraldine prefers cleanliness and order to the messiness of sex, and she is emotionally frigid as a result

- Pauline prefers cleaning and organising the home of her white employers to expressing physical affection toward her family

- Soaphead Church finds physicality distasteful, and this peculiarity leads to his preference for objects over humans and to his perverse attraction to little girls

Satisfying appetites versus suppressing them - happiness (theme)

In contrast, when characters experience happiness, it is generally in viscerally physical terms:

- Claudia prefers to have her senses indulged by wonderful scents, sounds, and tastes than to be given a hard white doll

- Cholly's greatest moments of happiness are eating the best part of a watermelon and touching a girl for the first time

- Pauline's happiest memory is of sexual fulfilment with her husband.

The novel suggests that, no matter how messy and sometimes violent human desire is, it is also the source of happiness: denial of the body begets hatred and violence, not redemption.

Misplaced hatred (theme)

As a teenager, Cholly experiences his first sexual encounter, however white hunters stumble upon them and force the two to copulate under their violating gaze. Cholly, unable to defend himself or Darlene against this attack, turns his anger and impotence toward Darlene.

'Hating her, he could leave himself intact.'

This channelling of frustration to those weaker than him is a pattern he will repeat throughout his life with devastating consequences for those close to him. Essentially, white oppression distorts black lives and leads to misplaced hatred. The oppressed turn towards those who are weaker than them, and in doing so, become the oppressors. We see this happen with Junior as well, who turns his hatred against Pecola and the cat.

Misplaced blame (theme)

As well as being about misplaced hatred, this novel is also more poignantly about misplaced blame. The marigold seeds the girls plant on behalf of Pecola's baby fail to sprout, and because they fail to save the baby's life, they avoid Pecola. The girls' guilty self-recriminations form the prologue and the epilogue, for it has not occurred to them that the earth itself (i.e. society) might have been "unyielding."

Whiteness as the standard of beauty (theme)

A three-hundred-year-old history of people brought to the United States during the period of slavery has led to a psychological oppression that fosters a love of everything connected with the slave masters while promoting a revulsion toward everything connected with themselves. All cultures teach their own standards of beauty and desirability through billboards, movies, books, dolls, and other products. The white standard of beauty is pervasive throughout this novel — because there is no black standard of beauty.

- white baby doll

- the idealisation of Shirley Temple

- the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls

- the idealisation of white beauty in the movies

- Pauline Breedlove's preference for the little white girl she works for over her daughter

Women's forced reliance on men (theme)

Pauline Breedlove symbolises female dependence on men, as she fantasises from a young age about either a man or God (also a man) saving her. Interestingly, The novel's black women only experience freedom from male oppression once they are no longer desired as sexual objects. Realising this only after they are elderly, however, they are bitter because they have endured oppression their entire lives, never realising their worth as young black women.

The significance of family (theme)

Family is key in this novel - those with a supportive family are able to survive, and those who do not sink. Cholly, for example, never had a sense of home and family, which sheds light on his inability to be a father. Cholly then follows in his father's footsteps by running, showing the way that familial dysfunction passes down generationally.