The Bluest Eye

      The novel is alternately narrated in first person by Claudia MacTeer and in third person, focusing on various other characters. 9-year-old Claudia and her 10-year-old sister, Frieda, live in Lorain, Ohio with their parents, who take two other people into their home: Mr. Henry, a tenant, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house has been burned down by her wildly unstable father, who is widely gossiped about in the community. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl with a hard life, and whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually being told and reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is, thus fueling her desire to be white with blue eye . One day while Pecola is doing dishes, her intoxicated father rapes her. His motives are unclear, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. Cholly flees after the second time he rapes Pecola, leaving her pregnant. Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community that hope for Pecola's child to survive. Consequently, they give up money they had been saving to buy and plant marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the flowers bloom, Pecola's baby will live. The marigolds never bloom and Pecola's child, who is born prematurely, dies.Finally, the ending reminds us that Pecola's "madness," if we want to call it that (do we?) is not her fault but is embedded in her community. The chapter begins with a quote from the initial Dick and Jane grammar school primer that is the book's epigraph, at the point in the story where a "friend" comes to play with Jane. The epigraph says, "THEYWILLPLAYAGOODGAME." It's painfully ironic that this excerpt foregrounds the theme of friendship. Pecola doesn't have any real friends, only this voice inside her head.

Now, calling this second voice an "imaginary friend" is maybe a bit too easy. It might be more interesting to see the second voice as the part of Pecola that still wants to live. After all, this is an affirming voice, an encouraging voice, one that wants her to go outside and to help her address the aftermath of the rape. Perhaps the true tragedy of the novel is that in ignoring her completely, Pecola's community forces her into such devastating loneliness that she has to imagine someone talking to her. The community commits a crime on a par with Cholly's abuse: if Cholly failed her by raping her, Pecola's community failed her by never acknowledging that a rape took place.

                      

       Key Facts

FULL TITLE  ·  The Bluest Eye

AUTHOR  · Toni Morrison

TYPE OF WORK · Novel

GENRE  · Coming-of-age, tragedy, elegy

LANGUAGE  · English

TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN  · New York, 1962–1965

DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION  ·  1970

PUBLISHER  · Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. The novel went out of print in 1974 but was later rereleased.

NARRATOR  · There are two narrators: Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspective; and an omniscient narrator.

POINT OF VIEW  · Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but we also see things from Cholly’s, Pauline’s, and other characters’ points of view. Point of view is deliberately fragmented to give a sense of the characters’ experiences of dislocation and to help us sympathize with multiple characters.

TONE  · Lyrical, elegiac, embittered, matter-of-fact, colloquial

TENSE  · Past, as seen by the adult Claudia

SETTING (TIME)  ·  1940–1941

SETTING (PLACE)  · Lorain, Ohio

PROTAGONIST  · Pecola Breedlove

MAJOR CONFLICT  · Pecola needs to receive love from somebody, but her parents and the other members of her community are unable to love her because they have been damaged and thwarted in their own lives.

RISING ACTION  · Cholly tries to burn down the family house; Pecola is snubbed by a grocer, tormented by boys, and blamed for killing a cat.

CLIMAX  · Pecola’s father rapes her.

FALLING ACTION  · Pecola is beaten by her mother, requests blue eyes from Soaphead Church, begins to go mad, and loses her baby.

THEMES  · Whiteness as the standard of beauty; seeing versus being seen; the power of stories; sexual initiation and abuse; satisfying appetites versus repressing them

MOTIFS  · The Dick-and-Jane narrative; the seasons and nature; whiteness and color; eyes and vision; dirtiness and cleanliness

SYMBOLS  · The house; bluest eyes; the marigolds

FORESHADOWING  · The prologue foreshadows the major events of the plot.

                                                          (Spark Notes) 

Toni Morrison

    Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Her mother’s family had come to Ohio from Alabama via Kentucky, and her father had migrated from Georgia. Morrison grew up with a love of literature and received her undergraduate degree from Howard University. She received a master’s degree from Cornell University, completing a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Afterward, she taught at Texas Southern University and then at Howard, in Washington, D.C., where she met Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica. The marriage lasted six years, and Morrison gave birth to two sons. She and her husband divorced while she was pregnant with her second son, and she returned to Lorain to give birth. She then moved to New York and became an editor at Random House, specializing in black fiction. During this difficult and somewhat lonely time, she began working on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970.

The Bluest Eye contains a number of autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up, and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old, the age Morrison would have been the year the novel takes place (1941). Like the MacTeer family, Morrison’s family struggled to make ends meet during the Great Depression. Morrison grew up listening to her mother singing and her grandfather playing the violin, just as Claudia does. In the novel’s afterword, Morrison explains that the story developed out of a conversation she had had in elementary school with a little girl, who longed for blue eyes. She was still thinking about this conversation in the 1960s, when the Black is Beautiful movement was working to reclaim African-American beauty, and she began her first novel.

The Bluest Eye   

-Mayor Characters 

   * Pecola Breedlove -  The protagonist of the novel, an eleven-year-old black girl who believes that she is ugly and that having blue eyes would make her beautiful. Sensitive and delicate, she passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates. She is lonely and imaginative.

Pecola's need to achieve a white kind of beauty is not only linked to America's beauty obsession, however. Pecola also thinks that if she were prettier, her parents wouldn't fight so much. This is the classic "it's my fault" logic that many kids have when their parents fight, taken to an extreme. Pecola is constantly victimized and humiliated throughout the novel. When we first meet her she is homeless By the end of the novel, Pecola has completely lost touch with reality. Unable to process and accept the fact that she has been raped by her father, she becomes convinced that everyone in town is looking at her strangely because she received her wish of blue eyes. She acquires an imaginary friend whom she talks to almost exclusively about her eyes.

*Claudia MacTeer -  The narrator of parts of the novel. An independent and strong-minded nine-year-old, Claudia is a fighter and rebels against adults’ tyranny over children and against the black community’s idealization of white beauty standards. She has not yet learned the self-hatred that plagues her peers.Claudia is the primary narrator of the book. An inquisitive, sensitive young girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio, Claudia is the product of a loving family. Her narration is interesting in that it moves back and forth between her reflective, adult stance and a more innocent, childlike one. At the end of the novel, Claudia and Frieda spend the entire summer selling marigold seeds in order to buy themselves a bicycle. Once they learn of Pecola's pregnancy, they sacrifice their seed money as a payment to God, in the hope that he will allow Pecola's baby to survive.

*Cholly Breedlove - By all rights, we should hate Cholly Breedlove, given that he rapes his daughter. But Morrison explains in her afterword that she did not want to dehumanize her characters, even those who dehumanize one another, and she succeeds in making Cholly a sympathetic figure. He has experienced genuine suffering, having been abandoned in a junk heap as a baby and having suffered humiliation at the hands of white men. He is also capable of pleasure and even joy, in the experience of eating a watermelon or touching a girl for the first time. He is capable of violence, but he is also vulnerable, as when two white men violate him by forcing him to perform sexually for their amusement and when he defecates in his pants after encountering his father. Cholly represents a negative form of freedom. He is not free to love and be loved or to enjoy full dignity, but he is free to have sex and fight and even kill; he is free to be indifferent to death. He falls apart when this freedom becomes a complete lack of interest in life, and he reaches for his daughter to remind himself that he is alive. Cholly has no role model to teach him how to be a parent or love children. 

   When he becomes a father, he is at a complete loss at what to do. He starts to use alcohol as a way to cope with fatherhood, married life, and the pressure of being the breadwinner, which leads to bouts of violence and the neglect of his family. After Cholly rapes Pecola, his daughter, near the end of the novel, he slips out of view and dies alone at a workhouse.

*Pauline Breedlove - Pauline is Pecola's mom, and her character allows us to see how cultural conceptions of beauty can play themselves out in a more benign, though still unfortunate, form than in Pecola's case. Pauline's lame foot is a constant source of humiliation for her. Once she moves to Ohio, she must contend with regional and social class barriers to normative beauty that she had never imagined. Up north, Pauline's southern accent makes her stick out like a sore thumb, and her inability to keep up with the latest fashion takes its toll on her spirit as well. When Pauline loses herself in Hollywood films and styles her hair like Jean Harlow feel prettier, we see that not only were little girls influenced by white celebrity culture, but older black women as well. Once she loses her tooth, Pauline's preoccupation with making herself beautiful is replaced with an obsession with being the perfect servant for the Fishers. In this affluent white household, Pauline gets to pretend that the Fisher kitchen is her kitchen, that the money she receives to buy their groceries is her money, and maybe even that their little white daughter is her daughter. Just like her daughter Pecola, Pauline creates an elaborate fantasy world that consumes her.

*Video

This video is an amazing explanation about the bluest eye book.. The life of Pecola Breedlove and all her problems just for her black skin. The person who suffers most from white beauty standards is, of course, Pecola. She connects beauty with being loved and believes that if she possesses blue eyes, the cruelty in her life will be replaced by affection and respect. This hopeless desire leads ultimately to madness, suggesting that the fulfillment of the wish for white beauty may be even more tragic than the wish impulse itself.

*Important Links

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Victorious Black Women brings hope, provides support to women of color

http://www.peersnet.org/news/2012-10/victorious-black-women-brings-hope-provides-support-women-color

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 How to Deal With an Alcoholic Parent
http://www.wikihow.com/Deal-With-an-Alcoholic-Parent

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Domestic Violence: You Can Live Without It
http://www.msba.org/departments/commpubl/publications/brochures/violence.asp
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Combating Racial Discrimination

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Discrimination/Pages/discrimination_racial.aspx

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Natural Blue Contact Lenses
http://www.youknowit.com/online-shop/natural-blue-contact-lenses.cfm