Source of book: I own this.
This book is one of my official choices for Black History Month this year. (You can see the entire list on this page.) I have been meaning to read Toni Morrison for years, but never remembered to request a book from the library. Finally, we found a used hardback to add to our own collection, and I decided to give it priority for Black History Month this year.
The other narrative quirk which works somewhat better is the use of the old Dick and Jane primers both as an opening “chapter” and as the title to various chapters. The words are all run together, but any of us who grew up with those in the house recognize the text and can conjure the illustrations. The books are ultra-white and suburban and of a particular era. They are also boring as hell, and vapid in their lack of anything interesting ever really happening. No wonder Dr. Seuss was able to upend the whole system with stories that kids actually wanted to read. Morrison’s contrast of the sanitized white family with the black families of her story is palpable. But also, the one white family - the one that Pauline cleans house for - is clearly not the family of Dick and Jane once you go even a millimeter below the surface.
The Bluest Eye follows a family with generational trauma to its eventual disintegration after the father (Cholly) rapes his young daughter, impregnating her. Surrounding all this is the poverty and social stigma associated not merely with being black in a white supremacist society, but the effects of being disabled, or physically unattractive, or impoverished generally. It is a whole constellation of negative and traumatic effects that plague the entire society, black, white, and everyone else.
One can see this first in Pauline Breedlove, who injures her foot as an infant, and thereafter walks with a limp. She is disabled, but also not particularly pretty, so she assumes nobody will love her - until Cholly comes along. Cholly has his own trauma - abandoned by his parents and raised by his great aunt until she dies when he is still young. He also has a traumatic sexual experience when he and his partner are surprised and mocked by a group of white men.
This then trickles down to the next generation. Pauline plays the martyr to her drunken husband, while emotionally withdrawing from her children. Cholly drowns his trauma in alcohol and violence toward his family. And Pecola, the young daughter, decides that everything would be better for her if she just had blue eyes. Then, she would be pretty, and loved, and admired.
That’s the main plot, but there are several subplots that come up, but often seem to fade away as soon as they start. The narrator is (mostly) Claudia MacTeer, a young friend and foster sister of Pecola. As a stable, middle class Black family, they have their own issues in society, from the bullying by the Italian immigrant family next door, to the mocking by the “yellow” - and thus more acceptable - light skinned blacks who also happen to have more money.
There is also a subplot involving the local brothel and the prostitutes who are both stigmatized and in a way admired for their independence. There is a dirty old man who has buried his homosexuality by preying on young girls, while running a fortune-telling and spiritualist scam.
Combine these with the flashbacks to the childhoods of Pauline and Cholly, and there is a lot going on in a book of a mere 200 pages. That’s why I felt that things were a bit messy and incoherent in layout, and I think that it would have worked better with a bit more linearity and probably a bit longer length so that the subplots could breathe a bit.
As I noted above, the writing is beautiful: Morrison is skilled and talented, and compelling. There were many moments when I went back just to re-read a particular gem of a sentence or turn of phrase. I definitely want to read her other books.
Here are a few highlights from the book:
The tiny, undistinguished days that Mrs. Breedlove lived were identified, grouped, and classed by these quarrels. They gave substance to the minutes and hours otherwise dim and unrecalled. They relieved the tiresomeness of poverty, gave grandeur to the dead rooms. In these violent breaks in routine that were themselves routine, she could display the style and imagination of what she believed to be her true self. To deprive her of these fights was to deprive her of all the zest and reasonableness of life. Cholly, by his habitual drunkenness and orneriness, provided them both with the material they needed to make their lives tolerable.
That is just part of an amazing and perceptive passage on the dynamics of an abusive relationship. I have done a lot of domestic violence cases, and, while this is not the only kind of dynamic I have seen, it is definitely one of them. For Pauline, her very identity is tied up in being a martyr to Cholly.
If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would never have forgiven Jesus. She needed Cholly’s sins desperately. The lower he sank, the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task became. In the name of Jesus.
There is a bit of that dynamic in my own family, I’m afraid. The need to pray for a “wayward” child gives meaning to life, and one’s own undistinguished days can feel better when you can look down on someone else for making different choices. Of course, for Cholly too, there is a reward in the dynamic. He never has processed his trauma, particularly that sexual trauma, and Pauline is a convenient way to numb that pain.
No less did Cholly need her. She was one of the few things abhorrent to him that he could touch and therefore hurt. He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact.
Again, that is a dynamic I have seen a lot in violent intimate relationships. Morrison points out here and elsewhere that shame is a difficult emotion to handle, so we often turn it into anger. (Oh man, do I know what this feels like. Way too much.) Pecola herself does this when the store owner refuses to touch her hand, even to take her money.
Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
This, unfortunately, raises some difficult - perhaps impossible - issues in our society. I think that one significant source of the Trumpist anger and rage on the part of many white people in our society is a sense of shame. This is a reason why there is the push to keep all honest teaching about history out of schools - white Americans have a lot to be ashamed of, and not just the past. But trying to avoid the shame isn’t helping, and it won’t just go away, because there are genuine reasons that the shame exists. Merely telling people that they shouldn’t feel ashamed won’t fix the problem - it will ultimately require them to stop doing the shameful things that bring the shame in the first place.
It also contrasts with the shame that Pecola feels, because her shame is at being black in a society that considers her literally untouchable. Cholly has both kinds of shame, of course. His inappropriate shame and the shameful way those white men treated him feeds his doing shameful things - beating his wife, raping his daughter - that he should be ashamed of. It’s a tough nut, to be sure.
Morrison also takes an unflattering look at light-skinned black girls from the city, who look down on Southern rural (and darker skinned) blacks like Pauline.
They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.
While this is specifically about a certain kind of refined black woman, the project of a lot of white religion and white culture is quite similar. The elimination of passion, nature, and the full range of human emotions. In fact, that was literally a key part of Bill Gothard’s cult: the suppression of all “negative” emotions, particularly in children and women. It was the inculcation of a certain kind of “manners” that was every bit as subservient as what Morrison describes for refined black domestics. I am currently reading Walden Two by B. F. Skinner (stay tuned), and it takes a similar utopian approach to the messiness of human emotion to that of Gothard, although Skinner sought to eliminate the underlying causes of negative emotions, while Gothard just told you that negative emotions were evil, and had to be brutally suppressed, even at the cost of one’s psychological health. (The damage is real and widespread among ex-Gothard kids.) Morrison really nails how this plays out in her characters, with an inability to make emotional or sexual connection with a spouse or raise emotionally healthy children - after all, babies have messy emotions. Much easier to get a cat.
Morrison points out that neither money nor whiteness protects against this dysfunction. In a way, the white family is the most dysfunctional, despite having plenty of money to paper over that fact. Once incident is fascinating. The woman rants at Pauline about the fact that her brother - who she put through dentistry school - hasn’t invited her to a party.
All the while I was thinking how dumb she was. Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks can’t like folks just ‘cause they has the same mama.
Oh yes. This question of the meaning of “family” can be a tough one. In some circumstances, economic or safety concerns require sticking together no matter what - a clan matters in time of war. But there is no automatic reason why sharing a mother (or father) guarantees friendship. In fact, in dysfunctional families like mine, what it leads to instead is flagrant favoritism and bullying behavior, all while expecting a loyalty that goes only one way. In families, as anywhere else, relationships must be earned and maintained, not taken for granted.
The Bluest Eye was an interesting read. I think what surprised me the most was Morrison’s depth of understanding of human psychology and interpersonal dynamics. While the book is about the black experience and takes a hard look at the way whiteness is seen as beauty and virtue, most of what Morrison describes is universally human, between the unhealthy coping mechanisms, the emotional stunting, and the way we cage our own souls as we seek to cage the souls of others.
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