Katherine's Blog: Family Dynamics in The Bluest Eye

I opened The Bluest Eye determined to read it optimistically, as hard as that may be. I read searching for signs of family dynamics that worked and reasons why they didn’t. The families we read about in The Bluest Eye are far from desirable, but they are real and familiar in some ways and not totally dysfunctional. As Professor Bump mentions in his piece, only 5 percent of black families researched in a psychiatrists’ study were determined to be “severely dysfunctional.” (Bump, 350) While that observation may be taken to be severely naïve if anything—at least that’s something. Similarly, I liked Professor Bump’s observations about the complaint that some African American writers, “Toni Morrison among them—have betrayed the black family by failing to shoulder responsibility for restoring it to an image of wholeness and unity.” (Bump, 350) I think it’s important that Toni Morrison and other writer’s “report” families the way they want to. It’s honest, if not in the sense that it’s literally true but from the idea that these families are somewhere within these writers, within their communities, their consciousness. (After all, The Bluest Eye, is set in Toni Morrison’s childhood hometown as it says on the back of the book.) As she says within the first few lines of the book, “Here is the family.” (Morrison, 5) There’s no use in glamorizing something to make any of us feel better. Families aren’t perfect; they aren’t all “optimal.” (Bump, 350) Here they are.

Not all families are like this, but that doesn't mean they're all bad.

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So what about the opening section? I took it to mean that there are all sorts of layers to a family. Each family has the potential to be any variant of these stories. There’s the Dick and Jane variety, perfect, clean and meant to bring up children positively (after all, the books were meant to teach children to read). The next extreme is the space-less, hurried, messy and overwhelming case of a family, without structure, without a true consideration for others. I took one look at that representation of a “family” and decided that I didn’t want to take the time to go through it or pay it any attention. Finally, there’s something in between. Like I said before, any of these forms can become the next. The ingredients are all there to build the “ideal” family, but just as quickly everything can be taken away and the overwhelming blob of a family can take its place. I first took this passage to mean that families are irredeemable, dysfunctional—that no sort of ideal Dick and Jane family exists. But I think there’s more to it. Morrison could’ve shown the two extremes and created a direct contrast, but she did not. She included something in between.

While Morrison’s pictures of family life in Lorain, Ohio are grim, there’s plenty of good, plenty of bad and a lot of in between. There is obvious value placed on the family. When Claudia talks about the fear some people have of being placed “outdoors,” or kicked out, the thought of placing your own kin outside of the house is “criminal.” (Morrison, 17) Similarly, the threats and fighting—while terrible—are largely hollow and probably just serve as a response to their undesirable conditions, not some true hatred of their family members. The book even talks about Mrs. Breedlove’s need for arguing and illustrates an example that shows that it is not so terrible. During a particularly intense fight between Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove—which appears to be a typical occurrence—their son shouts, “Kill him!” after which Mrs. Breedlove yells back, “Cut out that noise, boy!” (Morrison, 44) Of course this is not a desirable family situation, but is not one that is hopeless. I understand that it’s dangerous to take the position that these families are normal or redeemable in this book, especially because we know something terrible that is going to happen, but I think Ms. Morrison wants us to feel the same way. Endearing qualities of Claudia’s mother are found throughout the book—Claudia loving her singing, her mother taking care of her when she’s sick, and feeling genuinely sorry when she misunderstood the girls for helping Pecola outside. Similarly, clues point to the reasons behind the families’ troubles: poverty takes the forefront, certainly, while a general understanding of love and the man’s role (Claudia thinking that a man leaving is a necessary part of the love cycle, for example) differently than what we’re used to allow us to better understand the family dynamics in The Bluest Eye.