First of all, I’ve really enjoyed reading The Bluest Eye—as much as one can enjoy a story like this, anyway. Toni Morrison’s voice and writing style is incredible and expressive. She has this way of capturing emotions and details that would escape even the people living the experience. I’ve never had much difficulty visualizing a book playing in the back of my head while I’m reading, but the vision Morrison brings up is more complete than most. There were a few phrases I wrote down among my notes while I was reading through this most recent section, not because they were particularly relevant to our topic but because the way they were crafted was so...beautiful or right that I didn’t want to forget. Like this one—“But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.” (Morrison, 74)—about Pecola after she’s been teased by the group of boys surrounding her “like a necklace of semiprecious stones.” (Morrison, 65) Every page or section of Morrison’s book has something to it, and I’ve enjoyed (that word again) being swept away both by her writing and her story. Enough about my writing crush on Toni Morrison.
Toni Morrison talking about some of the problems she faced as a female writer
I think it’s her writing more than anything that brings her understanding of racism and judgment into focus. To be honest I wasn’t excited to read The Bluest Eye in the first place because it was a book about race. Race again. For the most part, I feel like I’ve heard it all before and understand. I heard all about it in school. I read about every young adult book on the Holocaust that Barnes and Noble carried when I was younger. I didn’t want to read the same old things again and again. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I really wasn’t too happy to pick up The Bluest Eye a week ago. Morrison has such a thorough eye for detail, however, that she is able to bring so many issues to the forefront at once in ways that I hadn’t thought of before. From a deeper understanding of the character’s backgrounds and the by knowing the details of their daily lives, we may begin to have a better understanding of what it truly means to be the “minority,” where sometimes even your own race doesn’t want to be associated with you and lives with a self hatred. Like Professor Bump wrote in his essay, “Morrison did not want Pecola to be pitied...” but causes us to feel “compassionate grief” for her character, (Bump 331) an arguably more “complete” feeling of empathy for Pecola’s plight. In the next paragraph I’m going to try to outline just a few of the ways Morrison presents racism and judgment in such a complete context.
Writing as a medium of explanation and understanding
The most astounding example of racism that Morrison describes in The Bluest Eye is what I guess would be described self-racism, “us v. us”. The black boys taunting Pecola in a circle because she’s black too. Geraldine, the picture-perfect housewife who seems to be trying to remove her association with her race, and only allowed her son junior to play with “white kids.” (Morrison, 87) Her obvious discrimination against the people like Pecola, girls who knew “nothing of girdles,” who “broke things in dime stores,” and “hovered” “like flies.” (Morrison, 92) The complete disgust she held for these people, the people she was trying so hard to separate herself from, was completely evident in Morrison’s rant on page 92—people whose “grass wouldn’t grow where they lived.” (Morrison, 92) It’s ironic, then, and powerful that her son was so terrible to Pecola, killing his mother’s cat and blaming it on her. When Geraldine tells Pecola, “you nasty little black bitch,” to “get out of [her] house,” (Morrison, 92) would her world have been shattered knowing that it was actually her son’s fault...or does she already know? In addition to self-racism and in the vein of the unfair stereotype that Geraldine holds for the disadvantaged members of her community, Morrison gives us a glimpse into why the people of Lorain came to be as they are. After reading the terrible fight between Mr. and Mrs. Breedlove, we are given Pauline Breedlove’s life story—how she loved Cholly and cared for her family before forming her own, why she and Cholly began to fight. So much of judging is not understanding and deciding that it’s far easier to dislike someone because they “just are” that way. Mrs. Breedlove shows the differences that can arise in even (somewhat) friendly interactions when she recounts her experiences with her employer. When her employer asked her a question and Mrs. Breedlove replied, Pauline says, “She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was.” (Morrison, 119) In addition to focusing on explaining the differences among people, Morrison explicitly gives instances of how people respond to these instances, the classic “us and them” dichotomy. In the first reading, we read about the man behind the candy counter who was clearly judging the girls, and in this section we meet the “yellow-haired” girl who stops, slightly terrified when she sees Pecola, Claudia and Frieda in her house. Finally, Morrison gives examples of a type of judging that goes beyond and works in addition to race and shows how ready people are to judge. Claudia and Frieda “looked hard for flaws” in Maureen Peal because she was so respected by her teachers and peers and at first had to settle with “uglying up her name.” (Morrison, 63) Additionally, Mrs. Breedlove drastically changes her opinion of herself, love and her life after receiving “her education in the movies” (Morrison, 122) and learning about physical beauty. Morrison clearly has a deep understanding of race and does an excellent job giving a description of how it is treated in the lives of these people of Lorain.
Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, the people Mrs. Breedlove watched in the movies and hwho determined her sense of beauty.
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