INTRODUCTION

African American Literature is literature written by, about and sometimes

specifically for African Americans .The genre began during the 18th and
19thcenturies with writers such as poet Phillies Wheatley and Orator Frederick
Douglass, reached an early high point with Harlem Renaissance and continues
today with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Ange- lou and Walter
Mosley being ranked among the top writers in the United States.
African American literature tends to focus on themes of particular
interest for Black people.For example, the role of African Americans within
the larger American society and issues such as African Americans within the
larger American culture,racism,religion,slavery,freedom and equality.This
focus began with the earliest African American writings such as the slave
narrative genre in the early nineteenth century,and continues through the work
of many modernday authors. The history of Black women in the United States
began with the forced migration of millions of African women from the
interiors of the west coast of Africa to European colonies with their men.
Unfortunately, men and women did not experience slavery in the same way.
Slave women experienced sexual exploitation, child bearing, motherhood and
slave holder’s sexism. Slave women were exploited for their reproductive as
well as a productive capacity.
Unlike the white women, who were viewed as prudish, pious and
domestic, black women were considered sensual and promiscuous which
resulted in molesting them. The declaration of slave trade in 1807 even
worsened the status of black women in America. Black men, white men and
women manipulated black women, thus making her life a misery and
forbidding her from finding her identity.Black women are marginalized in a
colonial, predominantly white society.Their suppression is twofold. They are
oppressed

1
the white men and women and by the black patriarchal society. Black women
faced sexism within their own community, and racism on the whole. Women were
treated as inferior to man. In the late nineteenth century, women came to the
forefront of political scenario.
The purpose of Black Feminism was to develop a theory which could adequately
ad-dress the way race; gender and class were interconnected in their lives and to
take action to stop racist, sexist and classiest discriminations. So in 1973, a group
of Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) held a conference which was noted for
the participation of black people from all walks of life. Around 1970s Black
Feminist Movement came in full swing.
Toni Morrison has a central role in the American literary canon, according to
many critics,award committees, andreaders.Her award-winning novels chronicle
small town African American life, employing “an artistic vision that encompasses
both a private and a national heritage”. [Time magazine contributor Angela Wigan
]
Morrison,meanwhile,helped to promoteBlack literature and authors when she
worked as an editor for Random House in the 1960s and 70s, where she edited
books by such authors as Toni Cade Bambara andGayle Jones.Morrison herself
would later emerge as one of the most important African American writers of
twentieth century. Her first novel The Bluest eye was published in 1970.Among
her most famous novels is Beloved, which won the Pulitzer prize for Fiction in
1988.This story describes a slave who found freedom but killed her infant
daughter to save her from a life of slavery. Another important novel is Song of
Solomon, a tale about materialism and brotherhood. Sula was nominated for the
National Book Award.This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black
heroines from their growing up together in Ohio town, through their sharply
divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
Through her works she proves herself to be a gifted storyteller of stories in which
troubled characters seek to find themselves

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and their cultural riches in a society that warps or impedes such essential growth.
Morrison is the first African American women to win the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Each of her novels is as
Original as anything that has appeared in our literature in the last twenty years.
The contemporaneity that unites them - the troubling persistence of racism in
America - is infused with an urgency that only a black writer can have about our
society.[Charles Larson, writing in the Chicago Tribune Book World]
One of the recurrent themes in the novels of Toni Morrison is the problem of good
and evil. Morrison had dealt with the themes of violence, oppression and sacrifice
in all her novels. The conflict between the black and the white communities, the
victimization of the blacks by the dominant whites, the violence and bloodshed
within the black communities have been presented nowhere so effectively in the
entire American Fiction. Though all her works are suffused with violence,
Morrison had dealt with violence in each novel in a unique way.
For Morrison, “all good art has been political” and the black artist has a
responsibility to the black community. She aims at capturing “the something that
defines what makes a book ‘black’. And that has nothing to do with whether the
people in the books are black or not”. She thinks that one characteristic of black
writers is “a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends”. Her novels “bear
witness” to the experience of the black community and blacks in that community.
Her work “suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what
circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was
legal outside it”. In the past, music expressed these things and “kept us alive.Un-
fortunately, music no longer serves this function and other forms of expression,
like the novel, are needed.”

An author’s style is what defines his or her work. Morrison’s writing style is easily
distinguishable due to her unique use of language. Her novels are easy to read,and
she incorporates many different styles into her writing, such as switching the voice

3
of narration throughout her stories for a change of perspective. Some of her most
commonly used techniques are; the use of descriptive analogies, important
historical references and varied sentence structures. Morrison is generally known
for her use of unusual - yet effective — comparisons that give further descriptions
to the details she presents. More specifically, she utilizes similar techniques in her
writings to help the reader connect the content with alternate images and
experiences. In reading Morrison’s fiction, rich in folk knowledge and inspired by
the rhythms of black music, blues and jazz, it is clear that she was highly influ-
enced especially by the African American twist on modernism.
The Bluest Eye was also a product of its own time, 1970. At the time the Civil
Rights movement had produced historical advances in the freedom and dignity
granted to African - American citizens, but African Americans still found
themselves discriminated against on all fronts - economic, religious,educational,
political and legal. They began to notice also that the culture industry produced a
single standard image of beauty and that standard insistently excluded them. It was
the image of white womanhood and also of white girlhood, blonde, blue - eyed
and economically privileged. The Black Pride movement was borne out of this
recognition .Morrison’s novel is part of this movement. Although she had trouble
getting the book into print-the manuscript was rejected several times - it was final-
ly published in 1969. At age thirty - eight, Morrison was a published author, and
her debut, set in Morrison’s hometown Lorain Ohio, portrays “in poignant terms
the tragic conditions of blacks in a racist America”[Chickwenye Okonjo
Ogunyemi in Cri
tique], She demonstratesthe serious damage caused by internalized racism, what
happens
when African - American people begin to believe the stereotypes of themselfwhen
they comply with the idea that white is most lofty and beautiful and black is most
degraded and ugly. Morrison demonstrates this phenomenon in the most
devastating way - as it affects children. Black children were commonly given dolls

4
which looked like privileged white babies. They were encouraged to see these
dolls as the epitome of beauty and worth. In this they were indirectly encouraged
to see themselves as less than beautiful, even ugly. A particular branch of the
cosmetics industry thrived - the branch that served the needs of internalized
racism. Vanishing creams which claimed to lighten dark skin, hair straighteners
promising to make African hair look more like that of movie stars, and all kinds of
other produces were used by African Americans. The training in physical
inferiority began with
children. Morrison attacks the problem at this point.

5
BLACK EXPERIENCES IN THE WHITE WORLD
Morrison is a pioneer in the depiction of the hurt inflicted by blacks on blacks;
for instance- her characters rarely achieve harmonious relationships but are
instead divided by future- lessness and the anguish of stifled existence.
Is thick with an atmosphere through which her characters move slowly, in
pain, ignorance, and hunger. And to a very large degree Morrison has the
compelling ability to make one believe that all of us are penetrating that dark
and hurt full terrain- the feel of a human life- simultaneously [Vivian Gomick
correspondent of Village Voice]
The Bluest Eye is about the victimization of one small black girl named
Pecola. Self -hate makes her vulnerable to abuse not only from her family but
from the entire community as well. Pecola is obsessed with the myth of
physical beauty and as a result is plunged into a world of ugliness. Nature
reflects the stunted growth of this child as the marigolds refuse to grow in her
town. Morrison contracts Pecola’s life to the normal pain of growing up for a
black girl like Claudia to show how unprepared Pecola will react for the
realities of adult-hood.
The Bluest Eye is told by narrator who is still a child. It is the world as seen
through the eyes of a black girl named Claudia who has a constant companion
and friend in her sister Frieda. Their family is an “ideal” nuclear family and
they live with their mother and father in a green house. Their house is cold and
dark and is inhabited by roaches and mice. She remembers the smells, touch,
taste and above all the love of her family and her house,
where adults battled to keep the children alive. Life is tied with pain from birth
onwards,

6
BLACK EXPERIENCES IN THE WHITE WORLD

Morrison is a pioneer in the depiction of the hurt inflicted by blacks on blacks;

for instance- her characters rarely achieve harmonious relationships but are
instead divided by future- lessness and the anguish of stifled existence.
Is thick with an atmosphere through which her characters move slowly, in
pain, ignorance, and hunger. And to a very large degree Morrison has the
compelling ability to make one believe that all of us are penetrating that dark
and hurt full terrain- the feel of a human life- simultaneously [Vivian Gomick
correspondent of Village Voice]
The Bluest Eye is about the victimization of one small black girl named
Pecola. Self -hate makes her vulnerable to abuse not only from her family but
from the entire community as well. Pecola is obsessed with the myth of
physical beauty and as a result is plunged into a world of ugliness. Nature
reflects the stunted growth of this child as the marigolds refuse to grow in her
town. Morrison contracts Pecola’s life to the normal pain of growing up for a
black girl like Claudia to show how unprepared Pecola will react for the
realities of adult-hood.
The Bluest Eye is told by narrator who is still a child. It is the world as seen
through the eyes of a black girl named Claudia who has a constant companion
and friend in her sister Frieda. Their family is an “ideal” nuclear family and
they live with their mother and father in a green house. Their house is cold and
dark and is inhabited by roaches and mice. She remembers the smells, touch,
taste and above all the love of her family and her house,
where adults battled to keep the children alive. Life is tied with pain from birth
onwards,
conveyed through a number of images. The tangible Shirley Temple mug has
blue eyes, so does the little Fisher girl. The Shirley Temple mug and the Mary
Lane Candies allow Pecola to carry the image through her very being. The

7
dolls presentedto black girls like Claudia are to the parents, their own
unfulfilled longings of childhood and Mrs. MacTeer cannot understand
Claudia’sdestroying them. Claudia tears them apart in an attempt to find a
source of their lo-veliness and what makes the world treasure them.
Ultimately, Pauline and her marginalized community succumb to the look of
the other.
In The Bluest Eye Pecola Breedlove is told from the day she is bom that she is
ugly. Pecola lives with her brother Sammy, her mother Pauline and her father
Cholly. Though their surname is Breedlove ironically all they breed is self-
hate and mutual destruction. They all believe themselves to be ugly and as a
result ugliness becomes all pervasive in their home and in their countenances.
It was as though some mysterious all-knowing Master had said, “You are ugly
people”
They had looked about themselves and saw
Nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in
Fact, support for it leaping at them from
Every billboard, every movie, every
Glance...and they took the ugliness in
Their hands, threw it as mantle with it... (Page No. 34)
Pauline accepts as her standard of beauty what she absorbed from Hollywood
images. Pecola considered herself to be so ugly that her only concept of self is
in terms of white girl named Shirley Temple. She consumes enormous
quantities of milk so that she can hold the
cups and gaze the image of Shirley Temple in them. She even eats Mary Jane
candies because she believes that by ingesting them she has somehow ingested
beauty. ‘To eat candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary
Jane’.Pecola is obsessed with blue eyes. She is able to suppress all her
emotions and senses, but she is not able to keep from seeing the ugliness that
surrounds her in her home. Her home is filled with violence and obscenity.

8
“She wants to disappear, to leave and be free of the physical sickness she feels
and the horrors she witnesses. So she prays for a miracle, “please God”, she
whispered in to the palm of her hand, “please make me disappear”. She
believed that if she were beautiful, people would treat her in a beautiful
manner. To Pecola beauty is being seen and acknowledged as a human being.
The class conflict is also an important issue which pushes Pecola towards
marginali- ty. The blacks as a class were poor and weremarginal groups in
America. The MacTeer’s are poor, but the Breedlovesare even poorer and
hence ostracized Patric Bryce asserts that: The Double Jeopardy of being
both‘poor’and‘ugly’excludes Pecola from sharing in whatever social and
economic tidbits that may be offered. Pecola and her parents cannot fully
comprehend the depth of ostracism and are powerless to change the situation.
(Page No. 39)
Morrison uses a primer story to depict this class conflict in the novel. The
novel begins with a passage from an elementary children’s school book in the
simplest language, the language of a prep school reader. The primer describes
the red and green house of two white children-Dick and Jane. It talks about
their father, mother, dog and cat and a friend who come to play with them. It
depicts the life of an ‘ideal’ bourgeoisie white family. The primer with the
white children was the way life was presented to black people. The second
version of the primer repeats the same passage exactly but without any
punctuation. In the third version of the primer, the wording remains unaltered
but the passage is run together in frenzy, like one long collection of vowels
and consonants, seeming to signify nothing.
The three version of primer are symbolic of three lifestyles-the first version is
the description of the alien white world that the poor blacks cannot hope to
attain, the second version represents the lifestyle of the MacTeer family which
tries to survive the poverty and racism in Ohio and the third distorted version
represents the Breedlovesfamily which is being exploited by the capitalist

9
ruling class. The Breedloves live a futile, makeshift existence, their storefront
house and even their furniture reflects their decadent condition. The primer
with its picture of a happy family is the frame acknowledging what Morrison
calls the ‘Outer Civilization.’ In The Bluest Eye there are three minor African
Families who try to imitate the whites for their social, economic and political
advancement. These people also exploit members of their own community in
order to get close to themonopoly ruling class; are pampered by teachers at
school.
One such ‘most white’ family is that of the Peals who are mulattos. Although
the reader is only introduced to one member of this family, Maureen, her
appearance, her behavioral pattern and remarks offer sufficient glimpses into
the social consciousness of the Peals. Maureen terrifies the girls and has fully
internalized white associations of darkness with ugliness. For people like
Maureen, black seems to be the color of the devil himself.
The concept of self of black people revolves round an idea of “freedom” that
Black women do not possess. There Sammy can run away from the family but
Pecola must stay and cope with the situation. Cholly had been abandoned at
four days old and orphaned at thirteen. His life, till he meets Pauline is a series
broken ties with the people and society. Cholly is man who has experienced
the world while Pauline on the other hand has been sheltered, experiencing
very little in her life. Cholly finds refuge in the bottle and Pauline in being a
servant. . He was abandoned by his mother, rejected by his father, orphaned by
Aunt Jimmy and unable to communicate with old Blue Jack. He goes in search
of his fantasy father who has never shown any interest in him at all. When he
finally finds him the rejection is complete and the old Cholly is destroyed. He
misses the love and affection of his Aunty Jimmy, the nourishment she gave
him, instead he must settle for lemonade and the attention of three prostitutes.
’’They give him back his manhood; which he takes aimlessly”. He is born in
flesh and is a freeman.

10
Pauline’s situation is difficult but not untypical of Black women who have to
do domestic work. She is able to do her job and handle the situation until the
white women asks her to make a choice between her and Cholly. In fact, it is
insulting for Pauline even to hear such a request. The white women feel
insulted when Pauline chooses to stay with her man. Pauline still has rainbows
and laughter in her mind, despite the tension of her marriage, her life is
incomprehensible to the white women. To her Cholly is beautiful and white
features are unappealing. Pauline becomes a reflection of the powerful images
that surround her ugly in contrast to white women and good in contrast to evil
black men. She uses fear and violence to shape and control her children. She
thus ensures that Sammy will grow up to be like is father and Pecola like her.
Sammy and Pecola are thus even more defenseless to fight the powerful
images that seek to enslave their minds.
Cholly is an abnormal character incomprehensible to the Black community,
who cannot understand why he puts his family “outdoors”
There is a difference in being put out and Being put outdoors. If you are put
out, you Go somewhere else if you are outdoors There is no place to go. The
distinction is Subtle but final (Page No. 18)

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When Cholly bums his family out of their apartment through his manners and
care lessness, they are left outdoors because they have no friends or support to
rely on. They must turn instead to the social welfare system to provide them
with shelter. The state of being “outdoors” highlights to the Black, their
powerlessness in the social system. Cholly and breed loves are always been
“outdoors”.
Whereas Cholly had many experiences and is free, Pauline is sheltered and
had led an isolated life, her life is ordered and she is happy to stay at home
keeping the house while her mother works. Pauline expects that she will be
found by a perfect stranger, sexually gratified, loved and led by the hand to the
Promised Land. When a stranger does appear in the form of Cholly, she lets
him take her hand and lead out of Kentucky away from her family, to Ohio,
the Promised Land.
When Cholly and Pauline arrive in Ohio, they find life quite suffocating.
Material things -make-up, hairstyle, clothes etc. are her key to enter into the
community. “The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and
make-up. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way”.
So she tries to get a job, but instead of answers she only finds new problems.
She and Cholly start arguing because he does not like the way she spends her
money. Her life becomes ritualistic. She goes to work every morning and
comes home to argue with Cholly every night.
Not only is Morrison critical of Black women who imbue themselves with
white propaganda and poison the community with it, she is also critical of
those Black men who do not fulfill their roles as men but instead prey upon
the community. One of these men is Henry Washington, a border in the home
of Claudia and Frieda.. Claudia’s mother describes him positively in a
conversation with one of her friends: “He is just sensible. A steady worker
with quiet ways.. ..’’.These women remark that he is not married blaming it on
the lack of “desirable” Black women in the community. Ironically, the some

12
standards of respectability are applied to Pauline as to Henry-the ability to
work hard and steadily for the whiter whole is actuality both are brutalizing
the children of the community. Mr. Washington is a “sensible quiet man” who
readers pornographic magazines patronizes prostitutes and tries to molest
Frieda.
The black characters in the novel who have internalized white-middle-class
values are obsessed with cleanliness. Geraldine and Mrs. Breedlove are
excessively concerned with housecleaning- though Mrs. Breedlove cleans only
the house of her white employers, as if the Breedlove apartment is beyond her
help. This fixation on cleanliness extends into the women’s moral and
emotional quests for purity, but the obsession with domestic and moral sanita-
tion leads them to cruel coldness. In contrast, one mark of Claudia’s strength
of character is her pleasure in her own dirt, a pleasure that represents self-
confidence and a correct under-standing of the nature of happiness.
Throughout the novel, Pecola is used as a dumping ground by most of the
other characters. She is not considered a witch; rather she is the scrape goat,
the sacrificial victim. Cholly and the boys in the schoolyard, with their
battered egos and tortured psyches can safely vent their rage and frustration on
her because she has not defense system and thus cannot fight back. She is a
completely defenseless creature and when she can no longer stand ugliness
and pain which her eyes reveal to her; there is no recourse for her but to
withdraw into her sanctuary of blue eyes and madness, where she can no
longer be hurt. She flutters around aimlessly, looking like a bird that is trying
to fly away into the blue sky trying in vain to be free of this earthbut cannot
because it is crippled. She cannot fly away to the heavens. Instead she remains
earth bound scratching the ground with sightless eyes. The Black community
is conscious of the guilt they feel for not helping Pecola,, but their contempt
for her is intensified. In their eyes, she represents all the possible horrors of
being Black and female in America. She is allowed to stay in the community,

13
but she is relegated to a spot amongst the insane, which are tolerant but
ignorant as they are harmless.

The character of Sam Breedlove, Pecola’s brother is also a brilliant

drawing. The true picture of American teenage and their problems can be
traced in Sam Breedlove. Like the other boys of this age, he cannot bear
happiness, smartness and is symbol of those who suffer inferiority feeling.
Like his sister he is also affected by disharmony in their home and deals with
his anger by running away from home. The idea of happy families which are
portrayed through Dick and Jane stories make Pecola to believe happiness is
something which stands only with white and not with Black. Not only Pecola,
but also her dysfunctional parents had a life full of hearted and hardship. Her
mother Pauline feels happy and alive only when she is working for a rich
white family. When the family affectionately calls her “Polly” she feels proud
and happy. These affections also make her long for the white background.

Not only have the female characters of the novel but also Pecola’s father
who physically abuses her is a victim of racial discrimination. The upper class
people having a feeling of discussed for Black people considered them as
mere worms. They even had to suffer untold sexual harassments. Pecola’s
father is presented as a drunkard who left family when he was young in search
of his unknown father but ended in vain. Equally troubling to Cholly as a
young man was his loss of “virginity” when he was forced by friends to make
sex in their presence. This instance mentally destroyed Cholly and this self-
humiliating experience made him rape his own blood. It is the society which
they belong made them “mindless shits having mere black flesh”.

But Pecola at the end of the novel presence a strange imagination though her
contempt for her is intensified. In their eyes, she represents all the possible
horrors of being Black and female in America. She is allowed to stay in the

14
community, but she is relegated to a spot amongst the insane, which are
tolerant but ignorant as they are harmless.
The character of Sam Breedlove, Pecola’s brother is also a brilliant drawing.
The true picture of American teenage and their problems can be traced in Sam
Breedlove. Like the other boys of this age, he cannot bear happiness,
smartness and is symbol of those who suffer inferiority feeling. Like his sister
he is also affected by disharmony in their home and deals with his anger by
running away from home. The idea of happy families which are portrayed
through Dick and Jane stories make Pecola to believe happiness is something
which stands only with white and not with Black. Not only Pecola, but also
her dysfunctional parents had a life full of hearted and hardship. Her mother
Pauline feels happy and alive only when she is working for a rich white
family. When the family affectionately calls her “Polly” she feels proud and
happy. These affections also make her long for the white background.
Not only have the female characters of the novel but also Pecola’s father who
physically abuses her is a victim of racial discrimination. The upper class
people having a feeling of discussed for Black people considered them as
mere worms. They even had to suffer untold sexual harassments. Pecola’s
father is presented as a drunkard who left family when he was young in search
of his unknown father but ended in vain. Equally troubling to Cholly as a
young man was his loss of “virginity” when he was forced by friends to make
sex in their presence. This instance mentally destroyed Cholly and this self-
humiliating experience made him rape his own blood. It is the society which
they belong made them “mindless shits having mere black flesh”.
But Pecola at the end of the novel presence a strange imagination though her
dialogues she indicates a strangely positive feeling about her rape by her
father, as though her wish has been granted. This may make the readers feel
strange and disgusted. She states that her father expressed his love for the
daughter by raping her. Here the love stands ironically for the lustful pleasure

15
which her father forces to his daughter. But through Peco- la’sdialogue, the
narrator showed her boldness in stating the inner conflicts and frustrations in
black bodied women.
One of the great virtues of the book is its capacity to empathize and to allow
its readers to empathize with the Afro-American experiences. The Bluest Eye
represents Afro-American people and focuses most specifically on the
histories and realities of black people especially black women. At one point
Morrison writes as a black person among other black people speaking to a
white audience, at another point as a woman among the women speaking to
man. The black verses white and female verses male is a feature of the novel.
Morrison through her work states that it is clear that black is suppressed and
becoming black as women is facing double jeopardy in a white society. The
double jeopardy leads the focal character to think that her color is her curse.
It is important to include some mention of magic in the life of the Black
people, for this is a force that can be used for good or evil. Magic is seeking of
power by the powerless. Henry Washington uses magic to entertain Claudia
and Frieda. Hoping to gain their friendship, and their parents trust, Claudia
and Frieda resort to it in their effort to help Pecola and her unborn child.Pecola
then finds solace in miracles and magic. It was interesting that black people at
one time seemed not to respond to evil in the ways other people did, but that
they thought evil had a natural place in the universe; they did not wish to
eradicate it. They just wished to protect themselves from it, maybe even to
manipulate it, but they never wanted to kill it. They thought evil was just
another aspect of life.. .it’s because they are not terrified by evil, by
difference. Evil is not an alien force; it’s just a different force.
Morrison shifts the boundaries between what we ordinarily regard as good and
what as evil, so that judgments become difficult. This reflects the complexity
of making moral judgment in life. Her villains are not all evil, nor are her good
people saints.

16
The power of magic is to be seen in the context of the adult conversation in
which Pecola is blamed for her rape and the unborn child is wished dead.
Claudia and Frieda feel an instinctive compassion and love for Pecola and
child. Thus needing an additional power to affect this change, they resort to
magic. Claudia and Frieda’s magic is well intentioned, a healing force, a
magic allied with life and Nature. Thus they plant seeds and sing magical
words over them to help them grow, believing that just as they would sprout
and grow, so too would Pecola’s baby.
This ritual is in stark contrast to the one which Pecola perform, giving an old
dog some poi soled meat in the belief that blue eyes will the bestowed upon
her. The situation of the Breedlove family is such an abomination to the
community and to Nature itself that inevitably the infant dies and Pecola goes
insane. No marigold blossom in the town that year. Claudia and Frieda’s seeds
never grow; because the soil is sterile, contaminated and mere magic cannot
render it fertile. If the flower bloomed, it would be a sign that everything was
going to be all right with Pecola and her baby. As it toned out, these flowers
did not blossom that fall.
Claudia in the closing chapter of the novel observes:
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent
people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly,
but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The
lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized,
frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye (Page No. 159-160)

It describes love as a potentially damaging force, following the suggestion that

Cholly was the only person who loved Pecola “enough to touch her”. If love
and rape cannot be dis-tinguished, then we have entered a world in which love
itself is ambiguous. Against the usual idea that love is inherently healing and
redemptive, Claudia suggests that love is only as good as the lover. This is

17
why the broken, wrapped human beings in this novel fail to love one another
well. In fact, Claudia suggests, love may even be damaging, because it locks
the loved one in a potentially destructive gaze. Romantic love creates a
damaging demand for beauty the kind of beauty that black girls, by definition,
may never be able to possess because of the racist standards of their society.
But the pessimism of this passage is offset by the inherent hopefulness of the
idea of love. If we can understand Cholly’s behavior as driven by love as well
as anger (and his rape of Pecola is in fact described in these terms), then there
is still some good in him, however deformed. We are left to hope for a kind of
love that is genuine gift for the beloved.

18
 THE BLUEST EYE AND THE BLACK FEMALE PSYCHE

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the Breedlove’s store front apartment is
graced overhead by the home of three magnificent whores, each a tribute to
Morrison’s confidence in
the efficacy of the obvious.The novel’s unhappy convergence of history, naming
and bod- ies-delineated so subtly and variouslyis signified most simply and most
crudely by these bodies and their names: Poland, China and The Maginot Line.
With these characters, Mor-
rison literalizes the novel’s overall conflation of black female bodies as the sites of
fascist invasions of one kind or another, as the terrain on which is mapped the
encroachment and colonization of African-American experiences, particularly
those of its women, by a seem-
ingly hegemonic white culture. The Bluest Eye as a whole documents this
invasion-and its concomitant erasure of specific local bodies, histories, and
cultural production-in terms of sexuality as it intersects with commodity culture.
Furthermore, this mass culture and, more generally, the commodity capitalism that
gave rise to it, is in large part responsible-
through its capacity to efface history-for the “disinterestedness” that Morrison
contemns throughout the novel. Beyond exempt-ing this, Morrison’s project is to
rewrite the specific bodies and histories of the Black American whose positive
images and stories have been eradicated by commodity culture. She does this
formally by shifting the novel’s perspec- five and point of view, a narrative tactic
that enables her, in the process, to represent black female subjectivity as a layered,
shifting and complex reality.
The novel is divided into four seasons, but it 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 of harvesting.

19
20
Morrison uses natural cycles to underline the unnaturalness and misery of her
characters’ experiences. To some degree, she also questions the benevolence
of nature, as when Claudia wonders whether “the earth itself might have been
unyielding” to someone like Pecola
Pecola’s desire for blue eyes, while highly unrealistic, is based on one correct
insight into her world: she believes that the cruelty she witnesses and
experiences is connected to how she is seen. If she had beautiful blue eyes,
Pecola imagines, people would not want to do ugly things in front of her or to
her. The accuracy of this insight is affirmed by her experience of being teased
by the boys - when Maureen comes to her rescue; it seems that they no longer
want to behave badly under Maureen’s attractive gaze. In a more basic sense,
Pecola and her family are mistreated in part because they happen to have black
skin. By wishing for blue eyes rather than lighter skin, Pecola indicates that
she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen
differently. She can only receive this wish, in effect, by blinding herself.
Pecola is then able to see herself as beautiful, but only at the cost of her ability
to see accurately both herself and the world around her. The connection
between how one seen and what one sees has a uniquely tragic outcome for
her.
The disallowance of the specific cultures and histories of African-Americans
and black women especially is figured in The Bluest Eye primarily as a
consequence of or sideline to the more general annihilation of popular forms
and images by an ever more all pervasive and insidious mass culture industry.
This industry increasingly disallows the representation of any image not
premised on consumption or the production of normative values conductive to
it. These values are often rigidly tied to gender and are rise-specific to the
extent that racial and ethnic differences are not allowed to be represented. One
lesson from history, as Susan Willis reiterates, is that “in mass culture many of
the social contractions of capitalism appear to us as if those very

21
contradictions had been resolved”. Among these contradictions we might
include those antagonisms continuing in spite of capitalism’s benevolent
influence, along the axes of economic privilege and racial difference.
According to Wills, it is because “all the models (in mass cultural
representation) are white”-either in fact or by virtue of their status as
“replicates....devoid of cultural in- tegrity”-that the differences in race or
ethnicity (and class, we might add) and the continued problems for which
these differences are a convenient excuse appear is erased and to be erased or
made equal “at the level of consumption “. In other words, economic, racial
and ethnic difference is erased and replaced by a purportedly equal ability to
consume, even though what is consume are more or less competing versions
of the same white image.
Finally, though, since The Bluest Eye focuses most specifically on the histories
and bodies of black women, the novel’s alternating perspective reproduces
formally their complicated subjectivity in particular. As she shifts from young
girl to older women to black man to omniscient narrator, Morrison seems to
move her examination of Pecola’s life back and forth from the axis of race to
that of gender. This process allows her in turn to move through the story as
both insider and outsider in what Mae Henderson calls a “consistorial dialogue
” involving “the hegemonic dominant and subdominant or [after Rachel Belau
Du Plisses] ambi-guously (none) hegemonic discourses “. At one point
Morrison writes as a black person among other black people speaking to a
white audience, at others as a women speaking to men.
The movement between these positions allows Morrison to “see the other, but
also to seewhat the other cannot see, and to use this insight to enrich both our
own and the others understanding”. Of course these categories can be
separated only artificially since, as Valerie Smithnotes“the meaning of
blackness in this country shapes profoundly the experience of gender, just as
the condition of womanhood effect ineluctably the experience of gender, just

22
as the condition of womanhood effect ineluctably the experience of race”. By
doing so she, however, Toni Morrison enables the reader to witness
structurally the complexity of black female subjectivity as she writes it back in
to a culture whose social and economic mechanisms would otherwise try to
write it out.
The Bluest Eye can be said as a manifesto in which the problem of African
American life experiences is pictured in a true manner. Being an African
American writer, Morrison could clearly narrate the experience of African
people who live in the United States. The struggle of the Africanin the United
States has been a central issue in every juncture of our history. Black people
have to suffer racial discrimination which made them believe that they are
more puppets subjected to such discrimination. Morrison tried hard to express
the emotions and likes of African people among white society. Even in this
twenty first century things have not changed and black people suffer similar
kind of experiences even under a Black American President.
Toni Morrison has said that she wrote the novel out of her childhood
experiences and it is clear that even now the Black in the present century is not
safe and well treated in America. This novel tells the story of United States
just after the fall of 1941. The picture of Great depression is clearly seen in the
novel and the novel itself is a heart breaking experience. The book in one level
tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a Black American girl and on a deeper
level it revealsthe struggles, quest for identify and existentialism of Black
people especially Black women.Being a feminist writer her writing showed
clarity in revealing the inner picture of the struggle and conflict that people of
Black skin especially Black women has to suffer from inside and outside her
family in a white society. The disallowance of specific cultures and histories
of African American and Black women especially is figured in The Bluest Eye
primarily as a theme. The values and cultures are often rigidly tied up with

23
gender and race and that racial and ethnic differences are not allowed to be
represented throughout the life of the Black people.

24
CONCLUSION
Toni Morrison pasteurizes the clear status of black people in The Bluest Eye.
Popular culture, shaped by film, theatre, advertisement, press and literature is
heavily engaged in race talk. Whatever is the lived experience of the Black
immigrants in Africa- pleasant or bruising the experience renders blacks as
non- citizens or discredited outlaws. Whatever is the ethnicity or nationality of
the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American. This sort of
struggling immigrant identity is manifested in this novel.
Toni Morrison, who is essentially an African American writer of lost souls,
thereby presents the darker side of American life. She depicts the American
space as a place where the old values of the present are destructive. In
presenting the degeneration and collapse of a family, Morrison has penetrated
deeply into the psychological and social deviations that con-tribute to its decay
that black family is broken, the society is disrupted and the humans are thrown
into the burning space of horror signifying nothing. Memory is something that
cannot be escaped. Memories of the past itself is terrifying and frustrating.
Each member of the Breed love family is haunted by the memories of their
abandoned and dark past. It is the ghost of this lost past that makes the African
Americans real aliens in a white society. There-fore the crux of the problem is
both psychological and sociological. It is the social space that trapped Pecola
and her family to a hard and joyless life. They suffer from alienation,
frustration and misery. This misery and frustration is common to all black
immigrants trying to adjust in a white dominated world. Their misery is bom
out of either their heredity or of the ty-ranny of the social system. The Breed
love family represents the world of disillusionment and gloom experienced by
the immigrants as a whole. Things are still the same even in this era of
globalization and advancement. Even after the efforts are endeavors of certain
individuals and associations to promote mutual understanding between the two

25
races, the present relationship between the Blacks and the Whites in America
is not satisfactory.
Morrison can be said to be a writer “who in her novels characterized by
visionary force and poetic importance gives to an essential aspect of American
reality”. Although her novels typically concentrate on Black women, Morrison
doesn’t identify her work as feminist. The major concern of almost all her
works are the conflicts of Afro-American conflicts. The American novel tells
the story of a group of American men, women and children who are
descendants of slaves and live in a society where, even though many people
deny it, the color of the skin determines who they are and what privileges they
have and what privileges they are entitled to.
The tragedy of Pecola in The Bluest Eye is the absence of blonde hair, blue
eyes and white skin and was the envy of most young African American girls
in the 1940s. Pecola is the victim of racial self- loathing and also raped by her
father which results in pregnancy. Described as submissive, ugly and ignorant
she is labeled as outcast amongst the Black community. The story of the
young girl growing up in the 1940-s clearly illustrates the fact that the
American dream was not available to everyone. The importance of eye in The
Bluest Eye is everything. The word (eye) over and over appears with rich
objectivities that describe color, movement and nuance of expressions to
signify a character, mood and psychological state.
Morrison found Black women the corner-stone of the community. They are an
“umbrella figure, culture bearer, in community with not just her children but
all children”. In this novel this role of women is given to Pauline who feels
that she has responsibilities as wife, mother and provider. The demands of her
life force her to put dreams aside. She is not the cross but the martyr, who
lives only to die for holy cause. The characters thus so far discussed are part of
a Black community which Morrison paints as the background. The community
has its own standards of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness and its own

26
methods of healing wounds. Claudia and Frieda’s family life reflects many of
the norms of the larger community. While the Breed loves reflect all that can
go wrong. Cholly is an abnormal character, incomprehensible to the Black
community.
Thus the Breed love family presented in the novel is a representative of the
black rising community in the novel. Pecola is thus a representative of the
younger black population who is obsessed with the white ideals of beauty as
presented to them by the popular icons and traditions of white culture. Cholly,
the father is a part of that group of blacks who struggle to exist in the society
and finally withdraws from the society. Pauline stands for the group of blacks
that tries too hard to conform to the white culture. This fact brings forth the
naked truth that the American freedom, excluded the Amerindians and the
African Americans of American identity and the African identity. They are
denied space for even peripheral existence. Thus they are unseen and invisible
in the content of Americans and the stuff with which American dream is
made.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES

 Vaidyanathan,G. Toni MorrisonThe Bluest Eye ,Agra: Lakshmi

NarainAgarwal Educational Publishers, 2000. Print.
 Bryce, Patrice. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The search for self and
place within the Community. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Print.
 Karen, Carmean. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. New York:
Whitson Publishing Company, 1993. Print.
 Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. London: PEN, 1970. Print.
 Smith, Valrie. African-American Writers. New York: Scribner, 1991.
Print.
 ❖ Sumana, K. The Novels of Toni Morrison: A Study in Race,
Gender Class. New Delhi: Prestige, 1998. Print.


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  http://www.sparlcnotes.com/lit/bluesteve/themes
 http://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-bluest-eve/themes
 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminarv/issue4
 http://www.shmoop.com/bluest-eve/pecola-breedlove

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