Introduction
In the novel, The Bluest Eye Morrison depicts life and grievances of black women and their self-identity. Morrison’s emphasis on form manifests itself through a conscious framing of the narrative that demands specific interpretations by the reader but also suggests closings and resolutions.
Thesis
Many black women characters feel they do not meet standards of beauty because of false social values and ideals imposed by “white” community.
Main text
Morrison portrays that black women characters are considered as common women and never portrayed as beautiful. They represent a homogeneous Black culture from which the author calls materials to construct her fictional worlds. She focuses primarily on the “village” or the “tribe.” Moreover, every minor detail is considered in terms of its effect before it is incorporated in her works. The Morrison goal, then, is the construction of well-wrought ideals of black women that portrays a mythical Afro-American community.
The ideals of beauty are based on contrasted characters of a white and black woman. The Bluest Eye develops its dominant themes through the interplay of two narratives: Claudia MacTeer’s rite of passage and the disintegration of Pecola’s life. The novel suggests closure through its exploration of the tragedy of Pecola, mediated within the frame of the Dick-and-Jane story, and its evocation of the marigold symbol to signify Claudia’s passage from ignorance to knowledge. Morrison portrays Claudia” “If I pinched them, their eyes—unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll’s eyes—would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain” (34). Cultural domination is seen as a struggle between two competing discourses: a codification of reality whose legitimacy is asserted (the Dick-and-Jane myth), and an alternative (oppositional) representation that challenges and threatens to displace the first (the “real” story of the Breedloves).
The novel illustrates concept of the relationship between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. The Bluest Eye depicts the struggle between two warring factions. The Dick-and-Jane frame has as its referent not only the primer but the cultural values of the dominant society. It is read and deconstructed by the lived experiences of the Breedloves. Juxtapositions of the two narratives not only reinforce the dominant theme of the novel but illuminate the novel’s textual processes. Contrasts between the Dick-and-June world and the “real” world of the Breedloves are structured around several sets of binary oppositions: White/Black, affluence/poverty, desirability/undesirability, order/chaos, valued/ devalued. After Cholly’s rape of Pecola, the disintegration of the Breedlove family, and Pecola’s descent into madness, Claudia reflects on her own narrative and that of Pecola by locating them within the framework. The “truth” of the authoritative discourse is challenged by the internally persuasive discourse. The comfortable home of the Dick-and-Jane myth is contrasted with the squalid living conditions of the Breedloves; the Dick-and-Jane family has its counterpart in the misery and violence that seem normal among the Breedlove clan; the Dick-and-Jane myth celebrates familial love, while rape and incest are rife in the Breedlove household.
The ideal of beauty portrayed by Morrison is a blue-eyed blonde, slim and tender, young and pleasant. This dominant ideal, however, is subverted by embedded narratives that contribute to the overall effect of the book and simultaneously indicate a departure from the novel’s primary focus. Morrison portrays an American idea through the description of a doll:
I had only one desire: to dismember [the doll]. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful, and if you are in this day ‘worthy’ you may have it”…. I could not love it.” (3),
Although they seem to fill in the ideal that constitutes Afro-American culture, they also disrupt the textual dominant emphasis by introducing the problem of feminine desire. This is particularly true in two narratives that inform the dimensions of the novel while advancing peripheral materials. These women have rejected the norms of the community, although they are inscribed in the text as one aspect of “the real” community. They generate issues that are almost totally unrelated to the novel’s dominant focus. What is stressed is their absolute economic and sexual autonomy, the significance of which becomes evident when we examine another group of women.
Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, “Do this.” White children said, “Give me that.” Then they were old. Their bodies honed, their odors sour. Squatting in a cane field, stooping in a cotton field, kneeling by a riverbank they had, they had carried a world on their heads…. [Their] lives were synthesized in their eyes — a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy” (109).
These two narratives are readily subsumed by the ideological thrust of the novel through their focus on the feminine, but they create points of rupture in the text. As elements of “real life,” they contribute to the total representation of Black culture, but as specific articulations of women’s lives. The prostitutes’ beauty ideals embody women’s independence and empowerment, while Aunt Jenny’s peers, largely a reproduction of Hurston’s characterization of Black women as “mule of de world,” eloquently address the complexities of Black women’s existence. Unlike the women in Hurston’s novel, however, these women are ultimately triumphant.
At times in the novel, an embedded narrative apparently developed to support the dominant theme is related to the feminine issue and ideals. For example, the schoolteacher Geraldine can be seen simply as a middle-class Black woman who has divorced herself from “real” Afro-American culture. My view, however, is that she is far more complex. What strikes one first is her background: “They [women like Geraldine] come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian.” These are southern or borderline provincial towns, not quite rural yet not quite urban, in which certain constraints are imposed on social conduct, particularly that of women. “Respectability,” an instrument of repression, dictates standards of morality and ethics. Moreover, Geraldine is a product of a Black land-grant college — in the novel’s historical period Blacks could not have attended white institutions of higher learning in the South — that primarily serves Black working-class families and allows them entry into the lower middle class, largely as teachers, social workers, and similar professionals.
These traits are encoded in our society as within the domain of the feminine, and represent what is being repressed. While the control of passions is the dominant issue, stability and security are corollary concerns. These issues emerge in contrasting portraits of Geraldine’s family life and her perception of Pecola’s life. The narrator presents Geraldine’s life as a symbol of stability.
[Women such as she never seem to have boyfriends, but they always marry. Certain men watch them, without seeming to, and know that if such a girl is in his house, he will sleep on sheets boiled white, hung out to dry on juniper bushes, and pressed with a heavy iron (68).
At one level, what is presented is free indirect discourse in which the text provides a dual voice; the narrator’s and character’s perspectives are merged so that there is an interweaving of the two positions. The contrast is reinforced by the intervention and mediation of the narrator, as in the following commentary on the extent of the Breedlove’s oppression. The novel focuses on this characterization and the ideology implied in it. Each episode enlarges on the Breedlove tragedy; minor characters (Geraldine and Maureen Peal) are introduced to elaborate on this theme. The Dick-and-Jane framework restates it, and the fusion of the first-person narration of Claudia MacTeer with the author’s narrative intervention keeps the issue of cultural domination in the foreground.
Summary
In sum, Morrison portrays that false social ideals put manacles on the society and deprived black women of a chance to feel equal to white women and fit the ideal of an American beauty. Rebellion against socially dictates roles and emphasizes the hostility that the community encourages between white and black girls. This idea of beauty marks the emergence of a consciousness grounded in feminine experiences. The questioning and challenging of beauty ideals, the insertion of the problem of female bonding in the text, and, most significantly is the construction of a rebellious protagonist. Beauty is nothing more than ideological production imposed on society and deprived black women a chance to ‘compete’ with white females. One major effect of this is that the complexities of women’s issues, although suggested in the text, are often passed over.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970.