Introduction
Despite the fact that American writer Toni Morrison has long received international recognition and even a Nobel Prize in 1993, some of her work has until recently remained unknown to our readers. Her debut novel The Bluest Eyes was published half a century ago in 1970. Meanwhile, it is not at all a juvenile attempt at writing and not a timid attempt to find her style. It is a very concrete and harsh statement, in fact, an indictment.
Although black slaves were freed by Lincoln in the 1860s, the 1960s in the United States (when the novel was written) and the prewar 1920s and 1930s (which the novel recounts) were not a time of equality between whites and blacks at all. It was a time of segregation, confrontation, and even outright hatred. I suppose it would have been easy to write a book about how black people hated white people and blamed them for all their problems. But that’s not what Toni Morrison, In the Bluest Eyes, writes about. She writes that black people’s plight is a consequence of their nurtured self-disdain. The central theme of the novel is the self-loathing that the main characters experience.
Discussion
The plot for the debut novel the writer has chosen a rather harsh one. You might even think that it is taken from some criminal chronicle. At the center of the story are several black and colored families, and the story is told on behalf of a girl Claudia, who goes to school with another heroine – black Picola Breedlove. The narrator Claudia and her sister Frieda are innocent children. They like to walk outside and eat ice cream, and little by little they begin to think about how babies appear, although they have no idea about gender relations.
When a beautifully dressed girl whose skin color is almost white shows up at school, they envy her, though they are afraid to admit it to themselves (Li 662). However, the plot twists not around Claudia and her sister, but around Picola Breedlove, who everywhere they turn out to be a victim. One day a boy invites her to his house to show her something interesting. Picola believed her and went to his house. But the boy didn’t want to be friends with her at all, he just wanted to play a prank and threw a cat in her face.
The boy’s mother, who came home, was horrified at the sight of the slovenly girl and chased her away with disdain. This, however, is nothing compared to what her own father did to her. The father, who saw his daughter in the kitchen and felt pity for the first time for her, simultaneously felt that pity transform into sexual desire. Not too struggling with his urges in life, he raped Picola, which led to pregnancy (Morrison 45). Thus, The Bluest Eyes is a tale of a broken destiny from childhood, though Toni Morrison reports almost nothing about the girl’s later life.
Perhaps this is the reason for the social gloom in which they live. Pauline Breedlove, the girl’s mother, was already in her teens waiting for a prince, and she waited. He became a simple boy, Cholly, who grew up as an orphan. His mother had mental problems and took him to a garbage dump a few days after her son was born (Survin 553). Cholly’s father ran away altogether when he learned of his girlfriend’s pregnancy. Cholly was raised by his grandmother, who saved him from death (Eaton et al. 28). When the boy grew up, his grandmother died. Some relatives were supposed to take him in, but the teenager preferred to run away and go wherever he could. At first, he tried to find his father, but to no avail. Maybe the man he met at a dice game was his father, but it is not certain that such an unprincipled man would accept him into his family, which he, in fact, did not have. Therefore, Cholly was left to himself. When he met Pauline, he managed to love and charm her. At first, the couple lived in harmony, but over time Cholly began to drink more and pay less attention to his wife. Later, he even makes an attempt to burn down the house.
At the same time, the couple’s relationship expresses a vengeful dependence on each other. Pauline revels in suffering, believing that this is how she saves her husband for God, and Cholly likes to pour out his irritation to his wife, also in need of a listener. By and large, however, at least Paulina is not a criminal, while Cholly will turn out to be as antisocial as his father, unable to take responsibility for his own children (Eaton et al. 15). And the reason for this is not at all the miserable financial situation. Money was in short supply, but both parents worked, and the family did not go hungry. The reason is that both Cholly and his father did not care about themselves.
The blue eyes in the book act as a symbol of a different, white life: Picola does not want to be black, because black life is ugly, both literally and figuratively, as it seems to the heroine. Picola’s story is tragic: having been abused more than once, living in dislike (including dislike of herself), she loses her mind. Thinking that her eyes have become blue, acquiring in her imagination the coveted whiteness, she loses herself, herself, and her mind.
There is a portrayal of racial differences in the novel. Though the differences are small, it is enough to provoke the vivid emotions aroused by racial and class differences. On one side of the racial opposition is arrogance and smugness, and on the other side is resentment and anger. The class situation arises according to racial differences, as is very often the case in racially diverse societies. Both “whites” and “blacks” are represented among the characters in the novel (Suvin 28). This work depicts how self-esteem is formed in situations that can rob people of their sense of self-worth for reasons that are beyond their control. But people who find themselves in humiliating situations often develop too much self-esteem to compensate for being born into a subordinate situation and poverty.
The white population of America appears only sporadically in the novel, and the writer does not demonize them at all. She addresses her question specifically to black people: why do you despise yourselves and dream of conforming to white people’s standards of beauty? When Pauline’s daughter is born, she contemptuously calls her hair Negro hair” (Morrison 25). The children of her masters, for whom she is a housekeeper, she loves and respects far more than her own.
As for Picola’s father, when he looks at his daughter, he frankly wants to wring her neck. And Picola herself, unloved and tortured, dreams precisely of the beauty of white people, symbolized by her blue eyes. For these blue eyes, she even goes to the local priest or soothsayer, who provides services similar to those sought by fortune-tellers and healers. This man, a somewhat deranged pedophile, and misanthrope, actually promises to help Picola. The chapter at the end of the book, when Picola supposedly acquires blue eyes and talks about it with either a friend or God, is an example of mystical incrustation into a realistic text. All of this is the result of Picola’s frantic desire to become like a white person (Eaton et al. 68). She sincerely believes that appearance affects life, and if she had had blue eyes, things would have worked out much better (Waters). And Picola is not alone, her mother also received her “education” in the cinema, which taught her the absolute and proper beauty that brings happiness. That said, it’s not just the Breedlove family, all black people are poisoned by these blond and blue-eyed standards.
But that is exactly what Toni Morrison does not understand. In her opinion, the main mistake black people make in America is that they identify “white” beauty with virtue. Black children are fascinated by the pretty Shirley Temple, whom they go to the movies to see, and they deny the possibility that they themselves might be beautiful. This painful oblivion prevents them from accepting themselves for who they are (Nittle 25). The position of black people is already unenviable, Toni Morrison even launches into a bit of metaphysical speculation, saying that black people are people who “find themselves on the street” (Survin 553). This is why they dream so much of owning something house, a garden, or things (Eaton et al. 34). What is quite surprising here is that the writer fundamentally separates black people and people of color, that is, those whose skin color is not entirely black.
Racial distinctions are made based on skin tone, eye shade, and hair texture, but when these markers fail to identify race, characters choose socioeconomic, educational, religious, regional, and hereditary differences. The theme of race and the destructive power of racial self-loathing reaches its climax during the rape of Picola. This moment offers a literal and metaphorical apex of racial self-hatred. After the rape, Picola must endure the metaphorical internalization of Cholly’s racial hatred of herself through the trauma she endures, and literally, as she carries her father’s child.
The author tries to lead the reader to believe that the right to hate blacks is shared by coloreds as much as if they themselves were descendants of Europeans. The novel shows how people of color live – neat, well-groomed, proper, and blacks – scandalous, squabbling, and unkempt (Eaton et al. 28). Even the innocent sisters Claudia and Frida have one of their favorite pastimes: rummaging through garbage cans. They are two different planets, two different worlds. Colored people hate black children just as much as white people, raised on racial theories, hate them. Toni Morrison wrote very evocatively about this hatred of whites: there was a hopeless vacuum in their eyes at the sight of blacks, at the leaden bottom of which dwelt disgust.
Toni Morrison’s voice is a voice of self-awareness, saying that one should not despise but love oneself, because it makes no sense to measure oneself against the virtues of others, especially since these virtues are conditional and fashion-dependent. The girl Claudia, who is the narrator in the novel, has virtues of her own; for example, at Christmas, she does not need presents at all, but the intangible feelings of warmth and celebration. Isn’t that wonderful? And about the Breedlove family, you can read the following: “Sometimes you look at this family and wonder why they are all so ugly. That’s when you realize that it’s because they are convinced of their own ugliness” (Morrison 23). At the very beginning, the writer compares Picola’s story and the seeds that died in the ground. She says that she does not know why this is the case. Rather, her book answers the question of how these contradictions arise.
Conclusion
Thus, the story of Picola Breedlove is precisely the story of the ways in which black people despise themselves. Why this is so remains a mystery; anyway, this leads me to a not-so-optimistic outcome that, as the narrator Claudia, says that they were never strong and free. And yet, the only hope of remedying this rests with the same children like Claudia and Frieda, who simply say, “We were really quite comfortable in our black skin; we were happy with what our senses reported; we loved to get dirty sometimes; we were proud of our scars and could never understand why it was so bad.
Works Cited
Eaton, Alice Knox, et al. New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: Race, Culture, and History. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2020.
Li, Stephanie. “Reflections on Fifty Years of the Bluest Eye.” College Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, 2020, pp. 682–686.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. London Vintage, 2019.
Nittle, Nadra. Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature. Fortress Press, 2021.
Suvin, Sujana. “Racial Conflicts in Tony Morrison’s the Bluest Eye: A Literary Analysis.” Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 8, no. 11, 30 Nov. 2020, pp. 553–559.
Waters, Lauren. “Black Girlhood in the Bluest Eye.” Inquiry Queen’s Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings, vol. 16.