Walls 6
Novel Resource Guide
The Bluest Eye
Novel Resource Guide
The Bluest Eye
A novel by Toni Morrison
Synopsis:
This is the story of the young girl Pecola Breedlove as narrated by the nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer. Claudia and her ten-year-old sister Frieda, along with their parents, live in Lorain, Ohio. The story is set at the end of the Great Depression, and ostensibly the girls’ parents are too busy earning a living to spoil their daughters with attention. But in Claudia’s recollections we learn that they have a stable and loving home [“So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die”]*. The MacTeers take in a boarder, Henry Washington, and also Pecola. The events of Pecola’s life, her perception of herself, and the views of Pecola by others in her town, are central to the novel’s themes. Pecola’s needing a place to live result from her father (Cholly Breedlove) attempting to burn down his family’s house [“Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. . . . There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors”]. Pecola’s love of Shirley Temple is aggravating to Claudia; Pecola believes that whiteness – and more particularly blue eyes – is beauty and that she is ugly.
Pecola returns to her family (Cholly, the mother (the children can only call her “Mrs. Breedlove”), and a brother Sammy who constantly runs away). The home life is tumultuous; her father is a drunk and her mother is aloof. The parents have knock-down fights [they “fought each other with a darkly brutal formalism that was paralleled only by their lovemaking”]. Pecola prays constantly for blue eyes believing they are the key to a better life [“[l]ong hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike”]. While struggling with self-hatred, Morrison depicts scenes that reinforce Pecola’s view of herself as “ugly.” From the grocer who can barely look at her or touch her hand to take payment for candy, to the boys who believe she is a fitting target for their jest, to the lighter-skinned Maureen who – in the tradition of “Mean Girls” – temporarily befriends her to later ridicule her. When one of these torturous boys induces the naïve Pecola to his home to see a kitten (a cat he really despises), she is blamed for the death of his mother’s beloved cat. The mother calls her a “nasty little black bitch.”
Morrison reveals some of the roots of Pecola’s self-hatred when describing her parents’ difficult upbringing [“[t]hey lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly”].
Pauline, her mother, has a lame foot and has always felt isolated. She loses herself in movies, which reaffirm her belief that she is ugly and that romantic love is reserved for the beautiful. She encourages her husband’s violent behavior in order to reinforce her own role as a martyr. She feels most alive when she is at work, cleaning a white woman’s home. She loves this home and despises her own. Cholly, Pecola’s father, was abandoned by his parents --
[his mother was mentally impaired in some undisclosed manner, she wrapped her unnamed baby in “two towels and newspaper and set him out in the trash”]
-- and raised by his great aunt, who died when he was a young teenager. He was humiliated by two white men who found him having sex for the first time and made him continue while they watched --**
[“He hated her . . . [Darlene, the girl who was with him] Cholly want to strangle her . . . For now, he hated the one who created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, . . . ”]. This was Cholly’s first sexual experience, occurring in the field after his aunt’s funeral, believing Darlene may get pregnant even though there was no consummation, Cholly runs away to find his biological father. He never musters up the courage to say who he actually is and his “father” dismisses him believing him to be the messenger of another woman he’s left. He runs away again. [“Cholly’s life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. . . . Cholly was free. Dangerously free.”] During his transient life he’d been a drunk, abused woman, jailed, and perhaps even killed. Then he meets the lame Pauline [“[h]er general feelings of separateness and unworthiness she blamed on her foot”], his future wife and mother of his children. But this life soon becomes stale.
A drunken Cholly returns home finding Pecola washing dishes and rapes her. Pecola passes out and Pecola’s mother disbelieves her story and beats her. Out of desperation for her new blue eyes she goes to Elihue Micah Whitcomb [“[h]e could have been an active homosexual but lacked the courage”] aka the neighborhood scam psychic Soaphead Church for her blue eyes. [“It had occurred to Pecola . . . that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights – if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. . . . If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes’” (emphasis added)]. Although Soaphead Church’s upbringing and internalized racism welcomes and agrees with her desire for blue eyes, he realizes he cannot give them to her. He dismisses her by tricking her into killing a dog that he detests and telling her that she will receive her blue eyes.
Claudia and Frieda find out that Pecola has been impregnated by her father, and unlike the rest of the neighborhood, they want the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they have been saving for a bicycle and plant marigold seeds. They believe that if the flowers live, so will Pecola’s baby. The flowers refuse to bloom, and Pecola’s baby dies when it is born prematurely. Cholly, who rapes Pecola a second time and then runs away, dies in a workhouse. Pecola goes mad, believing that her cherished wish has been fulfilled and that she has the bluest eyes.
Major Themes: (in alphabetical order)
Abuse of Power
Alienation
Beauty
Domestic Violence
Internalized Racism/“Racial self-loathing”
Love
Ownership
Sexuality
Whiteness
Complimentary Texts:
Caucasia by Danzy Senna
The Bear by William Faulkner
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Movie: For Colored Girls
Documentary: “A Girl Like Me”
Essay “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness” by Harryette Mullen Source: Diacritics, Vol. 24, No. 2/3, Critical Crossings (Summer - Autumn, 1994), pp. 71-89 – Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Alternative Assignments/Activities:
1. Students will have the option of rewriting Morrison’s novel in another literary form, i.e., a poem, short story, rap, spoken word, song, readers’ theatre, etc. that demonstrates an understanding of at least three (3) of the novel’s social constructions of power; privilege; violence; alienation and empathy.
- Students may create a modern-day The Bluest Eye using a literary form described above or mutually agreed upon between student and teacher. The re-interpretation will demonstrate an understanding of at least three (3) of the novel’s social constructions of power; privilege; violence; alienation and empathy.
- Students may re-write the novel in another mode and provide an alternate ending to the novel, i.e., creating an alternate ending in a sci-fi mode where Pecola receives blue eyes and is not insane.
2. Morrison vividly describes the town, homes, certain women, etc. These descriptions of scenes and people may be drawn, sketched, painted, etc., accompanied by a written component describing how and why the artist made their decisions for the selection.
3. Students can create a journal that contains a collection of letters that a character writes to another character in the mode of conflict resolution. For example, Claudia could write to her mother explaining how her whippings insult and humiliate her; Cholly writes to his father asking that he acknowledge his existence, etc. The students’ letters will demonstrate the understanding of the text and also elaborate as to how the decisions of the addressees have impacted their lives. The letters will also include what the writer’s would ask for as remediation and/or restitution. The completed journal will include one letter to the addressee and a response from the addressee using at least three (3) characters from the novel.
- Students may choose to create a “text messaging” log where the events of the novel are detailed. The “texts” will demonstrate an understanding of at least three (3) of the novel’s social constructions of power; privilege; violence; alienation and empathy.
- Students may choose to create a “Facebook” wall where the characters are “friends” and there are comments between characters and posts on the “wall.” Students will demonstrate a knowledge of the novel and an understanding of at least three (3) of the novel’s social constructions of power; privilege; violence; alienation and empathy.
Summative Assessment:
How does the manner in which the student re-presents the character demonstrate an understanding of:
Social constructions of power; privilege; violence; alienation and empathy.
Highlighted Quotations (to promote discussion, to kick-start free writes, to use as debate themes, etc.):
“Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition.”
“Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with – probably because it was abstract. But the concreteness of being outdoors was another matter – like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead.”
“Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. . . . Renting blacks cast furtive glances at these owned yards and porches, and made firmer commitments to buy themselves ‘some nice little old place.’”
“It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.”
“They were anything but describable, having been conceived, manufactured, shipped, and sold in various states of thoughtlessness, greed, and indifference. The furniture had aged without ever having become familiar. People had owned it, but never known it.’ (The furniture? Pecola? Cholly?)
“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The 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 leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. ‘Yes,’ they had said. ‘You are right.’”
“It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds – cooled – spilled over lips of outrage consuming whatever was in its path.”
“We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals [lighter-skinned African American] of the worlds.”
“They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; . . . . In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.”
“All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.”
Discussion Forum:
The rise of PETA – Have African-American Children Been Relegated to a Position beneath Animals? (Morrison’s depiction of the care and love shown to animals contrasted with the care and love directed towards Pecola.)
Significance of Morrison’s Form and Structure:
Some of Morrison’s segments are broken into seasons beginning with autumn. How is this significant to the way Morrison lays out the events?