North American Fiction and Film

Chapter 9: Toni Morrison's
The Bluest Eye


In this chapter we will provide you with some introductory comments regarding Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. This novel can be read as a series of subversions in that notions such as family, "woman," beauty and Black are shown as "constructions" within a self-serving, dominant, White, male hegemony and not as "essential traits" of the human condition.

The failure to save Pecola from her alienation and madness is figured as a blindness of the "bluest" eye, the one-eyed idealism of this hegemony not only in its culturally "legitimate" manifestations (such as the films Polly watches) but also in the ways in which its dominant mores are tragically (mis)appropriated and (mis)applied by the disempowered and the dispossessed within Black culture. Nonetheless, the characters themselves are shown to be complicit in their fate.

Moreover, the novel deals with the consequences of the struggle between the genders, a struggle which shows that Pecola's madness and alienation is an effect both of her "incest-rape" by her father and of her rejection by her mother. In this, Pecola's fate provides stark evidence not only of the failure of Black/White and gender relations but also of the failure of parental relations-of parents not taking responsibility for themselves and their children.

Table of Contents

The Bluest Eye: Discussion

Critical Reading
Review questions
Works Cited

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Fairytale epithet

The Bluest Eye uses a complicated narrative structure which combines third person omniscient, third person intimate, "oral history" and first person narratives. The first section of the narrative, the "epithet," involves a fairytale story about a family-mother, father, Dick and Jane. It is a simple story of apparent domestic bliss, love and happiness. Although the family could be Black or White, one gets the sense that it is White. Nothing much happens other than that Jane is looking for someone to play with, and when her parents (laughingly) appear to say no, she ends up playing with a friend. This story is "re-told" in The Bluest Eye except that Jane becomes Pecola, and she is brutally rather than laughingly "rejected" by her parents (and by everyone else), and finishes up "playing" with a "friend" who is a tragic and "imaginary" facet of her split personality.

This re-telling is itself figured in the epithet because the "Dick and Jane" story is retold three times: the first as "normal"; the second without any punctuation; and the third without any punctuation or spaces between the letters. Without having read the first story, the third would be like a cipher which needs to be deciphered. In the context of the novel, this third section suggests that language itself is a problem, that it does not clearly or easily reflect the complexities of family life, that family life itself is a sort of descent into madness. The effect is striking although we may not realise its significance at this point in our reading.

We discover much later in the novel that Soaphead Church (who "gives" Pecola her blue eyes), reads selectively and narrow-mindedly ("He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment" 134) and is a devotee of self-deception. This, more-or-less, is what we do when we construct our expectations of families from Dick-and-Jane stories. By taking a simple story which anyone can follow, and changing its materiality so that it is virtually impossible to read, we are being shifted out of our comfort zones not only with respect to families but also in relation to the capacities of language itself.

In other words, this triple-epithet section can be read as an index of the kind of readers who might read this story: the Dick-and-Jane readers who look for utopian, idealist tales of happiness and redemption; and those who garner multiple readings from the same material. Fairly clearly, without the "formalism" of punctuation and spacing, family life is a facade. Sections of the "mad" third iteration are used as separate epithets to the third person narratives within the novel. In this first of many narrative frames, all is not as it seems.

The novel is divided into the seasons beginning with Autumn, and Claudia's narrative begins each of these seasons. Her narrative is followed by the third person narrator, within each season, who uses not the seasons but sections of the cipher epithet (e.g. "Hereisthehouse . . ." 24). We might term this kind of structure as a "counterpoint narrative." In other words, each of the sections overlaps with and repeats characters, actions and ideas present in other sections as though there is one larger theme at work, yet at the same time, each section, like the instruments in a jazz band, has its own story to tell and its own way of doing it. Each section of the narrative functions both as a means to move the story along and as a counterpoint to some other section. One could describe the narrative, then, as a kind of long, complicated jazz song. In jazz, the strength of the music comes from the swirling counterpoints in both musical terms and in the relation between the apparent meaning of the "words" and the singer's (or musical instrument's) interpretation.
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Singing the pain into sweetness

We see this kind of counterpoint at work in some of the songs Claudia's mother sings. For example, when, while staying with Claudia's family, Pecola drinks all the milk in the house, her mother begins complaining about it with a "fussing soliloquy," which Claudia and Frieda find "extremely painful" and which indirectly insults the world and everyone in it. In this soliloquy, her mother rehearses her anxieties-Pecola's "greed," the fear of feeding an extra mouth, of going to the poorhouse, of not being appreciated by her husband and her family, and so on (16-17).

Her "fussing soliloquies" are immediately contrasted with her "singing moods" where she would sing about "hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-and-left-me-times" (17-18). What Claudia notes but does not dwell on is, on the one hand, the pure beauty of her mother's voice and the way it makes her feel, and on the other, the melancholy and despair of the thing her mother sings about:
But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without "a thin di-i-ime to my name." I looked forward to the delicious time when "my man" would leave me, when I would "hate to see that evening sun go down . . . " 'cause then I would know "my man has left this town." Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet. (18)
The dual nature of blues/jazz is evident here: on the one hand, the music counterpoints and drains the words of their grief thereby making life endurable by making the pain sweet; on the other, there is also the suggestion of "longing" for pain, or at least its "sweet" after-taste, which goes along with enjoying the status of being a victim, of refusing to finds ways out of situations which render one a victim, of refusing to take responsibility for oneself.
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"Ugliness" as conviction

This "double-counterpoint" is evident in many of the characters, most obviously in Polly and Cholly. The narrator describes this tendency in terms of the "ugliness" of the people who live in abject poverty, particularly the "Breedloves": Cholly Breedlove's ugliness is the "result of despair, dissipation, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people" (28); and Polly Breedlove uses hers as a "prop": "for the articulation of character, for the support of a role she frequently imagined was hers-martyrdom" (29).

The narrator suggests, in other words, that, as with the counterpoint, the "ugly" people are more than complicit in their own fate:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realised 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. (28)
The all-knowing master could be God, or the White culture, or even the Black culture within which they live. But the Breedloves and people like them wear their cloak with the same desire for melancholy that Claudia's mother sings into her songs.

The violent argument which immediately follows this section between Polly and Cholly is described in just such terms. For example, the narrator observes of Polly:
The tiny, undistinguished days that Mrs Breedlove lived were identified, grouped and classed by these quarrels. . . . They relieved the tiresomeness of poverty, gave grandeur to the dead rooms. In these violent outbreaks in routine that were themselves routine, she could display the style and imagination of what she believed to be her own true self. To deprive her of these fights was to deprive her of all the zest and reasonableness of life. . . . Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly into the red-hot stove, she screamed, "Get him, Jesus! Get him!" If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would never have forgiven Jesus. She needed Cholly's sins desperately. The lower he sank, the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task became. In the name of Jesus. (31)
This description raises a number of difficulties, not the least of them being that it characterises violence against women as something they need and take sustenance from. Having "tacitly" agreed "not to kill each other" (32), however, Polly and Cholly make this scene a "wicked dance," to use a phrase Claudia uses in another context (9), one in which both Polly and Cholly are both complicit and for which they are both responsible.

Polly, in resorting to Jesus to help her settle her scores, undermines the notion that religion (of any sort) can redeem these people. In damning each other they are themselves damned, as are their children. Pecola Breedlove, for instance, listens to their quarrel and, as she usually does, wishes herself out of existence, a process she believes she succeeds in except for her eyes: "They were always left" (33). Perhaps this is why she wants to make them blue: so that there will be nothing left of her.
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Counterpoint

The desperation of the Breedloves' situation is counterpointed with their willingness to embrace it, a counterpoint which shows that their own belief that they are "ugly" produces a sweet pain of its own, one that is difficult to let go. What breaks this counterpoint-prevents it from singing the pain into sweet melancholy and thence to escapism-is the "incest-rape" of Pecola by Cholly.

No song will account for this, and the victim is cast out by everyone, including her mother and Claudia: Polly beats Pecola and puts her "outdoors"; Pecola cannot sing this pain away and goes "mad"; and Claudia admits defeat when she and Frieda "acquiesce" and support the notion that "the victim had no right to live" (164). Pecola finishes up wandering the dumps at the edge of town having imaginary conversations with herself about just how blue the eyes are which Soaphead has "given" her for poisoning his landlady's annoying dog.

The complex narrative structure, then, relies on a counterpoint of relational difference where apparently disparate things interweave, intermingle, struggle to separate only to find themselves drawn back into the theme; that is, the elements of the counterpoint are tied together, like Cholly and Polly, around a common theme like "ugliness" (and their own conviction of it) which provides the "beat" for their "wicked dance" or helps them to sing the pain into melancholy. This counterpoint is itself finally broken when something is introduced which the counterpoint can no longer accommodate-this circuit-breaker then reflects back on the cosy relations of the counterpoint and shows them as self-serving and self-perpetuating.

This is, I take it, the "message" Claudia tries to articulate at the end of her narrative when she says:
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, 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, neutralised, frozen in the glare of the lover's inner eye. (163)
Try singing the sweet pain of melancholy into that!

"There were no marigolds"
Claudia's conclusion that love is a prison for the beloved, that love sings (counterpoints) sweetness into its pain, that love is a mask behind which hides wickedness, violence and stupidity, is a story already told in the "preface," the section which immediately follows the triple-epithets. This "preface" acts as a counterpoint to the epithet in the same way that each of the epithets counterpoints the others.

Although the triple-epithets frame the preface, the dysfunctional family described in the preface (Pecola is having her father's baby), and the depth and maturity of Claudia's voice, counterpoint and then subsume the childlike voice of the triple-epithets. The preface tells a very different tale of family life and sets up the main terms of the story. It is told in Claudia's adult voice to which she returns at the end of the narrative.

The preface, paradoxically, is told after the events to be recounted in the story. It seems at first glance to be an explication of the Christian theme of "as ye sow so shall ye reap." The marigolds did not grow in the fall of 1941. There seems to have been a general failure of the seeds. Or perhaps the earth itself is barren. Claudia and Frieda believe that they need to say the right magic words over the seeds in order for them to grow. The failure of the seeds becomes their failure, and they begin to blame each other. Perhaps it was the earth after all. In any event, Claudia concludes:
We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all the hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too. (3)
In other words, perhaps one does reap what one sows, but this is based in the mistaken notion that the earth can be personified, managed, given god-like powers. Claudia recognises that planting the seeds and saying "the right words over them" not only fails to placate the gods but also shows that the relation between what the earth yields and what is sown is purely arbitrary.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the notion of story-telling itself. Claudia admits that although "There is really nothing more to say" (that is, we already have the "story" in the preface), although explaining "why" is too difficult, she will nonetheless "take refuge in how." What we can expect is a descriptive tale, not one that explains and analyses or one that rationalises the misery which is Pecola's story.

In other words, none of the voices in the subsequent tale are themselves omniscient, nor are the compilation of the many narrative voices likely to add up to a satisfactory explanation. In the preface, then, Claudia explicitly acknowledges as naive the idea that loss of innocence can in any way be compensated for by telling a story where life is nothing more than an absurd, nihilistic loss and where the only escape lies in madness and death.
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Autumn: Claudia's first exclusion

Claudia's narrative begins with a conflict. The verbal mood shifts from the present continuous to the subjunctive, thereby turning this conflict into a model for all the conflicts in the novel. Conflicts frequently involve a taunting, teasing power game of maintaining nothing more than pride and dignity. Rosemary Villanucci, whilst obviously belonging herself to an ethnic minority, constructs herself as a "have" and Claudia and Frieda as "have-nots." By telling them that they can't "come in," she commits the first of many exclusionary gestures we are to see in the novel.

Claudia and Frieda respond by not only wanting the bread Rosemary is eating, but also by wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and to smash the "pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth" (5).Their response is conditioned-their family lives are characterised by receiving violent rebukes for seemingly trivial offences. Rosemary will receive their blows, and herself respond by asking if they want to pull her pants down. In propitiating violence by offering sex, is she imitating an adult female?

Claudia knows that what Rosemary is offering is "precious" although she does not know why, and she refuses on the basis of pride. In this conflict, social constraints are evident but they appear minimal. The sisters' childish desire for revenge become the basis on which other conflicts in the novel are resolved-the children imitate the adults who imitate the children they used to be, and so on. Sex or its promise is used as an act of appeasement thereby doubly positioning women as victims.

"Adults do not talk to us"
The politics of family life are not very pleasant for Claudia. Adults apparently believe that children are a burden, that they should be seen and not heard. Certainly, they make no attempt to relate to them. As Claudia observes: "Adults do not talk to us-they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information" (5).

Something as simple as a cold becomes in the mind of the young Claudia a metaphor of mother/daughter relations. These are characterised by violent episodes, a desire for control, and attempts to acculturate where the older woman acts as agent for the patriarchal/white system. The older narrator intervenes (7) to ask whether it was as painful as she remembers. She believes that it was a "productive and fructifying" pain but nonetheless real. In a sense, Claudia is doing what her mother does-singing the sweet pain of melancholy into her experiences by telling us this story.

Women beget women
This reflection is followed by a conversation between her mother and a friend, which Claudia describes as a "gently wicked dance" (9) where she listens not so much to the words, many of which she does not understand, but for "truth in timbre" (10). In this conversation, men are described as "dogs" who want women for sex and nothing else, and the women descry the sexual attractiveness of other women ("You see anything around here you'd marry" 9). In this, the women act as agents of the (Black) patriarchal system which pits women against each other in a struggle for domination and control.

The relations between all the men and women in the novel reflect this struggle, one which, as like as not, will be passed down to the next generation, not as a direct injunction, but as "truth in timbre." In other words, Claudia learns, in part, her identity as a "woman" from these kinds of conversations, a sort of "identification with" process which takes on tragic proportions later in the novel when Pecola over-identifies with the blue eyes of Mary Jane and Polly decides that Pecola is "ugly," a decision she bases on the "White" standard of beauty she has imbibed from Hollywood films. Even Mr Henry, who is a boarder in Claudia's house, greets Claudia and Frieda (who are Black) by calling them "Greta Garbo" and "Ginger Rogers" (who are White Hollywood beauties, 10).

One of the things which keeps families together, despite the violence and misery, is the threat of being "put outdoors": "There is a difference between 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" (11). Being "outdoors" represents a physical and a metaphysical condition, the possibility of being beyond poverty in both senses, being disinherited from the disinherited: "like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Dead doesn't change, and outdoors is here to stay" (11).

This encourages Black people, with their "peripheral existence", to acquire property and to behave "Like frenzied, desperate birds" (12). What happens is that "renting blacks" are considered beneath "propertied blacks," a distinction which leads to class divisions and snobbery. In the end, this is what happens to Pecola: she is "put out," and then "put outdoors."
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"Thin brown girls from Mobile"

These divisions are exemplified in the "thin brown girls from Mobile" who live in quiet neighbourhoods where "everyone is gainfully employed" (63). These girls are never "fretful, nervous or shrill," and are as "sweet and plain as buttercake" (64). They learn, in fact, to deny their Blackness:
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; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. 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. (64)
The narrator is brilliantly scathing about these "White" imitations, not only because they have sold out their Blackness (even their colour is diluted to Brown) but also because, in becoming honorary Whites, they denigrate all Blacks. For example, when Geraldine, one of the "girls from Mobile" (she is anything but mobile, except in her class aspirations), finds Pecola in her kitchen (she is lured there and tormented by Geraldine's obnoxious son, Junior), she says: "'Get out. . . . You nasty little black bitch" (72). In effect, the Geraldines of the world, with their obsessive eradication of funkiness, have made life for girls like Pecola (who is Black with a low hairline) impossible. This game of setting standards of beauty and behaviour, which Geraldine is so good at, is also played out by Claudia, Pecola and Polly.
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A blond, blue-eyed Shirley Temple

Claudia has, like other children, a model child held up to her-in this case, a blond, blue-eyed Shirley Temple (13-14). Shirley comes in the form of a doll, a gesture which genders Claudia and denigrates her race. Claudia, however, is not keen on this game and she "dismembers" the doll to see what makes it so desirable to the adults (14). It is significant that what Claudia wants for Christmas is not presents but the feeling which comes from the sort of Dick-and-Jane-family love ("'I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin alone for me" 15). Instead, she is scrubbed and washed (she hates this) and given a doll.

Significantly, she transfers her hatred of dolls on to little white girls:
But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, "Awwwww," but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. (15)
Setting up impossible standards involves, even with a look of (dis)approval, denigrations which challenge Claudia's sense of self-worth, and she is disarmingly honest about her violent feelings in response. In effect, the looks themselves function as a form of violence to which Claudia responds by reeking violence on the embodiment of that which the looks embrace-the blond-haired, blue-eyed doll.
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Pecola's "ugliness"

If Claudia responds to this "looking violence" with violence, Pecola responds with the sort of escapism which eventually leads to her madness. Unlike Claudia, who does get some positive feedback from those around her which adds to her sense of self-worth, Pecola gets none-from anybody. For instance, she sits for long hours in front of a mirror trying to discover the secret of her "ugliness."

She sits alone at her desk at school and the teachers never ask her questions. When her male classmates want to be particularly insulting, they chant: "'Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove! Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove'" (34). Those who dare try this sort of thing with Claudia usually finish up with a thick ear, but Pecola's sense of self-worth is so low that she has lost the ability to stand up for herself.

Pecola wonders whether, if she had "'Pretty eyes. Pretty blue eyes. . . . Alice-and-Jerry-blue-storybook-eyes'" (34-35), people might respond differently to her. She wonders why people call dandelions "weeds" (35) (that is, she realises that although weeds are things you don't want around, this may not have anything to do with what they are). When Pecola goes into the store for candy, she buys "Mary Janes" each of which has a little smiling picture on them of a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. Mr Yacobowski, the store owner, whose eyes are "Blear-dropped" blue, responds with classic racism:
He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. . . . Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary. (36)
The suggestion here is that we might have expected a little more empathy from someone who has himself no doubt experienced a sense of loss because of his background, but for the storekeeper, racism is so ingrained that he cannot even bear to look at Pecola, or to touch her hand when he takes her money. The reference to the Virgin Mary highlights the contradiction between being Christian and being a Christian: that is, a contradiction evident perhaps not so much in religion itself but in its practitioners.

Pecola, who has seen "disgust, even anger in grown male eyes," knows that Mr Yacobowski's "vacuum" non-look has an edge: "somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste." She feels "shame" (she thinks of the dandelions she has just been praising: "They are ugly. They are weeds" 37). This shame ebbs when she leaves the store to be replaced by anger: "Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dregs of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging" (37-38).

Unlike Claudia, who would have remained angry and found pleasure in the sense of being it provided her with, Pecola finds that "the puppy is too easily surfeited" and her shame wells up again. She resorts to contemplating the blue-eyes of the pictures on her nine "Mary Janes," which bring her "nine lovely orgasms" (38).

Anger, shame and escapism
The pattern established here of anger, shame and escapism is what eventually leads to Pecola's madness after she has been raped by her father (128-129) and rejected by her mother. Having been "ruined" by her father's touch and the baby she carries (which dies), Pecola pre-empts this final madness by asking Soaphead Church, the local quack with problems of his own (paedophilia), whether he can give her blue eyes (138). Soaphead is so taken with this request that he uses it as an excuse to write a letter to God in which he laments the predicament of his race ("We in this colony took as our own the most dramatic, and the most obvious, of our white master's characteristics, which were, of course, their worst" 140).

Here, Soaphead is questioning the whole idea of identity as a construction, a questioning which strikingly highlights Pecola's own construction of desirability (White and blue-eyed). He suggests that in modelling themselves on the Whites (as Pecola has done), the Blacks have not only given up their own identity, they have taken up the very White characteristics which position the Blacks as inferior others: "We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom" (141).

That is, Blacks have characterised themselves as violent, lazy and reckless, which is exactly what the Whites wanted them to do. Or, like the "thin brown girls from Mobile," they remove their funkiness to the point of obsessive/compulsive denial of Blackness itself:
Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it till it dies. They fight this battle all the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair. (64)
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Soaphead's plea

For Soaphead, all this comes down to a question of "naming," and he asks God why He refused to give Moses His name when He was asked: "You would not say, and said instead 'I am who I am.' Like Popeye? I Yam What I Yam? Afraid you were, weren't you, to give out your name? Afraid they would know the name and then know you? Then they wouldn't fear you?" (143).

If God himself refuses to help a little Black girl, is deaf to the pleas of the dispossessed, then what are we to make of His comment: "'Suffer little children to come unto me, and harm them not'" (144)? Soaphead believes that God has forgotten what He said:
Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God. (144)
Soaphead's plea is undermined by the account we have been given of his own abuse of children (he attempts to mitigate his paedophilia by suggesting that he bought children ice creams which they ate while he fondled them, 136-137).

Nonetheless, we see in Soaphead a grotesque parody of a minister of the Lord (which he believes himself to be) who abuses God's children (think of any number of recent revelations about priests and Christian brothers abusing children, mainly boys), an abuse which Soaphead sanctions by his own interpretation of God's "forgotten" promise to protect these children. In effect, this section of the novel poses the unanswerable question: if we are all the children (Black and White) of God, then why this terrible carnage of dead and broken bodies? Who's in charge?

What Soaphead doesn't understand, and what his own account of the Black (mis)appropriation of White culture makes explicit, is that his own (mis)appropriation of religion is itself a kind of self-abuse. In other words, Soaphead's questioning of God's intentions and actions is about as useful as Pecola's request for blue eyes.

Or to put it another way, as Pecola appears unable to take any responsibility for her own sense of self worth and escapes into an imaginary "miracle" but illusionary world of her own "blue" eyes, so Soaphead, who is both unable to deal with his own Blackness (so he blames the Whites) and unwilling to deal with the lived experiences of his people (so he practices a form of quackery which caters to their escapisms), embodies Pecola's failure to take responsibility for herself.

What Soaphead wants is a world fit for himself to live in and a God worthy of his love, one who will cure everything with a miracle. Religion, in this form, perpetuates misery because it provides false hope of an earthly redemption; the people who believe in it are abrogating responsibility for themselves, and the people who purvey it are nothing more than confidence tricksters.
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Pecola's final humiliation

So complete is Pecola's humiliation that she steps "over into madness" (163) which takes the form of a divided self-Pecola "constructs" an imaginary friend which spends "its" time reminding Pecola how wonderful her "blue eyes" are. The question being posed here is whether Pecola's imaginary friend and miracle "blue eyes" are any different to Soaphead's God (or Polly's White screen goddesses, or the Breedloves' conviction of their ugliness, or Claudia's mother's songs)? All of these illusionary, objectionable talismans divide the self against the self-the talismans function as a means of escape, a means which is paradoxically a device of self-abuse.

However, as we have seen, these talismans have the discomforting habit of asking difficult questions-like why Pecola didn't tell her mother about the second time her father came to her and whether it was really as horrible as she made out (158-159). At the end of the narrative, Claudia appears to be the only one capable of sensing and dealing with this paradox. For instance, she wonders whether anyone really "loved" Pecola, and comes to the shocking conclusion that the only person to have any feeling for Pecola was the father who raped her: "He, at any rate, loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death" (163).

Whether we go along with this or see it as Claudia trying to rationalise her own guilt (for her rejection of Pecola) is open to question. That she is prepared to offer it as the culmination of the "how" explanation she promised us in the preface suggests, clearly, that she still cannot account for the "why." The question that remains for the reader is whether we have any better idea of "why" than Claudia. What do you think?
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Critical Reading

Black memory
Karla Holloway argues that The Bluest Eye "is a journey into Black memory" where the memories belong to "Black readers." However, although she acknowledges that "The funerals, the love, the helplessness and hopefulness," and the "brief quick hugs" and "the quick angry switches" are identifiable "Black events," she believes that all this stops at "the horror" of "the incest-rape" of Pecola (37).

Holloway likens these Black memories to the notion that linguistic communication has a cultural significance from which Black communities draw strength and which enables them to draw boundaries around their "African identity" to ward off constant threats of "cultural assimilation and dissemination." The problem for Claudia, as exemplified in her opening reflection, is that language fails her; she cannot find the right words to chant over the seeds to make them grow, and from this sense that language becomes "an inadequate medium for carrying the truth . . . actual desolation is finally reached."

This loss of "verbal" expression characterises Claudia, Cholly, Polly, and finally Pecola, which means that they "fall more deeply into a chasm of despair and face the fact that rescue is essentially unobtainable for any of them." Consequently, Holloway believes that if we approach the characters in the novel "through their language garments," we might be able to understand the despair of the novel (38-39).

For example, Holloway notes that Claudia describes a conversation between her mother and one of her friends as a "gently wicked dance":
sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmers, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another; the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter-like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre. (The Bluest Eye 9-10)
[Note how this quotation supports the argument made above about the connection between narrative structure and jazz music. Holloway's argument about the importance of these "language garments" is supported by Pierre Bourdieu's suggestion that understanding the social laws of the production of language means acknowledging that they are "transmitted without passing through language and consciousness, but through suggestions inscribed in the most apparently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices of everyday life."

The "modalities" concerned, here, include "the ways of looking, sitting, standing, keeping silent, or even of speaking ('reproachful looks' or 'tones,' 'disapproving glances' and so on)" all of which are "full of injunctions that are powerful and hard to resist precisely because they are silent and insidious, insistent and insinuating."

What this means is that "the most anodyne actions or words are now seen for what they are-as injunctions, intimidations, warnings, threats" which "instead of telling the child what he must do, tells him what he is, and thus leads him to become durably what he has to be" (The Logic of Practice 47-52) . These language "garments" (like "timbre"), then, are as, if not more, significant in communicating than the words themselves. In the context of the novel, do you agree with this argument?]
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Review questions

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Works Cited

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Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia