The Bluest Eye
by
Toni Morrison
(Motifs)
The Dick and Jane Narrative
The
novel opens with a narrative from a Dick-and-Jane reading primer, a narrative
that is distorted when Morrison runs its sentences and then its words together.
The gap between the idealized, sanitized, upper-middle-class world of Dick and
Jane (who we assume to be white, though we are never told so) and the often
dark and ugly world of the novel is emphasized by the chapter headings
excerpted from the primer. But Morrison does not mean for us to think that the
Dick-and-Jane world is better—in fact, it is largely because the black
characters have internalized white Dick-and-Jane values that they are unhappy. In
this way, the Dick and Jane narrative and the novel provide ironic commentary
on each other.
Seasons and Nature
The
novel is divided into the 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 when Pecola’s is raped. Pecola’s baby dies in autumn, the season of
harvesting. 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.
Whiteness and Colour
In
the novel, whiteness is associated with beauty and cleanliness (particularly
according to Geraldine and Mrs. Breedlove), but also with sterility. In
contrast, color is associated with happiness, most clearly in the rainbow of
yellow, green, and purple memories Pauline Breedlove sees when making love with
Cholly. Morrison uses this imagery to emphasize the destructiveness of the
black community’s privileging of whiteness and to suggest that vibrant color,
rather than the pure absence of color, is a stronger image of happiness and
freedom.
Eyes and Vision
Pecola
is obsessed with having blue eyes because she believes that this mark of
conventional, white beauty will change the way that she is seen and therefore
the way that she sees the world. There are continual references to other
characters’ eyes as well—for example, Mr. Yacobowski’s hostility to Pecola resides
in the blankness in his own eyes, as well as in his inability to see a black
girl. This motif underlines the novel’s repeated concern for the difference
between how we see and how we are seen, and the difference between superficial
sight and true insight.
Dirtiness and Cleanliness
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 house-cleaning—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 sanitation 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 understanding of the nature of happiness.
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