The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (Pecola: A Traumatized Child)

 

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

(Pecola: A Traumatized Child)

 

Morrison addresses white American racial dominance in the 1930s. She is concerned with the relation between social power and individual psychology and tries to give voice to those who are traumatized by oppressive social and familial forces. The novel introduces a new element into colonialist discourse: it features as protagonist young subaltern girl not previously represented in the Western literary tradition. For the writer, traumatized children provide not merely poignant metaphors but also concrete examples of the neglect, exploitation, disempowerment and disavowal of certain communities and even entire cultures. We shall see how the writer challenges the subordination of women and children by testifying to their experience and by engaging their readers in that experience.

Trauma is an event in an individual’s life which is defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization. Prolonged exposure to threats of violence and ongoing abuse are particularly characteristic of oppressed groups and constitute a pernicious form of trauma, because the constant stress and humiliation are associated with being a person of low socioeconomic status In The Bluest Eye several of Morrison’s characters experience the gradual psychic erosion representing the weakening of whole communities living under an oppressive white cultural dominance. Morrison depicts an imposing white culture whose values are enforced through a variety of means (violent, economic, psychological, etc.). The Bluest Eye explores how the traumatic experience of social powerlessness and devalued racial identity prevents the African American community from joining together and truthfully evaluating the similarity of their circumstances, much fewer finding ways to oppose dominant forces.

The epitome of this devalued community, the Breedlove family suffers from trauma caused by single, startling events, but also in the form of daily, grinding oppression, whereby the parents pass their suffering on to their children. The Breedlove’s daughter, Pecola, is especially sensitive to the fearful, repetitively ritualized violence that her parents direct toward each other and their children. Her further devaluation by the world, with little relief except from her playmates and the whores who befriend her, includes constant ridicule from other school children because of her dark skin, poverty and ugliness. The black boys who torment her fail to recognize a fellow member of their community. Pecola’s parents, furthermore, are often powerless themselves, subject to the whites who employ them, victims of their poverty and the culture which invalidates them. In addition, they themselves have been physically or emotionally abandoned by their families- Cholly was rejected by both of his parents, Pauline was made an outsider because of a limp. Traumatized children themselves, they continue the trauma by denying their own weakness in their abuse of parental power, by instilling their own fears of impotence, and by calling upon their children to fulfill their own unmet needs.

Never valued as an individual when she was a child, Pauline continues throughout her life to seek approval in others’ eyes, particularly in her position as a servant for whites. In the one place that she feels powerful- the kitchen of the white family for whom she works- she attacks her daughter (who has spilled a cobbler), and in turn denies her own place in the world when she not only fails to acknowledge Pecola but also comforts the white family’s child. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes is in fact an inheritance from Pauline herself; based on idealized white images- images of acceptance and beauty completely disconnected from herself and her blackness- Pauline’s desire is to look like Jean Harlow.

Pauline and Pecola, like the rest of the black community, have internalized the pervasive standard of whiteness: in the white dolls they buy their children, in the movies they watch and emulate, and in their privileging of the light-skinned black child, Maureen Peal, over the darker children. Cholly’s traumatized past ultimately leads to consequences that are even more devastating for his daughter. After being abandoned by his parents, the most formatively brutalizing incident in Cholly’s youth was the interruption of his first sexual encounter by armed whites. The experience of being forced by the white hunters to continue relations with his partner constitutes a trauma not only in its humiliating intensity, but also in the impossibility of his being able to react to the situation. The displacement of his anger onto his fellow victim Darlene, reveals the extent and depth of his psychic wound: “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless”. Cholly, in short, cannot assimilate the truth of his subjugation without being annihilated by a sense of his own powerlessness. When the environment sustains him, i.e., when his marriage and work are stable, Cholly copes well, but when these sources of support and stability are taken away his past returns to plague his present actions. When Pecola makes a gesture which reminds him of the tender feelings he once had for Pauline, Pecola’s sadness and helplessness and his own inability to make her happy provoke a repetition of the violent impotence and the helpless fear that he and Darlene felt with the white men. His angry response toward Darlene returns and becomes confounded with feelings of love for Pauline and Pecola, and also with self-hatred, because Pecola is like Cholly once was, small and impotent. His pessimistic attitudes toward life, himself and his capacity to love return to this traumatic context, and he loses the ability to approach life or his daughter positively. One way for him to rid himself of his fears is to project them onto Pecola, and in part he tries to destroy those fears by raping her.

Pecola’s desire for blue eyes becomes obsessive after her rape, and her conviction that she has been given them by Soaphead Church (the man who promises her a miracle) indicates a complete psychic disintegration. Her own negative reflection in others’ eyes has been the continual source of her pain, and her main wish is that her reflection be desirable. The extent of Pecola’s obsession and pathology at this stage is presented through hallucinations, through her resistance to blinking, and her delusional view that others envy her gift. “Look. I can look right at the sun...” she says, “I don’t even have to blink...He really did a good job. Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off”). Her obsessive return to the mirror for reassurance that her “blue eyes” are the bluest and the nicest- “How many times a minute are you going to look?” her “friend” asks) - also represents a textual repetition of the destructive power of judgment based solely on appearance and prejudice.

Pecola’s belief that she has blue eyes represents her pitiable attempt to take power, for she is now the one who looks, but they more importantly symbolize the trauma of not being loved. She defends against her pain by reexperiencing others’ gazes with what she believes is an acceptable, if not loveable, appearance. Ironically, this delusion makes her more of an outcast because her madness spooks everyone, including her mother. In our last glimpse of Pecola, her wandering in a regressive animal-like state is punctuated by useless, repetitive movements: The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach- could not even see but which filled the valleys of the mind. When the baby does not survive, the future is cut off; so the loss of the child is a powerful symbol of an ultimate loss of the future. As the narrator of The Bluest Eye says, “I felt a need for someone to want the black baby [Pecola’s] to live- just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls...”.

In the novel there is an attempt to speak for victims virtually silenced by the process of trauma. First, this takes the form of trying to articulate the victims’ own words, suggesting their traumatized condition through the narratively dissociative yet emotionally overdetermined quality of these words.

Pecola seeks comfort in words. In part she seeks understanding of what her father has done to her, but her conflicted dialogue with a split-off persona of herself also illustrates how much she has been isolated and how her pain and need to speak are ignored by her community and even her family. To characterize this self-splitting, Morrison utilizes an interchange of roman type and italics: “How come you don’t talk to anybody? I talk to you.... I just wondered. You don’t talk to anybody. You don’t go to school. And nobody talks to you. How do you know nobody talks to me? They don’t. When you’re in the house with me, even Mrs. Breedlove doesn’t say anything to you. Ever. Sometimes I wonder if she even sees you”. Hence, the writer is faced with two important issues when speaking for the protagonist: first, there is the necessity of communicating her experience so that it will be known; second, there is the question of how this can be done when the characters are cut off from linguistic connections or from dialogue with others. Morrison tells Pecola’s story in part through an omniscient narrator and primarily through the sympathetic eyes of Claudia, who has been Pecola’s friend and who realizes the harm done to Pecola by the community, including herself in that complicity: “She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me”; “We tried to see her without looking at her...because we had failed her”. Not only is Claudia sympathetic toward Pecola, but she is also self-conscious and self-critical about her own complicity. In this way, through her narrative we are doubly exposed to the dynamics and effects of racism. Similarly, if Claudia is an insider in the way she experiences some of the same pain as Pecola, she is also an outsider and privileged in the sense that having been loved, she possesses the strength to have her own desires. Outsider and insider at the same time, she is sympathetically aware of the need to recognize her community’s role and their own defeat in Pecola’s disintegration.

Morrison acknowledges, that the inarticulate victims of abuse can be spoken for only inadequately, can be understood only partially, and yet that they need such interpretation from outside because they cannot do it alone. In giving their characters the opportunity to speak or to act in his or her own right, however briefly, Morrison gives us a sense of the victim’s limited ability to communicate and act, and his or her need to find empathetic ears.