English 2610-Diversity in American Literature
Secrets, Structure, and the Cycle of Nature in The Bluest Eye
“Quiet as it's kept” (Morrison, 6). This one phrase, on page six, is instantly foreboding and telling, setting up the plot for the rest of the novel. Morrison has structured her novel around this phrase, and two other things: secrets, and the turning of the seasons. Without this structure, the novel would not be nearly as complex or as breathtaking.
At the outset, Morrison deceives the reader that this is a pleasant children's book:
Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy (Morrison, 3).
Most adults remember first learning to read with the Dick and Jane books. Children today still read them. The books present a perfect world: everyone is happy, everyone is healthy. Not one problem is present in their lives. These were nice, clean, upstanding white people. Ms. Morrison then speeds up the Dick and Jane narrative, until the words become menacing, a hysterical recitation by a crazy person.
If there was any doubt that this is not a book for children, it is quickly wiped away in the next few pages:
Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow (Morrison, 7).
This is a sentence that grabs readers by the throat. Ms. Morrison is telling her readers, warning them, actually, that this is about as far from a child's book as possible. Clearly, Pecola is not living the Dick and Jane life. Ms. Morrison has given away the ending at the beginning, telling the readers what happened right away.
Ms. Morrison structures the novel from the end to the beginning: readers know what happened to Pecola, now they have to finish the book to find out the why and how. This is a clever way to
set up a novel. Many authors try to save the twist, the shocker, for the end. By putting it at the beginning, Ms. Morrison takes out the shock value.
By doing it this way, going from end to beginning, readers are able to focus more on the story itself. It also allows a terrible secret to be told, out in the open, for anyone to hear. The novel itself is told through the rotating narratives of children, adults, and the children who have now grown to be adults themselves. By proclaiming in a child's voice, that Pecola was going to have a baby by her dad, it makes the novel all that more tragic. It also, perhaps, softens the blow of that announcement; rather than saying “Pecola was raped by her own dad”.
Children are also less aware of specific dates and times. Children don't typically say “Today is September the first”, they usually say, “It was Monday, it was spring...” Ms. Morrison uses that language to help readers grasp the passage of time inside the novel, and to make the voices of the children that more authentic. This compounds the tragedy of the narrative: not only did this rape happen to a child, but the children are left to sort it all out within their own minds.
Sadly, responsible, caring adults are few and far between. Through the children's voices, readers are made aware of the fact that the adults are simply not discussing with their children what was going on. This could be due, in large part, to the time period the novel is set in; in 1941, matters such as sex, rape, and violence were not discussed with children. These are topics that the adults gossip amongst themselves about, hence the “quiet as its kept” phrase, which left the children to flounder through and make sense of on their own.
Ms. Morrison had specific reasons for using that phrase. In the afterword portion of The Bluest Eye, she states:
First, it was a familiar phrase, familiar to me as a child listening to adults....gossip...It is a secret between us and a secret that is being kept from us....In some sense it was precisely what the act of writing the book was: the public exposure of a private confidence (Morrison, 214).
Throughout the novel, most adults are seen as people who let children down. The children view the parents less as caring individuals and more as drill sergeants: the children are to do as their told, no questions asked. Asking a question or adding a comment to a conversation was grounds for the kids to be beaten. As Ruth Rosenberg, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Orleans states in her essay, Black Girlhood in the Bluest Eye:
The child's intense curiosity is not responded to verbally. Adults demand deference and fend off questions. They maintain a social distance between themselves and their children through non-r eciprocal conversations. [The main narrator], Claudia says, “Adults do not talk to us-they give us directions (Rosenberg,7).
When Pecola's pregnancy becomes obvious to the adults in her community, it is yet another thing that the adults refuse to discuss with the kids. They also do a grave injustice to Pecola, in that, rather than grabbing her father, Cholly, and killing or arresting him, the town just sits back and gossips about it, and the children are left to piece the story together of what happened.
Soaphead Church is a different type of adult. Rather than ignore children, he molests them . Equally evil as Cholly, if not more so, Soaphead preys on young girls. He feels he is acting innocent with them, when in reality he is molesting them. Ms. Morrison explains in the novel that he is nicknamed Soaphead because of how he styles his hair, when in all actuality, he believes he is a “clean”-minded man without sin. It is interesting to note that, while Soaphead views himself as a righteous, religious man, his soul is as dirty and sinful as they come.
The only adults that treat children well in the story are three whores: China, Poland, and Miss Marie. To them, the children are not a nuisance. They are welcomed in the whores' home, not only welcomed, but spoken to directly. Pecola, in particular, is close to the women, and they are the only adults who are truly nice to her.
Ms. Morrison structures the adults in the most shocking ways possible. Where the reader might assume that the whores are terrible people, and Soaphead Church is righteous, Ms. Morrison turns reader's expectations completely around. Soaphead is one of the most vile characters in the novel, yet the whores are actually the nicest, most well-adjusted people in there. By having the whores included in the story, Ms. Morrison provides Pecola with a stable home, the only stable home she will ever know.
While the adults are busy ignoring or hurting the kids, time is passing. Ms. Morrison has done another structure format in the novel: dividing the chapters into seasons. By doing this, the reader is made aware of the passage of time, and how Pecola and her two friends, Claudia and Frieda, deal with children and adult issues as they grow and change, as well. One example of this happens in Autumn, at the beginning of the book:
Then we both looked where Pecola was staring. Blood was running down her legs....A brownish-red stain discolored the back of her dress. She kept whinnying, standing with her legs far apart. Frieda said, “Oh. Lordy! I know. I know what that is!”..... “That's ministratin'” ( Morrison, 27).
It is a watershed moment in the book, a pivotal scene with Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda. The reader assumes that Frieda must have heard women talking amongst themselves, and, like everything else, the kids are forced to decipher the cryptic secrets the women are going on about. While Pecola is terrified, and Claudia stands there confused, Frieda remembers back to overheard conversations and tries to help the poor girl.
Ms. Morrison also uses this moment as a foreshadowing one, by having Pecola ask, still fearful of what occurred, if she is capable of becoming pregnant. Frieda lets her know, that, yes, Pecola can become pregnant. Now not only are the cycles of the seasons a part of the book, but so are Pecola's cycles of menstruation.
Mark Ledbetter wrote a critical essay on The Bluest Eye, and explains how the seasons themselves connect the story to form a whole:
The narrative is divided into chapters by the names of the four seasons, beginning with Autumn, an odd beginning for most of us, a sort of “in-the-middle” existence, but which seems appropriate for the life of the victim. The victim-less text would begin with Spring, a time of rebirth and new beginnings. The language within each chapter of the text violates the season which names it (Ledbetter, 15).
He goes on to correlate how three of the seasons deal with hatred and death, with the culmination of the death of Pecola's baby and the destruction of Pecola herself.
Another portion of the novel that alludes to cycles are the planting of marigolds. Ms. Morrison opens and closes the novel with the flowers. When Claudia and her sister plant the marigold seeds, they are excited and hopeful for the flowers. But when their seeds do not sprout, and the baby Pecola is carrying dies, the girls equate both as one and the same. Their childish minds cannot separate the two events.
Claudia and Frieda fight over why the seeds did not germinate, the earth was bad, the seeds were planted deeper into the earth than they needed to be. Ms. Morrison structures the seeds and flowers into the novel to draw parallels between Pecola and the marigolds. Menstruation and puberty is frequently referred to as “blossoming” or “flowering” into a young woman. The children understand that if you plant the seeds, something should grow. They are smart enough to contextualize that, since Cholly had “planted” his own “seed” into Pecola, that she would bear a flower herself.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on the reader's perspective, while a seed is planted, it does not necessarily mean something will grow from it. Pecola was very young, eleven years old, and had only been menstruating a few months when Cholly raped her. Her body was simply not matured enough to carry a child. Also, when Cholly raped her, he did a lot of damage to her internally. Just because a seed is planted, does not mean it will bear fruit.
Many of the characters deal with hatred. Hatred for themselves, hatred for others. The title of the novel, The Bluest Eye, refers to Pecola's wishing she had blue eyes, like the popular Shirley Temple. Ms. Morrison makes sure that readers know Pecola and her family are ugly. Much of the book deals not only with racism between blacks and whites, but racism of blacks towards other blacks.
Pecola is too black for the black people in her town. Not only do the adults adore lighter skin (Pecola's mom likes to go to the movies to watch white actors), but they pass this belief onto their children, as well. Frieda and Pecola love Shirley Temple. Claudia is always given a blue-eyed doll for Christmas.
Claudia, however, is different from Pecola and Frieda. She can't understand what all of the fuss is about with the white people and dolls. She finds nothing to like about the whites and the dolls, and takes her hatred and frustration out on the dolls by tearing them apart. Pecola is the opposite, and decides that, for her, everything would be easier, better, if she was white, particularly if she had blue eyes.
For Pecola, she grew obsessed with having blue eyes. To her, it was the epitome of being white, a sign that, for all of the people who called her ugly, if she had blue eyes, everyone would find her beautiful. Towards the end of the novel, her mind breaks because of what Cholly did to her, and part of her believes that she does, in fact, finally have the blue eyes she always wanted, the blue eyes that would make everyone love her and want to be around her.
Speaking of self-hatred, Cholly has a good dose of that going on, himself. His own mother dumped him by the railroad when he was only a few days old. His great aunt saw what happened, though, and brought him back to her place. The mother took off, and his father was unknown, and while his aunt took care of him, she didn't seem to really care about him. As if this wasn't enough to make him hate, his first time having sex broke something inside of him.
Lots of people remember their first time having sex as something embarrassing, awkward, or memorable. For Cholly, it was a memorable event, but in a sick, twisted way, as white men came upon
Cholly and his girl and they forced him to continue having sex. This is a moment that is etched onto Cholly's mind, the sex and the violence intertwined. Ms. Morrison uses this scene to humanize Cholly, because by structuring the novel from end to beginning, most of what the reader learns of Cholly is all negative.
Here, Ms. Morrison does not appear to be glorifying rape and incest, but wants her audience to realize that even monsters can have a shred of humanity. Or, at the very least, that human beings only become monsters after society breaks them down. Even when Cholly is raping his daughter, he is conflicted with himself. On one hand, he wants to rape her, is glad he is raping her, but there is another part of his mind that tells him what he is doing is wrong. Cholly is drunk when the rape happens, and confuses himself as to whether he is having sex with his wife or his daughter.
This is another unique structure to the novel that is worth pointing out. Usually, when a rape scene occurs in a novel, it is told from the victim's point of view. This time, Ms. Morrison decided to tell it from Cholly's point of view:
The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. His revulsion was a reaction to her young, helpless, hopeless presence.....The timid, tucked-in look of the scratching toe-that was what Pauline was doing the first time he saw her in Kentucky....The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him... (Morrison, 162).
So, the tale winds down. Pecola is driven into madness by her father and Soaphead Church, who deceives her into thinking she has blue eyes. Morrison then delivers the final blow to the reader, another ending this time, and while this one is not quite as shocking as the beginning of the novel, is still tragic in and of itself:
A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment...The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down...she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly (Morrison, 204).
Pecola's mind is split in two. She converses with herself, tries to rationalize with what happened to her (being raped by her dad, and later, by her brother, Sammy), and what she believes actually happened. She blocks out the rapes as best she can and only wants to talk about the blue eyes she thinks she has. She is broken, used, pitiable. Ms. Morrison wants to make it plain to the readers that loathing and hating yourself and others only leads to disaster.
Another thing that leads to disaster, is the “Quiet as its kept” (Morrison, 6). Children are beaten, raped, molested, and ignored. When the entire town turns a blind eye to the evil in their community, Morrison seems to be condemning them, as well. Had the community communicated with their children, had they cared enough to stand up to the adults who were ruining the children, how different Pecola's, and other kid's, lives would have been.
By structuring the novel around children, with adults on the periphery, Morrison delves deep into the psyche of the young mind, of how adults can ruin the lives of the innocent, and how evil and sadistic adults can be to the most vulnerable of our society. By beginning at the end, divulging a secret right away, and cycling the seasons, the reader is forced to confront some ugly truths about their own lives and the lives of those around them as time passes by.
Works Cited
Ledbetter, Mark. "Through the Eyes of a Child: Looking for Victims in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Literature and Theology at Century's End. Ed. Gregory Salyer and Robert Detweiler. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1995. 177-188. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 173. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2012.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.
Rosenberg, Ruth. "Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye." MELUS 21.4 (Winter 1987): 435-445. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 173. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
At the outset, Morrison deceives the reader that this is a pleasant children's book:
Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy (Morrison, 3).
Most adults remember first learning to read with the Dick and Jane books. Children today still read them. The books present a perfect world: everyone is happy, everyone is healthy. Not one problem is present in their lives. These were nice, clean, upstanding white people. Ms. Morrison then speeds up the Dick and Jane narrative, until the words become menacing, a hysterical recitation by a crazy person.
If there was any doubt that this is not a book for children, it is quickly wiped away in the next few pages:
Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow (Morrison, 7).
This is a sentence that grabs readers by the throat. Ms. Morrison is telling her readers, warning them, actually, that this is about as far from a child's book as possible. Clearly, Pecola is not living the Dick and Jane life. Ms. Morrison has given away the ending at the beginning, telling the readers what happened right away.
Ms. Morrison structures the novel from the end to the beginning: readers know what happened to Pecola, now they have to finish the book to find out the why and how. This is a clever way to
set up a novel. Many authors try to save the twist, the shocker, for the end. By putting it at the beginning, Ms. Morrison takes out the shock value.
By doing it this way, going from end to beginning, readers are able to focus more on the story itself. It also allows a terrible secret to be told, out in the open, for anyone to hear. The novel itself is told through the rotating narratives of children, adults, and the children who have now grown to be adults themselves. By proclaiming in a child's voice, that Pecola was going to have a baby by her dad, it makes the novel all that more tragic. It also, perhaps, softens the blow of that announcement; rather than saying “Pecola was raped by her own dad”.
Children are also less aware of specific dates and times. Children don't typically say “Today is September the first”, they usually say, “It was Monday, it was spring...” Ms. Morrison uses that language to help readers grasp the passage of time inside the novel, and to make the voices of the children that more authentic. This compounds the tragedy of the narrative: not only did this rape happen to a child, but the children are left to sort it all out within their own minds.
Sadly, responsible, caring adults are few and far between. Through the children's voices, readers are made aware of the fact that the adults are simply not discussing with their children what was going on. This could be due, in large part, to the time period the novel is set in; in 1941, matters such as sex, rape, and violence were not discussed with children. These are topics that the adults gossip amongst themselves about, hence the “quiet as its kept” phrase, which left the children to flounder through and make sense of on their own.
Ms. Morrison had specific reasons for using that phrase. In the afterword portion of The Bluest Eye, she states:
First, it was a familiar phrase, familiar to me as a child listening to adults....gossip...It is a secret between us and a secret that is being kept from us....In some sense it was precisely what the act of writing the book was: the public exposure of a private confidence (Morrison, 214).
Throughout the novel, most adults are seen as people who let children down. The children view the parents less as caring individuals and more as drill sergeants: the children are to do as their told, no questions asked. Asking a question or adding a comment to a conversation was grounds for the kids to be beaten. As Ruth Rosenberg, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Orleans states in her essay, Black Girlhood in the Bluest Eye:
The child's intense curiosity is not responded to verbally. Adults demand deference and fend off questions. They maintain a social distance between themselves and their children through non-r eciprocal conversations. [The main narrator], Claudia says, “Adults do not talk to us-they give us directions (Rosenberg,7).
When Pecola's pregnancy becomes obvious to the adults in her community, it is yet another thing that the adults refuse to discuss with the kids. They also do a grave injustice to Pecola, in that, rather than grabbing her father, Cholly, and killing or arresting him, the town just sits back and gossips about it, and the children are left to piece the story together of what happened.
Soaphead Church is a different type of adult. Rather than ignore children, he molests them . Equally evil as Cholly, if not more so, Soaphead preys on young girls. He feels he is acting innocent with them, when in reality he is molesting them. Ms. Morrison explains in the novel that he is nicknamed Soaphead because of how he styles his hair, when in all actuality, he believes he is a “clean”-minded man without sin. It is interesting to note that, while Soaphead views himself as a righteous, religious man, his soul is as dirty and sinful as they come.
The only adults that treat children well in the story are three whores: China, Poland, and Miss Marie. To them, the children are not a nuisance. They are welcomed in the whores' home, not only welcomed, but spoken to directly. Pecola, in particular, is close to the women, and they are the only adults who are truly nice to her.
Ms. Morrison structures the adults in the most shocking ways possible. Where the reader might assume that the whores are terrible people, and Soaphead Church is righteous, Ms. Morrison turns reader's expectations completely around. Soaphead is one of the most vile characters in the novel, yet the whores are actually the nicest, most well-adjusted people in there. By having the whores included in the story, Ms. Morrison provides Pecola with a stable home, the only stable home she will ever know.
While the adults are busy ignoring or hurting the kids, time is passing. Ms. Morrison has done another structure format in the novel: dividing the chapters into seasons. By doing this, the reader is made aware of the passage of time, and how Pecola and her two friends, Claudia and Frieda, deal with children and adult issues as they grow and change, as well. One example of this happens in Autumn, at the beginning of the book:
Then we both looked where Pecola was staring. Blood was running down her legs....A brownish-red stain discolored the back of her dress. She kept whinnying, standing with her legs far apart. Frieda said, “Oh. Lordy! I know. I know what that is!”..... “That's ministratin'” ( Morrison, 27).
It is a watershed moment in the book, a pivotal scene with Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda. The reader assumes that Frieda must have heard women talking amongst themselves, and, like everything else, the kids are forced to decipher the cryptic secrets the women are going on about. While Pecola is terrified, and Claudia stands there confused, Frieda remembers back to overheard conversations and tries to help the poor girl.
Ms. Morrison also uses this moment as a foreshadowing one, by having Pecola ask, still fearful of what occurred, if she is capable of becoming pregnant. Frieda lets her know, that, yes, Pecola can become pregnant. Now not only are the cycles of the seasons a part of the book, but so are Pecola's cycles of menstruation.
Mark Ledbetter wrote a critical essay on The Bluest Eye, and explains how the seasons themselves connect the story to form a whole:
The narrative is divided into chapters by the names of the four seasons, beginning with Autumn, an odd beginning for most of us, a sort of “in-the-middle” existence, but which seems appropriate for the life of the victim. The victim-less text would begin with Spring, a time of rebirth and new beginnings. The language within each chapter of the text violates the season which names it (Ledbetter, 15).
He goes on to correlate how three of the seasons deal with hatred and death, with the culmination of the death of Pecola's baby and the destruction of Pecola herself.
Another portion of the novel that alludes to cycles are the planting of marigolds. Ms. Morrison opens and closes the novel with the flowers. When Claudia and her sister plant the marigold seeds, they are excited and hopeful for the flowers. But when their seeds do not sprout, and the baby Pecola is carrying dies, the girls equate both as one and the same. Their childish minds cannot separate the two events.
Claudia and Frieda fight over why the seeds did not germinate, the earth was bad, the seeds were planted deeper into the earth than they needed to be. Ms. Morrison structures the seeds and flowers into the novel to draw parallels between Pecola and the marigolds. Menstruation and puberty is frequently referred to as “blossoming” or “flowering” into a young woman. The children understand that if you plant the seeds, something should grow. They are smart enough to contextualize that, since Cholly had “planted” his own “seed” into Pecola, that she would bear a flower herself.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on the reader's perspective, while a seed is planted, it does not necessarily mean something will grow from it. Pecola was very young, eleven years old, and had only been menstruating a few months when Cholly raped her. Her body was simply not matured enough to carry a child. Also, when Cholly raped her, he did a lot of damage to her internally. Just because a seed is planted, does not mean it will bear fruit.
Many of the characters deal with hatred. Hatred for themselves, hatred for others. The title of the novel, The Bluest Eye, refers to Pecola's wishing she had blue eyes, like the popular Shirley Temple. Ms. Morrison makes sure that readers know Pecola and her family are ugly. Much of the book deals not only with racism between blacks and whites, but racism of blacks towards other blacks.
Pecola is too black for the black people in her town. Not only do the adults adore lighter skin (Pecola's mom likes to go to the movies to watch white actors), but they pass this belief onto their children, as well. Frieda and Pecola love Shirley Temple. Claudia is always given a blue-eyed doll for Christmas.
Claudia, however, is different from Pecola and Frieda. She can't understand what all of the fuss is about with the white people and dolls. She finds nothing to like about the whites and the dolls, and takes her hatred and frustration out on the dolls by tearing them apart. Pecola is the opposite, and decides that, for her, everything would be easier, better, if she was white, particularly if she had blue eyes.
For Pecola, she grew obsessed with having blue eyes. To her, it was the epitome of being white, a sign that, for all of the people who called her ugly, if she had blue eyes, everyone would find her beautiful. Towards the end of the novel, her mind breaks because of what Cholly did to her, and part of her believes that she does, in fact, finally have the blue eyes she always wanted, the blue eyes that would make everyone love her and want to be around her.
Speaking of self-hatred, Cholly has a good dose of that going on, himself. His own mother dumped him by the railroad when he was only a few days old. His great aunt saw what happened, though, and brought him back to her place. The mother took off, and his father was unknown, and while his aunt took care of him, she didn't seem to really care about him. As if this wasn't enough to make him hate, his first time having sex broke something inside of him.
Lots of people remember their first time having sex as something embarrassing, awkward, or memorable. For Cholly, it was a memorable event, but in a sick, twisted way, as white men came upon
Cholly and his girl and they forced him to continue having sex. This is a moment that is etched onto Cholly's mind, the sex and the violence intertwined. Ms. Morrison uses this scene to humanize Cholly, because by structuring the novel from end to beginning, most of what the reader learns of Cholly is all negative.
Here, Ms. Morrison does not appear to be glorifying rape and incest, but wants her audience to realize that even monsters can have a shred of humanity. Or, at the very least, that human beings only become monsters after society breaks them down. Even when Cholly is raping his daughter, he is conflicted with himself. On one hand, he wants to rape her, is glad he is raping her, but there is another part of his mind that tells him what he is doing is wrong. Cholly is drunk when the rape happens, and confuses himself as to whether he is having sex with his wife or his daughter.
This is another unique structure to the novel that is worth pointing out. Usually, when a rape scene occurs in a novel, it is told from the victim's point of view. This time, Ms. Morrison decided to tell it from Cholly's point of view:
The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. His revulsion was a reaction to her young, helpless, hopeless presence.....The timid, tucked-in look of the scratching toe-that was what Pauline was doing the first time he saw her in Kentucky....The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him... (Morrison, 162).
So, the tale winds down. Pecola is driven into madness by her father and Soaphead Church, who deceives her into thinking she has blue eyes. Morrison then delivers the final blow to the reader, another ending this time, and while this one is not quite as shocking as the beginning of the novel, is still tragic in and of itself:
A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment...The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down...she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly (Morrison, 204).
Pecola's mind is split in two. She converses with herself, tries to rationalize with what happened to her (being raped by her dad, and later, by her brother, Sammy), and what she believes actually happened. She blocks out the rapes as best she can and only wants to talk about the blue eyes she thinks she has. She is broken, used, pitiable. Ms. Morrison wants to make it plain to the readers that loathing and hating yourself and others only leads to disaster.
Another thing that leads to disaster, is the “Quiet as its kept” (Morrison, 6). Children are beaten, raped, molested, and ignored. When the entire town turns a blind eye to the evil in their community, Morrison seems to be condemning them, as well. Had the community communicated with their children, had they cared enough to stand up to the adults who were ruining the children, how different Pecola's, and other kid's, lives would have been.
By structuring the novel around children, with adults on the periphery, Morrison delves deep into the psyche of the young mind, of how adults can ruin the lives of the innocent, and how evil and sadistic adults can be to the most vulnerable of our society. By beginning at the end, divulging a secret right away, and cycling the seasons, the reader is forced to confront some ugly truths about their own lives and the lives of those around them as time passes by.
Works Cited
Ledbetter, Mark. "Through the Eyes of a Child: Looking for Victims in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Literature and Theology at Century's End. Ed. Gregory Salyer and Robert Detweiler. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1995. 177-188. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 173. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2012.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.
Rosenberg, Ruth. "Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye." MELUS 21.4 (Winter 1987): 435-445. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 173. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
Reflective Essay on Diversity in American Literature
_This
class was a wonderful opportunity to finally be able to engage in
adult conversations and discuss adult topics. This is my fourth
semester at college, and I always felt frustrated that instructors
always chose to skirt around controversial subjects in order not to
offend anyone. The title of the course, Diversity in
American Literature, truly was
diverse. At the very beginning of the semester, Ms. Hull warned the
entire class that this was an adult course, one that was to be taken
seriously, and if students were going to be offended by different
topics throughout the semester, then the student should remove
him/herself from the class.
During the course of the semester, we covered, to name a few: African American authors, Jewish authors, feminist authors, and more. I was able to connect this class with another class I took this semester, Critical Introduction to Literature. Some of the stories we read in one class, we read in another, and by the end of the semester, I am very clear on what constitutes a short story, poetry, drama, novel and essay. A short story is a story that is shorter than a novel. Poetry is any type of verse, drama is a serious tale, and can be in play form, as well, a novel is a book that is longer than a short story, and an essay is a paper that a student writes to compare, contrast, analyze, and discuss different topics.
I am now able to think more critically and deeply about the texts I read, and extract other meanings from the works other than the surface meaning. I am also able to cite sources correctly, use better research sources, and better identify different genres of literature. I have realized that I am a feminist, as taking this course and another one, Diverse Women Writers, has opened my eyes to how oppressed the female gender has been for centuries.
One thing that has not changed, though, is my religious viewpoint. I am still firmly Wiccan, and reading about diverse Christian religions did not change that. However, I do find myself more sympathetic to people of other races, classes, cultural background, etc. Even within the class itself, it was a mixture of people of different genders, races, etc. which helped broaden my view further.
As for my writing this semester, Ms. Hull is a tough but fair grader. She helped me to stretch my writing out further than it had been before. The essays in her class were few but powerful. After I received my first essay back, I realized I needed to be much tougher on myself and really dig into whatever topic she assigned me. I found myself thinking, “Would Ms. Hull find this a valid point? Is my thesis clear enough?”
These are questions I have worried myself over on my final essay. The final essay is also the final copy of it. There is no time to turn it in in rough draft form, have it graded, get it back, revise it, and resubmit it, so I hope I have lived up to her standards. After turning in rough drafts for my other papers, it is nerve-wracking to only have one shot at the last essay of the semester.
For the final essay, I chose to do a critical essay on Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Ms. Hull also gave me the option of analyzing a novel called Bread Givers,but I found the novel boring and frustrating. I had read The Bluest Eye before, so I was familiar with the text, and found myself more invested in Morrison's characters, so I did her novel instead. It was a difficult paper to write, but I hope I did the novel justice.
The most influential aspect of Diversity in American Literature was my instructor, Ms. Hull. It was obvious that she cared about the subject she was teaching, and the students themselves. Ms. Hull was kind, gracious, and really asked in-depth questions of everything that was read over the semester in order to help her students think more critically, and also help them to write critical essays. It was an enjoyable class, and if I had to take another course from Ms. Hull, I would.
During the course of the semester, we covered, to name a few: African American authors, Jewish authors, feminist authors, and more. I was able to connect this class with another class I took this semester, Critical Introduction to Literature. Some of the stories we read in one class, we read in another, and by the end of the semester, I am very clear on what constitutes a short story, poetry, drama, novel and essay. A short story is a story that is shorter than a novel. Poetry is any type of verse, drama is a serious tale, and can be in play form, as well, a novel is a book that is longer than a short story, and an essay is a paper that a student writes to compare, contrast, analyze, and discuss different topics.
I am now able to think more critically and deeply about the texts I read, and extract other meanings from the works other than the surface meaning. I am also able to cite sources correctly, use better research sources, and better identify different genres of literature. I have realized that I am a feminist, as taking this course and another one, Diverse Women Writers, has opened my eyes to how oppressed the female gender has been for centuries.
One thing that has not changed, though, is my religious viewpoint. I am still firmly Wiccan, and reading about diverse Christian religions did not change that. However, I do find myself more sympathetic to people of other races, classes, cultural background, etc. Even within the class itself, it was a mixture of people of different genders, races, etc. which helped broaden my view further.
As for my writing this semester, Ms. Hull is a tough but fair grader. She helped me to stretch my writing out further than it had been before. The essays in her class were few but powerful. After I received my first essay back, I realized I needed to be much tougher on myself and really dig into whatever topic she assigned me. I found myself thinking, “Would Ms. Hull find this a valid point? Is my thesis clear enough?”
These are questions I have worried myself over on my final essay. The final essay is also the final copy of it. There is no time to turn it in in rough draft form, have it graded, get it back, revise it, and resubmit it, so I hope I have lived up to her standards. After turning in rough drafts for my other papers, it is nerve-wracking to only have one shot at the last essay of the semester.
For the final essay, I chose to do a critical essay on Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Ms. Hull also gave me the option of analyzing a novel called Bread Givers,but I found the novel boring and frustrating. I had read The Bluest Eye before, so I was familiar with the text, and found myself more invested in Morrison's characters, so I did her novel instead. It was a difficult paper to write, but I hope I did the novel justice.
The most influential aspect of Diversity in American Literature was my instructor, Ms. Hull. It was obvious that she cared about the subject she was teaching, and the students themselves. Ms. Hull was kind, gracious, and really asked in-depth questions of everything that was read over the semester in order to help her students think more critically, and also help them to write critical essays. It was an enjoyable class, and if I had to take another course from Ms. Hull, I would.