The Bluest Eye

¶ … Bluest Eye -- and the Saddest Story of Pecola Breedlove

The heroine, Pecola Breedlove, of Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye grows up in a culture where beauty is equated with whiteness. There is no cultural space, at least not in the mass, American culture that has infiltrated the African-American community in which the young girl is growing up, where beauty and blackness can ever be conjoined. Pecola grows up watching the great African-American entertainer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson dancing with the white, blonde Shirley Temple on the silver screen of cinema fantasy, not a little girl of her complexion, although it is the same color and complexion as Bill's own face. Shirley's face adorns Pecola's cup of milk. When Pecola buys candy, a white, blue-eyed Mary Jane stares at her on the wrapper. Even the most socially desirable students in Pecola's all-black school have the lightest complexions, like the (relatively) wealthy and privileged Maureen Peal. Is there any wonder that Pecola longs for blue eyes, and desires to embody such a positive cultural image of whiteness, rather than the negative cultural images of blackness that are even upheld by her fellow African-Americans?

Thus, the irony of Pecola's last name is that she feels no love for herself, and by the end of the novel, she can no longer have children. She is raped, but her child is stillborn, demonstrating how the penetration of white culture within her psychological esteem is not fruitful. Her father, whose esteem is also bruised and battered by white culture, turns this sense of self-hatred against his daughter. Thus Pecola, just like all of Morrison's other major female characters in The Bluest Eye has her emerging, young sense of identity infiltrated by a black-hating, women-hating American culture in a way that permanently damages her ability to reproduce her own culture.

Morrison's novel "as a whole" is a documentary of cultural invasion "and its concomitant erasure of specific local bodies, histories, and cultural productions -- in terms of sexuality as [well as how] it intersects with commodity culture." (Kuenz, 2006) The traditional community of the novel where Pecola dwells, such as the culture of the prostitutes living nearby who have a fairly secure sense of their positive identity as Black women, has now been eradicated by oppressive, American cultural forces that equate whiteness with beauty, rather than the blackness that women see every day in the mirror. Morrison has described her own project as a novelist as the process of revealing what blacks do with "each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization." (Moses, 1999, p.1, citing Morrison, "Language" 371).

Prizes like candy and Shirley Temple cups replace a developing girl's sense of self in a mirror that flashes back an image of what the girl feels is true beauty. Instead of her own people, mass white culture and commodity capitalism teaches Pecola to dislike herself, and also, in an even more damming lie, that she can buy blue eyes, whiteness, happiness, just as she attempts to drink herself happy from a Shirley Temple cup at the beginning of the novel. This parallels how her father attempts to drink himself into happiness with alcoholism, as alcoholism, Morrison suggests by association, is another, similar form of using an external object to create a sense of internal happiness.

The pervasiveness of commodity culture is even within the school system, which teaches Black children, how to read with White images. For example, the grade school reader that prefaces the text was a presence in schools across the country. Its widespread use made learning the pleasures of Dick and Jane's commodified life dangerously synonymous with learning itself. The words of a primary school reader meet the reader's eyes even before he or she meets the main characters. Dick and Jane's "placement first in the novel makes it the pretext for what is presented after: As the seeming given of contemporary life, it stands as the only visible model for happiness and thus implicitly accuses those whose lives do not match up." (Kuenz, 2006)

Furthermore, a white child, critic Jane Kuenz argues, can at least aspire to embody the image and the life of Dick and Jane, even if the white child is poor. But a black girl can never hope to embody the purity, happiness, and wealth encompassed in the figure of Jane, no matter how hard she tries. Pecola is an optimist, so she hopes that by having blue eyes like a white girl, she at least as a chance to become the image of American joy. But this apparent optimism is shown to be less effective than rage. Pecola does not rage that Bill Robinson does not dance with her; she instead plans to become Shirley, thus agreeing with a culture that hates her, as to what constitutes beauty. "The effort required to do this [become white] and the damaging results of it are illustrated typographically in the repetition of the Dick-and-Jane story first without punctuation or capitalization, and then without punctuation, capitalization, or spacing." (Kuenz, 2006)

Pecola's fantasy is not entirely delusional, or at very least, it might be regarded as a kind of mass delusion, rather than a particular fantasy of this poor girl. Viewed in context, it is no more delusional than the American dream of infinite possibility and social mobility. Furthermore, it makes ample use of what Juda Bennett calls "the passing narrative," or the cultural myth of the Black American, by virtue of being born with a fair complexion, who can pass for white. Pecola is not literally able to pass for white; she is only able to pass in her own mind. But by featuring "a dark-skinned child who cannot possibly pass for white," Morrison suggests that passing is not merely about biology. Passing also indicates a change in the subject's psychology. Passing is about the fantasy of becoming a blue-eyed Shirley Temple on the part of all blacks, and the cultural availability of the passing narrative has changed Pecola on the inside, even if she is still dark on the outside. "Although some might consider Pecola's delusion a weak or perhaps specious representation of passing for white, The Bluest Eye artfully reinforces its interest in racial passing by alluding to Peola, the passing figure in 'Imitation of Life,'" which was a popular movie about a young Black woman able to pass for a White woman. (Bennett, 2006) "This intertextual play effectively evokes the myth without actually representing the phenomenon of passing, and in this way Morrison decenters and deforms the traditional passing figure.... although Pecola hardly meets the physical qualifications of light skin and 'good' hair, she does possess the key emotional characteristics: a desire for white privilege and an increasing disassociation from the black community. Ensuring that we do not miss her point -- that Pecola is a passing figure despite her inability to pass for white -- Morrison introduces 'a high-yellow dream child' named Maureen Peal." (Bennett, 2006)

The other women of the community adore Maureen, even if her personality is not particularly adorable to the other children. Significantly, it is the light-skinned Maureen who reveals Pecola's connection with the traditional passing figure, Peola, when she says, "wasn't that the name of the girl in 'Imitation of Life?'" (Bennett, 2006) Maureen herself is white enough to pass, and she too takes delight in assuming the privileges of white existence, even though she is labeled as black. She styles herself in her physical image upon white images of beauty, and of course her affection for "Imitation of Life" is significant as well.