Novels in literature and contemporary culture

Morrison & Fitzgerald

Comparing and Contrasting Effects of Marital Infidelity in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

In both Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye and F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, the social norm of marital monogamy is repeatedly violated, causing both Pecola Breedlove, in The Bluest Eye, and Daisy Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby, in particular to become victims, although each in different ways. Pecola is raped and impregnated by her father. Daisy is seduced into breaking her marriage vows to Tom (who is also having an affair) by Gatsby. Both Pecola and Daisy suffer from psychological aftereffects of adultery (and, in Pecola's case, of rape and incest as well).

According to Brooks (2004), emotional effects of adultery include: "guilt, fear, anxiety, loss of self-esteem, shattered personalities, depression." Pecola and Daisy both exhibit such symptoms. I will analyze how, after the social norm of marital monogamy is violated, in The Bluest Eye by Pecola's father, and in The Great Gatsby by Gatsby and others, both Pecola and Daisy are traumatized and victimized.

The main characters in Morrison's The Bluest Eye are three girls, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer (sisters in a black family), and Pecola, the poor girl who is staying with the MacTeers because of abuse at her house. As Toni Morrison states near the beginning of the book (p. 2070), "Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt." In this novel, much that has to do with either sexuality or the lack thereof seems twisted, out of the ordinary, or turned around, which, in a symbolic way, even foreshadows Pecola's madness, the end result of much sexual and psychological abuse, at the end of the novel. The Bluest Eye is divided into seasons: Autumn; Winter; Spring, and as the first sentence of the "Autumn section, we read that "Nuns go by quiet as lust... "[emphasis added] (Morrison). As the article "Toni Morrison (18 February 1931-)" states: "Claudia, with her ten-year-old sister Frieda, befriends Pecola, the little girl who believes herself to be ugly and prays every night for blue eyes like Shirley Temple" (p. 244).

The first paragraph of The Bluest Eye (1970) begins with what seems an excerpt from a child's first or second-grade primer, with simple words widely-spaced, for slow and easy reading: "Here is the house.

It is green and white.

It has red door.

It is pretty.

Here is the family" (Morrison, p. 2068). This might be considered to be a typical or average way, for example, for a child to read such a book: slowly, deliberately, and at his or her own pace.

Soon, however, in the second paragraph of the book, the words of the previous paragraph are repeated, but this time, faster and without punctuation: "Here is the house it is green and white it has a red door it is very pretty here is the family" (p. 2069). This perhaps represents the pressure on the average black child (e.g., Claudia or Frieda) to "read" (that is, read the world) as an adult, perhaps typical of pressures on black children during Toni Morrison's own childhood. In the third paragraph, however, the words are again repeated, but this time with no space whatsoever between any of the words or letters, now rendering them incomprehensible: "Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhite ithasareddooritisveryprettyhereis thefamily" (Morrison). This version is Pecola's: that is, she has been forced to "read" (that is, interpret and understand) the world so fast, due to unwanted sexual attention from her own father, that it now makes no sense to her. The world is, in fact, from Pecola's perspective, now nothing but an incomprehensible blur.

These three versions of the same paragraph represent three distinct types of child characters: (1) the white girls (i.e., "slow readers" allowed to take their time and develop normally through childhood); (2) the black sisters Claudia and Frieda, forced to "read" (i.e., grow up) faster than white girls overall, but not as fast as Pecola; and (3) Pecola, who must "read" (grow up) so fast that nothing at all is clear. Another traumatic thing that happens early on in the book is when Pecola gets her first period. This is a normal thing, but it is traumatic for Pecola because she never heard about it at home. So Pecola thinks she is bleeding to death, and may even connect it with the violent sexual assault of which she has been a victim so early in life. Pecola's getting her period means that if she is raped again she could have a baby. Later in the book, after Pecola returns home, she is raped again by her father, gets pregnant, and later goes mad.

As "Toni Morrison (18 February 1931-)" states:

The Bluest Eye tells how tragic events happened, principally through the point-of-view of nine-year-old Claudia. Claudia with her ten-year-old sister,

Frieda, befriends Pecola, the little girl who believes herself to be ugly and so prays every night for blue eyes like Shirley Temple. (p. 244) (3 secondary)

The MacTeer girls have it better at home than Pecola, but all three girls are concerned about their looks, and how they look compared to white beauty standards. This is probably something Toni Morrison experienced herself, growing up in the 1940's in Lorraine, Ohio, as the only black girl in her first grade class. This is clear in the story when Frieda, Claudia, and Pecola go to school, where they compare their looks, clothes, shoes, socks, and hair to white girls. Early on, Claudia observes: " -- all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every child treasured (p. 2077).

All of the characters in the book face racial discrimination, and hate white culture. But some also think of white culture and white beauty standards as some sort of ideal. Therefore they hate whites but imitate them because white culture is considered good and beautiful, but black culture bad and ugly. Pecola's own self-esteem also suffers permanently from her being sexually abused by her father. As Bass and Davis (1994) remind us, and as seems true of Pecola after she is twice raped, and impregnated by her father: "All sexual abuse is damaging, and the trauma does not end when the abuse stops. If you were abused as a child, you are probably experiencing long-term effects that interfere with your day to-day functioning" (p. 24).

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby describes victimization of Daisy Buchanan, through adultery, but also shows Daisy as an adulterer. Daisy and Tom have a child who, while not prominent in the novel, cannot but be impacted. In "Fearful Attraction" (2005), Eaker-Weil discusses the psychological lure, and the dangers, of adultery:

Forbidden sex can seem to be nothing more than a delicious indulgence, like chocolate cake. In actuality this "simple pleasure" is more comparable to cocaine - addictive and potentially lethal. Everyone in the family suffers particularly the children. Potential after effects include broken, homes, shattered trust, lowered self-esteem, illegitimate pregnancies, abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, even suicide... Infidelity masks the real problems in the individual and the relationship... The epidemic of adultery poses as serious a problem to emotional health as incest or child abuse.

In The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove rapes his own daughter, committing both incest and adultery, indeed causing "everyone in the family," and "particularly the children" [Pecola, obviously, but also her brother Sammy] to suffer. This incest-rape-adultery also seems to Cholly, at the time, like a "delicious indulgence," but it clearly turns "addictive" when Cholly again rapes Pecola after she returns home from the MacTeers, this time, impregnating her.

In The Great Gatsby, similarly, the combined adultery of Tom, Daisy, Myrtle, and Gatsby results not only in violence against some of them, but also in the deaths, one accidental, the other premeditated, of Myrtle and then Gatsby. As is true of Morrison's The Bluest Eye, all of the characters suffer, in different ways, as a result of adultery.

In The Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, nouveau riche millionaire Jay Gatsby's long-sought love object and eventual partner in adultery, is married to Tom, who loves her but also takes her for granted, and who has been cheating on her with Myrtle Wilson (whom Daisy later kills, by accident, when driving Gatsby's car). Just as in Morrison's The Bluest Eye the MacTeer girls and Pecola Breedlove envy white girls at school, although they themselves can never be white, the newly rich Jay Gatsby envies the easy self-confidence of people with old money, something he (just as Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola can never be white, and Pecola can never have blue eyes) can never have. In pursuit of that elusive easy and comfortable feeling, though, Gatsby leads a decadent, essentially meaningless life, replete with elaborate parties of the sort that Daisy herself (who represents old money) finds distasteful.