Bluest Eye Mary Jane --

Bluest Eye

Mary Jane -- the Commodity of Candy and Whiteness in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye

The story of the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, tells the tale of a Black young woman named Pecola Breedlove growing up in the 1940s in a segregated rural, Southern America. The narrative of the story takes place before the civil rights movement had its impact upon the lives of the majority of Black Americans. Morrison's Black men and women of the Bluest Eye live in a world where Blacks and Whites are almost wholly separate in their lives and the levels to which they can aspire to, economically and personally. Yet Blacks are still tyrannized, despite their exclusion from a common white mass culture, with media representations of White beauty that are held to be superior to Black beauty. This affects both Black perceptions of female beauty, as they relate to men and women within the Black community, as well as negatively impacts the relationships Black men and women have with one another.

Eventually, Pecola Breedlove, the quiet central victim figure of the tale, suffers the fate being raped by her father, Cholly, an incident that is obliquely referred to at the beginning of the text, as her baby is said to have died. The narrator of the novel, named Claudia, is more spirited in her temperament than Pauline (Pecola). But the girl Claudia still suffers from the discrimination that marks her society and the poor self-image fostered by mass representations of Black female sexuality in the media. Claudia regards female maturity, especially Black female maturity, in a negative fashion, as is evidenced in her disgust for menstruation, when Pecola is revealed to have gotten the so-called curse earlier than expected.

One might argue, of course, that such revulsion is, of not natural, then expected of young women facing adulthood. But Morrison suggests that there is, in these young girl's perceptions, something of a bifurcation between their views of coming to age as a Black women and a White women. Whiteness is associated with purity and the relief from such darker (literally and figuratively) exemplifications of femininity and sexuality. Whiteness, because of mass cultural representations of White women, become idealized and stratified from the sense of self of these young girls.

Thus, even more so than discrimination because of race, sexual biases regarding appearance within the Black community, rooted in negative conceptions of Black beauty mark the fates of the young women at the center of the tale. Although named Breedlove, the name is ironic, because young girls nurtured in an atmosphere of self-hatred can possess no sense of self, much less breed self-love within their own hearts or the hearts of their babies, as evidenced in Pecola's still birth of her own self and incestuously fathered child. The title of the book the Bluest Eye, furthermore, is garnered for the world it depicts, because of the longing African-American women and girls all feel that to have blue eyes, blonde hair, and other accoutrements of White female identity -- to have the bluest eye, in their eyes, means to have power in the male dominated world of both men and women, White and Black.

Thus, the girls and women of the book long for what they can never possess -- they can never have blue eyes, nor perfectly embody the reproductions of mass White culture. Even in a wholly African-American community, the symbols and the trappings of whiteness mark even the candy wrappers the girls strive to possess. For example, at one part of the book, Pecola "has three pennies in her shoe which she has been saving to buy Mary Janes with. In the store, the owner, Mr. Yacobowski: looms up over the counter.... Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover," for this young Black girl, evidently, is not important and worthy of significance, not worthy of the economic transaction as is the girl on the wrapper, Mary Jane. Then, "at some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance.... She [Pecola] looks up at him [the owner]] and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition - the glazed separateness," that marks relationships between Blacks and Whites in the community...."Yet this vacuum is not new to her. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness.... Phlegm and impatience mingle in his voice. (Morrison 49) but Pecola endures this discomfort and rejection, not so she can establish her empowered Blackness as a consumer, but so she can purchase candy. The candy is not to satisfy her bodily, physical sexual or even stomach's appetite. Rather, it is merely so she may consumer and own, for a time Mary Jane's "Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane." (Morrison 50).

Consuming, in this capitalist world that Pecola must suffer, however unknowing, is simultaneous although not quite as good as 'being' the thing, the Whiteness one consumes -- so this passage poignantly suggests. Repeatedly through the first section of the Bluest Eye, entitled "Autumn and Winter," Pecola is seen consuming things, in a futile attempt to be 'someone,' that is to be part of a white mass culture and escape the unloving confines of her impoverished and rejecting environment. The consumption of Mary Jane and her blue eyes recalls another early passage of the novel where Pecola commits the small childish crime, which is quite economically significant in the cash-strapped Breedlove household, of consuming all of the milk in the refrigerator. Pecola does so, however, not out of hunger, but because she adores the sight of Shirley Temple on the Shirley Temple milk cup.

Thus, Pecola's hunger is never expressed in terms of her bodily needs and desires. Rather, the expression of her hunger is expressed in the consumption of the consumer goods of the world around her, goods that do not reflect the girl's real physical needs and true appetites. Beside her in her bed at night, the narrator Claudia seethes not only at her sister's crime of drinking all of the milk, but at Shirley Temple herself. Claudia resents Shirley's ability to dance on the screen with a Black man, Mr. Bill Robinson, yet represent all of the privileges of whiteness as well as have his comforting, fatherly Blackness so lacking in the real world of the Breedlove household.

Morrison wrote her novel in 1970, but the divide between the real and the false worlds of life and film is sharply expressed in terms of identity, that still resonates today. The lack of affection these Black girls receive from the depressed and impoverished parents of their world, in contrast to Shirley Temple on the screen, makes their envy of the White girl's beauty doubly poignant, and also highlights that what individuals expect from mass culture -- either to be a part of it through mimicking it, like Pecola, or wishing to insert one's self in Shirley's place like Claudia -- does not satisfy the real appetite for identity such longing expresses. Rather than smothering one's hunger in consumption, one must seek satisfaction from more culturally validating images.