The book starts with a rhythmic, repetitive, almost chanting text about the perfect American family and their lifestyle. Investigation reveals it is taken from a first grade primer used in the 1940s to teach both black and white children to read. Even without this information, the prose itself has a haunting quality. It’s clearly criticising the white, middle class conception of the American dream and its exclusivist definitions of beauty and happiness. The text is repeated three times. Each time the spacing and the punctuation become closer and closer until there is nothing separating the letters, the words and the sentences. I wasn’t sure about this technique but it definitely has the effect of a crescendo of claustrophobia and anxiety as the rules and structures of the text fall further apart with every repetition. Perhaps it is also an attempt by the author to take this primer, a white document handed down to black people by white masters, and turn it into something identifiably African-American thus overturning white hegemony over the written word. Throughout the text, the lines of this text form a substructure of chapters, beneath the four seasons that constitute the primary layout; referring to the character that will be discussed or feature in the next section. Stylistically, the author also uses italics quite liberally throughout the book. Usually these are used to denote colloquial dialect or recollection by the book’s black cast of characters and may be another device to highlight the African-American status of this book.
When I first finished the book, the contents felt fragmented and somewhat incoherent. First, I thought it might be traumatic nature of the described but Morrison mentions in the afterword to my edition (Vintage, paperback) that this was an intentional device to encourage the reader to piece together the fragments and, perhaps, attempt to make some sense of the incomprehensible acts therein. I went back through the text in an effort to extract the structure of the book to see if anything emerged from it. It was definitely a helpful exercise as what had felt like haphazard muddle of atrocities is transformed into an exhaustive demonstration of how badly the ‘American Dream’, described in the primer, fits with many of the experiences of black America; especially Pecola Breedlove’s. Another thing that emerged from the exercise was the centrality of Pecola’s story. In some sense, all the other stories about her mother, Pauline, and her father, Colly, serve to contextualise the central act of Colly raping Pecola.
Very broadly, Autumn establishes Pecola in the house of sisters Claudia and Frieda. Claudia is the primary narrator. Pecola’s there because her father is in jail. Following this, we encounter sections using fragments from the introduction. For instance, “HEREISAHOUSE…”, which is followed by a description of the Breedlove’s house. Here a sofa, purchased on an exorbitant monthly payment scheme, is delivered broken and the recipients are told ‘tough shit’ (pp26-7). This excited feelings of hatred and anger in me. Hatred of the people subjecting me to this ignominy and unfairness if I were in their shoes. And anger that I’m powerless to do anything about it, a second class, silent citizen with no voice and no clout. Next, “HEREISAFAMILY…”, which describes the intense domestic violence that takes place within the family. Pecola lies in bed wishing she would disappear and it’s tragic and devastating scene. The section when she hopes for more blue eyes, white people’s eyes, beautiful eyes so that, perhaps, such ugly things won’t happen in front of them is heart wrenching and poignant (pp33-4). Identifying the eyes are the primary sensory experience reminded me of Dostoevsky too. Pecola also has her first period, which the sisters try to help her with in the bushes. They’re discovered by a neighbour’s daughter, who raises the alarm, and they receive a beating from the girl's’ mother for ‘playing nasty’ before the misunderstanding is discovered. She also has an awkward interaction with a white shopkeeper while purchasing sweets; illustrating the huge chasm that exists between their worlds.
Winter finds all the girls at school with a beautiful and popular new student, who I at first assumed was white before thinking that the novel is probably set in the era of school segregation. She is later revealed to be half-white but the initial ambiguity serves the author’s point well. The girls save Pecola from being bullied and then walk home with Maureen, the popular new girl, who buys Pecola some ice cream but then bullies her about seeing her father naked, which is an ominous foreshadowing of Pecola’s fate. The sisters get angry with Maureen and try to beat her up but she runs away. Then there was have story about a well-to-do black family who live beside the school and whose son is only allowed to play with white kids. He resents it and begins to hate his mother but is too afraid and powerless to take it out on her, a theme repeated often in the book, and so does so with her beloved cat. In this section, entitled “SEETHECATITGOES…”, the son lures Pecola indoors before throwing the cat in her face and then almost killing it by throwing it against a wall. The son blames Pecola when the mother returns, who agrees with her son, and abuses Pecola her while she is tender towards the cat. The boy abuses both the cat and Pecola to make himself feel more powerful in the face of his impotence before his mother.
Spring brings the first of three examples of black men abusing young black girls. Frieda has her breasts pinched by the family’s lodger while everyone is out. She tells her mother and father and the lodger is beaten up and thrown out of the house. Frieda frets she will be ‘ruined’, like one of the prostitutes who is fat, and equates the two words. Claudia says the two other prostitutes aren’t fat because they drink whisky so they go in search of Pecola as her Dad is an infamous drunk who might have some liquor. Pecola is not at home and is collecting laundry from the house where her mother works so the girls go on there. The girls wait in the kitchen where Pecola’s Mum works, they marvel at all the luxuries and admire a pie “Polly” has just made. Pecola accidentally smashes it on the floor and gets beaten by her Mum who then mollycoddles her employer's child who is frightened by all the noise and the black children. She asks who they were and Polly won’t say, either ashamed or reluctant. We begin to see Pecola as rejected, dismissed and despised by all around her. For me, it recalled one of the first things Pecola says in the book: After her first period, the girls discuss its significance for pregnancy and how one becomes pregnant. Frieda says you have to get someone to love you before, heartrendingly, “Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind. “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” (p9)
Next, we hear her mother’s story in a section entitled “SEEMOTHERMOTHERISVERYNICE…” which is powerful coming directly after such a devastating display of indifference towards her child. Pauline’s life is one of hardship, living in a large, poor family in the countryside. The story (pp86-102) is rich, evocative and covers a huge expanse of personal and societal material despite it’s brevity. The contrasts experienced by Pauline as she moves from child to adult, countryside to town, Kentucky to Ohio, housewife to worker, childless to mother are sketched so powerfully using so few words. When she moves to Kentucky she meets Colly and marries him before moving to Ohio. In Ohio, she is lonely and looked down on by the white people and the other black people there as she is uncultured. She begins to fight with her husband and turns to clothes, makeup and the cinema to console her. After having children, she finally finds acceptance at the church where she channels her pain into becoming excessively moral and somewhat revels in the burden of her drunk, violent and slovenly husband. The children are treated to exceptionally harsh punishment for any perceived indiscretions. We watch as she becomes understandably disillusioned by her lot and takes refuge in the luxuries of the white people's house she works in (pp99-100) although Morrison clearly wants to show the damage this rejection of herself and her family will do to her own children's’ development shown in the previous incident of the smashed pie (pp84-5). Then there is her father’s story, “SEEFATHERHEISBIGANDSTRONG…”, which can be heartbreakingly summarised by this quotation, “Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him” (p126). After he was abandoned by his mother he was raised by his Great Aunt who then died. At the funeral, he goes off to the woods with a girl and loses his virginity but is discovered by two white hunters who humiliate him. Colly can only hate Darlene, the girl he is with, and not the hunters who embarrassed them because, ‘hating them would have consumed him’ (p118). His subsequent paranoia about Darlene being pregnant and the formation of a plan to run away to Macon, like his father, to find the man who had abandoned him and seek his understanding completes the tragedy. The fact that the white men are simply too powerful and overbearing to hate seems, to me, to be one of the primary explanations offered for the inexplicable, incomprehensibly destructive rape he perpetrates on his daughter at the end of this section. Spring finishes with Pecola visiting a sort of fake pastor, himself suffering from the effects of perceived racial superiority, where she asks him to change her eyes to blue ones. He tells her if she gives his landlady’s dog some food then she might get blue eyes. However, he hates the dog so the food is laced with poison. She does so and the dog dies. The fake pastor sits down to write a letter to God attempting to justifying his paedophilia with young black girls, which is one of the strangest and, to me, most extraneous parts of the book.
Summer shows the two girls, Claudia and Frieda, selling seeds door to door to make some money. On their rounds they hear people gossiping that Pecola is pregnant with her father’s child and are amazed that no one shows any pity towards her. They bury the money they have made and the seeds they’ve yet to sell in an attempt to help Pecola and her unborn baby. Last, we have a strange, other worldly and quite incoherent conversation between Pecola and an unnamed friend. I feel like it represents her descent into madness and this is how we find her at the end of the book; wandering around the neighbourhood picking at the rubbish with birdlike gestures.
Analysing the text with a focus on the structure showed me how Pecola is rejected by every constituent part of the American dream. These foundations, which are supposed to support the structure of her life, fail her and crumble beneath her causing her insanity; presumably because her own world is too cruel and incomprehensible to bear. Her house is a nightmare of domestic violence and poverty. Her mother and father both reject and abuse her. Even normally happy objects of pleasure, like cats and dogs, turn out to heap yet more misery on poor, young Pecola. In this sense, the book became more powerful and meaningful for me after looking at it for a second time in this way.
Something that is immediately apparent and does not require any further analysis is the quality of Morrison’s prose. The first section that struck me was the description of Claudia and Frieda’s mother holding a conversation with a friend while they do the laundry in the back yard:
“Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly” p9
It’s evocative and enhances the dialogue that has preceded it with its inventive and original similes and metaphors; with the possible exception of a conversation described as a dance, which is quite commonplace. Yet more impressive to me was a section describing young men hanging out on the street and smoking. While one might expect the author to be intimate with the feel of female conversation, her ability to penetrate the feeling and ambience of teenage boys is a little more unexpected but what she writes transported me back to similar experiences in my own life; or was so evocative it made me invent the memory! She writes:
“These young boys met there to feel their groins, smoke cigarettes, and plan mild outrages. The smoke from their cigarettes they inhaled deeply, forcing it to fill their lungs, their hearts, their thighs, and keep at bay the shiveriness, the energy of their youth.” p24
The aspects of the book I didn’t like were far fewer than those that I enjoyed. The misery is totally unrelenting and sometimes I felt it could be leavened by some warmer or more humorous interludes to better replicate the experience of life. There are a couple of examples of this, for instance the warm chatter between the ladies doing the laundry quoted above. Another would be the worldly and entertaining chatter between the prostitutes that live above Pecola. The wonderful trio of prostitutes (pp38-44) are warm, vivacious and reaffirming. The enjoyment and camaraderie contained in both conversations shows an aspect of life that cannot be devastated and cheated by circumstance. It gives a meaning to some of the suffering and saves it from becoming a meaningless abyss. Claudia and Frieda’s acts of kindness fall in a similar category but struck me as far less convincing, which I’ll discuss in the next paragraph. An example of what I’m talking about could be the film Manchester By The Sea (2016) where terrible tragedy is mixed with the inevitable comedy of day-to-day life. In a way, I thought the book would probably have benefited from a bit more of this but perhaps it would’ve reduced the overall effect. The author is clearly aware of the nature of the book, saying in the afterword to my edition that it is, “a terrible story about things one would rather know anything about” p170.
Another criticism I have is the terrible portrayal of men in the book. There are exactly zero positive male characters in the entire book! All of them are paedophiles with the exception of Claudia and Frieda’s father. However, this one hope for a positive male figure in the book plays a very minor role. While he appears to have a job and remain faithful to the girls’ mother, at least to the extent of remaining in the household, his only part in the narrative is to beat up the lodger who squeezed Frieda’s breasts. Even the boys are horrible and cruel, bullying Pecola and using her to take the blame as Junior does. As such, I feel like this book displays an unfairly negative view of men in general. In fairness, some of the women aren’t much better but all of the good, kind or altruistic acts are carried out by women.
Claudia, and to a lesser extent Frieda, conduct most of the acts of kindness in the book. Indeed, Claudia is close to being portrayed as a kind of saint throughout the novel. Despite her age, she is not enthrall to the image and values of white culture as almost everyone around her is. She destroys her white dolls earlier in her childhood as a demonstration of that. However, if American culture is totally saturated with ideas of white supremacy and superiority, as the rest of the novel suggests, how has a child managed to free herself from these norms? I felt the author writes Claudia’s character almost like a superheroine. She rejects what everyone else in society believes at an almost impossibly young age seemingly through some innate ability. She saves Pecola from bullies at school and defends her from Maureen’s sharp questions at the ice cream shop. Then they bury their money and seeds for her in an act of extreme, albeit ineffectual, altruism. Her character is almost too good to be true and I felt it distracted from Pecola’s story, which is the one with the real value contained in it. I found little of interest in the description of the improbable adolescent superwoman that Claudia is portrayed as and I wondered if it might be the author’s attempt to place her own views and perspectives into the story. The last lines of the afterword, “With very few exceptions, the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread. And it has taken 25 years to gain for her the respectful publication this edition is.” indicate a kind of self-importance and pride that I would associate with the creation of a heroine type character like Claudia. Of course, I can understand the author’s frustration that such a good book took such a long time to gain recognition but to equate it with Pecola’s experiences is too much for me!
This book’s basic formula appeared to me as, if you belittle and abuse people, seemingly especially men, then they will feel the need to find something else to abuse in order to restore their agency. This seems like a reasonable premise to me but I do take slight issue with the gender divide. If abuse creates abusers then why are all the victims of abuse women and all the abusers men? Pauline is arguably also an abuser but the gender divide is stark and this question goes unanswered. Pecola doesn’t want to abuse someone else, she wants a superficial trapping of white beauty; the bluest eyes. She wants to possess a property that she thinks will make people stop all the horrible things she has witnessed in her life. However, blue eyes won’t make a black girl beautiful, they’ll make her a freak as they don’t fit with the rest of her appearance. When she goes to see Elihue and asks him for blue eyes, when he abuses her by making her kill his landlady’s dog, she eventually receives the outsider’s status she seeks. However, it comes in a form commensurate with the chaos and devastation of her world and existence; people avoid her because she is too illicit rather than too beautiful. The book shows how we all look down on the weakest and most powerless around us to make ourselves feel better:
“among all the waste and beauty of the world - which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us - all who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used - to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.” p163
However, it also attempts to explain these acts of abuse and violence by placing them in their context. As the author says in the afterword, “I did not want to demonize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse” p168. The final paragraph seems, to me, to show the author’s extreme pessimism about the fate of African-Americans in America:
“This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late” p164
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