The Bluest Eye

(Questions)

1. Discuss the narrative structure of the novel. Why might Morrison have chosen to present the events in a non-chronological way?

2. Write an essay in which you discuss Morrison’s juxtaposing the primer’s Mother-Father-Dick-Jane sections with Claudia’s and the omniscient narrator’s sections. What is the relationship between these three differing narrative voices?

3. Discuss the significance of no marigolds blooming in the fall of 1941.

4. Compare Pecola’s character to Claudia’s. Which of these two characters is better able to reject white, middle-class America’s definitions of beauty? Support your answer with examples from the text.

5. Discuss the symbolism associated with Shirley Temple in the novel. What does she represent to Pecola? What might she represent to Maureen Peal?

6. Discuss Cholly’s dysfunctional childhood. What is his definition of what a family should be? Does knowing about his upbringing affect your reactions when he rapes Pecola? Why or why not?

7. How does Morrison present gender relations in the novel? Are men and women’s relationships generally portrayed positively or negatively? Support your answer with examples from the text.

8. Write an essay in which you compare Louis Junior’s and Soaphead Church’s treatments of Pecola. Is she treated worse by one of these characters than the other? If so, which one, and why? Is it significant that each relationship involves animals?

9. Discuss the mother-daughter relationships in the novel.

10. Does Morrison present any positive role models for Pecola and other girls like her? How might Morrison define what beauty is? Does she present any examples of such beauty in the novel?

11. Write an essay in which you discuss Pecola’s dream of happiness and Langston Hughes’ poem “Dream Deferred.” Is Pecola’s wanting the bluest eyes a “dream deferred”? Discuss Pecola’s dream in terms of its worth, compared to the dreams of young Pauline, the dreams of Louis Junior’s mother, Geraldine, and the dreams of Soaphead Church. What do these people dream for, and what will it take to make them happy? Are their dreams attainable, or will they eventually be deferred and dry up “like a raisin in the sun,” as Hughes’ poem suggests?

Nye, Louisa S. CliffsNotes on Morrison's The Bluest Eye & Sula (Cliffsnotes Literature Guides) . HMH Books. Kindle Edition.

The Bluest Eye

(About the Author)

Toni Morrison, original name Chloe Anthony Wofford, (born February 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio, U.S.—died August 5, 2019, Bronx, New York), American writer noted for her examination of black experience (particularly black female experience) within the black community. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Morrison grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 Morrison became a fiction editor at Random House, where she worked for a number of years. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired in 2006.

Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. In 1973 a second novel, Sula, was published; it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex.

The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987), which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1998 and starred Oprah Winfrey. In addition, Morrison

wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005), an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved.

In 1992 Morrison released Jazz, a story of violence and passion set in New York City’s Harlem during the 1920s. Subsequent novels were Paradise (1998), a richly detailed portrait of a black utopian community in Oklahoma, and Love (2003), an intricate family story that reveals the myriad facets of love and its ostensible opposite. A Mercy (2008) deals with slavery in 17th-century America. In the redemptive Home (2012), a traumatized Korean War veteran encounters racism after returning home and later overcomes apathy to rescue his sister. In God Help the Child (2015), Morrison chronicled the ramifications of child abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a black girl with dark skin who is born to light-skinned parents.

A work of criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992. Many of Morrison’s essays and speeches were collected in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008; edited by Carolyn C. Denard) and The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019). She and her son, Slade Morrison, cowrote a number of children’s books, including the Who’s Got Game? series, The Book About Mean People (2002), and Please, Louise (2014). She also penned Remember (2004), which chronicles the hardships of black students during the integration of the American public school system; aimed at children, it uses archival photographs juxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects. For that work, Morrison won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2005.

The central theme of Morrison’s novels is the black American experience; in an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. In 2010 Morrison was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour. Two years later she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) is a documentary about her life and career.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Morrison

The Bluest Eye

(Reviews)

Kirkus Review

"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garroted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.

The New Yorker Review

Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause for a few final images and thoughts framed by regret, shame, and horror. The

book? Toni Morrison's debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," which turns fifty this year. As the story ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less abandoned by the townspeople, who have treated her with scorn for most of her life; now she's left to wander the streets in madness:

The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on her shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach-could not even see-but which filled the valley of the mind.

Spectacular even alongside other early novels bathed in the blood of gothic dread-William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" (1930), say, or Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" or Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" (both published in 1952)- Morrison's book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black girls at the center of the story.

Like all the principal characters in "The Bluest Eye," Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison, who died last August, was born in 1931. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her classmates heap on her is to dream. And the dream is this: that someone-God, perhaps-will grant her the gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free-free from her

unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. Not that she ever looks in a mirror. She knows what she'd find there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has distorted the reflection of her face. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. But in those harrowing final images, Claudia MacTeer, Morrison's spirited nine-year-old narrator, sees what Pecola cannot, what her madness, the result of all that rejection, looks like to the rest of the town: "Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright."

In this short, intellectually expansive, emotionally questioning, and spiritually knowing book, the act of looking-and seeing-is described again and again. One example of many: Peering through a window in their family home, Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, catch a first glimpse of sex. A beloved boarder is consorting with a notorious prostitute. What can it mean, him sucking on that woman's fingers? Is that love? Or is it what a man does to, and not with, a female? Another example: When Pecola goes to buy some of her treasured Mary Janes, the white shopkeeper sees her but can't fix his attention on her; nothing in his experience has prepared him to recognize a little black girl as an entity.

Despite all this looking, few people, aside from Claudia, bear witness to much. To do so would be to think critically about the society that formed them and be moved to effect change. Instead, there's a great deal of condemnation and parochial disapproval. And it's mostly aimed at black women-especially those mothers who don't keep their home or their children clean. Cleanliness, of course, is next to godliness, and who would want to commit the double sin of being black

and dirty? Pecola's very presence exacerbates some of the other characters' not so buried feelings about their own race and poverty-liabilities that push these Ohioans apart, rather than unite them: no one wants to be confronted with her own despair, especially when it's reflected in the eyes of another despairing person. And the truth is, by the time we leave Pecola, pecking at the waste on the margins of the world, we, too, may feel a measure of relief at no longer having to see what Morrison sees, her profound and unrelenting vision of what life can do to the forsaken.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/toni-morrison/bluest-eye/

Als, Hilton. "Seeing Things." The New Yorker, vol. 95, no. 47, 3 Feb. 2020, p. 64. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.lapl.org/apps/doc/A613346052/LitRC?u=lapl&sid=LitRC&xid=708508f3

The Bluest Eye

(Enhancement)

Structure

The Bluest Eye is divided into four sections, each of which is named for a different season. (The novel begins with “Autumn” and ends with “Summer.”) The four sections are further divided into chapters. Most of the chapter titles are taken from the simulated text of a Dick and Jane reader. Three versions of the simulated text appear at the beginning of the novel. The first version is clear and grammatically correct; it tells a short story about “Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane,” focusing in particular on Jane, who seeks a playmate. The second version repeats the message of the first, but without proper punctuation or capitalization. The third version lacks punctuation, capitalization, and spaces between words.

The three versions symbolize the different lifestyles explored in the novel. The first is that of white families like the Fishers; the second is that of the well- adjusted MacTeer children, Claudia and Frieda, who live in an “old, cold, and green” house; and the distorted third is that of the Breedloves. Morrison’s references to Dick and Jane—an illustrated series of books about a white middle- class family, often used to teach children to read in the 1940s—help contextualize the novel. They also comment on the incompatibility of those “barren white- family primer[s]” (as Morrison called them) with the experiences of black families.

Origin and Analysis

Questions of race and gender are at the center of The Bluest Eye. In a 2004 interview Morrison described her motivations to write the novel. She explained that in the mid-1960s “most of what was being published by black men [was] very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or non-fiction.” These publications “had a very positive, racially uplifting rhetoric.” Black male authors expressed

sentiments like “black is beautiful” and used phrases like “black queen.” At the time, Morrison worried that people would forget that “[black] wasn’t always beautiful.” In The Bluest Eye, she set out to remind her readers “how hurtful a certain kind of internecine racism is.”

Morrison conceived of the idea for the novel some 20 years before its publication. During an undergraduate creative writing workshop at Howard University, she worked on a short story about a young black girl who prayed for blue eyes. The story was in part true; it was based on a conversation with a childhood friend who wanted blue eyes. “Implicit in her desire,” Morrison observed, “was racial self- loathing.” The soon-to-be author wondered how her friend had internalized society’s racist beauty standards at such a young age.

By 1965 Morrison’s short story had become a novel, and between 1965 and 1969 she developed it into an extensive study of socially constructed ideals of beauty (and ugliness). In The Bluest Eye, Morrison foregrounded the demonization of blackness in American culture, focusing on the effects of internalized racism. Through Geraldine, Polly, Pecola, and other characters, she demonstrated how even the most subtle forms of racism—especially racism from within the black community—can negatively impact self-worth and self-esteem.

Publication and Reception

After several rejections, The Bluest Eye was published in the U.S. by Holt, Rinehart and Winston (later Holt McDougal) in 1970. Somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 first-edition copies were printed; Morrison had expected only about 400. At the time, Morrison—a single mother living in New York City—was working as a senior editor in the trade division of the publisher Random House.

The Bluest Eye was not a commercial success. In a 2012 interview with Interview magazine, Morrison claimed that the black community “hated [the novel].” The little critical attention the novel received was generally positive. The New York Times celebrated Morrison’s willingness to expose “the negative of the Dick-and- Jane-and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-Cat photograph that appears in our

reading primers…with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” All things considered, Morrison felt that “the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, [and] misread.”

Legacy

Since its publication in 1970, there have been numerous attempts to ban The Bluest Eye from schools and libraries because of its depictions of sex, violence, racism, incest, and child molestation; it frequents the American Library Association’s list of banned and challenged books. Nonetheless, the novel has been categorized as an American classic in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Bluest-Eye