Toni Morrisson: The Bluest Eye

Table of contents

Table of  contents  1

  The subtext of the reading  2

1.1.  The Dick and Jane narrative  2

1.2.  Whiteness as the standard of beauty  4

1.3.  Seeing versus being seen / Eyes and vision  7

1.  Critical source  9

2.  Creative source  10

3.  Questions for discussion  11

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The subtext of the reading

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel and was published in 1970. Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character’s points of view. The subtext of the first part of the novel (Autumn and Winter) suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the “Dick and Jane narrative” by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes “whiteness as the standard of beauty” and “seeing versus being seen” which are sometimes closely connected. The Bluest Eye provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her. However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.

1.1. The Dick and Jane narrative

The novel begins with a series of sentences that seem to come from a children's reader. The sentences describe a house and the family that lives in the house - Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane. The brief narrative focuses on Jane. The pet cat will not play with Jane, and when Jane asks her mother to play, she laughs. When Jane asks her father to play, he smiles, and the dog runs away instead of playing with Jane. Then a friend comes to play with Jane. This sequence is repeated verbatim without punctuatio n, and then is repeated a third time without spaces between the words or punctuation (page 3-4).

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At a glance, the Dick-and -Jane motif alerts us to the fact that for the most part the story will be told from a child's perspective. Just as the Dick-and -Jane primer teaches children how to read, this novel will be about the larger story of how children learn to interpret their world. But there is something wrong with the Dick-and -Jane narrative as it is presented here. Because the sentences are not spread out with pictures, as they would be in an actual reader, we become uncomfortably aware of their shortness and abruptness. The substance of the narrative, though written in resolutely cheerful language, is also somewhat disturbing. Though we are told that the family that lives in the pretty house is happy, Jane is isolated. Not only do her parents and pets refuse to play with her, but they seem to refuse any direct communication with her. When Jane approaches her mother to play, the mother simply laughs, which makes us wonder if the mother actually is, as we have been told, "very nice." When she asks her father to play, her father only smiles. The lack of connection between sentences mirrors the lack of connection between the individuals in this story.

When the Dick-and-Jane story repeats without divisions between the sentences, its individual components are more connected because they are run together more, but this kind of connection is not a meaningful one. Instead, the meaninglessness of the sequence becomes mo re noticeable, even shocking, because the sequence is sped up. In the third repetition, when all the words are run together, the speed and closeness of the connection between the elements of the story make it nearly unreadable. This third repetition alerts us that the story that follows operates in two related ways: it presents a sequence of images that are isolated from one another, and it presents a sequence of images that are connected by sheer momentum rather than any inherent relationship. This repetition implicitly warns us to expect a story that is vivid but fractured. The gap between the idealized, sanitized, upper- middle-class world of Dick and Jane (who we can assume to be white, though we are never explicitly told by the novel that they are) and the often dark and ugly world of the novel is emphasized by the chapter headings excerpted from the reading primer (page 33, 38, 81). The picture established in the Dick and Jane narrative is the opposite of Pecola’s life. The accepted concept of beauty by society destroys Pecola’s life leaving her no chance to survive because it

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