“Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.” (TBB, p. 1)

Playing on the Dick and Jane trope of the “happy family,” Morrison opens her novel by stating all that is not. While primers such as this further mythic ideals, The Bluest Eye, much like the rest of Morrison’s oeuvre, challenges convention and exposes the inherent fallacies contained within decidedly White narratives. In doing so, she interrogates both the iconicization and idealization of the notion of the ‘family.’ In her novel, a house exists, but it is devoid of any vitality, life, or love. Instead, this storefront house is characterized by an inexplicably unique ugliness, originating from the withering and worn-down interior lives of its inhabitants. Although the Breedloves have not much in common, an aspect that can somewhat fashion our comprehension of them as a homogenous unit is their miserable and insurmountable lack—the penury of thought, possession, and relationships. This is a family that wears its “ugliness” on its sleeve.

Invariably, this definition of ugliness as a lack or as a disease requiring remedy develops in stark contrast to Whiteness that operates as an unrivaled standard of beauty. It is this unpunctuated, even breathless yearning for an ideal that underlines one of the novel’s most significant preoccupations—the collapse of the individual self under the weight of racialized desire. Morrison prefaces her novel with three elementary paragraphs from a popular nursery primer, each one progressively fraying in form, structure, and coherence—foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of such an ideal. It is ironic that the novel commences with autumn, another marker of the impermanence of the nature of things. Albeit a season of decline, autumn evokes several connotations for Morrison’s characters—darkness for some, a nurturing embrace for others. For Pecola Breedlove, however, it signifies “being put outdoors” (TBB, p. 11). Living with the MacTeers after a long and winding period of abuse at the hands of her family, she does not speak unless spoken to, has an air of cool indifference about her, and spends most of her time fawning over her Shirley Temple milk cup, all while exhibiting an insatiable greed for milk.

As we journey back in time, Morrison paints a melancholic picture of the Breedloves’ whiskey-stained, drab, and joyless abode. A disconcerting sight, their living quarters symbolize anything but love, affection, and grace, where each inhabitant is busy navigating the debris of their shattered dreams through contrived defense mechanisms. All her characters wallow in self-hatred.

The youngest child, Pecola, desires escape through beauty—“Please, God… Please make me disappear” (TBB, p.33), paralleling Keats’ “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” (Ode to a Nightingale). She identifies her baseness as a Black girl as the primary hindrance to a life of respect, recognition, and happiness and thus prays fervently for a pair of blue eyes. Both her desire to dissipate and her yearning to become something she is not ostensibly hint at self-erasure. Blue eyes promise her a revision of vision—a radically new way to see and be seen. They carry with them the possibility of change, a way to overcome self-loathing caused by the perception of her innate ugliness.

Perhaps, Pecola inherits this idea of self-denigration from her mother, Pauline. Born with a bad foot that goes on to become her only distinctive feature, Pauline Breedlove grows up acutely aware of her difference, her “separateness and unworthiness” (TBB, p. 86) that she attributes to her condition. Much like Pecola’s insistence on whiteness, Pauline tries to make sense of the disorder surrounding her through the literal act of ordering things in neat rows. She loves Cholly because he embraces her with all her flaws, leading up to a honeymoon phase of unprecedented happiness in their lives. The lonesomeness following the short-lived effervescence of marriage wrecks her sense of self-worth, leaving her to the mercy of external validation from the women in her neighborhood whose vituperative snickers plant in her the seeds of inadequacy. Soon, she conflates physical beauty with virtue and regards love as an act of control ending in incarceration.

In their nascent days of love, sex guarantees Pauline a transcendental feeling of being in control. She delights in being worshipped, placed on a pedestal, and granted power. Markedly significant is the destructive impact of the media she consumes. Pauline derives a hackneyed notion of beauty from the moving pictures that momentarily sequester her from the world of realities and plunge her into the far more preferable, and even comfortable, world of illusions. Pauline curates this beauty privately and disciplines her children so that they overcome their father’s inadequacies to become all that he is not and still much more—pure, successful, and respectable. In furthering her vain pursuits, Pecola’s mother unwittingly rears her on a steady diet of insecurity, dependence, and a crippling fear of life itself.

Interestingly, Morrison doesn’t completely antagonize the men in her novel. Cholly’s narrative brings to the fore the hardships of orphanhood and the paralyzing subservience to white masters that compels him to consummate with his girlfriend Darlene under their prying gazes. This act of power-taking strips him of the invincibility that comes with being ‘male’ and instead marks the onset of his metaphorical castration. His refusal to face Darlene afterwards depicts the extent of shame and incapacitation that constantly haunt him. In a particularly poignant moment in the book, where his foster parent, Aunt Jimmy, is seen discussing her plight with her female company, the rhythmic recitation of pain comes to embody the intersection of the individual and collective experiences of suffering and slavery. As subalterns, they occupy a world where everybody seems to be “in a position to give them orders” (TBB, p. 108). But more important than the articulation of agony is the synthesis of these explosive images of the past into a constructed portrait of the present, which is insulated from any pain at all—”They were through with lust and lactation, beyond tears and terror… They were, in fact and at last, free” (TBB, p.108)

Morrison probes sexual dynamics when Pecola conjures images of her parents in bed:

“Terrible as his noises were, they were not nearly as bad as the no noise at all from her mother. It was as though she was not even there. Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.” (TBB, p.44)

The battered and disillusioned Cholly Breedlove is no longer tractable; he subjugates through sex for it becomes a way to reclaim his lost manhood. It is horrific that Pecola regards this subjugation as a signifier of true love. Later in the novel, when she is ravaged by her father, an ambiguous numbness sweeps over her. Perhaps, the traumatic nature of the incident leaves her ruptured to the degree that she cannot possibly articulate her shock. It is also plausible that in her mind, submission becomes linked with being noticed, and sometimes, being noticed feels close to being loved. That she chooses not to confide in her mother after a second assault tells us about her fear of being met with disbelief or, worse, revulsion. In any case, her warped ideas about love and sex leave her “shorn, neutralized, (and) frozen” (TBB, p. 163). In the end, despite gaining what she pined for most—the bluest pair of eyes—Pecola remains slandered, marginalized, and, in fact, bluer and more despondent than ever.

The final chapter reads as an interior monologue set in the battlefield of her mind. As a self-absorbed Pecola luxuriates in her newly acquired feature, her ‘double’ reprimands her for acting too vain. Everywhere she goes, she carries a hand mirror to assure herself that her blue eyes are still there. Unfortunately for Pecola, her blue eyes end up becoming only preemptive defenses against her inexorable confrontation with shame, guilt, and unbecoming. Her fairy-tale utopia hurtles towards an inevitable catastrophe, and Morrison prefigures this at the outset. She forces her reader to sit through the uncomfortable unravelling of her life and confront its horrors without the capacity to fully exorcise them. Pecola’s tragedy is this: she achieves what she desired, only the cost is unbearable and the damage, absolute.

About the Author:

Currently a student of English Literature at St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata, Anikait Chakraborty is an aspiring academician who also dabbles in filmmaking and photography. Instagram Id: anikait.60fps