Toni Morrison (Photo by Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Autumn The novel is, in part, the adult Claudia’s desire to come to terms with her helplessness and, perhaps, to do the only thing she possibly can for Pecola: tell her story. Likewise, Pecola and her child/sister are doomed to stillbirth. The seeds they plant, like all of the other marigolds that year, never bloom. Claudia explains to the reader that she and her sister, with childlike belief, feel that they will be able to save Pecola and her unborn child/sister by planting marigold seeds. The novel, in part, is Claudia’s revisiting the details of Pecola’s story as well as her own acquisition of adult understandings. Presumably, this voice is the adult Claudia looking back on her childhood and trying to reconcile her successful survival of childhood with the tragedy of Pecola’s life. The plot of the novel begins with an invitational narrative voice that tells the reader the secret of Pecola’s rape and impregnation by her father.
Both of these primary characters, Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove, move through the four seasons of the novel, autumn, winter, spring, and summer, in search of validation of their lives. The story becomes a litmus test against which the characters measure their self-worth. In The Bluest Eye, the Dick and Jane narrative represents an accepted, almost invisible controlling narrative, against which each of the primary characters unconsciously evaluates her own existence. This narrative of family life is artificial and flat, yet, in its use as such a central tool in teaching millions of children to read, the narrative became a powerful sign of what is normal and desirable-a story that inevitably impresses itself upon the child who is in the process of acquiring literacy. By reproducing the primers at the beginning of the novel, The Bluest Eye questions the story told in the primers of the lives of the fictional Dick and Jane and their family.
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The Bluest Eye begins with a replication of the Dick and Jane Readers that were one of the primary instruments used to teach generations of American children how to read. Pecola, having no such reassurance, falls through the cracks created by history, racism, and sexism, and, at the novel’s end, is permanently psychologically fractured. Claudia has her family, which, while challenged by the post depression realities of African-American life, manages to convey to their daughter the knowledge that her intact survival to adulthood is one of their central concerns. Unlike Pecola, Claudia survives the damaging impacts of this invisibility. The Bluest Eye is a coming-of-age narrative that tells the parallel, but very different stories, of its protagonists, Pecola Breedlove and Claudia Mac- Teer, two African-American young girls faced with a world that disregards their existence and undermines their sense of self-worth during the adolescent years that are central to healthy identity formation. The Bluest Eye also echoes the public expressions of many African-American women in the late 1960s and early 1970s that addressed their particular situation and concerns. Many African Americans during that time rejected cultural stereotypes and worked to create a more accurate and affirmative understanding of African-American life. The Bluest Eye, written during the 1960s, reflects the increasing awareness during that time of the impact of representation on identity formation.
Using Pecola’s story as a focal point, The Bluest Eye reveals the destructive impact of social hierarchies and of social invisibility. Morrison examines the impact of this exclusion on individuals and on the community as a whole. Through exposure of the embedding of the dangerous hierarchies associated with these concepts into our primary narratives- reading primers, movies, and products-the novel demonstrates the difficulties of growing up and of surviving for African-American young women. These constructs are a particular issue for African- American communities that often are excluded from representation. The novel addresses the social forces that drive understanding and definition of cultural constructs such as beauty, normalcy, family, and sexuality. Pecola’s story intersects with and contrasts with that of the novel’s primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, whose coming of age, while challenging, is not the alienating, ultimately impossible situation experienced by Pecola. Individually and collectively people mark Pecola and her dysfunctional family as falling outside the boundaries of what is normal and, thus, as undesirable. The novel takes place in the 1940s in the industrial northeast of Lorian, Ohio, and tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American woman who is marginalized by her community and the larger society. The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first published novel.
Analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyeīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Janu
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