TONI MORRISON - THE BLUEST EYE

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH (ALSO ABOUT HER TYPE OF

WRITING)
Toni Morrison may well be the most formally sophisticated (refined) novelist in
the history of the African-American literature. Her single accomplishment as a
writer is that she has managed to invent her own mode of literary
representation. Her themes are often those expected of naturalist fiction
(accepted only in aesthetic values ) i.e. the burdens of history, the determining
social effects of race, gender or class along with the great themes of lyrical
modernism like love, death, betrayal and the burden of the individual’s
responsibility for her/his own fate . Never is ‘history’ faceless in her work and
never are individuals absolved from responsibility from their own actions. She
was born as Chole Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in a small town of
Lorain, Ohio to parents George and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her maternal
grandparents had left Albama and moved to Ohio in search of better educational
opportunities for their children. Tony’s father a Georgian by birth had also fled
the state’s hostile racial climate and settled in Ohio. She is the second of the four
children who grew up during the Great Depression of 1930.

MAJOR INFLUENCES
In Lorain everyone was poor and there was not much of racial discrimination on
class basis and overt racial hostility was not prevalent. Her early years created
within Toni a sensitivity towards the struggling masses in general and the african
people in particular. Her father George was a shipyard welder but a stickler for
excellence and Rama her mother, left a profound influence on her because they
firmly believed that black people were the humans of the globe. Her
grandmother, Ardelia acquainted her with blacklore and her grandfather
Solomon influenced her as a writer with his skilled craftsmanship as a carpenter
and superb artistry as a violinist. Her foundation and sense of self was also
strengthened by the corrosiveness of the small black Lorain community which
she considered 'neighborhood' and a place that cared if someone was in
difficulty.
AFRICAN AMERICAN FOLKLORE
African American folklore is the basis of Morrison's fiction as it is for the black
american literature. In the era when rules were made by whites wherein no
black could be educated it was necessary for the oral tradition to carry the
values which the group(blacks) considered significant.Transmission by word of
mouth took the place of pamplets , poems and novels. Themes such as The
quest for freedom, The nature of evil , and the powerful verses of the powerless
became themes of African American Literature. The African american folklore
has exercised a tremendous influence upon the characters and the words that
Toni Morrison creates as well as upon the very shape of her novels.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND AND EARLY

PROFESSIONAL LIFE
Her educational background and early professional life has helped her a good
deal in moulding herself into a creative writer with social and political
consciousness. She has been titled in the first grade as the only black child who
could read and eventually literature became her favourite and reading her
fondest past time. She studied latin for four years before graduating with
honours from Lorain High in 1949. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in
english from Cornell University in 1955 she embarked on a teaching career as an
english faculty in Texas Southern Univ in Houston. Her fascination for books
especially classics continued though she did not show any interest in writing.
Morrison worked as an editor at Random House and during this she was
exposed to the thoughts of those who were more conscious than herself on the
nature of the plight confronting black people.She was greatly influenced by a
pictorial she edited in 1974 by the name The Black Book ,a combination of news-
clippings and advertisements showcasing the life of blacks in the US from slavery
to the civil rights movement.. These factors have helped her become more
conscious of the nature of an African's dilemma, the crisis of the African's
personality , the causes and effects of it and her increasing commitment to help
solve it in terms of fictional art combining her political consciousness and
aesthetic sensibility . Her novels show the victimization of black people within
the context of a racist social order , black community , environment and folklore.
THE BLACKS IN AMERICA
Slavery or trade in human beings dates from the prehistoric times all ancient
civilizations used slaves in the past ,Africans were sent as slaves across the
Sahara to be traded in the Mediterranean in the red sea and beyond from east
africa to egypt and the middle east . The advant of the european age of
exploration in the 15th century gave a new dimension to the slave trade . The
Portugese, exploring the Western coast of Africa discovered a plentiful source of
slaves while at the end of the century . Christopher Columbus discovered
America which became the main market for them .

AFRICAN- AMERICAN SLAVES

A typical voyage would include a triangular course south to the slave coast of
West Africa to pick up the cargo of slaves who were transported across the
Atlantic in the most appalling conditions to the West Indies and North American
colonies from where sugar, cotton, tobacco or similar commodities would be
shipped home . Estimates vary concerning the number of slaves removed from
Africa and the most reliable figure is 12.5 million between 1650 and 1850. Many
more had lost their lives in wars and the total drain meant that due to such
losses the African population became static for over 2 centuries. The
enslavement of Africans in what became in the US formerly began in 1630’s and
1640’s and law was made that african’s who served their masters for life would
remain in the slave status which was to be inherited by their children . It ended
in 1860’s with Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation of January 1863
and though it officially came to an end in 1865 , unofficially it continued.

Slaves were in unknown often dangerous territories beset by disease and

sometimes hostile inhabitants , clearing land and performing heavy construction
jobs without modern machinery was extremely hard labour specially in the hot
humid climate of the south. They were driven mercilessly to plant, cultivate and
harvest the crops for the market. A successful crop would earn such returns that
the slaves were often worked beyond human endurance because their masters
believed that it was cheaper to buy than to breed so they worked the slaves to
death than to make them live a healthy life so that they could bear children to
increase their numbers. During this phase , on some of the sugar plantations ,
the life span of a slave from initial purchase to death was only 7 years. The
longevity of residence in America did not mean that slaves lost all their rich
heritage from their African origins though the white slave owners were
frightened by African customs and behaviour they could not understand . They
forced the slaves to give up African means of communication such as even
language and drums which is widely used as means of talking across great
distances in west Africa and were denied their own original names and made to
accept whatever names their masters imposed upon them . What came forward
was the mixing of divergent culture mixtures to create an entirely new culture
called the African-American culture. As the black writer Toni Morrison is fully
aware of the wrongs the blacks suffered specially the women folk during the
days of slavery .

Toni Morrison’s writing centre around the predicament of the blacks in the past
as well as the present but she avoids direct venture of the whites because she is
least interested in racial confrontation and wants to write and elevate her own
race in particular beginning with her debut novel The Bluest Eye in 1970.

THE PRINCIPLE WORKS OF TONI MORRISON

THE BLUEST EYE (1970)

The emphasis in Toni’s first novel is racism. She investigates the devastating
effects of beauty standards of the dominant culture on the self-image of the
African female adolescent. The role of class is only relevant in so far as it
elevates the self image of the African female. The Breedlove family has moved
from rural south to urban Lorain Ohio and in the displacement have brought the
family’s dysfunction due to the grinding work conditions and poverty. Told from
the perspective of 2 adolescent sisters Claudia and Freda Macteer , Morrison’s
narrative weaves its way through the 4 seasons and traces the daughter’s
descent into madness. Through flashback and temporal shifts, Morrison provides
readers with the context and history behind the Breedlove’s misery and Picola’s
obsessive desire to have blue eyes . However the novel serves as a proof of
Morrison’s low level of gender and class consciousness at the beginning of her
writing career when she thought that racism was the main form of oppression of
blacks in white America.

SULA (1974)
Both black, both smart , both poor and raised in a small Ohio town Sula and Nel
meet when they are 12, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes . Through their
childhood and girlhood years, they share everything until Sula escapes the
bottom, their hilltop neighbourhood of fierce resentment towards failed crop,
lost jobs, thieving insurance men n bug-ridden food. Sula roams the cities of
America for 10 years and when she returns back she finds Nel married n
accustomed to life at the bottom while Sula is considered to be the audity of the
community. Morrison’s primary emphasis here is on gender especially
individualism of the African women and she is interested in the struggle for
individual’s right in general and women’s rights in particular rather than the
rights of the African people as a group . The concept of gender and it’s relation
to the race and class is very much a part of this novel, the concerns of class are
treated after gender and race.

SONG OF THE SOLOMON (1977)

A novel of great beauty and power Song of Solomon creates a magical world out
of 4 generations of black life in America with the birth of Macon Dead Jr. known
as milkman and the son of the richest family in a Midwestern town . He grows
up in his father’s money haunted and death haunted house and then strikes out
alone towards adventure and as the unspoken truth about his family and his
buried heritage comes to light he moves towards an adventurous and crucial
embrace of life. The novel evokes the history of black immigration and chain of
economic expropriation from village to city and city to metropolis . The end
point of milkman’s journey is the starting point of the black racist history of
America and confrontation with reality of slavery coming at the end of the novel
marks the end of milkman’s penetration into the historical process.

TAR BABY (1981)

The cultivated millionaire , Valerian Street existence is arranges by his butler,
Sydney whose niece Jadine has been educated at Street’s expense. One night a
rugged starving black American streetman breaks into their house. Jadine who is
at first repelled by the intruder finds herself moving inexorably towards him. He
is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood, uneducated and violent.
Both become fascinated with each other and the novel deftly reveals how the
conflicts and dramas underlined by social and cultural circumstances must
ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart. Jadine has been incorporated
by Toni Morrison as the picture of liberated African- American women who
refuses to internalize an external image and seeks a definition of self.

BELOVED (1987)
Beloved draws our attention to the psychological turmoil experienced in the
context of slavery. The entire history of slavery in America is stretched out on a
giant canvas here that is the inhuman treatment of slaves both female and male,
children and adults as beasts of burden and the sexual exploitation of black
women by white men. Beloved herself a spiritual manifestation of history is the
embodiment of 6 million or more dead and enslaved Africans. She has returned
to reclaim her space and haunts us throughout the narrative with her enigmatic
appearance in Sethe household. It is very rightly said for her, anything dead
coming back to life hurts. The process of self discovery and rememorize form an
integral part of Toni Morrison’s narration and the quest for identity is the theme.

JAZZ (1991)
A novel set in Harlem in 1928, it is Morrison’s most disturbing novel. It is a
disturbing psychological study of a childless couple desperately trying to come to
terms with their frustrations and aspirations. Their fragmented directionless life
propels them towards the absurd. Joe Trace, a waiter, who also works as a door-
to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products shoots to death his lover of 3
months, the 18 year old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hardworking,
and mentally unsound wife violet tries to disfigure the corpse. Rich combining
history and legend, Morrison captures as never before, the complex humanity of
black urban life at a moment in our century, we assumed as understood.

PARADISE (1998)
“They shot the white girl first.”This is the stark opening of the novel which then
coils back and forth through a century of history to explain who they are and
why on a dewy Oklahama morning in 1976 when they felt compelled to storm a
decaying mansion and wreck violence on the handful of women living in it.
Morrison shows that African’s all over the world are one people having the same
history and sharing the same plight since they are seen as one by those outside
the African nation no matter what their class, status might be. She wants African
people to see themselves as one, undivided by their class, status.

Morrison’s greatness as a novelist lies in her extraordinary power of achieving a

harmonious fusion of her social concerns and demands of novel as an art form.
The ultimate solution of collective struggle to the problem of economic
exploitation of the blacks in white America is offered invariably in terms of
fictional art. For the characters as well as the author the scars of racial , sexual
and class oppression are more horrible on the soul than those on the body.

THE BLUEST EYE

BACKGROUND
After her divorce in 1964, Toni Morrison found herself in a situation that women
everywhere can relate to. She had no husband, had one child, another was on
the way and she was jobless and she was jobless with no prospects for
employment. At the age of 33, she returned to her parents home in Ohio and it
was a beginning of a painful rebirth. 29 years and 6 novels later, Toni Morrison
won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was titled as not the best woman writer,
not the best black writer or American writer but the best fiction writer in the
world. She began to write the Bluest eye in 1967, when she was lonely
depressed and living in a place where she had no friends. The question arises
how she chose her particular subject and the answer is that she perceived the
most tragic element in the history of black people and that was the literal
absence of black people in western literature where she found black writers
writing always to white audience explaining things about black culture only to
the whites and not to the blacks. She wanted to write a book about black people
in the language of the black people without giving any explanation to the white
people. She felt that she was alone in wanting to express the world of the black
people she had grown up with. Above all she wanted to talk about little girls who
were suffering under wraps and she wanted to tell their story. The bluest eye is
not the story of Picola Breedlove but an image of an 11 year old black girl who
thinks her life would be perfect only if she had blue eyes. That image itself is so
powerful that it sums up one of the great tragedies of her age in the time it
makes to snap your fingers. In a Toni Morrison novel there is a big difference
between the story and the book. The story maybe told in 2 pages but one still
won’t have a solid idea what the book is like. The bluest eye is the story of 3
black schoolgirls growing up in the 1940’s Ohio: the sisters Claudia and Freda
Macteer and their friend Picola Breedlove. Claudia and Freda’s parents are strict,
protective, and when they have time, which is not often, loving. On the other
hand Picola is ignored by her mother and abused by her father. The character of
Claudia, the main narrator is a strong-willed 8 year old black girl who cannot
stand the sight of blonde haired, blue eyed dolls. Picola who is raped by her
father goes crazy and dies, is a young girl who does not understand what has
happened to her and keeps thinking that her life would be perfect if only she
could have blue eyes. She is not even aware of the menstruation cycle and when
she bleeds, there is no one to help her. Toni Morrison within a couple of such
frames of ideas , questions all mothers, not only black but all mothers of the
world whether they have acquainted their daughters to come to terms with this
physical struggle.

The cultural values and knowledge embodied in the blues and transmitted orally
by Claudia, enable Toni Morrison to develop the black aesthetics from blue to
black. The transformation of lack, loss and grief into poetic catharsis is the
constitutive task of Toni Morrison and this she accomplishes through the
narrator Claudia.

The ‘eye’ of the title may refer to Picola’s disastrous longing for the blue eyes but
it also refers to the eye that takes Picola as her subject and who narrates her
story. The novel’s central theme is the community’s lack of self-love, a lack
precipitated by the privileges, the light skin and blue eyes inherently enjoyed in
communities internalization of this master aesthetic and Claudia’s voice defines
the communities blue’s and Picola is the side of the inscription of the
community’s blues.

(* during the winter of 1967 Martin Luther king was coordinating the black’s and
speaking with great pride about the black power, all excitement and hype
generated failed to make an impact on Morrison but what affected her most was
an experiment done in 1960’s that made headlines. The experiment conducted
was that little black girls were shown drawings of little girls of varying colours
and were asked to rate the girls in the pictures. The children were very
discriminating and they picked up the most subtle differences in the eye, hair
and skin colour and arranged the pictures in a near hierarchy of light to dark.
They were also consistent and nearly in every case they rated the blondest,
lightest skin, bluest eyed girls as the prettiest, smartest, nicest and best little girls
in the world. It was just a coincidence but not long after that there were riots in
nearly part in America and there was a novel The Bluest Eye.)

THE SEASONS IN WHICH THE STORY IS DIVIDED

There are no real chapters in the bluest eye- instead the novel is broken into
seasons: Autumn, winter, spring and summer and this type of organization
suggests that the events described in the bluest eye have occurred before and
will occur again giving it a universal appeal. All the seasons are significant of
their qualities in context of the characters of the novel and in contrast to like the
spring season which is significant of hope and prosperity but in contrast to the
Breedlove’s life it has no essence and does not mark any happiness for them, in
fact through and through all the seasons signify pain and pathos in context with
all the characters in the novel.

THE CHARACTERS IN THE NOVEL

PICOLA BREEDLOVE
She is the protagonist in the novel and by society’s standards ugly. She is a little
girl who is a total and complete victim of her surroundings. She is ignored
everywhere for her ugliness and little things that give happiness to children like
buying candy becomes a shameful and embarrassing experience for her. She has
been treated differently and indifferently by people leading to her isolation. She
sits in front of the mirror for long hours trying to figure out the reason for her
ugliness and why she is despised by her classmates and teachers alike. She is the
only member in the class who sits alone on a double desk and the teachers avoid
her and never glance at her and only look at her when they address everybody.
She is mocked by children and teased relentlessly and she is often left with her
own thoughts which mostly consisted of her desire for blue eyes. In essence
beauty equalled happiness. Her first encounter with ugliness comes from her
mother. Her mother who herself is brainwashed by the white movie industry and
decides that her daughter is extremely ugly, her parents are constantly fighting
with one another which greatly upsets Picola and she wishes that if she could be
beautiful, her parents would have paid more attention to her and their fights
might have reduced. Her adult role models are 3 prostitutes: Miss Mary, Miss
Poland and Miss China who provide her respite from her depressing life because
they are non interfering as they themselves feel as outcasts. Her only real friends
are Claudia and Freda Macteer who are relatively powerless in helping her and
her situation. All this is increased when her father who is extremely drunk is
overwhelmed with sexual desires and rapes his young daughter and this
incestual act brings out nothing but sympathy for the protagonist and Toni
Morrison points out that the society defines the act based on circumstances and
the inability to meet the society’s standard of beauty in terms of the character of
Mr. Breedlove who himself had an unhappy childhood and an unsatisfying life
and he drowns his consciousness into drinking and in this rage of frustration
rapes his own daughter, ripping away the child’s innocence and acceptance of
the society. When she was raped some people even tried to put the blame on
Picola saying that she did not fight her father and if she would have done so she
wouldn’t have been raped. Picola ends up delivering a still born probably as a
result of her young age and the beatings she received during her pregnancy. At
the end of the book, she is isolated both physically and emotionally. Adults look
away from her and children laugh at her outright. A young girl’s life is ruined as a
result of society’s placing of beauty on such a high standard and making that
standard and importance known to all.

MRS. BREEDLOVE
She was born Pauline Williams , the 9th of 11 children and when she was 2, a
rusty nail had pierced her foot and complete indifference to the wound left her
with an arch less, crooked foot that flopped like a limp when she walked. She
had no nickname and no anecdotes to relate. Nobody teased her and nobody
asked her preferences. She was very systematic and enjoyed living in a 5 room
frame house and with her brothers and sisters moving away she had the luxury
of the big house to enjoy and as a senior to 2 twins after her, she took the
responsibility of taking care of them. At the age of 15, she started fantasicising
about boys and men and fell in love with Cholly Breedlove the moment she set
her eyes on him. They decided to marry and move over to Lorain where her
husband started working in a steel mill and she started taking care of the house.
Very soon she started missing her people because she was not used to white
folks who ignored her completely and her loneliness she started turning more
towards her husband who was kind and affectionate at first but later began
resisting her dependence. Moreover she felt stifled in the 2 rooms which had no
yard and left her more isolated. She wanted to dress-up like other women and
because her husband could not afford it, she decided to work. She could not
adjust because her mistress was mean and soon frustrations overtook and she
and her husband became quarrelsome. During the same time she discovered
that she was pregnant and this made her husband happy and their relationship
eased back to normal. She stopped working and returned to housekeeping and
became an avid movie goer. Soon after her first child Sammy, she was pregnant
again with Picola but this time the situation became worse and soon she had to
become the breadwinner of the family because of her husband’s alcoholism.
Since she was adept and systematic, she was able to manage home and keep her
employers happy. She was not a good mother to her children though and it is
said that into her son she beat a loud desire to run away and into a daughter, a
fear of growing up, a fear of other people and a fear of life.

CHOLLY BREEDLOVE
When he was 4 years old, Cholly was wrapped in 2 blankets and abandoned in a
junk heap by the railroad by his mother. He was saved by his great aunt Jimmy
who had seen her niece carrying a bundle out of the backdoor. Aunt Jimmy beat
his mother with a razor strap and did not let her near the baby after that. His
mother, who was not right in the head, ran away shortly after this and Cholly
was raised by Aunt Jimmy herself and she named him after her dead brother
Charles. He had 6 years of schooling before he took up a job at a store as an
errand boy. He became friendly with Blue Jack who told him stories about
emancipation proclamation as well as ghost stories, the women he had had in
his life and how he too could enjoy in the same way. When he was 14 Aunt
Jimmy died of peach cobbler. The story goes as Aunt Jimmy had gone to a camp
meeting that took place after a rainstorm and the damp wood on the benches
on which she sat made her sick. She was confined to bed and was suggested
several remedies but all failed and when she was on the verge of death,
someone suggested that she drinks pot liquor and she would be alright. She
drank it and started recovering and when she felt strong enough to get out of
bed, one of her neighbour’s Essie Foster brought her a peach cobbler. The old
lady ate a piece and the next morning she was found dead. Cholly was greatly
fussed at Aunt Jimmy’s funeral but Cholly’s attention was drawn to what aunt
Jimmy had left behind. Her insurance came to a mere $85 whereas her funeral
could cost $105. The relatives chipped in the money and the funeral was
organized but Cholly did not realize the impact of his aunt’s death and fell in love
with one of the girl’s in attendance to the funeral, named Darlene. This lead to a
sexual intercourse between the 2 and this is important because during the act
they were caught by white policemen who insulted them and forced them to
continue with the act in front of their eyes and the next few days he became
extremely withdrawn and wanted to run away which he did after he found $23
more left by Aunt Jimmy to escape. Moreover, he is an escapist as pronounced
by Morrison who as runs away from a woman after establishing a relation with
her for the fear that she might be pregnant. He did odd jobs for several days in
summer and it was only the following October that he reached town and went in
search of his father whom he found in a gambling den and when they faced each
other and Cholly told him that he was his son, he was dismissed. He felt
extremely sorry for himself and this hurt left a raw impact on his senses. Later he
is found in the prostitute’s arms trying to drown his pain, shame , fear, guilt and
grief. He was a man of revulsion and that lead to his incest on his daughter. All in
all there is nothing appealing in Cholly’s character but through his Toni Morrison
has tried to showcase the men mentality of the blacks who are so made because
of the circumstances.
THE THREE PROSTITUTES
The 3 prostitutes Miss Poland, Miss China, Miss Mary lived in an apartment
above the Breedlove’s storefront. Picola loves them because they do not ignore
or despise her. All the 3 of them have no ill feelings towards Picola and she is
welcome to their apartment. Mary has been portrayed as being richer than the
other 2 who have a different lifestyle in which Mary seems to be earning the
most. They are involved with men from all walks of life and are found to be
giving aesthetic relief to the novel by singing songs and taking the grim scene to
cheerful ones in the novel. The impact that is created by Toni Morrison is the
only place for Picola to get respite though this should have been provided to her
by her family and friends but is done so by a class of people who are looked
down upon by the society.

SOAPHEAD CHURCH
It is the name given to a cinnamon eyed west indian with lightly browned skin
who lives in the black neighbourhood at Lorain and is a descendant of a British
Noble man, Sir Whitcomb who had introduced the White strain into the family in
the 1800’s. His children and grandchildren were highly accomplished
academically. Over the years through inter marriage, the white strain was lost
and some of the Whitcomb’s became eccentric. One such Whitcomb was Elihne
Micah Whitcomb i.e. Soaphead Church’s father, a school master known for his
precision and control of violence. He married a half Chinese girl who died after
giving birth to a boy and he was named Elihue Micah Whitcomb. When he was
17, he fell in love with Vehna who was a lovely bighearted girl and wanted
Soaphead who always remained in depression and moroseness to come out of
it. She married him but soon found that he was beyond cure and left him. Her
desertion was never forgotten by Soaphead and he shifted to America to study
the field of physcatry and physical therapy. He finally settled down in Ohio,
Lorain in 1936. He became the reader, interpreter and advisor of Dreams.
Although his income was small, he could manage as he had no taste for luxury.
He had genuine love of worn inanimate objects and rarely had keen sexual
cravings. He did not relish any physical contact with women, nor was he
interested in homosexuality. What interested him were little girls. Nobody knew
why the title church was attached to his name and Soaphead, people thought
meant the tight curly hair that took on and held a sheen and wave when covered
with soap lather. He rented a kind of backroom apartment from a deeply
religious old lady named Bertha Reese, who was clean quiet and very close to
total deafness. He did not like the old dog, Bob she kept. He was revolted by his
presence and even brought poison for it but could not bring himself to
administer it to the dog. He is stung when a pitifully unattractive girl of a young
age comes to him one day with a strange request. He told her that he is not a
magician to get her blue eyes. He sees the dog Bob and the desire to kill him
arises and he comes upon a plan. He tells Picola, in order to get blue eyes, she
must serve meat mixed with poison to God and see how it behaves. He says that
if nothing happens, god has refused you. But if the dog acts strangely, her wish
will be granted on the day following this one. Picola picks the packet handed by
Soaphead and places the meat on the floor which after eating, the dog chokes,
stumbles and dies, giving Picola an impression that her wish will be granted. The
character of Soaphead Church is used by Toni Morrison in the context of
universal happenings around the world where little girls are sacrificed physically
on the sexual desires of men who claim to be near god and people who blindly
follow them without realizing the impact created on their live. Through him
Morrison questions the world about the irony where parents themselves give of
their daughters to make a better life for themselves and how many parents act
as guides to their children to remain away from any physical contact whether the
person is a priest, relative or friend. What laws, she says, are incorporated for
such abuses and the impact that the sufferer or victim has to carry on the
psychological part of existence which is unhealed throughout their lives, the
scars so marked that they are difficult to diminish.

THE IMPORTANT ISSUES PULLED OUT BY TONI

MORISON THROUGH THE BLUEST EYE ARE:
The pathos contained in the idea of beauty

Who are the authority to stir the idea of beauty

The role of parents in the life on a child

The role of a mother in the life of a teenager girl and boy

Laws regarding sexual abuse and violence by a family member mother or father
The role of the elevated class f the society: the priests and the gurus in the life of
a man

Spirituality means sacrifice, what is the justification.

CRITICAL REVIEWS

HASKEL FRANKEL OF NEW YORK TIMES BOOK

REVIEW
She reveals herself, when she shucks the fuzziness bond of flights of poetic
imagery, as a writer of considerable power and tenderness, someone who can
cast back to the living, bleeding heart of childhood and capture it on paper. But
Miss Morrison has gotten lost in her construction.

L.E SISSMAN, NEW YORKER

The bluest eye is not flawless, Miss Morrison’s touching and disturbing picture of
the doomed youth of her race is marred by an occasional error of fact or
judgment. She places the story in a frame of the bland, white words of her
conventional school, surely and unnecessarily a subtle irony. She permits herself
an occasional false or bombastic line. None of this matters though beside her
real and greatly promising achievement to write truly and sometimes very
beautifully for every generation of blacks.

LIZ GRANT, THE BLACK WORLD:

Morrison had the courage to write about an aspect of the black experience that
most of us would rather forget our hatred of ourselves.

QUESTIONS
1. Discuss the element of pathos contained in the idea of beauty as it affected
Picola breedlove in the bluest eye?

2. Write a note on Afro-American quest for identity in the bluest eye or how is
the bluest eye a depiction of the Afro-American folk tradition.
3. Write a note on slave trade and its impact on the Africans.

4. Briefly discuss the major role of Morrisons’s parents and grandparents and
African folklore on her works.

5. Write in detail the major works of Toni Morrison

6. Characterize all the Characters.

7. Short note on role of narrator

8. Note on obsession with beauty

9. Discuss in brief, the themes brought out by Morrison in the bluest eye

10. Summarize the novel in ref to its chars

11. Picola the protagonist of the novel, makes u hate her or sympathize her?

Critical Essay An Overview of The Bluest Eye

Morrison's story about a young black girl's growing self-hatred begins with an
excerpt from a typical first-grade primer from years ago. The tone is set
immediately: "Good" means being a member of a happy, well-to-do white
family, a standard that is continually juxtaposed against "bad," which means
being black, flawed, and strapped for money. If one is to believe the first-grade
primer, everyone is happy, well-to-do, good-looking, and white. One would
never know that black people existed in this country. Against this laughing,
playing, happy white background, Morrison juxtaposes the novel's black
characters, and she shows how all of them have been affected in some way by
the white media — its movies, its books, its myths, and its advertising. For the
most part, the blacks in this novel have blindly accepted white domination and
have therefore given expensive white dolls to their black daughters at Christmas.
Mr. Henry believes that he is being complimentary when he calls Frieda and
Claudia "Greta Garbo" and "Ginger Rogers." The schoolchildren — the black
schoolboys, in particular — are mesmerized by the white-ish Maureen Peal, and
Maureen herself enjoys telling about the black girl who dared to request a Hedy
Lamarr hairstyle.
The Bluest Eye is a harsh warning about the old consciousness of black folks'
attempts to emulate the slave master. Pecola's request is not for more money or
a better house or even for more sensible parents; her request is for blue eyes —
something that, even if she had been able to acquire them, would not have
abated the harshness of her abject reality.

Pecola's story is very much her own, unique and dead-end, but it is still relevant
to centuries of cultural mutilation of black people in America. Morrison does not
have to retell the story of three hundred years of black dominance by white
culture for us to be aware of the history of American blacks, who have been
victims in this tragedy.

The self-hatred that is at the core of Pecola's character affects, in one degree or
another, all of the other characters in the novel. As noted earlier, a three-
hundred-year-old history of people brought to the United States during the
period of slavery has led to a psychological oppression that fosters a love of
everything connected with the slave masters while promoting a revulsion
toward everything connected with themselves. All cultures teach their own
standards of beauty and desirability through billboards, movies, books, dolls,
and other products. The white standard of beauty is pervasive throughout this
novel — because there is no black standard of beauty.

Standing midway between the white and black worlds is the exotic Maureen
Peal, whose braids are described as "two lynch ropes." Morrison's chilling
description of Maureen's hair is intentional, for she is referring to the young
black men who look in awe at the white-ish Maureen. These young men, she is
saying, are symbolic of all of the black men who have allowed themselves to be
mesmerized by Anglo standards of beauty. As a result, they turn on their own —
just as the boys turn on Pecola. Her blackness forces the boys to face their own
blackness, and thus they make Pecola the scapegoat for their own ignorance, for
their own self-hatred, and for their own feelings of hopelessness. Pecola
becomes the dumping ground for the black community's fears and feelings of
unworthiness.

From the day she is born, Pecola is told that she is ugly. Pecola's mother, Pauline,
is more concerned with the appearance of her new baby than she is with its
health. Pecola learns from her mother that she is ugly, and she thereby learns to
hate herself; because of her blackness, she is continually bombarded by
rejection and humiliation from others around her who value "appearance."
Unfortunately, Pecola does not have the sophistication to realize that she is not
the only little black girl who doesn't have the admired, valued Anglo features —
neither do most of the blacks who torment her. Pecola knows only that she
wants to be prized and loved, and she believes that if she could look white, she
would be loved. However, she becomes the scapegoat for all of the other black
characters, for, in varying degrees, they too suffer from the insanity that
manifests itself in Pecola's madness.

If Morrison seems to focus on female self-hatred in Pecola, it is clear that

feelings of self-hatred are not limited to black girls alone. Boys receive just as
much negative feedback from the white community, but they are far more likely
to direct their emotions and retaliation outward, inflicting pain on others before
the pain turns inward and destroys them. Cholly and Junior are prime examples.

After the publication of The Bluest Eye, Morrison explained that she was trying
to show the nature and relationship between parental love and violence. One of
the novel's themes is that parents, black parents in this case, do violence to their
children every day — if only by forcing them to judge themselves by white
standards. The topic of child abuse, once a socially unmentionable subject,
remained unaddressed far too long even though everyone knew about it. Mr.
Henry's touching Frieda's breasts is a subtle preparation, or foreshadowing, of
Cholly Breedlove's rape of Pecola. When Cholly rapes Pecola, it is a physical
manifestation of the social, psychological, and personal violence that has raped
Cholly for years. His name is "Breedlove," but he is incapable of loving; he is only
able to perform the act of breeding. Because he has been so depreciated by
white society, he is reduced to breeding with his own daughter, a union so
debased that it produces a stillborn child, one who cannot survive for even an
hour in this world where self-hatred breeds still more self-hatred.