Nobody Knows The Bluest Eye
Nobody Knows “The Bluest Eye”
Toni Morrison’s debut novel might be her most misunderstood.
This essay is adapted from On Morrison (Hogarth).
Banned as it’s been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That’s not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn’t care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.”
The gossipy tone and the mystery of the missing marigolds divert attention from those six key words: “Pecola was having her father’s baby.” But these are in fact the book’s shocking revelations: incest, rape, child pregnancy. And as yet more spoilers in these early pages go on to tell us—“Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too”—stillbirth and death are coming, too. This preface concludes: “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”
Deliberate spoilers like these force the reader to shift their expectations away from narrative suspense and plot resolution. In other words, if we already already know that the marigolds didn’t grow, that the ill-begotten baby died, then we must focus our attention not on what happened or why, but on how it happened, how it felt. Spoilers are a confidence trick, so to speak: a writer must have faith that a mere series of events is less interesting than how it is told.
Morrison even went so far as to have most of this page of The Bluest Eye—spoilers and all—printed on the cover of its first edition, which came out with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970. Designed by Herb Lubalin, the cover is all-white and filled to the margins with the text of Morrison’s prose. It produces a postmodern trompe l’oeil effect, as if you are looking at a book whose cover has gone missing from misuse or overuse. Only when you zoom in do you realize that all of the dots above the lowercase i’s are blue, a kind of typographic pun on the titular “bluest eye.”
Once, at the end of a lecture I was giving on the novel, I brought up Morrison’s choice to print The Bluest Eye’s intense disclosures of abuse on its very cover. This was evidence, I suggested, that she didn’t believe in trigger warnings any more than she believed in spoiler alerts. The next class, a student raised their hand even before I began to speak. They agreed with me that to put “Pecola was having her father’s baby” on the book’s cover was a spoiler. But they argued that this was also in fact a trigger warning, because it would prevent some bookstore browsers from opening the novel to read further.
Good point. But was this a trigger warning, or was it just a trigger? Aren’t these rather traumatic things to encounter on the cover of a book? Is Morrison giving us an offramp to avoid violence or is she seeking as swiftly as possible to inflict it upon us? Why print a label on a book that would surely push some readers away? These are not easy questions to answer.
Quiet as it’s kept, nobody knows what The Bluest Eye is really about. Ever since its publication, it has left many unsure about what to make of it. Why did Morrison decide to take her first steps into her literary career in this confrontational and paradoxical way?
Over the years, Morrison offered a few different origin stories for the book. In one interview she said, “It was a book I wanted to read and I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I began to write it.” In a later interview, she noted that she wrote the book in a cultural moment dominated by black male writers and by slogans like “Black Is Beautiful,” which, as she put it, were “gonna skip over something” unless she reminded people “that it wasn’t always beautiful” and “how hurtful a certain kind of internecine racism is.” Interested in “the feelings of being ugly…how it feels,” she chose to write about “the most vulnerable people in the world…female black children.”
In the 1993 foreword to the novel, Morrison suggested that a real-life incident from her childhood had in fact inspired it:
The origin of the novel lay in a conversation I had with a childhood friend. We had just started elementary school. She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish.… The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that.
These authorial comments have come to dominate The Bluest Eye, even occlude it.
Many continue to believe that the novel is, at heart, a sorrowful meditation on the effects of white beauty standards on a black child, like a literary version of the doll study in Brown v. Board of Education. This reputation has always irritated me. I find it reductive. It ignores the novel’s aesthetic design in favor of its subject matter. To rephrase Morrison’s justification for her spoilers, the inspiration for a novel (what it’s about, why you wrote it) is no more important than its effects (how we experience it).
To write the novel from the black female child’s point of view had in fact posed an interesting formal problem: “The main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void.” Morrison’s “solution—break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader”—was a formal one, too: “an attempt to shape a silence while breaking it.” As she put it in a later essay, “the visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context in The Bluest Eye.”
Whether historical, biographical, or literary, all of these stated reasons for writing the novel have in common a response to absence. Morrison’s form in the novel, her how, operates through negation: she takes things away; she leaves things out; she embeds absence and fracture at every level, from the novel’s structure to its tropes and images down to the most minute elements of its prose. And this is a black aesthetic, part of her effort, as she put it in her foreword, “to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture.”
Given the novel’s reputation as the piteous tale of the little black girl who yearns for blue eyes, it may come as a surprise to new readers that The Bluest Eye is narrated not by Pecola Breedlove herself, but by a woman named Claudia MacTeer, from Lorain, OH. In one of the few biographical gestures of her oeuvre, Morrison, whose grandmother’s maiden name was McTear, used her real hometown, where she grew up as Chloe Wofford.
Claudia is a character-narrator. As a young character, Claudia meets Pecola when her parents briefly take the girl in after a crisis in the Breedlove home. As an adult narrator, Claudia tells the story while dipping freely into the minds of the other people in the community. This means that we largely learn about Pecola from a distance, through rich, detailed portraits of the people in her life who have, as Morrison explains in her foreword, “mounted a series of rejections” of her, “some routine, some exceptional, some monstrous.”
Each of these interlinked vignettes sheds light on an aspect of Pecola’s life, starting with her poverty and her parents’ abusive relationship. We bear witness to her rejection by a Polish grocer, then by a group of white boys, then by a group of black boys, then by a group of black girls. We shift to a quasi-sociological account of a black neighbor whose horrid son throws a cat at Pecola, and then frames her for killing it, leading his mother to spit an epithet at the girl: “You nasty little black bitch.” This episode yields the image that Pecola fixates on: “the blue eyes in the black face” of the cat.
We spend some time with Pecola’s mother, Pauline, and read of the accidents of life that marred her destiny when she was young: a nail in the floor that made her lame; a tooth that rotted, and fell out; her escapist moviegoing, which only fed her self-loathing. We turn our gaze to Pecola’s father, Cholly, who also has known severe humiliations: the first time he has sex, two white men discover the young couple, then proceed to watch and instruct; when he finds the father who abandoned him, he is rejected so painfully that he soils himself. It is in Cholly’s chapter, and from his perspective, that we learn how he ends up raping his own daughter.
We then read the personal history of another neighbor, a lightskinned minister turned grifter of Caribbean origin named Soaphead Church, who is a believer—part of his chapter is structured as a letter to God—a self-described intellectual, and a repressed pedophile. Rather than molest Pecola, Soaphead decides to manipulate her, convincing her that if she poisons a dog that’s been bothering him, she’ll get the blue eyes she prays for.
These external “rejections” cumulatively fracture Pecola’s psyche by the novel’s end, where she finally speaks in the first person, but in a disturbing dialogue with herself. Why approach this broken child through this complex structure and sundry cast of characters? Why not let Pecola tell her own story straight? Why not simply give the voiceless a voice?
Morrison explained that she felt “centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.” Further, to avoid both sentimentality and “complicity in the demonization process,” it was necessary to treat “racism as a cause, consequence, and manifestation of individual and social psychosis.”
Disdaining straightforward storytelling or a personal account from the victim’s point of view, Morrison instead broke “the narrative into parts” that then have to “be reassembled by the reader,” who must piece together the myriad overdetermined forces that have obliterated this young girl. The novel in essence enacts structural racism while refusing to villainize individual culprits: “I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.”
This is how it happens, the novel insists: class politics, family trauma, extreme poverty, popular culture, intraracial colorism, and a cruelty bred of perversity all pile on together to blot out Pecola. Nobody is responsible; everybody is responsible. But this contradictory judgment is not an abdication of responsibility. It is a refusal to simplify. It is also an effort to create a specific reading experience—not passive pity or easy demonizing, but active reassembly and self- interrogation—through a formal structure.
In The Bluest Eye, as Morrison once said of William Faulkner’s work, “the structure is the argument.” We see Morrison’s awareness of this aesthetic design in seemingly incidental images in the novel. There is a motif of broken things in the Breedloves’ home in an old store, such as “the split” in a couch “which became a gash, which became a gaping chasm.” Soaphead Church’s personality is described as “an arabesque: intricate, symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constructed—except for one flaw.”
Through these moments of covert metafiction, whereby an author embeds clues in a text about its fictional construction, Morrison hints that the Bluest Eye is itself an elaborate structure of negation, a literary “arabesque” with “one flaw”—Pecola herself, the narrative void, the absent center around which the novel’s shards revolve. When Morrison said she was attempting in this novel to shape a silence “while breaking it,” she of course means this colloquially—to break a silence as in to disclose—but also, in an odd way, she means it literally: to shatter silence itself.
What would it mean to crack the quiet open, to break absence into pieces, to subject a void to rupture? How does it work, how does it feel, when things appear in a novel in the form of negative space, acts of undoing, or events depicted under the sign of erasure? Let’s take a minor tic in Morrison’s transcription oof speech:
“I’m willing to do what I can for folks. Can’t nobody say I ain’t.”
“Ain’t nobody bothering you.”
“Don’t nobody know nothing about them.… Don’t seem to have no people.”
Each of these sentence fragments exhibits Morrison’s insistence on using “speakerly, aural, colloquial” language. These examples of dialogue sound natural, overheard, spoken, and black. And that’s because they all use double negatives.
The double negative is a recognizable feature of colloquial American speech, but especially of African American Vernacular English or, as I prefer to call it, black English. Here it serves Morrison’s masterful deployment of an aesthetics of negation. To wit, it is significant that the black double negative does not signify a positive term (as it does in so-called standard English), but rather doubles down on the negative, suggesting a surplus of nothing, an intensification of the naught.
You can find this tendency everywhere in black works of art, from lines of poetry by Sun Ra (“out of nowhere they come from the no point”) to Kerry James Marshall’s “Black Painting,” which layers black paint over an image of Fred Hampton’s apartment at night, including a wall poster of the iconic Black Panthers logo. This aesthetic expresses the idea, as the critic Stephen Best puts it, that “there is something impossible about blackness…to be black is also to participate, of necessity, in a collective undoing, if not…a self-undoing.”
Self-undoing is the perfect way to describe another of Morrison’s forms of negation in The Bluest Eye. Pecola, watching as her parents exchange punches with “a darkly brutal formalism,” thinks:
“Please make me disappear.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush. Slowly again. Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too, went away. Then her chest, her neck. The face was hard, too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left.
Pecola’s self-negating contreblazon—the reverse of a blazon, the poetic listing of a beloved’s physical features—proceeds body part by body part, announcing via elimination both what makes up her body and what it is reduced to: the “tight, tight” eyes that she wishes were blue.
Negation is often strangely active like this in The Bluest Eye, a narrative form of creatio ex nihilo. When Pecola arrives at the MacTeers’ to stay for a short while, she arrives “with nothing. No little paper bag with the other dress, or a nightgown, or two pair of whitish cotton bloomers.” These lines might seem just to convey all the things Claudia expected Pecola to have with her. But notice how the simple word “nothing” seems to fill up with the very things that are said to be missing. When we read sentences, especially those that describe objects in specific detail (“two pair of whitish cotton bloomers”), we tend to picture them. This means that we mentally conjure even those things we are explicitly told aren’t there. Here, we hold the initial “nothing” and later “no” in reserve—or rather, they operate as imaginary lines striking through what follows.
Morrison often makes absence manifest through a narrative version of an obliquely ironic move called paralepsis, whereby you raise a subject by denying it outright or by feigning that you’re not going to bring it up. This rhetorical trope is familiar to us from the dry conversational gambit of saying “not to mention” before you go on ahead and mention, as with this passing example from The Bluest Eye: “Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.” Paralepsis is usually just a form of wry emphasis.
But when Morrison elaborates paralepsis at narrative scale, this technique of negation produces extraordinary effects:
There is nothing more to say about the furnishings. They were anything but describable, having been conceived, manufactured, shipped, and sold in various states of thoughtlessness, greed, and indifference. The furniture had aged without ever having become familiar. People had owned it, but never known it. No one had lost a penny or a brooch under the cushions of either sofa and remembered the place and time of the loss or the finding. No one had clucked and said, “But I had it just a minute ago. I was sitting right there talking to…” or “Here it is. It must have slipped down while I was feeding the baby!” No one had given birth in one of the beds—or remembered with fondness the peeled paint places, because that’s what the baby, when he learned to pull himself up, used to pick loose. No thrifty child had tucked a wad of gum under the table. No happy drunk—a friend of the family, with a fat neck, unmarried, you know, but God how he eats!—had sat at the piano and played “You Are My Sunshine.”
The paragraph goes on, listing all that isn’t there in the Breedlove home. Poverty robs you; it’s worth making an inventory of the stolen goods. We feel absence more poignantly through this photonegative of the life—the liveliness—that is missing, that ought to be possible.
When Pauline, while working as a maid for a white family, bathes their child, it is: “in a porcelain tub with silvery taps running infinite quantities of hot, clear water….dried her in fluffy white towels and put her in cuddly night clothes.…No zinc tub, no buckets of stove-heated water, no flaky, stiff, grayish towels washed in a kitchen sink.” What is not at her place of work (the textures and shades of the scenes of washing she’s used to at home) hovers behind the gleaming surfaces. By invoking both, Morrison uses a painterly effect called chiaroscuro, juxtaposing the brightness of porcelain, silvery, and fluffy white with the darkness of zinc, grayish, and black puffs. This technique intensifies the stark contrast of presence and absence, but also aligns them with racial blackness and whiteness.
Claudia invokes this same black-and-white palette when she makes two counterintuitive nugatory confessions about her childhood self. One is that she preferred being unclean, loathed that “hateful bath in a galvanized zinc tub,” which led to “the dreadful and humiliating absence of dirt. The irritable, unimaginative cleanliness. Gone the ink marks from legs and face.” The other, more disconcertingly, is that she longed to dismember every “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll” that she ever received.
Later in the novel, Claudia imagines Pecola’s unborn child, “the baby that everybody wanted dead,” with the opposite features:
I thought about…and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls.
Claudia’s negative diction here—no yellow bangs, no pinched nose—enacts her methodical dismemberment of white dolls, but it also counteracts her own erasure (the unwanted removal of dirt and ink marks) in the zinc tub, as well as Pecola’s earlier self-cancelling contreblazon. Claudia has, by force of double negation as much as by force of imagination, brought an otherwise nullified blackness to shimmering, vibrant life.
This effort to reverse the interracial dynamic between white and black, however, distracts the characters—and many readers—from the intraracial one: the terrible violence within the black world that will tear a little black girl’s psyche asunder. Pecola goes unseen by her own family, is raped and impregnated by her own father, and becomes invisible to her own community. This is what Morrison meant when she said she wanted to depict a “hurtful…internecine racism.”
In her evocation of internal fracture, Morrison allows a crack of negation to creep even into single words—with profound reverberations. She makes use of negative prefixes like un-, in- , or dis- as much as any writer might, but it is notable that versions of the words indifferent and disinterested in particular recur in her work. Claudia uses both terms to describe what her pathological desire to destroy white dolls betrays:
The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so.… When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge.
For Morrison, disinterest and indifference seem to sit on a spectrum of human experience that is not just a matter of perception or feeling, but of ethics as well.
Several critics have noted a cool neutrality in both theme and style across Morrison’s oeuvre. It permeates the violence within the ironically named Peace clan in Sula (1974); it emerges in the clinical brutality of an enslaver called “schoolteacher” and his nephews in Beloved (1987). What I find striking about this theme is that disinterestedness in particular is usually considered an ideal of Enlightenment philosophy, an ethical good when it comes to justice and art.
Immanuel Kant carefully distinguished disinterestedness from the “instrumentality” that would treat people as a means to an end rather than, in the famous formulation, as “an end in themselves.” But for Morrison, a loss of interest in the human world—and in its vivid, distinct internal differences—can in fact be worse than purposive instrumentality.
The moral implications of an absence of interest emerge in the context of the appalling crux of The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove’s rape of his own daughter, Pecola. The novel’s explanation for how he became capable of this act is surprising:
Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep.… free to live his fantasies, and free even to die, the how and the when of which held no interest for him.… Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose.… Nothing, nothing, interested him now. Not himself, not other people.
The rejections he has undergone have granted him a perverse freedom—not from his feelings as such, but from being interested in them or differentiating between them.
It is notable that Cholly’s rape isn’t depicted as an act of instrumental abuse: he doesn’t rape Pecola out of pedophilic desire, nor is he simply a bad man. Rather, it happens because he’s so indifferent to her that he can barely distinguish her as a person. Like Claudia’s fantasy of dismembering white dolls/girls, his act of violence emerges as an elision of crucial differences.
He initially confuses his daughter with his wife due to a shared gesture: Pecola stands “on one foot scratching the back of her calf with her toe.…[T]hat was what Pauline was doing the first time he saw her.” As he approaches, he sees Pecola “dimly and could not tell what he saw or what he felt.” Then, after the deed is done, he finds her fingers clenched around his wrist, but “whether her grip was from a hopeless but stubborn struggle to be free, or from some other emotion, he could not tell.” His “dangerous freedom” doesn’t just curtail Pecola’s own “struggle to be free”; it makes him incapable of discerning it at all.
What is perhaps most shocking about this scene that it is told from the rapist’s point of view. The act is relayed to the reader in the third person but because it is focalized through the character and uses free indirect style, we see it through Cholly’s eyes, feel it through his body, experience it through his consciousness. This surely accounts at least in part for the perennial efforts to ban The Bluest Eye. Morrison ferociously resisted that censorship—and was a loud-spoken critic of censorship of all kinds—but even she was perplexed by those who wished to teach her first novel to students in junior high: “I wonder, why do they want them to read it so young. It’s not a children’s book. It is scary.”
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“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →I, too, was surprised when, back in 2020, I saw the marketing for a “public reading” of the entirety of The Bluest Eye for Black History Month by “eleven critically acclaimed and bestselling authors” as part of an initiative “at the intersection of racial equity, social justice, and literacy.” Who would volunteer to read Cholly’s scandalous pages aloud in public?
The impulse to simplify Morrison’s complex aesthetic and ethical project to the identity politics of representation obscures the fact that The Bluest Eye has a lot in common with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). In both cases, the father figure has grown numb to the reality of another person, has lost track of the fundamental difference that she is a child. And in both cases, the child’s absent or silenced voice is a kind of moral vacuum whose gravitational force draws in much larger questions about the relationship between power and intellectual authority.
Morrison also responds to Ralph Ellison’s grotesque, satirical portrait of a former sharecropper who rapes and impregnates his own daughter in Invisible Man (1952). She in essence offers a counterpoint to Trueblood, whose name she quasi-anagrams to the incestuous Breedlove, through her nuanced psychological portraits of two very different black male child rapists: the poverty-stricken and traumatized Cholly, with his surplus of freedom; and Soaphead Church, who justifies his sexual proclivities through a sophisticated—or sophistic—reasoning process.
In Morrison’s opening literary foray, then, she uses formal techniques of negation to trouble the spiritual, intellectual, and artistic ideals many of us take for granted. So-called Enlightenment values of freedom and disinterestedness become the measure of Claudia’s speculative dismemberment of little white girls—“it was repulsive because it was disinterested”—then get aligned with the very real violence of men who rape little girls.
Morrison thus dramatizes the argument that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer made in the wake of World War II. They theorized that the concentration camps arose out of a mechanical instrumentalization of Enlightenment reasoning, which, as Aimé Césaire had already pointed out, had long been used to justify the violence of colonialism. Even more remarkable is that, in The Bluest Eye, Morrison used the simplest form of grammatical nullification—prefixes that undo difference and interest—to stage her own negative dialectic of enlightenment.
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