陳瑞欣Tracy Chen
Professor Hsin-chun Tuan
2010/01/07
Theory of Text and Discourse
A Gender Studies’ Eye for The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is not just a text which discusses the serious ethnic issues in America around 1940s; it is also a text which associates with gender issues about African American females. Claudia MacTeer, one of the main characters in the novel, is in charge of the most part of the narration, who recollects her memory in her childhood about another African American girl, Pecola Breedlove. In the process of her narration, Claudia describes not only her own ideas, including “the narrator Claudia”and the nine-year-old Claudia,but also the young Pecola in her eyes. As the story progresses, we can see that Claudia possesses a strong concept of self-identity against the dominated standard; however, in the eyes of young Claudia, Pecola and her family seem to yield to the values of White ideology. In this essay, I want to discuss how African American females perceive themselves in this novel toward the dominance through the viewpoint of gender studies.
Confronting the ascendency of White American culture, Morrison represents the obstacles and frustrations during the process of maturity of African American females. Both the color“blue”in the title of the novel and the ideal family image passage in the prologue of the novel serve as an typical image of beauty of the White ideology.The passage:“adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs---all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured”(20) also shows that the standard of ideal beauty impacts African American people, especially African American womanhood; furthermore, under such overwhelming influences, they loose the awareness and chance to examine these concepts or to develop their own ideas. Worst of all, controlled by the prevailing ideologies, African American people gradually look down upon themselves and tend to impose white Western ideologies upon their next generation. Thiskind of “culture of shame”displaces the focus on external causes or forces, as Jill Matus suggests. As a means of producing self-regulating and conforming subjects, the inculcation of shame secures dominant interests, converting and perverting anger in other eventually to breed false loves and desires(Matus, 45). As a result, when young Claudia did not appreciate her white baby doll as the one or other people expect her to do so, she was severely scorned:“I-never-had-a-baby-doll-in-my-whole-life-and used-to-cry-my-eyes-out-for-them.Now-you-got-one-a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with-you”(21). The style of replacing blank spaces between words with dashes create desperate and unacceptable emotions in the tone of the speaker, who represents the dominance. Encountering such authority, Claudia’s independence and confidence will seem quite distinct among her submissive community. However, even young Claudia shows the character of own self-reliance and strong resistance, the elder Claudia does not provide a clear answer to her dismemberment of the doll, or even the transferring desire to dismember the real person but a mere curiosity to unweave“the secret of the magic they weaved on others.”I think it is because the elder Claudia, after the transformation of“the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love,”gain the capability to examine her action though fail to explain why she destroyed those dolls. Meanwhile, facing the insults from Maureen, Claudia’s sophisticated character also allow her to ponder and analyze the circumstances calmly after their mutual impulsive invectives. The growth of Claudia lies in her sophisticated consideration and cautious insight about herself and how others perceive her ethnics. She can realizes the function of ideology that“dolls, little white girls, or even‘high yellow’girls in [her] community are not the‘Enemy’because they are not the sources of power; they are only vessels into which power flows”(43). I think it is the issue that Morrison tries to arouse and awaken African American female through the character of Claudia. Unfortunately, African American females scarcely have such self-awareness like Claudia. Contrarily, their situations and experiences may have more similarities with the other main character’s: Pecola Breedlove.
Pecola Breedlove, as the opposite character to Claudia in the novel, surrender herself to the white Western dominated standard of beauty; or to say, she is asacrificed victim who is fooled by the concept of ideal beauty in her imagination. The“culture of shame”is deeply rooted not only in her heart but also her parents:“they lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly”(38).“[The ugliness] came from conviction, their conviction”(39). In Otten’s words,“blackness is aligned with ugliness, and expunging it becomes a basis for acceptability(12).”As a result,“they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it”(39). Pecola’s own passive experiences in her miserable family, in her school, or even the encounter of candy shop keeper Mr. Yacobowski and Geraldine all bring about her lost of confidence, her frailty, and self-denial. She hides behind her ugliness, “concealed, veiled, eclipsed---peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask”(39). Therefore, as Otten says,“on the verge of self-awareness, Pecola is dangerously naïve and fully capable of accepting the idea that a socially defined beauty alone merits love”(12). Unlike Claudia who ponder these ideologies, Pecola’s focus and motive is rather simple: she just wants to receive others’ attentions and love through the only effective way she knows. As a result, she pursues desperately the ideal beauty that Claudia wants to get rid of: the image of the white baby doll. The“blue eyes,”especially, have the most influence on Pecola. Whenever she preys to God, or when she eats the candy, the imagined bright future after owning them. the blue eyes have already become a symbol, a guarantee to happiness and love. However, the irony is that till the end of the novel she have no access to it. The ideal family image in the prologue of the novel has dramatic contrast with Pecola’s own family in storefront. Even, when she is placed in the similar scene of the ideal scene twice, once is in Geraldine’s house and once in Pauline’s work place, what she receives are ignorance and reprimand.
According to Jan Furman, when Pecola stands in Geraldine’s house---tricked there by Geraldine’s hateful son---she transgresses a line demarking“colored people”from“niggers,”light-skinned from dark, hand-me-down whiteness from genuine culture(15). Geraldine, although as a colored woman, regards Pecola as a intruder in“her own inviolable world.”However, through her Morrison demonstrates that such a life as Geraldine’s is only validated by exclusion of others(15). As a result, Geraldine sets her teeth against any recognition of some part of who she is in Pecola(15). On the other hand, like Geraldine, Pauline appreciates the ideal image introduced in the prologue, yet she can only achieve it from her work place which is differ from Geraldine’s hostess position. As a result, all the meaningfulness of her life was in her work. Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private world, and never introduced it into her storefront, or to her children(128). Her neglect of her own family leads to the contrast between her attitudes toward her own child and other’s child and the contrast between Pecola and little white girl’s addresses to her. Even when Pecola’s first menses came, the very private experience of woman, it was Mrs. MacTeer, a woman temporarily had Pecola live together, took goo care of her. As Gurleen points out,“the character’s ignorance of the partisan and constructed nature of social reality leads to a consciousness turned against itself rather than the social structure”(24). In addition, Gurleen quotes the term of“feminine mimicry”fromIrigaray’s words that [female] is supposed to mimic the role of the feminine in order to shore up a masculine identity that does not recognize female difference.“Female mimicry in The Bluest Eye has to do with the construction of a gendered and racialized class hierarchy. As Pecola demonstrates, this socially mandated charade of being something one is not(middle-class white girl) and of not being something one is(working-class black girl) makes one invisible, while the split mentality it entails approaches insanity”(26). Like her mother, Pecola can only search for redemption from the ideal image she longs for yet can never gains. As Otten points out,“Morrison depicts Pecola more as victim than as genuinely tragic figure. Unable to commit a saving sin or protect herself against the prolonged self-hate of Cholly or Pauline or Geraldine, she falls prey to an evil beyond herself”(23). As the story progress, we see no salvation can save Pecola from her misery except for withdrawing from the painful reality passively.“Her violent passage from innocence to experience ironically results in the perpetual innocence of insanity that alone can grant her the blue eyes which assure her acceptance”(9).
Through Claudia and Pecola, the two characters in the novel, Morrison represents African American females’ predicaments facing the overwhelming dominated white Western valuations. Morrison, in her afterward of the novel, speaks of how she chooses a unique situation like Pecola to“dramatize the devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause”(211). Through the contrast between Claudia and Pecola, the significance to perceive the beautifulness of oneself by self-judgment is acutely brought out. As one of the“colored”females categorized and influenced by white Western standard, the issue within The Bluest Eye also needs contemplation.
References
1. Otten, Terry. “The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison.”University of Missouri Press, 1989.
2. Matus, Jill. “Toni Morrison.”ManchesterUniversity Press, 1998.
3. Furman, Jan. “Toni Morrison’s Fiction.”University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
4. Grewal, Gurleen. “Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison.”LouisianaStateUniversity Press, 1998. Netlibrary. LouisianaStateUniversity Press. January 7, 2010.
5. Tally, Justine. "Toni Morrison’s fiction." The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007. Cambridge Collections Online. CambridgeUniversity Press. 31 December 2009.
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