Seldom do I encounter a book that I dislike so intensely, that angers me, frustrates me, or torments me to such an extent that I obsess over it for days, then read it again just to see if I am judging too harshly, missing some important ingredient, overlooking some saving grace. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye affected me this way.

How I detested this book the first time I read it! But I doubted myself. Here was a book written by a winner of the Nobel Prize. How could it be as totally unredeeming as I found it to be? I must not have read it properly, I thought. So I decided to read it again, this time taking into account the time at which Morrison conceived and wrote it.

I took myself back in time to the 1960s, when Black is Beautiful was a rousing call for self-esteem, a claim to a long-denied, rightful sense of pride. An important mantra. A positive agenda. Thus transported back to that point in time, I re-read The Bluest Eye, and disliked it even more than I had on my first reading.

Morrison states in her Afterword that The Bluest Eye was her attempt to examine the causes of racial self-loathing and the devastating results that inspired the movements of the 1960s. But the content of this novel when considered in that context seemed to defeat the very cry of Black is Beautiful.

I saw little here to further a sense of Black pride or self-worth; I found only an indictment of the society which made the Black Power movement a necessity. Instead of life-affirming answers, instead of positive solutions to tragic situations, instead of a rousing call to escape from this cycle of tragedy, I found a tale that bolstered stereotypes and divisionism while casting a wide net of blame.

So, I read it yet again. Hey, I can be a real glutton for punishment! On the third reading, I think I may have understood what Toni Morrison was attempting to say here. I can even marvel at her effort. But ultimately, I feel she failed. The truths are too easily misunderstood because they are clothed too richly in literary devices that deliver seemingly contradictory messages.

The Story in a Nutshell

In the Lorain, Ohio of autumn 1941, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove leads an ugly, wretched, traumatic life. To her young mind, life would be happier if she were beautiful rather than ugly, and she prays for beauty in the form of the blue eyes that make the Shirley Temples of the world lead happy lives. Her life does change, but sadly for the worse in this woeful tale of lives lived in violence, misery, and self-loathing.

While this is primarily the tale of Pecola Breedlove's destruction, it is also the tale of the lives of those who destroyed her, either through direct victimization, or through indirect communal responsibility for allowing it to happen by failing to recognize the real Enemy.

Distrusting the Author's Purpose

My approach to and expectations of The Bluest Eye were dramatically colored by its two prefatory chapters. The inherent contradiction between the first preface (a liturgical repetition of a Dick and Jane story), and the closing lines of the second preface, had me questioning Morrison's honesty and intent.

The second preface ends with the eloquent (though dishonest) observation: There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. But the first preface (and most of the story to follow) screams out "why" loud and clear. This story is not so much the "how" of Pecola Breedlove's destruction, but rather Morrison's assessment of the "why" for racial self-loathing. The blatant contradiction of the prefaces left me suspicious of the prose to follow.

Defining the Norm By an Extreme

Pecola Breedlove's story is not, even in Morrison's view, reflective of black society as a whole. As she observes in her Afterword to the 1993 edition of The Bluest Eye:

In trying to dramatize the devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause, I chose a unique situation, not a representative one. The extremity of Pecola's case stemmed largely from a crippled and crippling family—unlike the average black family and unlike the narrator's. But singular as Pecola's life was, I believed some aspects of her woundability were lodged in all young girls.

I found it difficult to respect Morrison's broad-based universal finger of blame while using a narrow extreme as her focus. I also found it difficult not to be chagrined by Morrison's treatment of a universal tragedy of the human condition as a uniquely black plight. While Morrison may say "all young girls," the story limits itself to "all young black girls." Similarly, her reference to the "average black family" could as easily apply to any family regardless of color. With this narrow focus, I feel the white-family primer thread Morrison chose for weaving her tale became less convincing, and the universal nature of her observations became buried by a premise which, by its very nature, engenders race-specific opposing camps and blame-casting.

The prefatory Dick and Jane repetitions, followed by subsequent chapter titles deriving from this litany, were heavy-handed at driving home Morrison's premise of the incompatible and barren white-family primer as paradigm of the factors engendering racial self-loathing. And yet, it can be convincingly argued that these barren white-family primers set a standard of happiness and beauty just as much at odds with down-trodden white children as black, a point which Morrison ignores here. And what accounts for the fact that other black people, Morrison's Claudia or the author herself, have been subjected to these same influences and yet manage to avoid this sort of self-loathing? This question is never satisfactorily answered in The Bluest Eye.

Morrison may, in fact, have been critically examining the danger of accepting any outwardly imposed standard of beauty for evaluating self-worth, as well as considering the even worse danger of equating dubious standards of superficial beauty with happiness. Unfortunately, in having chosen the white-family primer as her dominant symbol, the surface layer of Morrison's text overshadows this universal truth, and encourages perception of the novel as no more than a divisive, race-segregating blamefest.

An Unequal Distribution of Blame and Exculpating the Culprits

In the Afterword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison says: I did not want to dehumanize the characters that trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse.

And she does not dehumanize them. Instead, she exculpates them by transferring blame to the incompatible models of beauty and happiness defined by white society which corrupt and destroy those who cannot conform to such standards. And herein lies one of my main complaints with this book. To say that Pecola's father is somehow absolved of personal guilt in her destruction because of socially instilled racial self-loathing does not sit well with me.

Morrison is far more judgmental and critical of the Geraldines of this world, the black women whom she depicts as disowning their race, than she is of Cholly Breedlove, a man who would rape his own daughter. Morrison stereotypes and dehumanizes these black women who deny their blackness. She villainizes them. Yet her treatment of Cholly Breedlove is sympathetic and far less judgmental.

I find it hard, however, to accept violence and brutality as any less ugly, to find people any less responsible for their actions simply because of outside pressures. It seems to me that to argue differently serves to diminish the inhumanity of those actions. Not all black fathers rape their young daughters even when subject to the same social pressures as Cholly, so I have difficulty appreciating Morrison's determination to so aggressively avoid his "demonization."

What I Did Like About the Dick and Jane Motif

Although, as discussed above, I feel that the Dick and Jane motif has its holes, I must give credit to Ms. Morrison for the clever device of organizing the chapters with excerpts from Dick and Jane as a contrast between the incompatible paradigm and the bleak reality of her characters.

A chapter headed HEREISTHEHOUSE... introduces readers to the Breedlove's antithetical home, while HEREISTHEFAMILY... presents us with a family bearing no resemblance to the happy primer. SEETHECAT... examines the black women (specifically Geraldine) whom the narrator disdainfully views as aberrations who divorce themselves from their black "funkiness" and sexuality and lavish their love on pets rather than their husbands and children.

SEEMOTHER... paints the sad story of Pauline Breedlove, while SEEFATHER... does the same for Cholly Breedlove, ending in his tragic "play" with Pecola. SEETHEDOG... introduces Soaphead Church's story and his connection with the dog that will be the final terrible event we witness before encountering Pecola's madness in a chapter entitled LOOKLOOKHERECOMESAFRIEND..., in which the happiness promised by the paradigm is instead replaced by Pecola's imaginary friend who comes to her only in her final descent into insanity.

The Prose

Morrison's poetic prose can be impressive. The power and economy of her words is formidable, although at times I felt rather distanced from the characters because there seemed to be more literary device than heart here, and I'll take heart over style any day.

The narrative does not progress in a linear fashion, and alters its focus from one character to the next, rarely leaving the reader long enough with any individual to feel a closeness before turning onto a new focus. The end result of this for me was that I felt I was being held at arm's length from all the characters by a controlling narrator.

An additional obstacle to my enjoyment was the narrator's inconsistent voice. Even though most of the narrative is through the voice of the character Claudia, Morrison's style makes it unclear whether we are hearing direct perception through the child Claudia's nine-year-old eyes, or if we are receiving after-the-fact perceptions from an adult Claudia looking back. The symbolic poetry of Claudia's descriptions could believably be the words of a Claudia grown older, but are certainly not credible as the words of a nine-year-old, and I was frequently left with the feeling that Morrison was putting forty-year-old words into a nine-year-old mouth.

When Morrison employs a third person narrative, it is frequently unclear if this is the adult Claudia sharing her philosophies or an omniscient narrator delivering these passages. (The highly scornful, judgmental depiction of the Geraldines of this country would appear to be delivered by such an omniscient narrator [pp. 81-93].) Problem is, this omniscient narrator has pretty much the same voice as the reminiscing Claudia.

A Surfeit of Sex

Long passages focusing on sex left me feeling that Morrison was a bit overly enthusiastic in her concentration on this narrative element. There were just too many lurid details. Sex scenes generally tend to either bore me or leave me impatient to get on with the story. Most (if not all) of the sex scenes here were extremely important to the storyline, and were definitely not boring, but I found them disturbing and difficult to endure. That may well have been Morrison's intent, but they were anything but a pleasurable reading experience.

Segregating a Universal Theme

At the story's end, Morrison, through her narrator, observes:

All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

Morrison's tale thus casts its universal net of blame upon white society for setting the stage for racial self-loathing, and upon the black community for their eagerness to allow others to be crushed to escape their own descent into self-loathing. But it is a sad fact of the human condition that all too often people, regardless of color, tend to despise those who have more beauty, money, power, or other desirable things than they themselves possess, and avoid their feelings of worthlessness by equally or more angrily despising those who have even less than they do.

And here, I suppose, is my greatest complaint with regard to this novel. By presenting this human tragedy as a purely racial issue, Morrison may have done more harm than good in bolstering the tendency to blame, deride, and divide, rather than absolve, uplift and unite. In the end, I feel Morrison's intent was positive, but the overall effect was extremely negative, leaving me unable to recommend this book.

Recommended: No