Toni Morrison

Writing the Moral Imagination

Valerie Smith

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118326749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This compelling study explores the inextricable links between the Nobel laureate's aesthetic practice and her political vision, through an analysis of the key texts as well as her lesser-studied works, books for children, and most recent novels.

• Offers provocative new insights and a refreshingly original contribution to the scholarship of one of the most important contemporary American writers
• Analyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to her critical writing about the process of reading and writing literature, the relationship between readers and writers, and the cultural contributions of African-American literature
• Features extended analyses of Morrison's lesser-known works, most recent novels, and books for children as well as the key texts

CHAPTER 1

The Bluest Eye and Sula

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s first novel, juxtaposes two moments in twentieth-century US culture. The novel centers on a set of traumatic events in the life of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl, in the 1940s. Claudia MacTeer, Pecola’s friend and the principal narrator, reflects upon these events both from her childhood point of view and from her adult perspective in the late 1960s. In its heightened attention to the politics of aesthetics, The Bluest Eye is certainly born out of the racial self-consciousness of the 1960s. But the novel also evokes the advantages and liabilities black migrants from the South encountered as they adapted to their new lives in the North (in this case, Lorain, Ohio) during the postwar era. In seeking wider opportunities for themselves and their children, they escaped the most virulent forms of racial oppression. But they risked becoming alienated from the values and practices that had sustained previous generations of African Americans.

In The Bluest Eye, this sense of alienation is most powerfully expressed in the form of racial self-loathing. Many of the characters have internalized the effects of the selfsame hegemonic social and political policies and practices that brutalized them; they display not only a contempt for African features and social practices associated with black culture, but also a reverence for standards of beauty associated with whiteness. Furthermore, the roots of their self-disgust lie so deep, that they do not recognize them for what they are. Instead, they project those feelings upon the most vulnerable members of their community, in this case the young Pecola. By the end of the novel, she has been destroyed not only by her rape at the hands of her father, but by the abuse that members of her community heap upon her.

In her “Afterword,” published in 1993, Morrison describes the moment from her childhood out of which the novel grew. When an elementary school friend expressed a desire for blue eyes, the young Morrison feigned sympathy, but was actually “violently repelled” by the mere idea of the radical alteration of her friend’s appearance: “very blue eyes in a very black skin.”¹ She recalls that when she heard her friend’s wish, she realized for the first time that “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (p. 209). Years later, she still wondered about “the gaze that had condemned” (p. 211) her friend and that her friend had subsequently internalized. The Bluest Eye offers a poignant and distilled exploration of the impact of dominant standards of beauty upon those who fall short of those cultural norms. By examining the pernicious effects of racial self-loathing upon the characters, the novel reveals ways in which African American communities are implicated in the valorization and circulation of these aesthetic ideals and the qualities they have come to symbolize.

The novel actually begins three times, a harbinger of the multiplicity of perspectives from which it is told. Before the narrative actually starts, the book opens with an excerpt from a Dick and Jane primer, one of a series of Basic Readers published by Scott, Foresman and Company from 1930 until the late 1960s. These primers both taught generations of children to read through the introduction and repetition of simple words, and also established as normative an idealized vision of a suburban, nuclear, middle-class white family. The second beginning, in italics, is told from the perspective of the adult Claudia. It identifies the year when the events of the novel occurred, mentions Pecola’s tragic circumstances, and introduces some of its dominant metaphors, such as seeds and earth. The third beginning, told from Claudia’s childhood perspective, actually launches the narrative.

The excerpt from the primer reads as follows:

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play. See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile. See the dog. Bowwow goes the dog. Do you want to play with Jane? See the dog run. Run, dog, run. Look, look. Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They will play a good game. Play, Jane, play. (p. iii)

This excerpt is repeated twice; the first time with no punctuation, no capitalization except for the initial “H,” and with the lines spaced closer together. The second time, all the words are run together, and the space between lines has been decreased even further.

The transformation of the passage from a familiar text to the frenzied rush of letters serves multiple functions. First, the excerpt establishes the standard against which Morrison’s characters are measured, measure themselves, and are found lacking. Second, it prompts readers to take notice of a passage so familiar that one might overlook it. With neither punctuation, spaces between words, nor capitalization, the passage teeters on the brink of meaninglessness, and the standard of value it articulates and circulates is exposed as arbitrary. And third, the concatenation of letters in the second repetition anticipates the action of the novel, since many of the touchstones of the passage factor into Pecola’s traumatic decline: the house, the family, the cat, the dog, the friend. Read in light of her own family circumstances, as well as her encounters with Maureen Peal, Junior, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church, the repetition of the word “play” becomes more than a way of introducing a new vocabulary word. Here it imitates the relentless pressure Pecola feels from standards of value she will never attain. Indeed, the final version is emblematic of Pecola’s psychological deterioration; by the end of the novel she is shattered by her own sense of shame and by the self-loathing that others project upon her.

Although The Bluest Eye centers on Pecola, Morrison chose not to tell the story from her point of view because, as she writes: “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” (p. 211). Moreover, by expanding her focus to encompass an entire community, Morrison ensures that her reader will understand that Pecola’s story is far from idiosyncratic. Not only are there three narrators – Claudia MacTeer as both an adult and a child as well as an omniscient narrator – but the text also includes the backstory of the children and adults who have a hand in Pecola’s psychological wounding and who are wounded themselves. In projecting their internalized self-loathing onto a child, they exemplify how “the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society” (p. 210).

The structure of The Bluest Eye underscores the proliferation of stories and of narrative voices within the novel. The body of the text is divided into four chapters (each named for a different season of the year) that are, in turn, subdivided. Each chapter begins with an episode, usually involving Pecola, told from the point of view of Claudia the child but shaped by her adult reflections and rhetoric. Claudia’s accounts are then followed by one or two stories told by an apparently objective, omniscient narrator. This narrator usually recalls information to which Claudia would not have had access: she tells stories from Pecola’s life that involve other characters and weaves flashbacks from these other lives into Pecola’s story. In addition, in each chapter, several garbled lines from the primer separate Claudia’s voice from the omniscient narrator’s and foreshadow the tensions contained within the story that follows.

The chapters juxtapose the 1940s, the eternal present of the primer, and the 1960s. The different narratives and moments in each chapter provide variations on a particular theme; these stories address indirectly the consequences of desiring qualities and possessions that will always be unattainable. By using this technique of repetition with a difference, Morrison reveals the interconnectedness of human lives and the inextricability of past and present. The structure of the novel suggests that readers must place Pecola’s story within the context of systemic social practices and beliefs in order to comprehend it.

Claudia MacTeer is strong and self-assertive. Her household comprises a nuclear family that includes her parents, her sister Frieda, and herself, and yet it, too, departs from the hegemonic norm described in the primer: their house is old and cold, not white and green. The MacTeers share the home with roaches, mice, and briefly with a predatory boarder, not with a cat and dog. Unlike the mother in the primer, Mrs. MacTeer does not laugh much. She is a quick-tempered woman who does not mince words when she confronts either a large or small offense. But Claudia recalls the healing presence of her family during a childhood illness: her sister sang a sentimental song to comfort her, and her mother forced her to swallow Vicks salve and massaged the ointment into her chest to help her breathe. From her adult perspective, Claudia appreciates these gestures. She looks back on her childhood and sees that while her experience may not have conformed to the Dick and Jane ideal, she was surrounded by love:

Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it – taste it – sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base – everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die. (p. 12)

This passage exemplifies the power of memory to render space symbolic, and the power of narrative to resist hegemonic norms. Through Claudia’s eyes, the love that surrounded her transformed the material deprivations of her childhood home into expressions of comfort and security. Her home may have failed to live up to the ideal presented in the primer, but it comes to life in the form of cold wind seeping through a cracked window, the smell of Vicks salve, the sensation of a hot flannel cloth on her neck and chest.

During the fall of 1940 when the novel begins, Pecola and her family are temporarily homeless because Cholly, the alcoholic father, has accidentally set their house afire. Until the family can find a new place to live, the County places Pecola with the MacTeers. Claudia is too young to worship the ideal of beauty that white dolls and little white girls embody and that so many of the black people around her adore. But she is old enough to sense the power they wield over not only Frieda and Pecola, but over the adults in her community as well. Indeed, the seeds of Claudia’s power as a narrator are evident in her childhood behavior and preferences. She disdains the white dolls that adults and older girls worship and expect her to value and believes that they have usurped the adoration that rightfully belongs to her. Instead of treasuring these symbols of white femininity, Claudia takes them apart in hopes of uncovering the mystery of their power.

The MacTeers may fail to fulfill mainstream ideals of a happy family, and they may succumb to the worship of white beauty, but they are able to create an undeniably loving home for their children. In contrast, Pecola’s parents, Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, carry deep wounds from their earlier lives, and they take out their frustrations on their children and on each other. Born and raised in Alabama, Pauline found “the end of her lovely beginning” at the age of two, when she stepped on a rusty nail; the wound festered, leaving her with a damaged foot and a limp. To her mind, this deformity explains why she alone lacks a nickname (even her own children call her “Mrs. Breedlove”); why there are no stories about her to secure her place in family memories; and “why she never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace” (p. 111). Without a place in the family’s oral lore, she found comfort in quiet and solitude, and especially in organizing her own possessions and those of her employers.

She meets Cholly after her family migrates to Kentucky, and he initially fulfills her fantasies for a rich intimate and romantic life. But after they move to Ohio, their marriage deteriorates, at least in part, because of her inability to find and establish community and friendships in the north. A child of the segregated south, she is unaccustomed to living in close proximity to whites, of whom she is afraid. Moreover, other black women scorn her country ways, and Cholly comes to resent her emotional dependency and her financial demands on him. Out of frustration, he turns to drink, and their quarrels grow increasingly violent.

Eventually, Pauline can only satisfy her fantasies of romantic love by imagining herself inside the Hollywood world of make-believe order and beauty. Ironically, she confronts the hollowness of her dream and the disjuncture between her fantasies and her lived experience in a movie theater. Watching a Jean Harlow film, her hair styled like Harlow’s, she bites into a piece of candy and accidentally extracts a tooth. The loss of her rotten tooth awakens her to the depths of her own despair; from that moment on, she lets everything go – her appearance as well as her housekeeping – and embraces what she believes to be her own ugliness. Finding solace only in her devotion to respectability, she dedicates herself to a church “where shouting is frowned upon (p. 126),” and to maintaining the home of the Fishers, the prosperous white family for whom she works. With the Fishers she can throw herself into her love of order; there she finds beauty, fastidiousness, and approbation. With them, she even finds her only nickname, “Polly.”

Pauline’s self-contempt is powerfully in evidence during the scene in which Pecola and the MacTeer sisters stop by to see her at the Fishers’. When Pecola accidentally spills a freshly baked deep-dish berry cobbler all over the floor her mother has just cleaned, scalding her bare legs with the hot juice, Mrs. Breedlove slaps her repeatedly; her tirade makes clear that the floor and the little white Fisher girl are more important to her than her own daughter. She speaks to Pecola with words Claudia describes as “hotter and darker than the smoking berries,” but as she comforts the Fisher girl, “the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake” (p. 109).

Cholly is likewise trapped in his traumatic past; unable to make peace with his own suffering, he destroys his own life and the lives of those around him. As a child he was abandoned by his parents but raised by his loving Great Aunt Jimmy in Georgia. His downward spiral begins during his adolescence; on the day of Aunt Jimmy’s funeral, grief, sex, and racial violence converge. Numbed and confused by the loss of his aunt, Cholly leaves the family gathering after the burial with some of his teenaged cousins to wander in the woods. When he is about to lose his virginity with his cousin Darlene, two white hunters discover them. Turning Cholly’s and Darlene’s sex play into blood sport, they hold the teenagers at gunpoint; the men leave when they realize that Cholly and Darlene are too humiliated to reach their climax.

In the days to come, Cholly finds that he cannot hate the white hunters. Instead, he directs his hatred toward Darlene, the witness to his humiliation and the person he failed to protect. He goes to Macon in search of the father who had abandoned him only to be harshly rebuffed. Only then does he realize how deeply he misses Aunt Jimmy. While she was alive, he did not know how to respond to her physicality and was often repelled by the smell and appearance of her aging body. But alone on the streets of Macon, when he remembers the very things that he had once found disgusting – her asafetida bag, gold teeth, purple head rag, crooked fingers – he is overcome with grief, for those very characteristics and possessions remind him of what he lost when she died.

Cholly’s upbringing failed to prepare him for the responsibilities of family life. The sight of Pecola scratching the back of her calf with her toe reminds him of the way Pauline stood the first time he saw her. The structure of the narrative suggests that because of his past deprivations, he does not know what to make of his daughter’s vulnerability. The only response available to him is sexual, and thus, in his drunken stupor, he rapes her.

As the adult Claudia explains, black people relegated to a marginal position in Jim Crow culture were hungry for home ownership and prided themselves excessively on maintaining their surroun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Introductions to Literature
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 The Bluest Eye and Sula
• CHAPTER 2 Song of Solomon and Tar Baby
• CHAPTER 3 Beloved
• CHAPTER 4 Jazz and Paradise
• CHAPTER 5 Books for Young Readers, Love and A Mercy
• Epilogue: Home
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index