The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison - Vanessa D. Dickerson (essay date 1989)
Vanessa D. Dickerson (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: Dickerson, Vanessa D. “The Naked Father in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” In Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy, edited by Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, pp. 108-27. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.
[In the following essay, Dickerson analyzes the “doubled” identity of fathers—characterized as at once both “familiar” and “unknowable” to their daughters—in The Bluest Eye, focusing on the way Cholly's familiarity with Pecola causes not only his daughter's demise but also his own.]
In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), the nine-year-old narrator Claudia McTeer and her ten-year-old sister Frieda lie in bed one night and peer at their naked father who “pass[es] the open door of [their] room”:
We had lain there wide-eyed. He stopped and looked in, trying to see in the dark...
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