The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The naïvete with which Claudia experiences the world allows readers a rare glimpse into the mind of a young African American girl coming of age. Much surprises her. When Pecola comes to stay with the MacTeers temporarily because Cholly has set his family’s house on fire, Claudia cannot believe that a father could be so irresponsible as to put his own family outdoors: “Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. . . . There is a difference between being put out and being put out-doors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.” During her stay, Pecola begins to menstruate. Claudia believes that such bleeding must be fatal, until her hardly more informed sister explains that it simply means that Pecola is now able to have babies. That night, Claudia feels that “lying next to a real person who was really ministratin’ was somehow sacred.” She is surprised again when an adult friend of the family inappropriately touches Frieda, and she concludes that her sister must now be “ruined,” the word applied to the three neighborhood prostitutes. The girls naturally reason that Frieda will either be fat like the one or thin like the other and can be cured only by whiskey. Claudia also comes to realize how important color is in the larger world—through white baby dolls, Shirley Temple, and Maureen Peal, through Mrs. Breedlove’s greater concern for a white girl than for her own child Pecola when a hot blueberry cobbler falls to the floor, splattering both. Only the perfect child is comforted; Pecola is scolded and sent away. Claudia reaches great maturity for the age of nine when she realizes that no one cares about Pecola or her baby, and that no one cares for dark-skinned children in general.

Claudia’s strength is contrasted to Pecola’s weakness. Pecola has been given none of the tools with which to fight the sense of worthlessness from which she suffers daily. No loving parents, no close playmates, not even a house to call her own—only a storefront with sheets strung across the large interior to separate one person from another. Ignored by shopkeepers, scorned by classmates and teachers, used by Soaphead Church, Pecola wants only to vanish. She cannot fight her circumstances; she only wants to escape them.

The narratives of Pauline and Cholly Breedlove help readers at least to understand their characters, even if it is difficult to empathize with them. Pauline is shown first as a young woman craving acceptance and love from her family and, when that is not possible, from Cholly. In the integrated North, acceptance comes only through resemblance to white people. When her rotten tooth undermines her attempt to fashion herself to white standards of beauty, and when her children look nothing like Hollywood’s lovable white children, Pauline succumbs to her own self-hatred and “ugliness,” which expresses itself in self-righteous judgment of her husband and rejection of her children. Cholly’s rape of his own daughter cannot be excused, but Morrison’s presentation helps readers understand him. A violent, drunken, and abusive man, Cholly has little chance to succeed, given the events of his childhood. Rejected by both parents, orphaned by the death of his loving Aunt Jimmy, and humiliated by white men during his first sexual experience, Cholly displaces his anger and humiliation upon all African American women, including his wife and daughter. With no father figure to emulate, Cholly mistakes sex for love. Making “love” to Pauline eventually comes to mean his noise, her silence, and mutual anger. When he sees Pecola washing dishes in the kitchen and scratching the back of her leg with her foot, a gesture that reminds him of the young Pauline, Cholly feels sorry for his daughter and rapes her, showing her affection in the only way he knows—through sex.

The wholly unsympathetic behaviors of Geraldine and of Soaphead Church are painted against a backdrop of the...