SOURCE: Malmgren, Carl D. “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41, no. 3 (spring 2000): 251-62.

[In the following essay, Malmgren studies the multicultural and polyphonic structures of The Bluest Eye with respect to the novel's concern with victimization and its causes.]

The Bluest Eye represents a remarkable undertaking, especially for a first novel. In terms of formal features, it might be described as a kind of narratological compendium. For one thing, the novel incorporates several different forms of textuality. It opens with three different versions of its epigraphic “master” text, several lines drawn from an elementary school primer. That is followed by an italicized “overture,” introducing the primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, and the dominant motifs of the work—victimization and its causes:

It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame.

(5)

The body of the novel is composed of two related kinds of texts, variously interspersed: four seasonal sections, narrated in the first person by Claudia MacTeer; and seven primer sections (employing various narrational situations), so named because each section is set off by an epigraph taken from the master primer. The end is a kind of coda, beginning “So it was” (204), in which Claudia reviews the outcomes of the narrative and rehearses its lessons. Linda Dittmar praises the architectonics of the novel as “a brilliant orchestration of a complex multiformed narrative” (140).

TEXTS AND VOICES

The novel is not only multitextual; it is also polyphonic. The seasonal sections are in the first person, but even they are double-voiced, aware of the difference between the experiencing “I” and the narrating “I.” In places Claudia speaks as the nine-year-old girl going through the experience, ignorant, for example, as to what “ministratin” is (28). Elsewhere, she switches to an adult perspective on the incident being narrated: “We trooped in, Frieda sobbing quietly, Pecola carrying a white tail, me carrying the little-girl-gone-to-woman pants” (31). And sometimes she speaks from the moment of the enunciation itself: “But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly” (12).

The primer sections are, if anything, even more ambitious, in that they eventually make use of the full spectrum of what Stanzel terms “narrative situations.”¹ The narrator assumes authorial position and privilege when she gives the reader a lecture on the lifestyles and values of the “sugar-brown Mobile girls” (82):

They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn to do the white man's work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave.

(83)

From the same position, she reviews the history of the Breedlove's storefront apartment (33-37); in the following primer section, she moves successively through the minds of the members of the Breedlove family during a violent morning confrontation (39-46).

The primer sections devoted to Pauline and Cholly Breedlove and to Soaphead Church are, in large part, narrated figurally, with Pauline, Cholly, and Soaphead as the centers of consciousness. Those sections focus on the what and how of their featured protagonists' experiences. But even those sections are multivocal. Those figural presentations are frequently qualified by authorial interpolations or commentary; the Pauline section, for example, begins with the following explanation of her feeling of unworthiness:

The easiest thing to do would be to build a case out of her foot. This is what she herself did. But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer. The end of her lovely beginning was probably the cavity in one of her front teeth. She preferred, however, to think always of her foot.

(110)²

What follows is figural narration, a recounting of Pauline's perspective on the events of her life. To make that experience even more immediate, however, the narration shifts several times to quoted and italicized first-person dramatic monologue. Pauline speaks aloud, apparently to a Lorain neighbor, deputy for the reader:

That was the last time I seen real June bugs. These things up here ain't june bugs. They's something else. Folks here call them fireflies, Down home they was different. But I recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well.

(112)

In the space of a few pages, the narration shifts from authorial to figural to first person. In addition, the Soaphead Church primer section contains, in entirety, a formal and pedantic letter that Soaphead writes to God after his encounter with Pecola. And the last primer section consists of a schizoid dramatic dialogue between Pecola and her imaginary second self in which the two of them rhapsodize about the blueness of Pecola's eyes.

A number of critics have called attention to the multiple narrations (and multiple narrators) in the novel. Arguing that “the possibility of a bystander really being able to tell the whole story is implicitly obviated by the novel's shift in narrators,” Demetrakopoulos stipulates at least three narrators: Claudia, “the omniscient point of view,” and Pecola (35). Samuels says that Claudia “retells the story with the assistance of other, external narrators” (25). Dittmar argues that “Claudia covers a lot of ground, but she is not the novel's pivotal consciousness. She is a narrator, not the narrator” (143). The critical consensus seems to be that there are two main speakers, Claudia in the seasonal sections, and an authorial persona elsewhere. The authorial persona supplies the master primer text and uses it epigraphically and assumes the privilege of rendering the dramatic monologues of Pauline and Pecola in the primer sections (Gibson 21, 25, 30; Holloway 40; Byerman 450). In her afterword to the novel, Morrison herself refers derogatorily to her narrational doubleness, saying that it made a “shambles” of her text: “I resorted to two voices, […] both of which are extremely unsatisfactory to me” (215).

I argue (pace Morrison) that strong evidence, textual and biographical, exists to suggest that a single narrator, Claudia MacTeer, has composed the texts and created the voices and that my reading adds an important dimension to the meaning of the text.³ As noted above, Claudia's first person seasonal sections are double-voiced, shifting back and forth between the perspective of the nine-year-old and that of an older and wiser adult. The passage in which Claudia discusses her evolving relationship to white baby girls indicates the distance between these two perspectives:

If I pinched them, their eyes—unlike the crazed hint of the baby doll's eyes—would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.

(23)

Here is a discerning adult making nuanced discriminations. We know that she is significantly removed from the time of the events she recounts because her narration rehearses and implicitly repudiates (and therefore comes after) a love for Shirley Temple that itself came “much later” than her original hatred and sadism.

The text gives us no way to date Claudia's enunciation or to specify her adult age, but she has the mature voice and perspective of someone looking back from a distance, someone, say, in her mid-to-late thirties. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, when Morrison was thirty-none years old. Like Claudia, Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio; like Claudia, she would have been nine years old in 1940-41, the year in which the events of the novel take place. Those similarities suggest that Claudia MacTeer is Morrison's persona in the novel, her fictional “second self.” Indeed, Morrison states in the afterword that the novel had a autobiographical origin, that Pecola was based on a real-life elementary school classmate who, out of the blue as it were, confided that she wanted blue eyes (209).

That is the (suspect) argument from biography, the old mimetic shibboleth about Art and Life being intimately related. But no substantial textual evidence supports that connection. As the passage above suggests, Claudia's seasonal sections demonstrate that she has the talent and insight to make the kind of discriminations that characterize the text as a whole and that she has the stylistic resources to rise to the lyricism found in various places in the novel.⁴ Most important, the Claudia sections articulate an ideological project that is carried out in great detail elsewhere in the novel: the critique of cultural stereotypes imposed by the dominant white culture. In terms of theme, then, the novel is seamless, univocal.⁵ In addition, Claudia is singled out as the MacTeer sister blessed with Imagination (just as Frieda is marked as the Executive, the one who makes decisions). In the “Autumn” section, for example, the girls are bored, and Claudia supplies an extensive list of possible activities for them: looking at Mr. Henry's girlie magazines or Bible, threading needles for the blind lady, searching through trash cans, making fudge, or eavesdropping at the Greek hotel (26-27). When the sisters are afraid that Frieda is “ruined” after she has been molested by Henry the roomer, Claudia comes up with the solution to their problem by concocting a highly fanciful line of “reasoning” that includes fat people, the three prostitutes, whiskey, and Cholly Breedlove (101-02). Those episodes reinforce the connection between Morrison and Claudia by suggesting that Claudia has the imaginative resources to invent alternatives, to impersonate various characters, to create fictional worlds.

The novel begins with Claudia's voice: “Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow.” The second paragraph specifies that “we” comprises “my sister and I” (5). The novel ends with Claudia speaking for a more generalized “we”: “We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late” (206). Occam's razor should dictate that what comes between the beginning and end belongs to her as well.

The problem is that the primer sections, which make up about two-thirds of the novel, refuse to say “I.” They contain almost no reference to the speaker's person,⁶ certainly no explicit identification of that authorial speaker as the grown-up Claudia MacTeer; therefore, no apparent linkage is evident between the primer sections and the seasonal sections. In addition to the thematic continuity I have mentioned there are other connections. For example, the substance, rhetoric, and syntax of part of Soaphead Church's letter to God is echoed in Claudia's coda to the novel. Soaphead indites (and indicts):

In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. Consequently we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious; we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

(177)

Claudia reprises (and embellishes):

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well-behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it the truth.

(205-06)

It is as if Claudia took the condemnation of African Americans she voiced in the persona of Soaphead Church and brought it to bear on the victimization of Pecola Breedlove.

More convincing than the rhetorical and stylistic echo is the explicit repetition of substantive commentary. In the cat primer section, Geraldine returns to her tidy home to find Pecola there and sees in the little girl only anathema:

She had seen this little girl all of her life. […] Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. [Little girls like this] had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.

(91-92)

In the coda, Claudia repeats that summary view of Pecola, but with a significant addition; she speaks elegiacly of Pecola wandering on the edge of town, “plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was” (205).

But the most compelling evidence of linkage connects the primer section devoted to Cholly Breedlove with Claudia's coda. Having rehearsed Cholly's history, the primer section asserts that it would take a jazz musician to render the essence of Cholly's being, “its final and pervading ache of freedom. Only a musician would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity” (159). The speaker continues for some lines detailing the contours and extent of Cholly's freedom and then links the “godlike state” of freedom Cholly enjoys to both his marriage to Pauline and his rape of his daughter. In her coda to the novel, Claudia insists that, despite what he did to her, Cholly loved his daughter, but that his touch was fatal because “love is never any better than the lover,” and “the love of a free man is never safe” (206). By using that epithet for Cholly and connecting it to his crime against his daughter, Claudia rehearses the argument spelled out in Cholly's primer section and makes it her own. Because we can link Claudia directly to the cat, Soaphead, and Cholly sections, it is possible to conclude that The Bluest Eye is entirely her composition, her achievement. Indeed, we can say that the eye in the title contains a multiple pun: it is at once the eye longed for by Pecola Breedlove, and the ‘I’ that author-izes the novel as a whole, the “bluest I” that witnesses Pecola's fate, Claudia MacTeer.

PRIMERS AND VOICES

At the very beginning of her narration, Claudia spells out why she is composing The Bluest Eye; she wants to figure out what happened to the marigolds she and her sister planted in the fall of 1941: “It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame” (5). The marigolds are, of course, metonymically and metaphorically connected to Pecola, so Claudia is asking “who is to blame” for what happened to Pecola, for her tragic fate. The end of the overture acknowledges that this is not an easy question to answer: “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how” (5). What follows is the first seasonal section, “Autumn.”

Claudia tells us that she must begin with how in order to get at why.⁷ Can we link those basic narrative questions with the shape her narrative takes? I have noted that the seasonal sections, narrated by a foregrounded first person, Claudia MacTeer, are quite different from the primer sections. She begins each section with a present tense epitomization of the season being recalled: “Nuns go by quiet as lust” (9); “My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there” (61); “The first twigs are thin, green, and supple” (97); “I only have to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer” (187). In each section, she then relates in detail one or two of her experiences during that season, partly from the perspective of a nine-year-old, who believes, for example, that drinking alcohol will keep her sister Frieda from being “mined”. These sections have irregular margins.⁸ The entire set-up—a first-person narrator, entries keyed to a particular time of year, the present tense, the perspective of the experiencing “I,” and irregular margins—suggests a particular narrative form, the diary.

The diary is a “primitive” narrative form, specifically intended to recount the how of experience. A diarist is someone who records events and is at the mercy of the seasons, the times, time. The seasonal sections, or diary entries, tell us what happened at that particular time. That Claudia uses seasons and not dates to identify the entries indicates, however, that the entries are retrospective, and therefore both selective and shapely. They are selective in that each of them focuses on encounters between the MacTeer sisters and Pecola Breedlove during that fateful year; shapely insofar as each encounter involves some kind of violence—verbal, emotional, physical—perpetrated against Pecola. The seasonal sections give us, in sum, an intimate, personal view of the how of Pecola's victimization.

The novel's epigraph consists of three versions of lines from the Dick-and-Jane primer—one regular, one without capitals or punctuation, and one without capitals, punctuation, or spacing. The standard critical reading of the three versions is that the first represents the life of white families, orderly and “readable”; the second, that of the MacTeer family, confused but still readable; and the last, that of the Breedlove family, incoherent and unintelligible.⁹ The primer sections of the novel use portions of that third version as “titles,” lines keyed to material presented in that section. The first primer section, for example, dealing with the history and condition of the Breedlove's seedy storefront apartment, begins

HEREISTHEHOUSEITISGREENANDWH
ITEITHASAREDDOORITISVERYPRETT
YITISVERYPRETTYPRETIYPRETTYP

(33)

Subsequent sections use as epigraphs primer lines describing Dick and Jane's family, the cat, Mother, Father, the dog, and a friend of Jane's. The section following the epigraph focuses on that figure in Pecola's life but relates tales of misery that are an ironic counterpoint to the fairy-tale world depicted in the primer itself. Cumulatively the sections render in great detail the loveless “Breedlove version” of the primer text.

In terms of voice, however, the primer sections are very different from the seasonal sections. The authorial narrator here refuses to say “I,” except when impersonating one of her characters. She keeps her material at a distance from herself. The Soaphead Church section, for example, begins “Once there was an old man” (164)—as if to signal her objectivity and control. From a magisterial position, she reviews and highlights the biographies of Geraldine, Pauline, Cholly, and Soaphead. Narrationally, she ranges from authorial commentary to figural presentation to dramatic monologue. She even supplies the text of Soaphead's letter to God and the script of Pecola's schizoid “dialogue” with herself. She employs a wide spectrum of novelistic techniques and practices—including justified right-hand margins—to explain what happened to the members of the Breedlove family. The conclusion would seem to be that diaries can tell us how or what, but only novels, and the narrative resources belonging to them, can tell us why.¹⁰ Diaries render the experience of victimization; novels explain it. The absence of ‘I’ in the primer sections can be taken as a sign of the unwillingness of the magisterial authorial persona to call undue attention to herself. To answer the question why, the novelist must go beyond the personal and diaristic. She must become im-personal if she is to rise to true impersonation. To make sense of what happened to Pecola, Claudia MacTeer has to call upon all her talents as a novelist.

The novelistic primer sections treat extensively those in Pecola's immediate family or those who come into immediate contact with her (Geraldine, Soaphead). They dwell upon the members of the African American community who act directly on her, implying that they are responsible for her fate, because they have embraced and internalized a set of values and ideas imposed upon them by the dominant white culture.¹¹ Accepting an essentialist view of beauty that consigns them to invisibility and condemns them to self-hatred, they become the “instruments of [their] own oppression” (Gibson 21). Claudia very clearly makes that indictment of her race at several places in her narrative. An early example is her summary remarks about the Breedlove family:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.”

(39)¹²

Leveling the same charge against Pecola's classmates (65), Maureen Peal (73-74), Geraldine (83-87), Pauline (122), Soaphead (168), and others, Claudia suggests that almost no one in the black community is able to resist that particular interpellation by the dominant white culture.

This near-total capitulation to white values, in combination with Pecola's awful victimization, leads many critics to see the novel as terribly bleak—in the words of Demetrakopoulos, “one of the darkest works I have ever read” (31). Commenting in the afterword on Claudia's conspiratorial opening words—“Quiet as it's kept”—Morrison herself says that the novel involves the “disclosure of secrets,” that “something grim is about to be divulged,” namely “a terrible story about things one would rather not know anything about” (212, 213). Dittmar worries that “the microcosm Morrison locates in her Ohio town includes few venues for anger directed beyond the black community and almost no potential for regeneration within it,” and concludes that the novel “does indeed seem overwhelmingly pessimistic, given its relentless piling up of abuses and betrayals” (140). Byerman argues that the “ideological hegemony of whiteness is simply too overwhelming to be successfully resisted” and specifies that even “Claudia, the strongest character in the book, cannot defy the myth” (449, 450).¹³

But if Claudia is the single narrator and the narrative is entirely her composition, then she has indeed resisted the power of “white mythology.¹⁴ In the first seasonal section, Claudia relates how, when she was a little girl, she dismembered white dolls to find out what made them beautiful and therefore lovable—to discover the essence of Beauty. All she found was sawdust (21). The text composed by the adult Claudia, The Bluest Eye, carries on the same discovery procedure on a grander scale; it undertakes the deconstruction and demystification of the ideology that makes those dolls beautiful: “And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us” (74, emphasis in original).

In that respect, Claudia's use of the Dick-and-Jane primer as master text represents a brilliant choice, for a primer is a basic tool of ideological indoctrination; it introduces readers to and inculcates the correct values,¹⁵ As one critic notes, “the act of learning to read or write means exposure to the values of the culture from which the reading material emanates. […] One cannot simply learn to read without being subjected to the values engraved in the text” (Gibson 20). The same logic adheres, of course, to reading the text that is The Bluest Eye; one cannot read it without being subjected to Claudia's discovery of “the unreality or emptiness behind the facade of [the white] construction of femininity” (Munafo 8). In that respect, her text constitutes a counterprimer, designed “to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals” (The Bluest Eye 190); it critiques and thus dismembers the values and iconography fostering that love.

Claudia suggests in the coda that her narrative originates partly in guilt and betrayal, that she and the other members of the black community “assassinated” Pecola by scapegoating her or by turning their backs on her. Her narrative tries to make up for that betrayal. If we compare the lines from the primer mastertext to the epigraphs for the primer sections, we discover that a silencing has taken place; there is no primer section for the following epitext lines: “See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane?” Jane (Pecola) has been effectively eliminated, erased, silenced. The eye is proverbially the window to the soul, to all that is unique, irreplaceable, essential, but Pecola's eye/I is not her own; it belongs to the dominant culture. As a result, she identifies herself with a lack, with what she has not. She is, in effect, self-less and invisible. As one critic notes, “Morrison's novel contains repeated instances of Pecola's negation as other characters refuse to see her” (Miner 187). Because she cannot speak for or defend herself, she is literally and figuratively silenced almost throughout the text, condemned to an “imitation of life.” As Morrison suggests in her afterword, the novel is built on a “silence at its center: the void that is Pecola's ‘unbeing’” (215).

The Bluest Eye is itself the text that counterpoints the missing primer lines. It makes “Jane” visible and gives her a kind of being; it is the attempt of Claudia/Morrison to make the silence speak, to give voice to the voiceless. As a child, Claudia herself is silenced: she notes that adults do not talk to children; they give them orders (10). Growing up means acquiring a voice, joining the world of discourse, something that Pecola is prohibited from doing. In a sense, then, Claudia makes up for her betrayal by lending her voice to Pecola, by speaking her through her story. In so doing, by giving a present to the absent, Claudia makes the absent present.

That line of argument recalls a basic idea that the narrative calls into question, the idea that beauty is an essence, that it is present to itself (Walther 777). Morrison's novel not only critiques that idea, but it also transvalues it. Claudia invites readers to imagine the very real beauty of Pecola's unborn baby, with “its head covered with great O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin” (190). As Munafo notes, “[t]his affirming vision of Pecola's unborn baby asserts black presence and reinscribes blackness as beautiful” (9). More important, Claudia insists over and over that we acknowledge Pecola's own beauty. At one point Claudia notes the pleasure that Pecola's smile gives her (106); elsewhere she frets that Pecola would never know her own beauty (46-47).¹⁶ Claudia's narrative exists, the coda informs us, to reveal “all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she [Pecola] herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us” (205). The Bluest Eye renders both the waste and the beauty.

Notes

1. I am referring, in traditional terms, to point of view. I use Stanzel's nomenclature because it is more exact (e.g., “authorial” is better than “omniscient) and less flawed (e.g., it does not rely on oxymorons such as “limited omniscience”).

2. Insofar as the implied author assumes the right to insert this kind of commentary throughout the primer sections, we can say that their narrational dominant is authorial.

3. Klotman notes in passing that Claudia is the sole narrator, but she does not develop that line of argument (123-24). Smith claims that Claudia narrates “the preschool primer with which the novel begins,” but that an “ostensibly omniscient narrator” recounts the subsequent primer sections (124). She does not explain why Claudia narrates one but not the others. Harris begins by suggesting that Claudia is the single narrator: “As storyteller, it is Claudia's job to shape the past so that it provides coherent meaning for the present audience” (16); “[a]s multivoiced narrator, Claudia must make sense of what has ravaged the community” (22). Later, she retreats from that position, referring casually to “the parts of the novel Claudia narrates” (24) and saying that Claudia “occasionally gets help from some of the members of her community” (23).

4. Claudia's memory of being ill in the Autumn section: “But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. 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 the house. […] 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” (12).

5. Klotman says that “education by school and society is the dominant theme of The Bluest Eye” (123).

6. I could find only one use of first-person pronominal forms in the primer sections (other than in direct discourse). It occurs in the Pauline section: “So she became, and her process of becoming was like most of ours” (126). The speaker is also clearly present in the following passage, which serves to date her enunciation in a way similar to Claudia's: “So fluid has the population in that area been, that probably no one remembers longer, longer ago, before the time of the gypsies and the time of the teenagers when the Breedloves lived there, nestled together in the storefront” (34). Like Claudia, the speaker remembers that time very well.

7. Smith argues that both Claudia and the novel dodge the question why: “The Bluest Eye does not undertake to explain, for example, why black Americans aspire to an unattainable standard of beauty; why they displace their self-hatred onto a communal scapegoat; how Pecola's fate might have been avoided” (124). I argue that Claudia and her book answer all these questions.

8. Dittmar is the only critic who notes the uneven margins, connecting them with orality, but not with a specific narrative form: “While such margins may serve to suggest the text's informal, possibly spoken origins, the mere use of this unusual device is attention-getting, especially given its recurrent suspension and re-introduction” (141).

9. See Ogunyemi 112, Klotman 123, Wong 472. Wong argues that the primer lines depict each character as “maintain(ing) himself in a self-enclosed unity” and thus enact “the very conditions of alienated self-containment which underlie [white bourgeois] values” (471, 472).

10. Structurally, the number of primer sections increases in the latter half of the novel, as if, having made the how of Pecola's victimization clear, the narrative chooses to focus on the why.

11. The argument that “by acting in ‘Bad Faith,’ Pecola remains responsible, in the final analysis, for what happens to her” (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 15) is, therefore, flat-out wrong.

12. In her afterword, Morrison warns specifically “against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze” (210). See, in this regard, Guerrero; and Miner, 184-88.

13. Cf. Dittmar: “Individual characters may not participate in [positive] change; certainly Claudia, for all her adult retrospection, provides no empowerment” (142).

14. Cf. Rosenberg: “Claudia's ability to survive intact and to consolidate an identity derives from her vigorous opposition to the colorist attitudes of her community” (440); and Munafo: “Claudia says no [to the idea of whiteness], and in so doing she retains a sense of self-affirmation” (9).

15. Powell also argues that the primer is “a highly significant beginning,” but for a different reason: “it points to the fact that all Afro-American writers have, willingly or not, been forced to begin with the Master's language. The Dick-and-Jane reader comes to symbolize the institutionalized ethnocentrism of the white logos” (749).

16. In her afterword, Morrison describes her response to the classmate who wanted blue eyes as follows: “although I had certainly used the word ‘beautiful,’ I had never experienced its shock—the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one else recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it” (209).

Works Cited

Byerman, Keith E. “Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva's Man.” College Language Association Journal 25.4 (June 1982): 447-57.

Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. “Bleak Beginnings: The Bluest Eye.” Holloway and Demetrakopoulos 31-36.

Dittmar, Linda. “‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’: The Politics of Form in The Bluest Eye.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 23.2 (Winter 1990): 137-55.

Gibson, Donald. “Text and Countertext in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 1.1-2 (1989): 19-32.

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