[In the following essay, Napieralski compares and contrasts the narrative elements of The Bluest Eye with those of the classical myth of Oedipus.]

In addition to the popular myths that she uses in The Bluest Eye to criticize society—the Dick and Jane Story and Pauline Breedlove's Dreamland Theatre—Toni Morrison also incorporates characters, incidents, and themes that recall classical myth. In her article, “Lady Sings the Blues,” Madonne M. Miner has explained how Pecola's rape by her father recalls Philomela's by Tereus and Persephone's by Pluto (176). Pecola's story—her tragic failure to find her truth, to find her happiness in knowing who she is and her worth to herself and others—recalls also the tragedy of Oedipus the King. In The Bluest Eye, however, the myth appears in a peculiar and distorted fashion. Raymond Hedin has pointed out that central elements of the Dick and Jane world—“house, family, cat, Mother, Father, dog, and friend”—become “inverted to fit the realities of Pecola's world” (50). Much the same can be said about the myth of Oedipus and the world of The Bluest Eye.

First, the novel's setting recalls Sophocles' play. Barrenness envelops Lorain, Ohio, in 1941: Claudia, a choral character, says, “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow … seeds shriveled and died” (3). Although not, on the surface at least, as serious as the plague gripping Thebes, it is a barrenness nonetheless—metaphorical as well as literal—that is somehow connected to incest, a sin that from the beginning of humankind has been thought to pollute the earth. Moreover, the novel progresses through chapters or episodes named after the seasons—Autumn through Summer—that provide the backdrop of a planting and harvesting cycle appropriate to the sacrifice of a scapegoat.

The Oedipus story takes further shape in the lives of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. As Jocasta mocked the truth of oracles, Pauline also rejects facts of her life, first for the fantasy of the Dreamland Theatre, and then for the imitation of life she lives with her white employers, the Fishers. As Jocasta had originally abandoned Oedipus as a child and had virtually denied his existence, Pauline denies and ultimately deserts her own daughter.

Abandonment has also crippled the life of Cholly Breedlove: “When Cholly was four days old, his mother wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad” (103). Cholly is rejected a second time, as a teenager, when he travels to Macon in search of his father. Samson Fuller resents this strange boy's intrusion on his dice game and brutally turns him away, leaving Cholly to soil himself and weep like a baby. Cholly's virtual denial of his relationship to his daughter in his rape of Pecola becomes understandable—though certainly not excusable—against this background. Cholly, the victim of a mother and father's rejection, becomes the victimizer in a worse abandonment.

Valerie Smith in The Southern Review noted that throughout her fiction Morrison demonstrates the “interconnectedness of past and present” (723). In The Bluest Eye, that interconnectedness appears as a family curse, a relentless and recurring pattern or design characteristic of Greek tragedy generally and of Oedipus the King in particular. Pieces of this pattern reach an awful climax in Cholly's rape of Pecola, an act that follows immediately the flashback to his own rejection by his father. Overcome by conflicting emotions of guilt, pity, love, revulsion, and fury, Cholly watches Pecola standing at the sink, “one foot scratching the back of her calf with her toe” (127). The gesture reminds him of that time in the past in Kentucky when he saw his wife-to-be for the first time—Pauline, with one foot pierced as a result of a childhood accident. In short order, abandonment, betrayal, and a crippling both figurative and literal from the past and the present gather in a fate-filled moment to destroy Pecola. After the rape she awakes from a faint, “trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her” (129).

Although Oedipus at first appears to belong to a family and to Thebes, he is, like Pecola, an outsider, alienated and apart—someone, as Claudia explains, who is a “case,” “outdoors.” Oedipus seeks answers about his identity from oracles, family, and servants; Pecola looks for her place too, but in her case from a variety of inadequate models and helpers: Shirley Temple, Mary Janes, Maureen Peal, Geraldine, a trio of whores. None provides helpful answers or even clues to who she is or should become. After the rape by her father, however, Pecola does seek out her own seer, her own Teiresias—Soaphead Church.

Morrison devotes considerable space in the novel to describing the background, personality, and theology of Soaphead Church—“Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams.” As adviser and interpreter he appears to perform functions similar to those Teiresias did for the people of Thebes: “People came to him in dread, whispered in dread, wept and pleaded in dread” (136).

Soaphead Church, however, whose real name—Elihue Micah Whitcomb—mocks the Jewish prophets, mocks in his behavior as well the seer of Sophocles' tragedy. Instead of the piety of Teiresias, he exhibits arrogance and disrespect in the letter he addresses “TO HE WHO GREATLY ENNOBLED HUMAN NATURE BY CREATING IT.” Instead of exercising power to do good as Teiresias tries to, he abuses his position to lead Pecola not to salvation but to damnation. Teiresias tries to dispel Oedipus' illusion and to lead him to see truth and to experience self-knowledge. Soaphead Church, on the other hand, leads Pecola to lies, self-delusion, and madness. “I, I have caused a miracle,” he boasts in his letter to God. “I gave her the eyes. I gave her blue, blue, two blue eyes. … No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever after” (144). Unlike Teiresias who is physically blind but spiritually enlightened, Soaphead Church is spiritually blind and even self-deluded.

Differences in the behavior and experiences of Oedipus and Pecola are also striking. On the one hand, Oedipus blinds himself in a fit of grief and guilt. He laments his condition, but sees the truth, claims an identity. He also gains stature by bravely accepting the exile he had decreed as further punishment for himself. On the other hand, Pecola who sees with what she believes to be blue eyes is really blind. She has no claim to an identity and wholeness but has instead been divided in two, inside and outside the mirror. Pecola also becomes an exile: “walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear” (162). For Pecola, no victory, only defeat. No plague is lifted.

Several critics of her fiction have remarked on Morrison's use of myth and on the tension her writing explores between universal myths and the unique experience of black people. Terry Otten, for example, notes that “For Morrison, the artistic struggle involves achieving the balance between writing a truly black literature and producing a fiction that in Faulkner's phrase ‘grieves on universal bones’” (2). In her study of The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, Cynthia Davis claims that these works testify to Morrison's developing use of mythic structure and to her attempt “to combine existential concerns compatible with a mythic presentation with an analysis of American society” (334)

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison seems less interested in depicting universal experience than in using myth to grieve over American society in general and black American experience in particular. The plague that ravages the landscape and infects people in the world of the novel and generation after generation is racism. Racism denies truth, freedom, justice, and the opportunity to experience identity and dignity. The tragic victim is neither a king nor even one little girl but an entire people. The question of responsibility, of fate and free will, hovers over Sophocles' play. At the end of The Bluest Eye the question of responsibility also remains to challenge us. Who or what is, after all, responsible for the soil that is bad for certain kinds of flowers, for seeds it will not nurture, for fruit it will not bear?

Works Cited

Davis, Cynthia A. “Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 323-342.

Hedin, Raymond. “The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction.” Novel 16 (1982): 35-54.

Miner, Madonne M. “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1985. 176-191.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri P, 1989.

Smith, Valerie. “The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.” The Southern Review 21 (1985): 721-732.