SOURCE: Kulkarni, Harihar. “Mirrors, Reflections, and Images: Malady of Generational Relationship and Girlhood in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” Indian Journal of American Studies 23, no. 2 (summer 1993): 1-6.

[In the following essay, Kulkarni interprets Pecola's fate in The Bluest Eye through Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage of psychosexual development, tracing the origin of Pecola's sense of inferiority to Pauline's self-image.]

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's The Waste Land. Like Eliot, she too, in a limited sense, presents bleak, wastelandish human conditions characterized by grotesque environment which, like the earth of 1941, is unyielding. She brings into focus a place that fosters an underground invisibility and barrenness, composed of an imaginary cultural dissolution and fraught with brutal discrimination that strains human comprehension and stuns our conscience; where the “soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, … and the victim had no right to live” (Morrison 1970:160).¹ The Lorain of 1941 is almost an industrial incarnation of the wastelandish underground where blacks like Cholly and Pauline Breedlove are pathetically relegated to a hidden, self-diminutive existence, “festering together in the debris of a realtor's whim” (p. 31), little more than compost for the capital growth of others. Hopelessly fragmented under the weight of various horrors typical of black life in America, the Breedloves remain buried as deep as the failed sacrificial marigold seeds planted by Claudia and Frieda MacTeer. Displaced from daylight, they remain invisible to the moted blue eyes of the Euro-American culture, yet ironically enough, such blue eyes are what dark Pauline and her eleven-year-old girl child Pecola obsessively long for. Morrison digs into the malady of black existential conditions characterized by a grotesque quality which, as Anderson (1976: 24) defines it, is

the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became falsehood.

The novel presents black persons who become grotesque by embracing the generationally inherited white culture and its value structure as their own.

The existential gloom and grotesqueness, then, could be attributed not to nature but rather to the misappropriated images of a Eurocentric cultural mirror inviting a renunciation of one's own true self and the natural resistance of one's own black reflection.

Offering a critique of mirrors and reflections, Jacques Lacan (1977:3) notes that “the mirror image could seem to be the threshold of the visible world.” For instance, an infant takes delight in testing mirror images and verifies the hypothesis of an emergent cohesive self. Culture, however, encourages cases of mistaken identities as one grows, since only certain images appear to have a chance for recognition by others. In The Bluest Eye, black girlhood assumes tragic propensities when it borrows identity models from the mandates of white culture and from the malevolent parental mirrors as well. Now, to seize upon and maintain a foreign image—inappropriative mental image of the self—seals the individual in the wastelandish soil of psychic underground, a terrain characterized by grotesque isolation and fragmentation: Pecola Breedlove's fate precisely.

Jacques Lacan envisages the mirror stage as having a clear function in growth because it gives form to the disembodied image of the earliest months of life. This specular image both verifies and alienates the self or, in the process of recognizing oneself, it even enables identification of another as potentially compatible. Such an identification, thinks Lacan (ibidem), leads to “the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.” This linkage of beauty to sexual and social fulfillment stands central to Morrison's discourse of disaffection.

Like many other contemporary black women writers such as Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Paule Marshall, Morrison too believes in the anxiety black girls/women feel about what their mirrors tell them. She holds that girls growing up black and female in a white society often experience the malady of internalizing the belief that an aesthetically pleasing image is what constitutes the necessary precondition for receiving love and security. If the cultural or patriarchal voice in the mirror emanates unkind messages about women's self-evaluation, it has still unkinder things to transmit to black females who are barred even from becoming “women” in the traditional sense. A preoccupation with overcoming this devaluation consumes Pecola and Pauline Breedlove. At the root of such preoccupation, almost an obsession with both of them, is something deeper and more fundamental, some emotional component which operates actively. Although Pecola spends “long hours … looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised …” (p. 39) everywhere, it is not merely the white beauty that she is looking for, but an existential harmony which that beauty symbolizes. Her search is for the security of a loyal mirror, for its total acceptance which, as Pecola presumes, can easily be found in the preoedipal unity of the mother-daughter symbiosis. For Pecola, an approving mirror is equivalent to an approving mother. Basing her argument on Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, Winnicott (1971:12) notes that the child looking upon the mother's face, sees himself or herself: “In other words, the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there.” The child, however, loses its sense of worth if it sees the mother mirror governed only by “moods or, worse still, the rigidity of her defenses” (ibidem).

Such malevolent reflections are exactly what Pecola sees. From the beginning, Pauline Breedlove's mirror reflects to her daughter her own sense of inferiority which, in turn, Pecola radiates back to her. This mother-daughter mirror reflects images of sometimes-self and sometimes-other in their struggle to know who each is, an effort which runs generationally. The reverence for whiteness, which is Pecola's most valued possession, is passed on to Pauline through the intergenerational mirror by her mother. Pauline seeks her own missing mother as she looks at Pecola. She tells Pecola: “So when I seed it [the baby], it was like looking at a picture of your mama when she was a girl. You knows who she is, but she don't look the same” (p. 99). Pauline's mother worked as a maid for a white family, and by internalizing its mores, allowed herself to be encased in the glass coffin. The intergenerational mirror has already fractured Pauline's psyche and placed her beyond redemption. She resists any concept of internal wholeness based on cultural autonomy, believing that salvation will come from outside. By escaping into the world of white acquescience, dark Pauline believes that she has been refined when she has actually been weakened through “psychological paralysis.”

The Fisher house is a place where she retains the illusion of being among the fairest in the land. A white movie theater is no mere place, but some religious shrine signifying wholeness and vision. To Pauline, it is a place where “the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches” (p. 97). She represents a self that exudes nothing but mania for all that is white, and lovelessness for everything that is her own. She reflects what Lacan (1977:4) calls a “primordial Discord” to her daughter. The image that Pecola returns weighs her mother's fantasies even more. She stands as a constant reminder of Pauline's blackness and limitations. To Pauline, the newborn Pecola is no more than a mere “black ball of hair” (p. 98), something that causes sheer disappointment. It was better to hold an image of Pecola than to embrace the real girl. Pauline clearly embodies the damages of what Morrison calls “an enslavement of the sense” (Clark 1980:51). “In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap” (p. 97), explains Claudia.

Morrison provides textual ambivalence by portraying the world of relationship in the MacTeer family. As opposed to Pauline's, the mirror that Mrs. MacTeer holds out to her daughter is the one which Demeter held out to Persephone. She provides Claudia enough sustenance and security to allow her to develop a voice that surfaces from the crisis of adolescence and blackness. In spite of the stress and tension that she encounters in white society, Mrs. MacTeer displays “love, thick and dark as Alga syrup … sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere …” (p. 14). The voices of her mirror transform Claudia's blues into sweet, exotic songs. Claudia narrates:

She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin di-i-ime to my name. …” Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

(p. 24)

Having not been succumbed to the societal indoctrination, Mrs. MacTeer sustains her daughter's gaze. Unlike Pecola, Claudia longs to express her knowledge based on a strong sense of relationship as well as on internal wholeness. She possesses a faculty she inherited from the well-guarded African “nommo” of her mother which, as Karla Holloway (1987:41) defines, embodies a power which “can be destructive or sustaining—but its power seems to be held best by women who have remembered its creative potential.” It is this power of the Demeterian mirror that enables Claudia to resist the notion of white superiority and to feel connections with her own community. She informs us: “We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness” (p. 62).

In Claudia, one finds what Lacan calls a perfect “dialectical synthesis” of the internal self and the external reality. She feels whole and happy and embodies the spirit of her community so much so that Morrison (1984:341) thinks of her as a reflection of “the community or the reader at large, commenting on the action as it goes ahead … a choral note.” The symbiosis with self and community is what Claudia has inherited from the positive reflections of her maternal mirror. Winnicott (1971:118) notes:

When a family is showing concern over a period of times, each child derives benefit from being able to see himself or herself in the attitude of the family as a whole.

By mirroring one another, the MacTeer family, especially the mother, endows her daughter with a sense of identity and selfworth, something that Pecola does not know. It is through the correct mirror of mother that Claudia has gained a valuable insight into the mechanism of “ideological environment.” She has a resentful realization that

adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

(p. 20)

Like Pecola, she has not learnt to “tame her anger down.” Rather, Claudia feels, and rightly so, that “anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger … An awareness of worth” (p. 43).

In contrast, Pauline is no Demeter nor Pecola a Persephone signifying a nurturing ground of authentic being. Pecola, therefore, can harbor no such resentment. Owing to her mother's flawed mirror, she allows the ideological apparatus to be inserted into the fabric of her consciousness and get her psyche hopelessly fragmented. To her, eating the penny candy is the only way to salvation. She sees on the candy wrapper a

[S]miling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

(p. 43)

Adulation of “Pretty blue eyes … Blue sky eyes. Blue-like Mrs. Forrest's blue blouse eyes. Morning-glory-blue-eyes. Alice-and-Jerry-blue-storybook-eyes” (p. 40) is Pecola's sole obsession, signifying an existential anathema which is passed on to her through the malevolent cultural mirror of her mother. Pauline's culture invites this obsession, tempts Pecola with it, and systematically poisons her life that finds no relief.

As a girl child growing up black and female in a hostile society, Pecola easily observes Pauline's self-distaste, gazes at her mother, her approving mirror, and buries herself through stunting complicity. Commenting on the attachment theory, psychologist Robert Karen (1990:49) observes that proper relationship with the mother provides impetus for growth to young children, who during their mirror stage life, try out various behaviors on their caretakers: “A sense of reciprocity—the agency of a friendly mirror—influences growth.” Karen adds that some mirrors are not so accommodating, and “nature's intentions could go awry … if the environment failed them.” In Pecola's case, there is no reciprocity, but only a self-surrendering complicity resulting out of her need for survival which demands total adaptation to her mother's needs in failed environments. Carol Gilligan (1989:25) thinks that adolescent girls possess a natural ability for spontaneity, even in anger, and “repeatedly … emphasize the need for open conflict and voicing disagreement.” Pecola's volatile environments dissolve all such possibilities of spontaneity, leaving only dreary complicity which, according to Winnicott (1971:147) “… is not authenticity but rather the creation of self that only appears to be authentic.” In other words, Pecola creates a false identity which is invented as “a defence against that which is unthinkable” (ibidem). In her case, there is nothing more “unthinkable” than a father's rape and a “dangerously poised” mother. It is this complicity that leads Pecola to her ultimate doom. “Her need for friendship and acceptance is finally met by her split personality” (Gaston 1980:210). Madness and isolation become her private, safe mirror that no one can shatter. Gilligan (1989:26) maintains that girls can be liberated and made to feel whole if women “can stay in the gaze of girls. …” Pauline's sustenance of that gaze could have enabled Pecola, in the Lacanian sense, to see the mature and positive other of her species and redeem her life. But only to be looked upon negatively and having nothing or nobody to look up to creates a disjointed self-image and thrusts her headlong into the dismal abyss of life-consuming isolation and madness.

The discordance of Pecola's girlhood could be attributed not only to Pauline and her flawed mirror but also to Cholly and his mirror-free life. “Abandoned in a junk heap” (p. 126) by his mother who “wasn't right in the head” (p. 105), “rejected for a crap game by his father” (p. 126), and later by Aunt Jimmy, Cholly remains blind to proper relationships with others. Without a father, mother or school where one would have some moral and social instruction, Cholly's perceptions and behavioral pattern were decidedly shaped by libertinism. In the absence of a guiding mirror,

Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep. Free to sleep in doorways or between the white sheets of a singing woman. Free to take a job, free to leave it.

(p. 125)

He is left with no one from whom to distinguish himself, no woman to recognize as unlike himself. Nancy Chodorow (1987:13) maintains that the male must reject his “primary femaleness,” as the discovery and rejection of this is “important to men to have a clear sense of gender difference.” Even Jean Strouse (1974:7) echoes the same opinion when she remarks that “… much of what we call ‘masculine’ behavior … is evidence of the constant struggle to fight off this primary feminine identification.” In the absence of a strong, primary relationship with a female, Cholly cannot distinguish “me” from “not me,” the object-relating which provides foundations for all relationships. For him, therefore, the distinctions between self and other remain constantly blurred. His libidinous desires assume anarchic shape and remain ungoverned by taboos. In the absence of proper role models, “he floated aimlessly” (p. 119) and did “what he felt at the moment” (p. 127). Ostensibly a child of chaos, he makes others lives chaotic.

Devoid of mirrors reflecting primary identification, Cholly's sense of self is not only wavering but even fraught with simplistic notions that life is just a matter of light over darkness, power over powerless, and male over female, or father over daughter, to be precise. He destroys Pecola by raping and impregnating her, shatters the cohesiveness of her self, and violates her reflective image, permanently transforming her into a big contaminated Other. Writing about daughters in seduction, Winnicott (1971:52) observes that “in seduction some external agency exploits the child's instincts and helps to annihilate the child's sense of existing as an autonomous unit.” Cholly's rape robs Pecola's existing sense of autonomy by forcing her to gaze into the same mirror he himself was forced to gaze into during his childhood days. The brutal patriarchal encounter removes Pecola from the sense that granted distinctions between self and other, between appropriativeness and the forbidden just as her father was removed in the early phase of his life. She remains without a cultural place in patriarchal society when she tries to achieve Oedipal love for her father. She is left to collect the garbage of life by seeking a pathetic regression to the previous generation, to her father's beginnings on a junk heap. She comes to symbolize, as Claudia puts it, “all of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed” (p. 159). Pecola becomes an emblem of inversion, of waste, of all rubbish that no one really wants. The voice of patriarchy shatters her semi-tranquil mirror, ruins the world of her relationships, and finally produces conditions of isolation, psychic derangement and silence in Pecola's life.

Toni Morrison describes The Bluest Eye as a novel “about one's dependency on the world for identification, self-value, and feeling of worth” (Gaston 1980:197). Generational dependency as the only base for identification is what constitutes the real malady for the Breedlove family. The parental mirror causes psychic annihilation in Pecola's life, and shatters the cohesiveness of her self, leaving no context of the past or hope for a future. The forerunner of Jadine Childes, Pauline Breedlove generates subterrean diabolical chaos in Pecola's life by introducing her to the destructiveness of a culturally sanctioned mirror symbolized by the “eye” that is decidedly singular and the “bluest” in the world. Subsequently, Pecola's wish, rooted in the singularity of the superlative, causes psychic devastation, splitting her psyche and splitting her own self from the world as well. As opposed to Pauline's intergenerational dependency, Cholly's pseudo-Bohemianism characterized by a chaotic disconnectedness leaves Pecola in a permanent disjuncture with the outer and inner world, causing total dislocation of self, mind and body. Thus, tragic entrapment becomes the only sign structure signifying Pecola's existence. As Gilbert and Gubar (1979:37) put it:

To be caught and trapped in a mirror rather than a window … is to be driven inward, obsessively studying self-images as if seeking a viable self. [This inward search] is necessitated by a state from which all outward prospects have been removed.

Having been offered the Lacanian “primordial Discord” at the social and familial level, whatever little inward search Pecola can make uncovers only an illusory and imitative self, a distorted, discordant version of the real thing, or a self that is hopelessly fragmented, making her life, to use loosely T. S. Eliot's phrase, a “heap of broken [self] images.” With all of her “outward prospects” snatched away, she is emotionally abandoned as if only isolation and madness, with its freedom to invent conducive voices and reflections, can restore that “viable self.” Grotesque mirrors and malevolent reflections coupled with dark images encase Pecola in a jar of mental illness, and finally seal her off in the glass coffin where, like millions of other black-eyed Susans, she is condemned to dwell eternally.

Note

1. All further references to this book are indicated by page numbers only.

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. 1976. Winesburg, Ohio. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Chodorow Nancy. 1987. “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective.” In Eisenstein and Jardine: 3-19.

Clark, Norris. 1980. “Flying Black: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon.” Minority Voices 4:2:51-61.

Eisenstein, Hester and Alice Jardine. 1987. Editors. The Future of Difference. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Evans, Mari. 1984. Editor. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor/Doubleday.

Gaston, Karen Carmean. 1980. “The Theme of Female Self-Discovery in the Novels of Judith Rossner, Gail Godwin, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.” Doctoral Dissertation, Auburn University.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gilligan, Carol et al. 1989. Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Wimma. New York: Wimma Willard School Press.

Holloway, Karla F. C. and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos. 1987 New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison New York: Greenwood Press.

Karen, Robert. 1990. “Becoming Attached.” The Atlantic 265:2:35-70.

Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton.

Morrison, Toni. 1970. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press.

———. 1984. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Evans: 339-345.

Strouse, Jean. 1974. Women and Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity. New York: Grossman.

Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books.