[In the following essay, Byerman compares the use of grotesque literary conventions in The Bluest Eye and Gayl Jones's Eva's Man, highlighting its suitability to African American literature as a vehicle for social protest.]

At the end of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the little black girl Pecola, a victim of incest, is pictured talking to herself in a mirror about her imaginary blue eyes. At the end of Eva's Man, by Gayl Jones, Eva is describing, in increasing incomprehensible terms, her poisoning and castrating of the man with whom she lived. Both of these female characters are the central figures of the novels under discussion, and each is, in literary terms, a grotesque. But such figures are not being used by Morrison and Jones just to shock or entertain; rather, they use these bizarre characterizations to examine the even greater grotesqueries of American society. Pecola epitomizes the American obsession with whiteness, while Eva, in a slightly different way, exemplifies the society's fixation on sexual dominance. The novels develop, then, a grotesque within a grotesque and serve to show the particular appropriateness of the grotesque in black literature that is also social criticism.

The grotesque as a literary convention has two aspects that can be found in the fiction under discussion. Flannery O'Connor has described one of these by saying of grotesque characters: “They seem to carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity.”¹ Frederick J. Hoffman, in discussing the Gothic and grotesque in Southern writing, comments that “one thing is expectedly true: in a society where intensities of behavior are frequent, the ‘gothic’ is a kind of norm. … There are frightening and often puzzling details, which the reader finds difficult to fit into context, so he concludes that they are ‘grotesque’. …”² As shall be seen, this social element is the most basic theme of the two novels. The supposed normalities of American life are shown to be absurd and ominous distortions.

The second aspect has to do with the reader's reactions to grotesque literature. The grotesque appeals to something in us that is pre-rational, that defies our intellectual categories. Unlike other writing that is concerned with the beautiful and the realistic, the grotesque is deliberately extravagant, distorted, violent, and ugly. We find it, nonetheless, strangely attractive as well as repulsive. Michael Steig has said that “the grotesque involves the arousing of anxiety by giving expression to infantile fears, fantasies and impulses. …”³

Such a reaction must be created by Jones and Morrison because the social elements they are talking about are themselves pre-rational. It is assumed by these writers that the reader shares the attitudes toward sexuality and race that they are criticizing. The moral visions of the novels can only be understood if these attitudes can be brought into question at the level at which they exist. Therefore, the incest, narcissism, murder, and castration of the books reach beneath the usual level of reader response to give a particular kind of shock of recognition.

In The Bluest Eye and Eva's Man, then, the social manifestations of the grotesque described by O'Conner and Hoffman are combined with the psychological ones mentioned by Steig. Morrison describes a social situation so distorted by the myth of whiteness that it produces a child, Pecola, who is so obsessed by the blue-eyed beauty of Shirley Temple that she creates a self-contained reality that cannot be penetrated even by rape and incest. Jones shows us a society so fixated on the domination of women that Eva can liberate herself only by biting off the penis of her lover. We as readers are forced to consider not only the absurdity of idolizing a blue-eyed child and protecting the sexual vanity of a preadolescent boy, but also the horror when these absurdities lead to murder, incest, and schizophrenia.

The world of The Bluest Eye is clearly one that has a distorted sense of color. All the blacks in the book feel insecure and even inferior because of their skin tone. The narrator says of Pecola's family, the Breedloves:

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.” And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.⁴

The significant point here is that such a burden is accepted without direct coercion. There are few white characters in the novel to impose the view. The ideological hegemony of whiteness is simply too overwhelming to be successfully resisted. No alternative source of valuation is provided for these characters. As a case in point, the narrator Claudia serves as a contrast to the Breedloves and especially to Pecola. Though much less passive and more aware of her black identity, Claudia, too, must eventually accommodate herself to the dominant view. When little, she has the disturbing habit of tearing apart the white dolls she is given as gifts. “But the dismemberment of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. … To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others” (p. 22). The magical secret points us toward the nonrational basis of the social belief. Claudia's bizarre response seems an almost reasonable treatment of this complex of ritual and superstition. She seeks understanding where only unthinking faith is tolerated. She changes, however:

When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for a 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.

(p. 22)

Claudia, the strongest character in the book, cannot defy the myth and is even made to feel guilty for her childhood doubts. Knowing full well that the myth is a lie, she must nonetheless bow before its idol.

Pecola, in sharp contrast, never has any uncertainties about the gospel according to Shirley. She is portrayed throughout as a true believer who wants only to be like her idol. Every scene in which she appears is used to demonstrate her lack of self-esteem and her passiveness in the face of this American dream. Whites, lighter-skinned blacks, and dark-skinned blacks who redirect their self-hatred, all make her feel her unworthiness. She responds by seeking out a presumed medium who, she believes, can provide her with the emblem of whiteness, blue eyes. In her last scene, she sits in her room talking to an imaginary friend about the precise intensity of the blueness, about whether she, in truth, now has America's bluest eye.

But this rather pathetic obsession is made horrifying when we realize that, during this time, Pecola has conceived and miscarried a baby as a result of rape by her father. This reality is only on the fringes of her consciousness, and we must depend on Claudia and an omniscient narrator to provide us with the details.

What we learn is that the father himself has been victimized, in terms of sexuality, by the same whiteness that destroyed his daughter. Abandoned by his father and mother, Cholly has had no opportunity to develop any self-esteem. What little might have existed was destroyed when his first attempt at lovemaking was interrupted by white men who ridiculed him. This assault on his being saps him of his manhood, both physically and psychologically. He turns his anger against himself and the black girl with him since there is nothing he can do to the men who caused the trauma. Such a feeling of powerlessness only reinforces his self-hatred.

His rage eventually turns into alcoholism and repeated conflict with his wife, who seems to him, simply by being his wife, to be a constant reminder of his ineffectiveness. He would love her, but because love imposes responsibility, he tries to hate her.

This same love-hate complex applies to his children. Moments before the incest, he sits watching Pecola:

Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet. What could he do for her—ever? What give her? What say to her? What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him—the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all?

(p. 127)

Somehow he wants her to be responsible for the misery of his life. He expects her to reinforce his self-hatred by despising him. The fact that she loves him only intensifies his despair. Such a reaction is to be expected from what we know of him. But what follows is not. In the midst of this emotional confusion, he sees Pecola make a slight gesture that reminds him of her mother in better days. A surge of tenderness causes him to move nearer his child. This protective gesture then is confused by his hatred, and he sexually assaults her. When she becomes pregnant, he abandons the family.

Pecola's reaction is to substitute the sweet world of Shirley Temple for her own bitter one. She escapes, but we as readers cannot. We are left in a state of the grotesque. On the one hand, we are repulsed by Cholly's action and sympathetic to his victim. On the other, we have been made to see that he is himself a victim of the society that condemns him. Because we have been introduced to his way of thinking and suffering, we verge on understanding his action and sharing his confusion. Both of these responses, repulsion against the action and attraction to the actor, are mutually necessary for the grotesque to work in this scene.

Similarly, Pecola leaves us with an ambiguous feeling. We are sorry for her victimization, but we know that she has entered a realm where her suffering will seldom come into her consciousness. That realm is, for us, both silly and pathetic. At a deeper level, Claudia has captured the impact of this particular grotesqueness by pointing out the Christ-like nature of her friend:

All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

(p. 159)

Pecola is a grotesque Messiah; she gives the world not grace but the illusion of relief from intolerable circumstances. She is sacrificed so that others may live with the perversions of society. She is a grotesque within a grotesque. She is unquestionably mad, but where in The Bluest Eye is there any sanity?

In Eva's Man, the madness of the central character is also readily apparent; but, significantly, the effect is to create an optimistic ending. Eva's act, though violent, is a way of resisting the oppression she has had to suffer. If Pecola is a suffering Christ, Eva is an avenging angel. Her crime is a symbolic liberation from the particular grotesqueness of her society.

The burden of color in The Bluest Eye becomes the curse of sexuality in Eva's Man. Domination in this book is exercised by men, of whatever color. Women are the ones who are victimized. Virtually every woman in the novel suffers some attack on her integrity. Just as Pecola was educated in color inferiority, so Eva goes through a long training in sexual politics. Every aspect of her society—family, folklore, friendships, marriage—is presented as infused with sexuality. Eva can no more escape the omnipresent phallus than Pecola could the ubiquitous blue eyes.

The family in this case seems almost normal. The mother is concerned that her daughter learn's proper social behavior, including the protection of her virtue. The father is a strong, authoritative figure who seems to deserve the respect he receives from Eva. But this situation is complicated by the presence of two other characters, Miss Billie and Tyrone. Miss Billie is the mother's closest friend, but her conversations are always related to the sexual aggressiveness of the men in the neighborhood. Thus the mother's teaching about chastity is complemented and contradicted by a sex education that demystifies and yet encourages sexuality. The primary lesson learned by Eva is that men are obsessed with sex.

Little in the book refutes this assertion. Tyrone is the mother's friend, though Eva, who narrates, can find no evidence of promiscuity. But Tyrone's attitude toward the child Eva is different. He finds her attractive, and despite her youth, he repeatedly attempts to seduce her.

This activity ends only when the father discovers what he believes to be the unfaithfulness of his wife. What is taught to Eva, however, is not the expected lesson. He waits until he has occasion to return home early and finds the “lovers” together. He then quietly dismisses Tyrone and focuses his hostility on his wife. Eva describes the scene:

Then it was like I could hear her clothes ripping. I don't know if the gentleness had been for me, or if it had been the kind of gentleness one gets before they let go. But now he was tearing that blouse off and those underthings. I didn't hear nothing from her the whole time. I didn't hear a thing from her.

“Act like a whore, I'm gonna [f——] you like a whore. You act like a whore, I'm gonna [f——] you like a whore.”

He kept saying that over and over. I was so scared. I kept feeling that after he tore all her clothes off, and there wasn't anymore to tear, he'd start tearing her flesh.⁵

What is important about this episode is not the obvious double standard, nor even the verbal and physical abuse; rather, it is the lesson taught Eva. It reinforces in a violent way what Miss Billie had said. The father, a figure of respect, becomes so obsessed that he punishes a woman Eva believes to be innocent instead of the man who she knows from her own experience is guilty. To the extent she believes her father, she must feel that she, too, can never be innocent, since Tyrone found her attractive. To the extent that she disapproves of her father's action, she realizes that no man is to be trusted in sexual matters. It is little wonder that she does not tell her father of Tyrone's real offenses.

This process of education is strengthened by the folklore of the community. In the most prominent case, Miss Billie tells the story of the queen bee. She is a woman who is cursed: each of the men she loves dies. The community holds her somehow responsible, even though she seems merely the victim of bad luck. When she falls in love again, she commits suicide rather than let another man die. Such a story only reinforces the view that women are by nature sinful, that they are responsible for the evil in the world. Original sin, in some cosmic way, has attached itself to the female gender. Eva is thus further encouraged to believe that a woman can never be innocent, even if she has done nothing.

This psychological training is complemented by her physical encounters with male companions. In addition to the trouble she has had with Tyrone, as a little girl she must deal with the sexually precocious Freddy. Although too young for intercourse, he is obsessed with the sexual act and substitutes a dirty popsicle stick for a penis when he play-acts a rape on Eva. When she tries to get advice about how to cope with his aggressions, Miss Billie only laughs and calls him a healthy young rooster. When another man later grabs for her crotch and she cuts his hand with a knife, she is the one put in jail for assault. Even the protection of her physical being is a matter of no consequence to her society. If she resists sexual encounters, then she is labelled silly or criminal. If she even appears to submit, then she will be labelled a whore.

She attempts to adapt herself to the distortions of her society despite her doubts. She marries James, a father figure, and moves with him to a new home. She becomes aware of his possible obsessiveness when he refuses to allow a telephone to be installed in the house, because, he says, he does not want her lovers calling. He reaches the high point of his madness when she repeats the mistake of her mother. A boy from the college she attends visits her one afternoon, and James comes home to find them talking. He then reenacts the violence of her father. Sending the boy away, he stares at her:

He was just sitting there, real hard, and then he just reached over and grabbed my shoulder, got up and started slapping me. “You think you are a whore, I'll treat you like a whore. You think you a whore, I'll treat you like a whore.”

Naw, he didn't slap me, he pulled up my dress and got between my legs.

“Think I can't do nothing. [f——] you like a damn whore.” Naw, I'm not lying. He said, “Act like a whore, I'll [f——] you like a whore.” Naw, I'm not lying.

(p. 163)

This confrontation serves to convince Eva that her gender is indeed her destiny, that she cannot delude herself that she can be different from her mother. But she is in fact different from both her mother and the queen bee, both of whom resign themselves to their condition. Unlike Pecola, Eva cannot accept the myth of her society.

When she next encounters a man who would rob her of her humanity, she strikes out. Her relationship with Davis begins ambiguously. He initiates it with a comment that is a refrain in the book. When she asks why he is interested in her, he says that something in her eyes told him what she wanted. This reading of the eyes is a presumption of all the men that meet Eva. What is read, of course, is sexual desire. Davis is another obsessed man.

Despite this fact, she returns to the apartment with him, though she knows that she cannot give what he wants, since she is menstruating. Two things are clear at this point. One is that Eva differentiates between sexuality and sexual domination. She makes the point several times that she enjoys intercourse, and she only resists the assumption that women are nothing other than their sexual organs. The second point is that she is not deluded into thinking that Davis must be, finally, the “right man.” The fact of her period makes it possible to test his perception of her.

He fails the test. Although he is kind and not initially insistent, he objectifies her to a greater extent than any other man. He will not allow her to leave the room or to comb her hair. He loses patience and takes her despite her condition. He also remains indifferent to her sexual preferences and concerns himself only with demonstrating his prowess. He will not listen to her story, and at one point, he mistakenly calls her Eve rather than Eva.

She does not this time tolerate her own reification. She first poisons him, and then, when he is dead, she indulges in sexual play with the body which culminates in her biting off his penis. This scene is comparable in shock effect to the rape of Pecola. But Gayl Jones uses hers to suggest complex possibilities by attaching mythic associations to it. When Eva arrives, she is bleeding from her period. Later, she comments that she has a pain in her side. At one point, she says that she feels as though there were large rusty nails in her hands. This Christ imagery is completed when, after the murder, she pictures herself being told by a man that her breasts are loaves of bread. Furthermore, Davis's misnaming of her has a strange appropriateness. At the moment of the castration, she relates her action to the biting of an apple. She is, in the light of these symbols, an Eve-Messiah who sacrifices another for both salvation and knowledge. She has gotten revenge for the death of the queen bee and the humiliation of her mother. But she has done this by symbolically liberating all women from the guilt attributed to them and by pointing to the true root of all evil.

She is mad, of course. And men put her in a prison for the criminally insane. Her incarceration replicates the confinement of her father's home, James's home, and Davis's apartment, all of which were clearly institutions for the insane. But in this case there is a kind of freedom in knowing that her resistance has made it possible to escape men. Her liberation is epitomized in the sexual attentions she receives from Elvira, her cellmate. Eva has nightmares, and her crime and situation are abnormal by all conventional standards. But this abnormality only serves to intensify the awareness that the society she has offended is an even greater obscenity.

The Bluest Eye and Eva's Man, though very different, are alike in their use of the conventions of the grotesque. Each involves some sort of obscenity that shocks our sensibilities. The incest of Morrison's book is outdone by the necrophilia and castration of Jones's. Each gives us central characters who are shown to be insane. But each also goes further, for the real grotesqueness in both is revealed to be primarily in the fictional worlds of the books. And these worlds are our world. The two black female characters, in their suffering, act as vehicles for criticizing America's treatment of blacks and women. The grotesque is an especially appropriate form for this commentary because it takes what is considered normal and twists it so that it loses its familiar qualities and becomes alien to us as the observers. In the case of these two novels, the normalities of American life, sex, and race are exaggerated to reveal their basic destructive absurdity. The actions and mental states of the heroines are clearly a function of the distortions and perversions of their worlds. Eva and Pecola respond to their impossible situations in ways that are unacceptable, and each of them enters a kind of prison. But we as readers are made to understand that the real horrors are still loose in the world.

Notes

1. Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), p. 44.

2. The Art of Southern Fiction: A Study of Some Modern Novelists (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 118.

3. “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art, 29 (1970), 258.

4. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 34. All further references to this work will be cited in the text.

5. Gayl Jones, Eva's Man (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 37. All further references to this work will be cited in the text.