[In the following essay, Fick analyzes the themes, structures and characters of The Bluest Eye in relation to Western literary and philosophical traditions, as primarily represented in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” and their significance to African American economic and social conditions.]

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is an unusually effective exploration of racism in twentieth-century American in part because of the place it gives to central legacies of Western civilization. Like Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man draws on Emerson and Whitman as well as folklore, Morrison recognizes the importance of Western literature and philosophy to the Afro-American experience in America; in some ways The Bluest Eye stands opposed to more hermetic work like Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which despite its many strengths does not come to terms with the intellectual and economic foundations of racism and whose portrayal of character and personal growth suffers accordingly.¹ Morrison's characters are more convincing and ultimately more moving than Walker's because they operate in a world shaped by a complex and sometimes repressive cultural heritage. In The Bluest Eye this heritage is primarily represented by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” in Book VII of The Republic.² These two important moments in Western culture provide specific thematic and structural elements in the novel; in a larger sense they suggest Morrison's belief in the close relationship between intellectual traditions and particular economic and social conditions.

Eliot's contribution in The Bluest Eye is the more apparent because it operates on the level of imagery as well as theme and structure. In the prologue the narrator Claudia MacTeer remembers when she and her sister Frieda planted marigold seeds in a childish rite they hoped would guarantee the health of their twelve-year-old friend Pecola's baby. If the seeds sprout, they think, the baby will thrive. But no seeds sprout, the baby dies, and Pecola spends her life “plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world.”³ Only much later does Claudia understand that it isn't her fault, that “the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year” (160). The Bluest Eye is framed by the narrator's brooding recollection of a wasteland, and the seasons which title the major sections—“Autumn,” “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Summer”—mark off a parody of rebirth and growth. In “the thin light of spring” (127) Pecola Breedlove is raped by her drunken father (a cruel sort of breeding indeed), and in summer, pregnant, she goes mad after the equivalent of Eliot's Mme Sosostris works a phony spell to give her blue eyes.

The echoes of Eliot's Waste Land are important for thematic and structural reasons and for what they reveal about Morrison's interest in literary tradition. The central conceptual presence in The Bluest Eye, however, is Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” This is initially difficult to see because the idea and image of the wasteland is everywhere directly present in the novel while Plato's allegory operates through the analogy of the cinema. Movies are the centrally destructive force in the novel not only because of the values they present—perfect white bodies and romantic love—but because of the way they present them: as flawless Archetypes above and outside the shadowy world of everyday life. For Morrison, that is, the message and the medium are almost equally dangerous: as we shall see, the cinema reproduces the structure of Plato's allegory in terms appropriate to a technological and capitalist society and provides the focus for an exploration of the complicity between Platonic realism, racism, and a culture of consumption. In order to understand the centrality of Platonic “realism” as it is embodied in the cinema, however, we first need to understand what personal, cultural, and artistic issues this version of realism engages.

The Bluest Eye is an angry book but it is also an orderly one, perhaps because in Afro-American literature a careful structure is frequently used to contain and shape the anger that might otherwise be construed as lack of control.⁴ A reasonable place to begin, then, is with the blue eyes of the title, the blue eyes Pecola Breedlove thinks will introduce harmony and love into her fragmented and emotionally barren life. For Pecola, change has become a matter of survival: her father is a drunk, her mother's love goes to a white child, and the whole world tells her she is ugly. On the most obvious level her desire for blue eyes is a response to an ideal of beauty that takes specific form in the Shirley Temples, Hedy Lamarrs, Ginger Rogerses, and unnamed models whose blond hair, blue eyes, and white skins dominate the landscape of American life, “leaning from every billboard, every movie, every glance” (34). Blue eyes epitomize everything desirable in white American culture, but Pecola's longing for this cosmetic change expresses her deeper need to reform the world by reforming the way she sees it, a transcendental rather than existential imperative: “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (40).

As this quotation suggests, like many children Pecola asks questions that are disconcerting for both their naiveté and their insight. She poses one such question at the age of eleven: “‘How,’” she asks Frieda and Claudia, “‘do you get somebody to love you?’” (29). The children don't know, but the narrative provides a number of exemplary answers: the neighborhood whores' caustic camaraderie, her parents' desperate fights, the sterile “nesting” of bourgeois black women, and most destructively Pecola's rape by her own father.⁵ But there is another question Pecola wants answered even more, for without an answer “love” has no meaning: the conditions of her own and the world's reality. This is the question she silently poses to Marie, one of the three whores who, besides Claudia and Frieda, are her only friends: “Pecola looked and looked at the women. Were they real? Marie belched, softly, purringly, lovingly” (49). Marie's answer is clear and unambiguous because its sheer physicality avoids the abstractions such a question is likely to evoke, but the primary emphasis of the passage is on sight, not sound—on the intensity of Pecola's “looking.” The connection between sight and reality tells us as much about Morrison's commitment to the mode of realism as it does about Pecola. As a mode realism has been characterized by its emphasis on sight: as Jeffrey Mehlman remarks, “excellence of vision is the distinguishing mark of realism” and Edwin Cady finds that the principal American realists share a common concern with sight.⁶ To “look and look,” therefore, is to accept the world's immediate existence, as Pecola does when she accepts the whore's insistent presence, but to look with eyes other than one's own is to falsify both self and world.⁷ Pecola's wish for blue eyes is not only a wish to match the ideal of the white child, it is also a rejection of right seeing, of the premises of realism for those of romance.

In fact, like many of the classic examples of realism from Flaubert's Madame Bovary to Clemens's Huckleberry Finn the themes and structure of Morrison's novel center on an explicit antagonism to the forms and motives of romance. Tom Sawyer's extravagant dedication to the conventions of romantic fiction counterpoint Huck Finn's sound heart and empirical instincts. Huck tests Tom's assertions both intentionally—for example by rubbing a lamp to see if the promised genie will show—and unintentionally by becoming involved with the real-life counterparts of Tom's fictional heroes. The Shepherdson-Grangerford feud shows Huck that Tom's “authorities” are dead wrong when it comes to chivalric ideals: codes of honor lead to murder not glory. The Bluest Eye follows a similar structure of ironic counterpoint. The novel's epigraph is a “Dick and Jane” children's story that serves as an ironic commentary on the MacTeers's and Breedloves's daily lives: “Here is the house. It is green and white. … Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy,” and so forth. Each segment of this story is used as a section “title” to introduce its counterpart in 1940s racist America: the green and white house of Dick and Jane introduces the Breedloves's “irritating and melancholy” (30) storefront apartment; the strong and smiling father is a bitter drunk; the happy family is poor and miserable.⁸ The commitment to realist discourse implied in this ironic juxtaposition is made explicit in the characterization of Pecola's friendly whores. Marie, China, and Poland “did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels, with great and generous hearts, dedicated, because of the horror of circumstance, to ameliorating the luckless, barren life of men, taking money incidentally and humbly for their ‘understanding.’” Instead, they are “whores in whores' clothing” (47-8).

In The Bluest Eye, however, the opposition between real and ideal is more profound than in Huckleberry Finn. The obsession with romance and chivalry that Clemens blamed on Sir Walter Scott does not depend on an alternative sense of the real, but on a belief that some actions and attitudes are better than others. Despite their literary origins, that is, notions of chivalry are thoroughly social: Tom Sawyer is not only an aficionado of pirate oaths but a consummate politician, able to read and use others' expectations and desires. Morrison, on the other hand, is interested in antithetical senses of the real, in different ways of locating value in the world rather than in the different values alone. The “Dick and Jane” primer is important not only because it provides a particular set of expectations of modes of behavior (as Scott provides a number of paradigmatic scenarios for Tom Sawyer) but because it locates these expectations and behaviors in a realm of immutable Archetypes—equivalent to the Platonic idea of the “real”—in contrast with which this transient world is only an imitation. Compared to the world of green and white houses, strong, smiling fathers and happy mothers, Claudia's and Pecola's world is but an Imitation of Life, to cite the title of a movie that one character admires extravagantly.⁹

The novel centers on one successful and several unsuccessful efforts to move beyond Platonic “realism” toward an understanding and acceptance of the physical world's primacy. The first section, narrated from the young Claudia's point of view, introduces the detailed and imperfect particulars of daily life from the limited perspective of a child. Here, as in each of young Claudia's subsequent sections, typography recapitulates ontology: the right margins are “unjustified”—as ragged and as honest as the perceptions of a young girl.¹⁰ The house is “old, cold, and green … peopled by roaches and mice” (12) and the first impression is of a world as starkly opposite Dick and Jane's as possible. Adults, young Claudia tells us, “do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information. When we trip and fall they glance at us; if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy” (12). But these are the impressions of a child; like their counterparts in the “Peanuts” comic strip the adults in The Bluest Eye are remote, unintelligible, and nearly invisible. Further, the uncertainty we as readers feel about the true proportions of love and neglect in Claudia's life duplicates the ambiguity mark of a world where emotions, like relationships, are mutable rather than absolute (as they are for Dick and Jane). In fact, we find out that love is not absent but “thick as Alaga syrup” (14). The adults are simply too preoccupied with scavaging coal and making ends meet to be the endlessly smiling paragons of a story book.

Unlike the monotonous rhythm of Dick and Jane's prose world, young Claudia's narrative modulates through a number of moods and ends with Pecola's question about love, a question which has been partially answered in the equivocal—because human—terms of the just-concluded section. Love is dynamic rather than static, a process rather than a magic formula. The primary focus, however, is on Claudia's commitment to right seeing—the reverse of Pecola's desire for new, impossibly blue eyes and all that they imply about value in literature as in life. Even as a child Claudia is determined to understand the “beauty, the desirability” (20) of America's cultural icons: Shirley Temple and the white dolls constructed in her image. Though fueled by hate for the icons that usurp her family's admiration, Claudia is rational and resolutely empirical in her quest for understanding. She tears apart her Christmas present of a white doll, looking for its beauty: “Remove the cold and stupid eyeball … take off the head, shake out the sawdust, crack the back against the brass bed rail, it would bleat still. The gauze back would split, and I could see the disk with six holes, the secret of the sound. A mere metal roundness” (21). Young Claudia is an empiricist among metaphysicians, unable to believe there is value above and beyond what can be found in the immediate world; she lays the groundwork for the older Claudia's rejection of romance for realism. For Christmas, she remembers, “I did not want … to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something,” and feeling is a matter of contact, of specific things and places: “The lowness of the stool made for my body, … the smell of lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach …” (21).

At the opposite pole from Claudia's world of sense and feeling is the celluloid world of transcendent beauty and health, Dick and Jane in the age of McLuhan. References to movies and movie stars punctuate the narrative, forming an insistent counterpoint to Claudia's quest for authenticity in experience. The MacTeers's boarder, Mr. Henry, delights in calling the young girls Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers; Pecola drinks three quarts of milk just to see Shirley Temple's picture on the mug; black women have their hair styled like Hedy Lamarr's; Betty Grable's name looms large on theatre marquees. Movies convey an adult version of Dick and Jane's ideal world, but in The Bluest Eye the emphasis is not just on the particular scenes, formulae, or characters—that special hairdo or inflection—but on the medium itself. To understand the importance of the cinema, therefore, we need to consider method as well as content, the how as much as the what of its deception.

By co-opting individual sight and replacing it with the camera's apparent omniscience a movie can bestow false authority on its images and offer a nicely framed, repeatable world totally unlike young Claudia's. But it is a mistake to think of the cinema only as cultural shorthand for twentieth-century escapism; its appearance in The Bluest Eye serves to recall an older and more intellectually distinguished precursor. The cinema functions almost precisely like the famous cave in Plato's The Republic, as a brief summary of the allegory will show. Socrates asks us to imagine people living from childhood in a cave, chained by leg and neck with their backs to the only entrance. Behind them is a fire with a parapet in front of it “like the screen at a puppet-show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top.”¹¹ Objects are carried by men behind the parapet so that the fire projects the objects' shadows on the wall of the cave in front of the chained viewers. Obviously, Socrates says, the captives would think the shadows are the sole reality, and if one of the people crossing behind them spoke, the echo would make the sound seem to come from the projected shadow. He concludes, “In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.”¹² But the shadows are still shadows; the “real” lies outside the cave, in the immutable Archetypes represented by the objects carried between the fire and the cave wall. This allegory is an accurate though technologically unsophisticated description of the cinema: celluloid takes the place of Socrates's hand-carried objects, and a projector the place of his fire.¹³ In each case the effect is the same: the screen shows the shadow of a perfect world, the “real” world of which ours is merely an imitation. But while Socrates imagines the possibility that through rigorous mathematical preparation one will be able to face the “real” (i.e., ideal) world itself, Morrison sees the very notion of a Platonic real as centrally false and destructive. The characters who measure themselves against advertisements and movies are captives not because they are ignorant of the world above and behind, but because they believe that there is such a world.

Pauline Breedlove is the cinema's primary victim, and her story gives shape and context to Pecola's more general tragedy. As a child in Alabama Pauline had cultivated the pleasures of ordering her small world, but she is an artist without the means to realize her creative impulses: “She missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons” (89). When her marriage to Cholly deteriorates she has little else to do but go to the movies, where she is introduced to romantic love and physical beauty, “the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought”: “She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was on absorbed in full from the silver screen” (97). The notion of absolute beauty commits Pauline to think of her world as a shadow, a projection of the perfect world where “‘white men [take] such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses’” (97). The consequences of Pauline's immersion in a world of absolutes are intensely personal. In order to embrace the Platonic real she must repudiate the temporal and conditional, the transient physical world whose most insistent manifestation is the body itself. Indeed, the cinema offers a neo-religious physical perfection whose ultimate source is not the Bible but a technologized Republic: “There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches” (97). But in the long run the body cannot be denied, as Pauline discovers one day in the Dreamland Theatre when, coiffed like Jean Harlow, she bites into a candy bar and breaks off a rotten tooth. In contrast with the absolutes of physical beauty and romantic love the pleasures of body and emotion can only seem disappointingly transient and flawed.

The lost tooth climaxes a long process that began with a tiny spot of decay, but personal hygiene is hardly at issue here. As the narrator comments, “even before the little brown speck, there must have been the conditions, the setting that would allow it to exist in the first place” (93). In context, these conditions are social and institutional rather than narrowly hygienic they recall the opening image of a wasteland that breeds only decay and rape. Thus while Pauline's experience in the movies can usefully be read as a general warning to dreamers it is also something more. As Marcia Westkott argues in “Dialectics of Fantasy,” “Fantasy not only opposes real conditions, but also reflects them. The opposition that fantasy expresses is not abstract, but is rooted in the real conditions themselves, in concrete social relations.”¹⁴ In The Bluest Eye the real conditions are those of American consumer culture, the continuing “gilded age” that began after the Civil War and replaced physical slavery with other forms of mastery.¹⁵ Try as she might, Pauline cannot be Jean Harlow, and the sense of inadequacy that comes from this failure is part of her tragedy. Even more troubling, however, is the sort of ideal that she does achieve: freedom in the 1940s means fulfilling a role that perfects the antebellum position of blacks. As her personal life falls apart she divides her time between the movies and her employer's family, where she becomes the “queen of canned vegetables,” “reign[ing] over cupboards stacked high with food” (101). Her skin glows “in the reflection of white porcelain, white woodwork, polished cabinets, and brilliant copperware” (86). Finally she becomes “an ideal servant” (100), trading personal authenticity for a stereotype in the guise of an Archetype. Pauline's decline from person to “reflection” illustrates how the means of slavery have been internalized. The captive is held most obviously by her commitment to images from movies; even more fundamentally, however, she is bound by this medium's operative assumption that human existence is but an “imitation of life.”

William Carlos William's poem “To Elsie” can help us understand the particularly American context of Pauline Breedlove's tragedy. Williams made “no ideas but in things” the battle-cry of his aesthetic program, and his prose and poetry are an extended response to the notion of Platonic realism, especially as it is worked out in twentieth-century consumer culture. He is the poet of the local and the physical, of body and place; what “depends” upon the white chickens beside the red wheelbarrow in Williams's best known poem is quite simply poetry itself. Whether dancing naked in front of the mirror (“Danse Russe”), indulging his indiscriminate nose (“Smell”), or simply eating cold plums (“This Is Just to Say”) Williams is intent on recovering what we have lost pursuing abstractions. “To Elsie” is one of the clearest statements of his commitment to the immediate against the transcendental. Like Pauline Breedlove, Elsie is an exemplary rather than exceptional figure, “expressing with broken / brain the truth about us.”¹⁶ Cut off from peasant traditions, unable to see the beauty of the peasant world, she addresses herself to dreams of cheap finery,

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we were degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth. …(17)

Like Morrison, Williams sees us as prisoners in a twentieth-century version of Plato's cave, dismissing our world as excrement while straining after a transcendent but meretricious ideal. Both believe that to free ourselves from these chains we need, like Claudia, to have “all of [our] senses engaged” (21) in the discovery of the local and immediate. But most of all we need to see straight, through our own eyes: to trust and respect the angle of vision that makes each imperfect world, and makes it valuable.

Pecola's trip to buy candy early in the novel concisely explores these needs. When Pecola sets out for Mr. Yacobowski's store she is filled with affection for herself and her immediate world: the “sweet, endurable, even cherished irritation” (40) of the coins in her shoe; the dandelions that others call ugly “because they are so many, strong, and soon” (41); the Y-shaped crack in the worn-smooth concrete so perfect for skating. These are “the familiar and therefore loved images” of her world:

These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions. … And owning them made them a part of the world, and the world a part of her.

(41)

But at the candy store she can't make Mr. Yacobowski see what she wants—“the angle of his vision, the slant of her finger, makes it incomprehensible to him” (42). Pecola has once again been told that the way she sees is wrong, and that her world—the immediate, the local, and the sensual—is worthless, even unreal. It is not surprising, then, that on the way home she finds the world beneath her feet has turned to excrement: she looks at the dandelions and discovers “‘They are ugly. They are weeds’”; she trips on the sidewalk crack (no longer her friend) and “anger stirs and wakes in her” (43). The world has changed because Mr. Yacobowski denies her perspective, and because as a consequence Pecola, like Elsie, has been forced to deny the particular in herself—the special conditions of her own loves and hates.

As Pecola's experience suggests, The Bluest Eye is as critical of economic and political systems, of the underlying “concrete social relations” that generate fantasy, as it is of fantasy itself.¹⁸ The essentially political and economic origins of Pecola's self-betrayal are represented in the exchange of the “sweet, endurable, even cherished” feel of her money—more sensation than specie—not for an equivalent feeling but for a consumable image of the ideal. Her transaction reverses the terms of Claudia's economy: feelings are exchanged for things, rather than things for feelings. Specifically, Pecola wants “Mary Janes” because each wrapper has the picture of a young girl, “blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort,” and she devours the Mary Janes because to do so “is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane” (43). Like the earlier milk-drinking binge (three quarts to see Shirley Temple on the mug), her action points to a confederation of the ideal with an economy of consumption. Eating Mary Janes is a strictly capitalist magic: by ingesting the product she hopes to ingest what advertising associates with it, and certainly an appeal to this magic is at the root of advertising's power.¹⁹ In other words, the idea of a transcendent reality is no longer a matter of philosophical debate but of immediate commercial application, as the shift from cave to cinema clearly suggests. Capitalism appropriates the idea of Platonic reality in order to inspire a demand for products that is both insatiable and predictable since both qualities are essential for a smoothly functioning system. Only economic chaos can result when some want dandelions and others marigolds, when the common is as valuable as the exceptional, or when values and demand vary from region to region, class to class. Modern consumer capitalism is made possible by locating or even more commonly creating stable markets, as recent work on the institutional matrix in the publishing industry has effectively illustrated.²⁰ In short, in The Bluest Eye capitalism is presented as redefining the image of a bound and shackled audience in the “Allegory of the Cave”: Socrates's observers become the captives of an economic system which appropriates the ideal in the name of profit.

In a novel concerned with racism, of course, captivity has a special resonance, and The Bluest Eye is profoundly concerned with the shifting forms of “slavery” in America. Slavery can be most simply defined as a commodification of the body: men become objects of commerce, as Harriet Beecher Stowe recognized when she wished to subtitle Uncle Tom's Cabin “The Man That Was a Thing.” When we look for signs of racism in The Bluest Eye we are most quickly drawn to those made familiar by works like Uncle Tom's Cabin whose explicit message is the visible dehumanization of blacks: segregation, lynching, poor paying jobs, racial stereotyping. But even Stowe's novel deals with more than the cruder forms of Southern slavery. As Richard Slotkin demonstrates, the paternalistic slave-owning economy shared important qualities with the paternalistic factory system in the North,²¹ a point Stowe also makes when she has Augustine St. Clare, her spokesperson, quote his plantation-owning brother: “‘he says, and I think quite sensibly, that the American planter is “only doing, in another form, what the English aristocracy and capitalists are doing by the lower classes;” that is, I take it, appropriating them, body and bone.’”²² Shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin Herman Melville made the same connection in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” a powerful and topical short story which portrays the exploitation of white, unmarried women in a Northern paper mill.²³ When the balance of power definitively changed from agrarian to industrial society (and from South to North) after the Civil War, this form of economic and psychological captivity extended its domain to the Southern blacks who began to join the ranks of white workers in the North. Finally, as labor laws progressively eliminated the conditions Stowe and Melville wrote about advertising stepped in, blurring the line between “captivity” and “captivating” by internalizing the means of bondage for blacks and whites.

The journey of the Breedlove family South to North, from pre-industrial America to consumer society, recapitulates this temporal and economic change in geographic terms. The contrasting experiences of rural, Southern-reared Cholly and his Northern-born daughter are especially instructive. As an adolescent in the South Cholly is interrupted during his first sexual encounter by white hunters, who make him give a dehumanizing sexual performance at gunpoint: “‘Come on, coon. Faster. You ain't doing nothing for her’” (117). But this gut-wrenching scene belongs to a polemical tradition whose very familiarity can distract us from the more subtle but related influences at work in the North—the sorts of performances and responses required of those who buy into the premises of a consumer society. The crude white masters of the South are replaced by invisible systems of mastery dedicated to maximizing profit through a process equally dehumanizing. In the sections of the novel set in Ohio, Morrison portrays Pecola's violation of self in imagery that recalls Cholly and his companion's violation at the hands of the hunters. The incident at the candy store, for example, draws its power from the conflation of sex and consumption: when Pecola eats her Mary Janes she experiences “nine lovely orgasms” (43), one for each candy. Sexual love is one of the most profound and private expressions of individuality, but for both Cholly and Pecola sex assumes a public aspect: for Cholly a spectacle, and for Pecola a form of packaged masturbation. In each case human beings are defined not in terms of their feelings but as performers and consumers respectively, and in each case the results are nearly the same: anger is displaced from its real target. When Cholly is surprised by the hunters he directs his hate not at the powerful white men, since doing so “would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal” (119), but at his adolescent partner. Similarly, after buying the candy and tripping on the cracked sidewalk Pecola experiences a moment of cathartic anger: “There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging”. (43). Her anger's unspoken target is not the beloved crack but Mr. Yacobowski and all those who devalue her world; unfortunately the momentary clarity of vision, the discovery of reality and worth, cannot hold against the attraction of “blue eyes [in] a world of clean comfort” (43). Instead of turning her anger outward as Claudia does, she turns it self-destructively inward and celebrates her surrender to external definition with the orgiastic pleasures of consumption.

The story of Pecola's idealism and destruction has an unexpected but important precursor in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, an American classic that can help us locate The Bluest Eye in a long tradition of works about the American dream. Both novels focus on protagonists who at bottom believe not so much in the reality of an ideal as in the ideal nature of reality, a Platonic reality in the service of consumption. As Nick Carraway tells us, Jay Gatsby “Sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. … [and] he must be about his Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.”²⁴ Race, sex, and opportunity rather than values account for his success and Pecola's failure. Despite his criminal business practices, that is, Gatsby believes in a world of absolutes where Daisy Buchanan, her voice “full of money” (120), survives in splendid and virginal youth just as he last saw her; this is a glitzy adult version of Pecola's Dick and Jane world where time, lust, and ambiguity seem to play no part. In each case the protagonist is confronted with violent proof of the world's disorder and transience. Gatsby breaks up “like glass”²⁵ against Tom Buchanan's brutal malice and the evidence of Daisy's imperfection; Pecola is raped by a father who has not learned how to love. One is murdered—a symbolic suicide—and the other goes mad.

In its concise duality Pecola's family name, Breedlove, summarizes the problems posed by each novel: how can one reconcile the claims of body and spirit in a secular world, how can one be in and of the world without becoming brutalized by physical impulses, enthralled by the ideal, or exploited by those who would make use of both? Cholly Breedlove shows the depth of this problem when he rapes Pecola: confused, caught between disgust and love, “he wanted to fuck her—tenderly” (128). The rape, like his name, is an oxymoron whose two terms, at least for Cholly, cannot be conjoined. But The Bluest Eye does not end in despair; both anger and community offer a way to redeem the waste land, although each has its own dangers.²⁶ Anger can provide a “sense of being” and “an awareness of worth” (43), but it becomes lethal if displaced from its rightful target: Claudia remains sane by confronting racist society directly and through her retrospective narrative, while Pecola goes mad because she fights herself. A community, on the other hand, can support and comfort, as we see in young Claudia's first section. But when Pecola's drama has played itself out this same community takes the pregnant girl as a scapegoat whose defects define their virtues; as Claudia says, “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” (159). Personal and collective health begins with the effort at self-recovery exemplified in the narrative, which is itself a shaping and refinement of Claudia's anger at the white dolls, but it ends in a recognition of human interdependency. Finally, The Bluest Eye asks us to consider how as well as what we see, both as individuals and as a society. The wasteland will be fully redeemed only when all its members see with their own eyes, when they are no longer held captive, like a contemporary version of Plato's audience, by the idea that “reality” is a consumable absolute, a product independent of local commitments and personal loyalties.

Notes

1. Trudier Harris, for example, argues that The Color Purple leaves the reader “equally skeptical about accepting the logic of a novel that posits so many changes as a credible progression for a character. Such total change of life-style, attitudes, and beliefs … asks more of the reader than can be reasonably expected” (“From Victimization to Free Enterprise: Alice Walker's The Color Purple,” Studies in American Fiction 14 (1986), 16.

2. Gerry Brenner has recently discussed Morrison's treatment of Western mythology in Song of Solomon. See Song of Solomon: Morrison's Rejection of Rank's Monomyth and Feminism,” Studies in American Fiction 15 (1987), 13-24.

3. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), p. 159. Future references will be cited in the text.

4. Raymond Hedin argues that anger has been problematic for black writers because of racist attributions of brutishness and lack of control. As a consequence, Hedin says, black writers have paid special attention to structure in their fiction: “Emphasis on form implicitly conveys the rationality of the writer; and that context of rationality allows him to express his anger, or the anger of his characters, without suggesting an overall lack of control” (“The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction,” Novel 16 [1982], 37). Hedin discusses The Bluest Eye briefly on pages 49-50. For a discussion of the novel as a female Bildungsroman see Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1986), 97-102. Frye argues that “The general problem for Claudia's self-definition is a version of the conflict between submission and self-assertion, which is the problem of all female authorship” (99). But this application of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's influential thesis in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) seems less useful than Hedin's approach because it minimizes the special circumstances of black authorship in America.

5. Morrison comments that “all the time that I write, I'm writing about love or its absence” (Jane S. Bakerman, “The Seams Can't Show: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Black American Literature Forum 12 [1979], 60).

6. Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 124; Edwin H. Cady, The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971), 5.

7. Many critics have discussed vision and the relationship between seeing, subjectivity, and objectification in The Bluest Eye. Frye comments that for Pecola the need “to see, to participate in the culture's image of what life ought to be … become the negation of her subjectivity” (102). Cynthia A. Davis, on the other hand, analyzes The Bluest Eye in terms of Sartre's Existential doctrines: “human relations revolve around the experience of ‘the Look,’ for being ‘seen’ by another both confirms one's reality and threatens one's sense of freedom” (“Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 23 [1982], 324).

8. For a concise discussion of the child's reader in The Bluest Eye see Phyllis Klotman, “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye,” Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979), 123-25.

9. Maureen Peal, the “high-yellow dream child” (52) who is everyone but Claudia and Frieda's favorite, mentions this 1934 movie starring Claudette Colbert because (in Maureen's selective synopsis) it is about a beautiful mulatto girl named Pecola who “‘hates her mother' cause she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral’” (57). In the movie Pecola's mother gives her pancake recipe to her white employer, who parlays it into a fortune.

10. Throughout the novel the margins reflect different narrators and points of view. The sections with ragged right margins are narrated primarily from young Claudia's point of view, although the language is the adult narrator's; sections with justified right margins are narrated by the older Claudia from an omniscient point of view. I will use “young Claudia” whenever I need to distinguish the narrator of the childhood sections from the omniscient narrator (the adult Claudia).

11. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (1941; rpt. New York: Oxford UP, 1967), 228.

12. Plato, 229.

13. L. Chauvois points out that in fifth- and fourth-century Greece puppet theaters formed a sort of “cinéma populaire,” and that Plato's allegory of the cave is a transposition of this extremely popular form of national amusement. See L. Chauvois, “Le ‘cinéma populaire’ en Grèce au temps de Plato et sa projection dans l'allégorie de la ‘caverne aux idées,’” Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées, 74 (1967), 193-5. In the notes to his translation of The Republic Cornford remarks that “A modern Plato would compare his Cave to an underground cinema” (228n).

14. Marcia Westkott, “Dialectics of Fantasy,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2 (1977), 1. Quoted in Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 7.

15. For a discussion of the black emigrant's experience of reification in the North see Susan Willis, “Eruptions of Funk,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Methuen, 1984), 263-83.

16. William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie,” in The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1951), 271.

17. Williams, 272-3.

18. The political thrust of Morrison's novels is apparent to every sensitive reader. As Morrison explained in a recent interview, “I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political” (Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: the Ancestor or Foundation,” in Black Women Writers [1950-1980]: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans [Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1984], 343).

19. Susan Willis points out that candy is often associated with capitalism in Morrison's fiction (228n).

20. Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 48-66; Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986, 19-46.

21. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985) 138-58.

22. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 269. Gillian Brown argues that “in the name of domesticity, Uncle Tom's Cabin attacks not only the patriarchal institution, but nineteenth-century patriarchy: not only slave traders, but the system and men that maintain ‘the one great market’ upon which trade depends” (“Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Quarterly, 36 [1984], 511).

23. For an excellent introduction to nineteenth-century American racism see Carolyn Karcher, Shadow Over Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980), 1-27.

24. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1925), 99.

25. Fitzgerald, 148.

26. Morrison's cautious optimism comes from a belief in the power of the local and individual; in this she resembles William Carlos Williams, who found Eliot's The Waste Land “the great catastrophe to our letters” because it ignored “the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions” (The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams [New York: Random House, 1951], 146, 174.). Williams's response to Eliot is “Spring and All,” a poem rooted in the sense of place. In reworking the image of the waste land Morrison strips it of abstraction: at the end of the novel Pecola is living among very real Coke bottles, tire rims, and milkweed.