Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause for a few final images and thoughts framed by regret, shame, and horror. The book? Toni Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye,” which turns fifty this year. As the story ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less abandoned by the townspeople, who have treated her with scorn for most of her life; now she’s left to wander the streets in madness:
Spectacular even alongside other early novels bathed in the blood of gothic dread—William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930), say, or Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” or Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (both published in 1952)—Morrison’s book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black girls at the center of the story.
Like all the principal characters in “The Bluest Eye,” Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison, who died last August, was born in 1931. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her classmates heap on her is to dream. And the dream is this: that someone—God, perhaps—will grant her the gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free—free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. Not that she ever looks in a mirror. She knows what she’d find there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has distorted the reflection of her face. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. But in those harrowing final images, Claudia MacTeer, Morrison’s spirited nine-year-old narrator, sees what Pecola cannot, what her madness, the result of all that rejection, looks like to the rest of the town: “Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.”
In this short, intellectually expansive, emotionally questioning, and spiritually knowing book, the act of looking—and seeing—is described again and again. One example of many: Peering through a window in their family home, Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, catch a first glimpse of sex. A beloved boarder is consorting with a notorious prostitute. What can it mean, him sucking on that woman’s fingers? Is that love? Or is it what a man does to, and not with, a female? Another example: When Pecola goes to buy some of her treasured Mary Janes, the white shopkeeper sees her but can’t fix his attention on her; nothing in his experience has prepared him to recognize a little black girl as an entity.
Despite all this looking, few people, aside from Claudia, bear witness to much. To do so would be to think critically about the society that formed them and be moved to effect change. Instead, there’s a great deal of condemnation and parochial disapproval. And it’s mostly aimed at black women—especially those mothers who don’t keep their home or their children clean. Cleanliness, of course, is next to godliness, and who would want to commit the double sin of being black and dirty? Pecola’s very presence exacerbates some of the other characters’ not so buried feelings about their own race and poverty—liabilities that push these Ohioans apart, rather than unite them: no one wants to be confronted with her own despair, especially when it’s reflected in the eyes of another despairing person. And the truth is, by the time we leave Pecola, pecking at the waste on the margins of the world, we, too, may feel a measure of relief at no longer having to see what Morrison sees, her profound and unrelenting vision of what life can do to the forsaken.
Morrison said that she wrote “The Bluest Eye” because she wanted to read it. She began the book in 1965, when she was thirty-four years old. She had majored in English at Howard University, after which she did her M.A. at Cornell. (Her thesis, which she described as “shaky,” was about suicide as a theme in the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.) Morrison went on to teach at Texas Southern University, and then at Howard, in D.C., where she joined a writers’ group and worked on a short story about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes. The character was based on a girl she’d known growing up in Ohio, who’d wanted those eyes and decided that God didn’t exist when He didn’t give them to her. Morrison put the draft in a drawer and got on with the business of living. In 1958, she married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison; seven years later, the couple was divorced, and Toni was by herself, supporting two young boys and working as an editor at L. W. Singer, a textbook company in Syracuse, New York. During an argument, a neighbor called Morrison a tramp in front of her children. Morrison filed a two-hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit, which she later dropped. She fought to protect herself, but how do you protect yourself from isolation or loneliness?
Loneliness and hurt are often an artist’s first tools, and Morrison put hers to work by remembering and writing about the world she’d come from: the funk of poverty as well as its flowers, the ghost stories that her father, a welder and a Jack-of-all-trades, told his children. In a way, “The Bluest Eye” builds on those tales and honors the years when, without knowing it, Morrison was preparing to become an artist. Set near the start of the Second World War, before postwar prosperity changed Lorain, the book is narrated by Claudia, a feisty child, but the tone is elegiac, since a lot of the novel is driven by memory and the stories that shape it. Before the narrative begins, Morrison gives us the crux of the tale in a sort of preface:
