Toni Morrison’s Art. A Humanistic Exploration of The Bluest Eye and Beloved

Bhandari, Sumedha

Toni Morrison’s Art. A Humanistic Exploration of The Bluest Eye and Beloved

Summary

Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Astutely, she describes aspects of human lives and, unlike many other writers, reveals the hope and beauty that underlines the worlds ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect balance between black literature and writing abouth the universally truth. Although firmly grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns.
The endeavor in this study is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni Morrison’s works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this book tries to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the strings of Morrison’s novels with the colour of humanist concerns, this book delineates the term ‘Humanism’ from which these humanistic concerns arise.

Excerpt

NSPOKEN

EXIS OF

ONI

ORRISON

S NOVELS

Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born

Chloe Anthony Wofford. Her family had migrated North to escape racial prejudice

and to seek educational and employment opportunities. In Ohio, Morrison was

predominantly surrounded by racist whites. However, this did not impede her growth

and success. She attended Lorain High School, where she excelled as a student.

She was a member of the student council, worked in the school library (an honor at

her school), and was an associate editor of the high school yearbook. She graduated

with honors.

Morrison attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the nation's

oldest and most prestigious colleges. There she was shocked to find ostentation

among the students around her. Most people seemed interested in socializing, their

physical appearance, and going to parties. Morrison was mostly concerned with her

studies and sometimes found it difficult to find a place at Howard. People had trouble

pronouncing her name, so she shortened it to her middle name, Anthony. This later

became her now accepted name, "Toni." She majored in English and minored in

classics. While at school, she showed interest in the theater and became a member

of the Howard University Players, the campus theatrical company. After graduating

from Howard, she received a Master's degree in English from Cornell University in

1955. From there, Morrison went to Texas Southern University in Houston, to teach

introductory English.

In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard as a member of the faculty where she

had the opportunity to teach and to meet many students who later became famous

writers and civil rights activists. Some of these students included: the poet Amiri

Baraka; Mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young; civil rights activist and leader of the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael; and finally

the famous writer, Claude Brown.

At Howard, Morrison met and fell in love with an architect from Jamaica,

Harold Morrison. They were married in 1958 and had their first son, Harold Ford, in

1961. Although her marriage was not complete bliss, Morrison and her husband

stayed together for six years. In 1964, the family moved to Europe and Morrison

became pregnant with her second child. However, by the time she returned from

Europe, her marriage had ended. She attributes her marriage failure to the cultural

differences between her and her husband. When Morrison returned from Europe,

she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as an associate editor with a

textbook subsidiary of Random House. She worked hard during the days and came

home to parent her two sons. Then, at night, she would work on her writing, and

specifically, the book that would bring her world acclaim, The Bluest Eye. Morrison

drew on many of her own life experiences and memories growing up in Lorain, Ohio

to write this first book. After twenty years of editing for Random House, Morrison left

in 1984 to become a professor at the State University of New York in Albany. She

worked there for five years, working on many literary pieces. But in the spring of

1989 she left and became the first African-American woman writer to hold a named

chair at an Ivy League university. She was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor

in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She taught in the creative

writing program, and participated in the African-American studies, American studies,

and women's studies departments. Her plethora of work includes novels like The

Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved

(1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003); miscellaneous writings like:

Dreaming Emmet (performed 1986, but unpublished), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness

and the Literary Imagination (1992), Remember: The Journey to School Integration

(2004); and for children, with son Slade Morrison she wrote: The Big Box (1999),

The Book of Mean People (2002), The Lion or the Mouse? (2003), The Ant or the

Grasshopper? (2003), and The Poppy or the Snake (2004).

Before customizing the work of Toni Morrison it is necessary to delineate the

character of Afro-American fiction. It is primarily a social treatise which deals with the

social, psychological and humanistic milieu. It is a microcosm of the entire Afro-

American existence. It has a plot, a structure, a language intertwined with cultural

symbols, patterns, beliefs and practices and the author's point of view or vision.

Through their pen Afro-American writers try to comprehend the overwhelming nature

of life. Afro-American women writers in the seventies and eighties like Alice Walker,

Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Alexis De Veau have been able to explore the self as

central rather than marginal entity. Early Afro- American writers like Zora Neale

Hurston, Frances Harper, Jessica Fauset, Nella Larsen and Ann Petry had also tried

their hand in this direction. Quest for personal freedom, demand for respect and a

desire for a self, were the major themes for these novelists.

Toni Morrison is, perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the

history of African-American literature who astutely describes aspects of human lives.

There are many writers in the world who are willing to describe the ugliness of the

world, Morrison shows her uniqueness and exquisiteness by revealing the hope and

beauty that underlines this ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect

balance between black literature and writing what is universally true. Although firmly

grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work

transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal

mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns.

The signal accomplishment of Toni Morrison as a writer is that she has managed

uncannily to invert her own mode of literary representation. Her themes are often

those expected of naturalistic fiction-the burdens of history, the determining social

effects of race, gender, or class-but they are also the great themes of lyrical

modernism-love, death, betrayal, and burden of individual responsibility for her or his

own fate. Like Golding, her novels have a fabulistic quality as she has been directly

influenced by Afro-American folktales. Like George Eliot she has a rare gift for

characterization. She can compel her readers to learn about themselves by

experiencing through her characters, their states of mind which they would ordinarily

disavow. As a result of her literary and artistic abilities and competence, Toni

Morrison stands in the vanguard of contemporary writers of fiction, transcending both

her racial identity and gender.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), received mixed reviews, didn't sell well,

and was out of print by 1974. Critical recognition and praise for Toni Morrison grew

with each novel. Her second novel Sula (1973), made both the critics and readers

pay attention to her. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her

third novel Song of Solomon (1977) and the Pulitzer prize for Beloved (1987). She

received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for, in the words of the Swedish

Academy, her "visionary force and poetic import" which give "life to an essential

aspect of American reality." On October 7, 1993, Toni Morrison became the eighth

woman and first black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When she

learned of the honor, she said: "This is a palpable tremor of delight for me."

Toni Morrison believes in the function of the novel as the medium that gives

voice to the unheard, unspoken lives of the black people. Morrison wants her prose

to recreate black speech, "to restore the language that black people spoke to its

original power"

; for her, language is the thing that black people love so much--the

saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with

them. It's a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher's: to make you stand up out

of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible

things that could happen would be to lose that language. Her prose has the quality of

speech; Morrison deliberately strives for this effect, to produce literature that speaks

rather than reads. She hears her prose as she writes, and during the revision

process she cuts phrasing which sounds literary or written rather than spoken. She

rejects critics' assertions that her prose is rich; to those who say her prose is poetic,

she responds that metaphors are natural in black speech. Her strong ties to her

black culture and oral tradition create a rich foundation for her novels. For Morrison,

"all good art has been political"

and the black artist has a responsibility to the black

community. She aims at capturing the unknown entity that defines what makes a

book 'black' oblivious of the fact whether the people in the books are black or not.

She thinks that one characteristic of black writers is a constant hunger and

disturbance that never ends. Her novels are a reflection of the experiences of the

black community and blacks in general. Her work suggests who survived under what

circumstances and why, who were the supposed fugitives, what was legal in the

community as opposed to what was legal outside it. In The Salon Interview taken by

Zia Jaffrey, she asserts: "I'm very much interested in how African-American literature

is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It's been a long, hard

struggle, and there's a lot of work yet to be done."

Morrison wants readers to be a part in her novels, to be involved actively.

Readers are encouraged to craft the novel with her and to help assemble meaning.

She uses the model of the black preacher who requires his parishioners to speak, to

join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, and to accede, change or to

modify. She wants readers to say the final prayer. Thus, her writing is meant as a

communal experience, a sharing of passion and ideas and responses, with her

holding the reader's hand during the experience. One small example of her

encouraging reader participation is her not using adverbs so that the reader should

recognize and feel the speaker's emotion by feeling the words.

The endeavor in this book is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni

Morrison's works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide

denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on

adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this

study

would try to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human

community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the

strings of Morrison's novels with the colour of humanist concerns, it is important to

delineate the term `Humanism' from which these humanistic concerns arise.

"Humanism stresses the importance of the individual human personality and

its power to learn from suffering and to rise above circumstances and in the process

it takes cognizance of the paradox that lies at the root of life - the individual is part

and parcel of the cultural environment that shapes him, while the self is always in

conflict with the culture that shapes him."

Its aim is to allow human values to guide

one's course in life and affirm those "universal truths" that transcend dogmatism and

parochialism. It acts as a counter to all types of authoritarianism, intolerance, loss of

self, alienation, atomization, and gradual deterioration from the level of the human to

the mechanical or the animal. Humanism, as Kurtz

puts it, is life affirming and not

life-denying; it seeks to elicit the possibilities of life, and establish the conditions of a

satisfactory life for all and not only a few. It grounds humanitarianism, providing

foundations for a normative critique as well as explanation of social conditions.

Humanism is a philosophy that affirms the dignity of each individual and

supports maximum individual freedom within the framework of social and planetary

responsibility. Humanists believe in individual rights and freedoms - but believe that

individual responsibility, social cooperation and mutual respect are just as important.

What a piece of art is a man! How noble in reason! how

infinite in faculties!

In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action,

how like angel!

In apprehension how like god! the beauty of the world!

the paragon of animals!

Humanism emphasises the dignity of man and his perfectibility. With the essential

focus on man and his activities, it considers the world a legitimate object of interest

and `Love' wherein reason tends to soar above revelation. Even Greek writer

Socrates shows that God is not necessarily the source of good, or even good

himself. Socrates asks if something is good because God ordains it, or if God

ordains it because it is already good. It is thus quite natural that the Greeks held in

great esteem the heroism of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods in order to

preserve mankind. A saviour of man and a rebel against an oppressive god,

Prometheus is chained for eternity by Power and Force. Albert Camus in Myth of

Sisyphus, shows how Sisyphus returns each time to roll the stone up the hill not in

despair but with a smile of scorn hurling defiance to the gods. During Renaissance,

when great emphasis was placed on a man-centred universe, it was John Milton

who, with bold strokes of his poetic genius, created Satan, the embodiment of evil

and yet an incarnation of the defiant spirit of man. Endowed with all the human

attributes of both good and evil, he asserts: "the mind is in its own place and in itself

can make a Hell of Heaven, a heaven of Hell."

Satan here boldly proclaims: "To

reign is worth ambition. Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven,"

thus making

Paradise Lost an immortal epic where the spirit of humanism reigns supreme.

With the advent of the industrial revolution and unprecedented technical

advancement, new dimension were added to the concept of humanism. Karl Jaspers

in his Man in the Modern Age offers a powerful indictment of the progress of the

contemporary technological civilization, which he regards as a social disease.

Jaspers felt that ever-growing reliance upon objective criteria of thought would have to

be paid for by ever- deepening ignorance of the real nature of human existence. It can,

thus, be by far emphasized that there is nothing beyond man himself that can solve

the problem of man's existence. Soren Kierkegaard offered new perspectives to the

humanist thought by focusing attention on Man, in the total, unfathomable

inwardness of his being. Kierkegaard bases his position upon individual man here

and now, man in his passion and anxiety. Man as a being with a passion for an eternal

happiness. He pointed out that genuine critical dilemmas of the individual's life are

not solved by intellectual exploration of the facts nor of the laws of thinking about

them. Their resolutions emerge through conflicts and tumults in the soul, anxieties,

agonies, of faith into unknown territories. The reality of every one's existence proceeds

from the inwardness of man, not from anything that the mind can codify.

Jean Paul Sartre recounts in his lecture Existentialism and Humanism that

though man's fate is simply to perish, man can triumph over it by inventing "purposes"

or "projects," which will themselves confer meaning both upon himself and upon the

world of objects-all meaningless otherwise and in themselves. W.H. Auden's

exhortation to writers, poets and intellectuals caught in the grip of a life characterized

by anxiety and dismay admirably reflects the humanistic concerns of a sensitive soul

in combating individual, social and historical crises:

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

(In Memory of W.B Yeats)

Derek Walcott is probably right when he says how a writer through "creative

schizophrenia" can turn the fragmented cultural legacy occasioned by colonialism

into a source of strength rather than divisiveness. In one of his fictional observations,

Arun Joshi writes that "life's meaning lies not in the glossy surfaces of our

pretensions but in those dark mossy labyrinths of the soul that languish forever."

Keeping these fundamentals in mind this book will proceed towards its aim of

analyzing Toni Morrison's work. It is important to note here that no brand or

philosophy is being followed here. The concern is with the human part in the word

`humanism'. Humanistic concerns are those concerns that arise out of the

consciousness of humanism, the consciousness of man being the central focus and

the consciousness of him having the right to lead a respectable life. The concerns of

a normal man, woman, and child in the hostile sociological topography are being

explored. In this respect, humanism holds a solid ground in the writings of Toni

Morrison. Her novels like The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved and many more, explore the

conditions of men, women and children in the face of hostility and alienation from the

outside world. In the Afterword of her novel, The Bluest Eye, Morrison beautifully

portrays this point:

The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the

self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial

foibles common in all groups, but against the

damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable

inferiority originating in an outside gaze.

The notion of "twoness", a divided awareness of one's identity, was introduced by

W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement

of Colored People (NAACP).and the author of the influential book The Souls of Black

Folks: "One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,

two unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged

strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

In her Nobel Lecture Morrison gives voice to the predicament of alienated

individuals present in her novels.

Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what

it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is

to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the

one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns

that cannot bear your company.

(Nobel Lecture, 1993)

Morrison's style combines these unrealistic elements with a realistic presentation of

life and characters. This mixture has been called "magical realism." Initially she

objected to the label magical realism, feeling it diminished her work or even

dismissed it. Now, however, she acknowledges that it does identify the supernatural

and unrealistic elements in her writing. In The Bluest Eye the "magical" appears in

the failure of marigolds to bloom and the belief by some members of the community

in Soaphead Church's powers. The juxtaposing of the unrealistic with realistic make

her novels depict true image of life. This magic realism helps us identify with her

characters, their pains, their sorrows, their happiness, their living.

The solution to the dilemma of man to belong is answered by Morrison by her

assertion of past and memory as an integral part in man's life. She believes that if a

man reclaims his past and his heritage the whole question of belonging will be

answered. Morrison says she wrote Beloved convinced that:

This has got to be the least read of all the books I'd

written because it is about something that the characters

don't want to remember, I don't want to remember,

black people don't want to remember, white people

don't want to remember. I mean it's national amnesia.

For Morrison black history is the core of black identity. In Beloved, Sethe the

protagonist is a victim of sexist and racist oppression. The story is narrated through a

series of flashbacks. Morrison is not only concerned with what history had recorded

in the slave narratives but what it has omitted, the unvoiced past. This unspeakable

past if not claimed will create an unspeakable present and future.

With Sula (1973), the black cultural past is represented by the family, Sula's

mother and Grandmother Hannah and Eva Peace, and by Bottom, the community in

which they live. In her search for identity and self-definition, Sula (1973) chooses to

reject her past and to define herself in opposition to her family and community. In the

present novel, thus Morrison uses the past-cultural, political and familial- as both

revealing and healing for her characters.

In psychological assessment of characters and their lives, Morrison is akin to

Camus, Kafka and the likes, yet she is diverse as well. She affords an answer to the

problems of her characters. Unlike Camus and Kafka, Morrison does not leave the

readers with a pessimist outlook. Her characters are given an answer and though

good may not come to the always but there is always a scope for finding answers.

Thus, Morrison's writing endeavors can be perfectly adjudged against the

backdrop of humanism. Her fictional characters are constantly engaged in perplexing

struggles to maintain their human dignity and emotional sensitivity in an impersonal,

alien and frequently threatening world. As the epitaph in her Love

(2003) claims:

It takes a lifetime

to read a face behind a face

And ages to decipher

words behind a talk.

In the following chapters

this study aspires to bring forth the relationships those

different characters in Toni Morrison's novels share with one another. The

dissertation is divided into four chapters. The introductory chapter has tried to place

Toni Morrison in the literary tradition of women writings, and establish the

interconnectedness of race, gender and class which, as systems of societal and

psychological restrictions, have critically affected the face of human existence. The

chapter has also traced her biography and various literary and cultural experiences

that have shaped her fictional art. The second chapter deals with Toni Morrison's

first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which the emphasis is on the devastating effects of the

beauty standards of the dominant culture on the self-image of a female adolescent.

Toni Morrison gets across a very powerful idea that is found in every society today.

Although the book is written during the 1940's and most of the events that occur

mirror that time period, the main idea transcends to this day and age. With a

persuasive argument in mind and a poor, innocent black girl to appeal to the reader's

pathos, Morrison craftily writes her story. She uses the rhetorical knowledge that

arguments are often improved through the use of sensory details that allow us to see

the reality of a problem or through stories that make specific cases and instances

come alive. Morrison's argument is how influential society can be on an individual

and how strongly its ideas and views are impressed upon that individual. The ideas

and views that she speaks of mostly pertain to beauty and what makes an individual

beautiful. This idea of beauty can turn someone's life upside down and in the end

lead them to madness. Thus, Morrison is trying to impress upon her readers what a

negative effect society's ideas and views can have on an individual and how that

individual's life is changed forever. Morrison has written of desolation and decay,

because this is where, as victims of our environments, we are left. It is a tragedy that

Pecola had to undergo such gruesome chain of events. Again redressing the causal

argument, society has a standard of beauty; Pecola does not meet this standard. Her

life is plagued by event after event which impresses her ugliness upon her. She

becomes the object of hatred by all of the members of her town. Her unstable family

life leads to her rape which further enhances the problem. Pecola then becomes

pregnant and begins her descent towards madness. Her life is then changed forever;

she will never be the same. At the end of the book, one of the main characters,

Claudia, reflects as an adult that people need someone like Pecola in their lives.

The contention is that what fate lies for Pecola has its genesis in her

upbringing and in her parents' insecure attitude in life. The dilemmas and

predicaments are transferred in the blood of Pecola. While probing the liaison

between her parents; her parents and society, and the society and black people in

general,

the study has strived to show the general decay and degradation that has

marred our society. Pecola suffers because her parents suffered and Pecola's child

died because no life could survive in such hostile, alienated environment.

Estrangement of a small girl by this insensitive society is enough to unsurface the

grisly face of the social order.

The third chapter is concerned with Beloved where Morrison's primary focus

is how whites had used every weapon in their armory to devastate the blacks and to

keep them fettered in the eternal inferno of slavery. One of the primary themes of

Beloved is the issue of race and effects of slavery. Much of the novel focuses on a

community of ex-slaves and how they manage to get on track with their lives. The

novel questions, through the eyes of schoolteacher, what the difference is between a

man and an animal. In its vivid portrayal of the Negro community, complete with their

desires and troubles, the novel shows that a colored man is like any other man. The

novel also addresses the concern of whether it is better to endure the injustices of an

unfeeling people or to fight against them.

Closely tied to the theme of race is that of the past. Each of the characters

have endured a furious past, complete with the worst horrors imaginable. Sethe has

been raped and forced to murder, Paul D has been imprisoned in a cube in a ditch,

Stamp Paid was forced to give his wife away to be a sex toy, and the list goes on

and on. Many of these men and women have chosen, like Sethe and Paul D, to

repress the past. Others worked actively against it, like Stamp Paid. However, no

sort of resolution occurs for any of the characters until each learns to accept and

deal with the past (which is very alive in the present). Only then can a future be

found. Another humanistic apprehension in Beloved is that of the banality of evil.

Slavery is not just an institution; it is a philosophy and mindset which is far-reaching

in its consequences. The Garners treated their slaves well, and consequently were

respected by such people as Sethe and Paul D. However even then they were mere

toys in the hands of their masters. The theme also comes up in the description of the

Bodwin's household, which includes the statue of a black boy and the words

meaning at your service. The Bodwins have taken an active stance in the fight

against slavery, yet fail to comprehend the mindset behind that statue. With such

images, Morrison demonstrates the extent of slavery and what must be done to

abolish it completely.

The focus is that the moral ambiguity, of course, plays a large role in the

novel. The question of, was the murder right or wrong? crops up many times in the

book. The answer finally reached is that it was the right thing to do, but Sethe didn't

have the right to do it. Had she not murdered Beloved, her and all the children would

have been sold back into slavery. Yet, when she committed the murder, she was

shunned by an entire community and placed at the mercy of a vengeful spirit. With

this comes the larger question of what it means to be free. Was Baby Suggs truly

free, when white men were allowed to barge into her yard at any time? Was Paul D

free, though he wasn't allowed to love whatever he wanted to love? Were any of the

Negroes truly free, who had to wait at the back of the supermarket for the whites to

be served before they could get their groceries? Freedom, Morrison points out, is

more than a matter of not belonging to a single master.

Another humanistic concern of a well bound of family is also explored in this

chapter. Most of the slaves have been torn apart from their families at an early age,

and there is little hope in discovering what is left of their families. The consequences

of this type of separation can be seen in Sethe, who is possessive of her children,

and Paul D, who is determined not to love anything too much. Crisis is also

manifested in a loss of values and a breakdown of social and religious institutions. In

direct response to Beloved's murder and the slave catcher's threat, Baby Suggs

relinquishes her role as the community's spiritual leader. As a result, the

community's religious underpinnings falter, threatening it with a deepening of the

crisis. Beloved gives testimony to the pain that all the slave women and their

descendants have suffered and will suffer. According to Wilfred Samuels and

Clenora Hudson-Weems, Morrison has decided that she must "`rip the veil' behind

which the slave narrator was forced to hide." Morrison, as Hudson-Weems and

Samuels point out, must also reconstruct the narrative of the slave woman, whose

story is seldom recorded and then not fully. She provides "the avenue for a

resurrected female slave narrator's voice."

(Weems, 97-98). The story that Toni

Morrison's Beloved tells is, in her narrator's words, "not a story to pass on." Molly

Abel Travis writes that Morrison reminds us that we must "embrace the wholeness of

our personal histories and cultural histories; we must remember even those parts we

would most like to forget."(Weems, 18)

While offering a summing up of the main argument of the dissertation, the last

chapter shows how an evolutionary pattern emerges as Toni Morrison, with her

heightened consciousness treats, in the course of her novels oppression of black

people in white America. The major focus is the oppression of a human being at the

hands of grisly society. The theme of humanistic issues is fully addressed in the

works of Toni Morrison. Her narrative structures are shaped to imbibe these themes

and pose the questions of why and how.

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18. Wilfred D. Samuels, and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. New York:

Twayne, 1990. 97. All subsequent references indicated parenthetically are to this

book.

UEST FOR

LUE

YES IN

LUEST

Beauty is said to be in the eyes of the beholder, but what if the image of beauty is

forced into the minds of many? The beauty of a person could be expressed in many

different ways, as far as looks and personality goes, but the novel The Bluest Eye

begs to differ. It contradicts the principle, because beauty is no longer just a person's

opinion but beauty has been made into an unwritten rule, a standard made by

society for society. The most important rule is that in order to be beautiful, girls have

to look just like a white doll, with blue eyes, light pink skin, and have blond hair. And

if they're not, they are not beautiful. W.E.B DuBois, in his book, The Souls of Black

Folk gauges the deleterious impact of racism on cultural self-consciousness and

identity. The term, "double-consciousness", refers to two distinct realities-a

psychological conflict between opposing cultural world views and debilitating

resolution in which externally derived and distorted perceptions of the self constitute

a single, but alienated self-consciousness. DuBois further notes: "It is a peculiar

sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self

through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks

on in amused contempt and pity."

Jane Rosenmary Clay (1963:11), one of the Afro-American poets, writes:

You [America] are my country... but you do not want me.

You have belittled and degraded me until I have become

little and degraded. You have not believed in me, until I no

longer believe in myself. You have not accepted me, until I

no longer accept myself.

Toni Morrison in her piece of fiction, titled, The Bluest Eye catches the gnawing self-

consciousness, bashfulness and reticence of an innocent black girl. Pecola has

recently stepped into the world where perceptions are made by looking at one's

outer physical reality. Bewildered at being labelled misfit, Pecola endeavours to be

akin to the social world around her. Thus, begins her quest, a pursuit to achieve the

existing American standards of beauty-blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. Since

this desire is not feasible, she suffers from the pangs of being unworthy, unwanted

and undesired. Pecola's yearning for blue eyes is an external manifestation of the

internal need to be loved and accepted by the white community.

Pecola Breedlove is a young black girl driven literally

insane by the pressure toward absolute physical beauty in

a culture whose white standards of beauty... are impossible

for her to meet, though no less alluring and

demanding. Surrounded by cultural messages that she is

ugly by definition, she can achieve peace only by retreating

into schizophrenia.

Pecola who never considers herself beautiful, is all admiration for the eyes of the

whites which she longs to possess through some miracle. Her obsession with

physical beauty leads to disastrous consequences. And as Morrison herself states,

"the concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious

and destructive ideas of the western world."

Pigeonholed to be one of community's ugly children, Pecola lives life each day

wanting to be accepted. The wider community also fails Pecola. Having absorbed the

idea that she is ugly and knowing that she is unloved; Pecola desperately wants the

blue eyes that she understands will make a child lovable in American society.

The attempt to become "white" intensifies rather

than mitigates the Negro woman's frustration in white

world. No amount of pain, powder and hair straightner

can erase all things in the black woman's background

that make her feminity and aesthetic appearance of

herself as beauty capable of attracting men. The Negro

woman becomes ashamed of what she is...

As a black girl, Pecola undergoes all the traumatic experiences. She wants to rise up

out of the pit of her blackness and see that world with blue eyes, but the pity is that

she is not allowed to. Excluded from reality by inequality and discrimination, she

goes mad. Fantasizing that her eyes have turned blue and so fitted her for the world.

While tracking the novel from a humanistic angle one is stumped by the

bareness and infertility that has cropped up in human associations. The society is

not ready to accept a child because she doesn't conform to the regularized

standards of beauty. The society allows the weight of ugliness to burden the

innocent mind of Pecola. No polite words, no loving hands, no warm bosoms are lent

to this poor black girl. The unspoken words, worries and pains of Pecola remain

unapprehended. She is just another unwanted, unworthy being, churned in the

mechanical cycle of this world. It is the dehumanizing society that engenders a

colonial situation, sustains it through excessively violent means, destroys the victim

both physically and psychologically, and finally, leaves him into pathetic state of

powerlessness and psychic impotency. Selwyn R. Cudjoe (1984:14) critiques:

...the major crime of the society is that it attempts to

reduce all Negroes to a sense of impotence and

nothingness.

Moreover, the oppressive system operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing the

victim or the members of the subordinate groups to replace individual and cultural

ways of knowing with the dominant group's `special' thoughts. Subtle but highly

pervasive manifestations of socialization or indoctrination operate in all ramifications

and finally lead the alleged to believe in their inferiority. The primer, which talks

about economic disparities, also refers to the portrayal of what the whites reject-

blackness, overt sexuality, lack of cleanliness and insubordination. The primer

represents cultural colonization and repression of any deviant attribute. This is what

every student reads in the first lesson in the first school. There, pictures of Dick,

Jane, father, mother, the cat and the dog are drilled powerfully into young minds.

Words have power; pictures have power. Blue eyes, blond hair, fair skin are the

symbols of beauty valued in the west as proclaimed by romantic movies, bill-boards,

and the reaction of people of golden objects. The violence inherent in this

perspective is that only white is beautiful. Beauty exists in and of itself, independent

of human nature or character, human beings are considered unequal and superior or

inferior according to their nearness yardstick. As Cynthia A. Davies points out,

"Pecola is the epitome of the victim in a world that reduces persons to objects and

then makes them feel inferior as objects."

Morrison depicts Pecola as a victim of an evil that has roots deeper than

human conviction and can't be understood in such terms. This vicious cycle of

rejection, this embodiment of supernatural forces of the creator, creation, and the

created combine to produce the evil that left Pecola Breedlove barren and unable to

know how or why. Toni Morrison attempts to satisfy this more difficult question of

why. Although unspoken, this question obsessively hovers over Pecola throughout

the novel and in her circular narrative style Morrison weaves a story that seeks to

answer this question by gathering all of the forces that were instrumental in the

creation of a social mishap. By using what seem like tangents in the story, we are

shown examples of how forces beyond human control such as nature, an omniscient

being and primarily a legacy of rejection have joined hands with human

insensitiveness to establish the heritage of desolation that has been passed on to

Pecola Breedlove.

A child is a progeny of his parents. The beliefs, ideologies and dogmas that

find home in their minds are transmitted through their blood to their children.

Pecola's belief of her own ugliness is a disease, roots of which can be found in her

mother Pauline and Cholly Breedlove. The Breedloves despise themselves because

they believe in their own unworthiness which is translated into ugliness for the

woman of the family.

It was as though some mysterious all knowing master

has given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they

had each accepted it without question.

(28)

Pauline, who works as a domestic servant in a beautiful house, hates the ugliness of

her house, her daughter, her family and herself. She lavishes all her love and

affection on her employer's daughter, reserving her jibes and slaps for her hapless

daughter. In her master's house Pecola's nervous carelessness is given harsh

rebuttal while the little girl in pink is greeted with warm apologies and assurances.

When the little girl seeks introduction of the visitors, she goes to the extent of

describing her own flesh and blood as "none" (85). The tendency of the black people

to harass other black-people is a direct indictment of self-loathing, a legacy of white

hegemony. White standards corrupted the minds of black people in such a way that

black people have developed self-hatred:

The masters had said, "you are ugly people." They looked

about themselves and saw nothing to contradict

the statement, saw in fact, support for it leaning at them

from every billboard, every move, every glance. (28)

Pauline has been over the years brought into the folds of the society. She has learnt

that it is not possible to fight the racist system and has made peace with it. Working

in a white man's house, being a demi-mother to the white child, at least gives her a

sense of worthiness. She is allowed to live in her dream house and forget for a while

her alienation from the society. These blacks were cultural half-breeds, half

saxonized, unassimilated, marginal, whose culture was substituted by the most

rudimentary American culture of the cheap newspaper, the movies, the popular

song, the ubiquitous automobile. Moved by English shibboleths and prejudice "the

fear of stranger", these aggressive and frustrated men developed personality needs

and psychological strength by scapegoating and stereotyping the blacks. They

colonized their very thoughts with their ideas and made the subjugated blacks

conform to their terms of structuralization. "This constituted the core of American

culture and enabled the white elite to maintain its super-ordinate position politically,

economically and socially over the centuries."

Any deviation from the entrenched

inflexible social system led to negativism and backlash.

Carter G. Woodson (1969: xxxiii), a great Afro-American political thinker and

activist argues:

When `the Negro's mind has been brought under the

control of his oppressor, the problem of holding the

Negro down is easily solved. When you control man's

thinking, you do not have to tell him not to stand here or

go yonder.

Pauline Breedlove's personal history is shown to have played out in extreme

measures in the life of her daughter. From the early part of her life up to the time the

reader is introduced to Pauline, she has worn a shroud of shame. The novel says

that it is due primarily to her injured foot that she felt a sense of separateness and

unworthiness and also why she "never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged

anyplace" (111). This feeling was intensified by her experiences of exclusion and

loneliness after moving up north. She was confronted by prejudice on a daily basis,

both classicism and racism, and for the first time, the white standard of beauty.

These experiences worked to transform Pauline into a product of hatred and

ignorance, leading her to hold herself up to standards that she didn't fully understand

nor could realistically attain. These standards and feelings of rejection are the

qualities that Pecola inherits from Pauline. Her mother, from her birth, placed upon

her the same shroud of shame, loneliness, and inadequacy. More significantly, just

as in the Whitcomb dynasty, the Breedloves as a whole are at one point described

by the narrator as one distressing unit. They are unified in their acceptance of the

mantle of unexplained ugliness, shame, and social dysfunctionality. The narrator tells

us that

No one could have convinced them that they were not

relentlessly and aggressively ugly...You looked at them

and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely

and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came

from conviction, their conviction...And they took the ugliness

in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went

about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his

own way. (39)

Cholly and Pauline Breedlove came to the city after leading a life of unfathomable

penury and deprivation in the southern plantations. But in the city they do not

achieve their aim of leading a good, comfortable and secure life. Although free and

equal to whites legally, they realize that any semblance of happiness is illusory. The

Bluest Eye opens with the Dick - Jane primer:

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door.

It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and

Jane live in the green and white house. They are very happy.

See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will

play with Jane. See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and

play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play. See

mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with

Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh mother laugh. See father. He is

big and strong. Father is smiling, Smile. Father, smile. See

the dog. Bowwow goes the dog. Do you want to play

with Jane? See the dog run. Run, dog run. Look. Look.

Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They

will play a good game. Play, Jane, play. (7)

Details

Pages
Type of Edition: Erstausgabe
Publication Year: 2017
ISBN (PDF): 9783960676188
ISBN (Softcover): 9783960671183
File size: 1.7 MB
Language: English
Publication date: 2017 (February)
Grade: A
Keywords: Toni Morrison Beloved The Bluest Eye African-American literature Humanism Black literature

Author

Sumedha Bhandari (Author)

Toni Morrison’s Art. A Humanistic Exploration of The Bluest Eye and Beloved

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Author

Sumedha Bhandari (Author)