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5
T
HE
U
NSPOKEN
L
EXIS OF
T
ONI
M
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
6
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.
7
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."
1
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
8
original power"
2
; 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"
3
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."
4
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
9
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."
5
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
6
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!
7
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
10
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."
8
Satan here boldly proclaims: "To
reign is worth ambition. Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven,"
9
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.
10
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
11
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.
11
(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."
12
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.
13
12
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."
14
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.
15
(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.
16
13
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
17
(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
14
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.
15
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
16
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."
18
(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.
17
R
EFERENCES
1. ToniMorrisonNobelLecture.<http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-
lecture.html>.
2. ToniMorrisonHomePage.http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/ tonimorrison.
3. ToniMorrisonHomePage.<http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison>.
4. Salon.com: Great Books Online.
<http://www.archive.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_02int
>.
5. Mira Panigrahi, Humanism and Culture. New Delhi: Concept, 2001. 20. All
subsequent references indicated parenthetically are to this book.
6. Paul Kurtz. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Humanism>.
7. William Shakespeare. Hamlet. Ed. M.M. Reese. New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers,
2001, Act ii sc. ii.
8. John Milton. Paradise Lost Books I and II. Ed. F.T. Prince. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1984. 254-55.
9. John Milton. Paradise Lost Books I and II. Ed. F.T. Prince. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1984. 263.
10. Nibir K. Ghosh. "Prespectives and Challenges". Humanism in Indian English
Fiction. Eds. T.S Anand etc. Creative New Literature Series-78, 2005. 20. All
subsequent references indicated parenthetically are to this book.
11. W. H. Auden: Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage
Books, 1991. lines 61-65.
12. Sujata Mathai. "An Interview with Arun Joshi". The Times of India. July 7, 1983. 8.
13. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. Vintage, 1999, 168. All subsequent references
indicated parenthetically are to this text.
14. W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Avon Books, 1965. 14.
15. ToniMorrisonNobelLecture.
<http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html>.
16. ToniMorrisonHomePage.<http://www.luminarium.com>.
17. Toni Morrison. Love. New York: Plume, 2003. 1.
18. Wilfred D. Samuels, and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. New York:
Twayne, 1990. 97. All subsequent references indicated parenthetically are to this
book.
18
Q
UEST FOR
B
LUE
E
YES IN
T
HE
B
LUEST
E
YE
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."
1
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.
2
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
19
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.
3
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."
4
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...
5
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
20
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.
6
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."
7
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
21
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.
8
(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)
22
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."
9
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.
10
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
23
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)
Excerpt out of 96 pages
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- , 2017, Toni Morrison’s Art. A Humanistic Exploration of The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Hamburg, Bedey Media GmbH, https://www.anchor-publishing.com/document/353541
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