Childrens Views of Love In Tony Morrisons The Bluest Eye - Research Paper Example

 The “Bluest” Eye Is The “Blindest” Eye: Children’s Views of Love In Tony Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” For Pecola Breedlove blue eyes represent what she believes the world sees as beauty and she believes that being beautiful will bring about love in her life. What she never comes to realize is the blindness in those blue eyes. They do not see her beauty as an individual person or as part of a race and culture of people, and thus they do not allow her to see her own beauty. They define love and loveability by outward appearance rather than by inner character and spirit, thus rendering themselves blind to its presence and incapable of experiencing it. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes represents her rejection of herself as a person and her wider rejection of her heritage. In the end she loses herself in the insanity of a person who has allowed the world’s lack of acceptance of who she is to become hers, and is thus rendered blind to her own beauty as well as to her abilities to give and receive love. Pecola’s parents, particularly her mother, and the world in which their attitudes were formed laid the foundations for Pecola’s unrelenting desire for “blue eyes.” Pauline was lonely and unhappy, and marrying Cholly Breedlove did not assuage her loneliness or relieve her unhappiness. She escaped into the imaginary life created by Hollywood at the movies. That world became the basis for her beliefs and the manner in which she lived out those beliefs – beliefs that beauty was the most important attribute of a person and that beauty was the opposite of everything she was. "In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap....She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty..." (Morrison, pg. 122) Pauline’s relationship with the Fisher family is the primary place in her life where her belief system emerges. She focuses all her energy and even her capacity for tenderness on them and their little girl, seemingly without consciousness of how this impacts her entire family, especially her children. Her son Sammy chooses to run away from home, trying to escape not only a drunken father but a mother who has come to believe that she can only love what the world has defined as beautiful and her family does not qualify. Her daughter Pecola also chooses to escape, by running away to an inner world which she also adopts the same value system as her mother, and “blue eyes” are the keys to her happiness. One incident powerfully illustrates the impact of Pauline Breedlove’s beliefs and resulting attitude about love on Pecola. One afternoon Pecola, and her friends Claudia and Frieda go to find Pecola’s mother at the Fisher’s home. While she is downstairs finishing the laundry, the girls are upstairs including the Fisher’s daughter. A freshly baked cherry cobbler cooling on the counter is much too tempting for Pecola and she reaches in to touch it. When she does so, she spills it all over the place including on her legs and clothes and on the clothes of the Fisher’s daughter. Pauline comforts the Fisher’s daughter and verbally berates and hits Pecola and then throws Pecola and her two friends out of the house. This incident no doubt imprints forever on Pecola’s heart that if she only had blue eyes, she would see not only her mother’s love, but the love of the rest of the world as well. (p. 87) Cholly Breedlove is an unwanted child whose life is also filled with self-contempt and an overwhelming unhappiness that often, with the help of alcohol, heats into anger. Whereas his wife escapes into the movies, Cholly escapes into the bottle. The contempt with which he sees women is bound to his desire to love them. He does not know how to love them without the anger as the energy of his love. His rape of his daughter is a demonstration of his anger, contempt, and love bound together in a confusing and destructive emotional bundle. Thanks to Soaphead Church, a local self-styled fortune-teller of sorts, Pecola now believes she has blue eyes and is thus beautiful and worthy of love. The fulfillment of her dreams of love is now a nightmare, a rape at the hands of her father. The affect is profound and mind-altering. Now Pecola’s inner world of escape becomes her reality. She has an imaginary friend who is her constant companion and escapes into an inner world of insanity. Soaphead Church is one of several other adults that to a lesser but equally profound extent impact the attitudes of the children in this story. His family, too instills in him the ‘lighter is better’ mentality. When he looks at her, he sees an “ugly little black girl.” “I looked at that ugly little black girl and I loved her … I gave her the blue, blue, two blue eyes … no one else will see her blue eyes. But she will.  And she will live happily ever after” (p. 143). He, too, was living a myth passed on to him by a white world. He had no idea of the nightmare to come for Pecola for which he had now unknowingly opened the wide the door. Earlier in the story, a boy whose name is Louis Junior one day invites Pecola into his house. He is also black, but his mother Geraldine, similar to Pecola’s mother, idolizes all things white. She has taught her son not “to play with niggers. She had explained to him the difference between colored people and niggers. They were easily identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud." (p. 87) Junior teases Pecola by throwing a cat at her. Pecola tries to save the cat which has blue eyes, but Junior throws it at her again and it dies. At that moment Geraldine returns home, sees Pecola disheveled, believes her son who accuses Pecola of killing the cat, and so immediately throws her out of the house. Once again the message is reinforced: “you are nothing the way you are.” China, Poland and Miss Marie are three black prostitutes that live in the apartment above Pecola and her family. She and her friends talk with them a lot about love. But even these three women are fully enveloped in the ideas about beauty imparted to them by a white world. They use all kinds of make-up to change their appearances and straighten and curl their hair into styles that the world considers beautiful.    (pp. 44-49)  They too are communicating a message that says, “The way I am and the way I look is unacceptable. The way to love is to look like ‘they’ look.” Not everyone in this story adopts this attitude, however. For in reality, the story can only be told by someone who is willing to stand outside of the wider world’s notions of beauty and love; and thus the narrator and her family emerge as standing apart from this viewpoint and thus able to see and reflect upon it with a critical eye. Claudia MacTeer is the narrator. Like all children, she engages in magical thinking and makes concrete associations but is of the age where she is beginning to allow her thinking to help her make abstract conclusions from her concrete associations. For example, she opens the story with her belief that the marigolds this year are not blooming because Pecola is having a baby by her own father. And that somehow, if they had planted the seeds differently everything would be as it should be and the flowers would grow. However, she concludes that there many deaths – the baby, Cholly Breedlove, the seeds. “It’s not their fault; it’s just the way things are.”(p. 206) In that insight the naivete of Claudia’s youth also succumbed and a wiser Claudia emerged. Unlike Mrs. Breedlove, Mrs. MacTeer is disinterested in the world’s standard of beauty. And when she felt treated unjustly, she had no hesitation about saying so. Claudia describes her this way, “she would go on … for hours, connecting one offense to another until all the things that chagrined her were spewed out.” (p. 22) It is fascinating to note that in contrast to all the other characters, there are no descriptive passages relating to any of the MacTeers, clearly a brilliant writing tool used to emphasize in an indirect almost subliminal fashion their refusal to invest any of their values in the predominantly white culture in which they lived at the time. However, Claudia was fully aware of the culture being thrust upon the world around her. In her narrative she reflects, “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window sign - all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. ’Here,' they said, 'this is beautiful, and if you are on this day "worthy" you may have it.’ ” (pp. 20-21) Claudia received such a doll for Christmas and promptly dismembered it. Her anger became the energy by which she resisted the views of beauty and love presented to her by the wider world. Her narrative not only stands in contrast to Pecola’s sad non-acceptance of who she is but it also stands in sharp counterpoint to the “Dick and Jane Reader” excerpts which punctuate this story. The “Dick and Jane” reader sections punctuate this story and act as a foil for the childrens’ views of love. They part and parcel of the affect of adult attitudes on children’s views of love in this time period as well as for some time to come. “Dick and Jane” is not just a reading primer but also a social primer, planting in the mind of a child what a “perfect” society should look like. It contains white children with blue eyes and represents the social view of a “perfect” life at the time. It was written by adults for children and has a huge impact on their attitudes, both directly and indirectly. It was a brilliant tool to use for a foil in the telling of this story. Dick and Jane are caricatures of the values of a blue-eyed society and how those values are communicated. In Morrison’s bigger story for which they provide the punctuation, the “bluest” eye represents the “blindest” eye because it equates beauty and love and defines beauty as itself and therefore renders itself blind to both beauty and love. Works Cited Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin Books, Plume Division, 2000. Read More