Works Cited

DuCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1993.

• This book compares the patterns of white and African American writers. It draws an historical account of the black literary tradition, focusing mostly on black female writers, in order to examine their use of tropes, such as the marriage plot, popularized by white authors, and how they rejected and reworked such tropes to the end of reclaiming their sexuality. It further sketches out cultural attitudes towards non-traditional relationships throughout history.

Malmgren, Carl D. “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/QKPMSE517876176/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=04d83dce. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019. Originally published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 41, no. 3, Spring 2000, pp. 251-262.

• This article looks at how Morrison uses a variety of diverse voices and perspectives in The Bluest Eye. From a much more technical perspective than many of the other sources, it analyzes the text to determine Morrison’s intent in using her many different techniques.

Moses, Cat. “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, pp. 623–637. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2901343.

• This article looks at the ways in which The Bluest Eye acts as a piece of music. In the course of doing so, it analyzes the characters of the three prostitutes, coming to find that they represent reclaimance of female sexuality as opposed to victimhood, as many others  argue.

Pal, Payel and Neelakantan, Gurumurthy. “Morrison’s Prostitutes in The Bluest Eye.” Notes on Contemporary Literature. Volume 44. Pages 4-7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261527825_Morrison’s_Prostitutes_in_The_Bluest_Eye

• This article analyzes the role of the characters of China, Poland and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye, looking at the facets of life these women give us insight into that no other characters are able to show us. It argues that in many ways they better adhered to society’s standards than many of the other characters.

Rickard, Wendy, and Merl Storr. “Editorial: Sex Work Reassessed.” Feminist Review, no. 67, 2001, pp. 1–4. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1395526.

• This article explores efforts to shift negative attitudes towards sex workers by giving insight into the hugely diverse life experiences sex workers go through. It provides anecdotal evidence of how sex workers are regarded and gives a modern account of social attitudes, likely most directly applicable to the time right after Morrison would have been writing The Bluest Eye.

Saleem, Taqwaa Falaq, “The Village Mother in Selected Works of Toni Morrison” (2010). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 180. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/180

• This article examines the “surrogate mother” characters in Morrison’s novels. In looking at China, Poland and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye, the author concludes that they are the most prominent motherly figures in Pecola’s life, and looks at the implications of this evaluation.

Scott, Lynn. “Beauty, Virtue and Disciplinary Power: A Foucauldian Reading of Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/SNXFMQ391694420/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=65607942. Accessed 5 May 2019. Originally published in Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 24, 1996, pp. 9-23.

• This article looks at the historical and cultural context surrounding The Bluest Eye to better examine the power structures at play. Although it does not contain an analysis of Morrison’s prostitutes, its historical discourse and analytical method are both very informative.

Jozwiak, Elisabeth Mermann. “Re‐Membering the Body: Body Politics in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10436920108580287?journalCode=glit20.

Malmgren, Carl D. “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 173, Gale, 2003. Literature Criticism Online, http://link.galegroup.com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/apps/doc/QKPMSE517876176/GLS?u=cuny_hunter&sid=GLS&xid=04d83dce. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019. Originally published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 41, no. 3, Spring 2000, pp. 251-262.

Moses, Cat. “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, pp. 623–637. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2901343.

Pal, Payel and Neelakantan, Gurumurthy. “Morrison’s Prostitutes in The Bluest Eye.” Notes on Contemporary Literature. Volume 44. Pages 4-7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261527825_Morrison’s_Prostitutes_in_The_Bluest_Eye

Rickard, Wendy, and Merl Storr. “Editorial: Sex Work Reassessed.” Feminist Review, no. 67, 2001, pp. 1–4. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1395526.

In searching for these articles, I mostly focused on seeking out journal publications concerning the analysis of the characters China, Poland, and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye. I found most of the articles listing above by searching their names in Google Scholar and the library portal. It was difficult to find articles solely focused on these characters, so the articles I found look more broadly at the themes of victimization, subjugation and issues revolving around the body found in The Bluest Eye, all of which have analyses of these characters. I was also interested in finding an overview of sex work in America, and I consulted one of the journals to which Hunter subscribes that covers a broader range of subjects than the literary journals.

How does Toni Morrison’s portrayal of sex workers in The Bluest Eye speak to general attitudes about sex work during the time in which the book took place? What kind of divide existed between treatment of white and African American prostitutes at the time? How might this differ from Toni Morrison’s own attitudes about sex work, and what message might she have been trying to convey with her inclusion of China, Poland and Miss Marie in The Bluest Eye?

In the first chapter of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the term ‘microaggression’ takes on an enhanced meaning. The racist comments central to each narrative Rankine presents in her first section take a physical toll on their audiences; she shows us that microaggressions feel invasive not just on a psychological level but in the body. In Descartes’ theory of the mind-body connection, he argues that the body, being made of matter, can be ‘extended,’ and that this is what differentiates it from the mind. He argues that souls, lacking matter, cannot move bodies. Rankine seems to suggest that microaggressions take on the characteristic of extension, with the result of their prompting people of color to react bodily.

“Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx” (4). Here, words become tangible things. Instead of making their way harmlessly through the air to their listener’s ears, they thicken, creating a stoppage in the lungs. In another passage, words become like rotten food that makes you vomit. Some microaggressions fill you up, Rankine seems to suggest, and we can imagine that there must be little room left for their subjects to form their own identities, or even to allow themselves to be filled up with positive affirmations.

Some instances bring to mind uncleanliness for Rankine. “[…] puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in towards your rib cage” (5). At another point, you “want time to function like a power wash.” Rankine hopes that the farther behind her the racism she has faced gets, the less she will feel its impact. As things stand as she writes Citizen, it seems that thus far each microaggression she has heard of or personally experienced has only added to the grime coating her body. She has not found a way to clean herself of it permanently, though at times the vomit-covered blouse gets rinsed and she smells good again. The dirt which remains must be stubborn, for Rankine is not yearning for time to function like a shower or a hose, but a power wash. The microaggressions are caked on, again taking away space that Rankine could have used to develop her own identity. The fact that it is a blouse that gets covered in puke is also significant. We can assume that the subject of this narrative has dressed up for something, perhaps a professional engagement. But because she is surrounded by racism, it is as though she is deprived even of the ability to choose to look nice against the white background that makes her color stand out so starkly.

Rankine’s writing seems to play with the word microaggression. Her subjects do not only face insensitive words, they face aggression, and are affected as a victim of a violent crime would be. Because of the force behind them, and because of the physical impact they have, microaggressions can be extended per Descartes’ definition, becoming like weapons.

Toni Morrison, in The Bluest Eye, spends far more time in the novel with those surrounding Pecola Breedlove, who we must take to be the book’s subject, than with the main character herself. For the most part, Morrison focuses on showing her audience how people react to and treat Pecola rather than giving her audience concrete insight into how Pecola reacts to the world. By the end of the novel, this proves to be an extremely effective method of characterization of Pecola herself.

Pecola is shown to be a pitiable character throughout The Bluest Eye. We are introduced to her when Claudia explains that “Mama had told us two days earlier that a “case” was coming—a girl who had no place to go” (16). Here, because Pecola has no place to go, she is less than a person. She is merely a case, something for Claudia’s mother not truly to take care of or help, but to deal with. Pecola is constantly being overlooked in this way, seen especially by the adults around her as a problem rather than a person, whose own problems are too insignificant for anyone else to bother with. When she encounters the boy Junior and ends up at his mercy, and his mother comes home, Geraldine too refuses to have any real consideration for Pecola’s plight. Instead, she lumps Pecola into the population of poor African Americans with which she is familiar and which she sees as deeply inferior to herself and calls her a black bitch before kicking her out. Through Geraldine’s eyes, we see why Pecola is a problem for the affluent members of society, who don’t truly have to concern themselves with her as Claudia and Frieda’s mother does but who let themselves be bothered by Pecola’s (and others in her community’s) mere existence. She ‘recognizes’ Pecola— “They were everywhere […] They sat in little rows on street curbs, crowded into pews at church, taking space from the nice, neat colored children; they clowned on the playground, broke things in dime stores, ran in front of you on the street, made ice slides on the sloped sidewalks in winter” (92).

Pecola’s own concerns, as they are presented, have a limited scope— she’s mostly worried about the fact that she’s ugly. Crucial to understanding Pecola’s character is that the fact of her ugliness is never questioned. As far as the audience should be concerned, Pecola is ugly. Morrison does not leave any room in the text for the possibility that the story might find its way to a place where someone sees Pecola and finds her to be beautiful. Her only experience in the world of the novel is that of everyone, even her peers, thinking that she is ugly. The first time in the novel when the story is told from Pecola’s perspective, we find her trying to make herself disappear so as not to have to deal with her family anymore. And she blames her ending up with an abusive family on the fact that she’s ugly. “As long as she looked the way she did, as long as she was ugly, she would have to stay with these people” (45). We start to understand the impact that everyone’s perception of Pecola has on Pecola’s mindset, that without validation from anyone in her life all she wants is to reduce herself to nothing.

Because she is constantly thinking about her physical appearance, Pecola, like the adults in her life, seems to delegitimize the more obvious struggles in her life. The women who gossip about Pecola after her father impregnates her have no sympathy for her; “They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl” or, “Poor baby,” but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been” (190). And Pecola, in the novel’s final chapter, won’t even talk with her imaginary friend about the fact of her pregnancy. She’s only concerned with her eyes, which she is convinced have been turned blue. In this way, she refuses care even from herself, because she has been taught by those around her that she does not deserve consideration for her problems.

The Bluest Eye tells the story of a little girl who isn’t strong enough to overcome the negative perceptions of everyone in her life. Its audience must find itself begging for Pecola to find some strength within, some sense of self that will never come as naturally as her self-loathing because she lacks even the love of a mother to validate her existence. Because we largely hear Pecola’s story in the words of others, we learn that Pecola has not yet gathered the strength to face the task of ‘finding herself.’ The only one who apparently cares about Pecola is Soaphead Church, who gives her a pair of blue eyes only she can see. In a letter, he tells God about her: “I did what You did not, could not, would not do: I  looked at that ugly little black girl, and I loved her” (182). And it is as a result of this man, pedophile though he may be, that Pecola finds happiness within herself. Thus it becomes clear that for now, Pecola only has the ability to take on whatever characteristics those around her perceive her to have. She has been deprived of a sense of self.