Baker, Houston A. “To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison’s Trueblood Episode.” PMLA, vol. 98, no. 5, 1983, 828–845. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/462262.

Baker argues that the Trueblood episode blurs the line between folklore and literary art that Ellison draws in his critical work. Trueblood also consolidates supposed “public” and “private” Afro-American experience. Baker believes the Trueblood episode is “meta expressive” in that it references and comments on multiple other narratives, including narratives within the novel and narratives in fields other than literature. By focusing on these narratives, Baker effectively ignores questions of gender.

Doane, Janice and Devon Hodges. Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire. The University of Michigan Press, 2001. Print.

In their book, Doane and Hodges focus on father-daughter incest specifically. They argue that the idea of incest is often otherized and seen as only happening in fantasy, which discredits and prevents those involved in incest from being heard truthfully. In Chapter 2, Doane and Hodges focus on incest in Invisible Man and The Bluest Eye, asserting that Morrison responded to Ellison’s paternalistic depiction of incest by giving Pecola a voice. Doane and Hodges define African American incest as uniquely framed under paternalism/slave narratives, which serve to blame the relatively powerless for their suffering.

Grogan, Christine. “Morrison Responds to the Psychological Community in The Bluest Eye.” Father-Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Complex Trauma of the Wound and the Voiceless. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016. 75-94. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2016383186&site=ehost-liVe.

In Chapter Three of her book on father-daughter incest in twentieth-century American literature, Christine Grogan compares Ellison and Morrison’s depictions of incest. Both authors reveal that paternal incest is a microcosm of power dynamics. However, Morrison gives a voice to underrepresented poor, black girls with Pecola. Pecola also makes incest concrete, where it had previously been only hypothetical. Grogan’s work expands on some of Doane and Hodges’s ideas, as it elaborates both on Pecola’s voice and on the concretization of incest narratives.

Koopman, Emy. “Incestuous Rape, Abjection, and the Colonization of Psychic Space in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 49, no. 3, July 2013, 303–315. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2013394547&site=ehost-liVe.

Koopman questions that colonialism narratives can be perfectly mapped onto rape narratives.  She also challenges connections drawn between rape and abjection, or “being cast aside.” She identifies the “colonization of psychic space” as it is present in The Bluest Eye, with Pecola internalizing colonial notions of inferiority and superiority. Koopman’s work pushes back on Doane and Hodges’s linkage of rape and paternalism.

Zender, Karl F. “Faulkner and the Politics of Incest.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 4, 1998, 739–765. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2902390.

Zender examines Faulkner’s depiction of incest, finding it to be religious and oedipal. He notes that depictions of incest have been similar not only in Faulkner’s work but also in the work of other authors, suggesting that incest narratives have subscribed to a set of motifs. Zender’s work is valuable to my research because it echoes Baker’s references to Freud and explains how episodes of incest fulfill the Oedipus complex, a lens which could also be used to analyze Morrison and Ellison.

Baker, Houston A. “To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison’s Trueblood Episode.” PMLA, vol. 98, no. 5, 1983, 828–845. JSTOR,  www.jstor.org/stable/462262.

I found this journal article by searching the terms “Houston Baker Trueblood” on Google Scholar through the Hunter Library Portal. This was the first result. I was nudged in the direction of this source by Professor Allred, who noted this is a classic reading of the Trueblood episode.

Doane, Janice and Devon Hodges. Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire. The University of Michigan Press, 2001. Print.

I found this book through a journal article that I found on JSTOR entitled “Anatomy of Rape,” which mentioned that this book analyzes both Invisible Man and The Bluest Eye. After only finding reviews of the book by searching its title on JSTOR, I then found a sizeable preview through Google Scholar. I’m not sure yet which page numbers will be relevant, so I will add those to my citation later.

Grogan, Christine. “Morrison Responds to the Psychological Community in The Bluest Eye.”  Father-Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Complex Trauma  of the Wound and the Voiceless. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016. 75-94. EBSCOhost,  search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2016383186&site=ehost-liVe.

I found this book chapter by searching “the bluest eye” in MLA International Bibliography. I limited the publication date to articles from 2000 onward, since the two other sources I had found thus far were from before 2000, so I wanted a good mix of older and more recent sources. MLA International Bibliography showed that Hunter does not own a copy of the book, but linked me to a Google Books preview which contains most of the chapter on The Bluest Eye.

Koopman, Emy. “Incestuous Rape, Abjection, and the Colonization of Psychic Space in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 49, no. 3, July 2013, 303–315. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2013394547&site=ehost-live.

I found this journal article through the same search of “the bluest eye” in MLA International Bibliography, with only results from 2000 to now. The search returned 153 results in total and this source was located on the second page of results.

Zender, Karl F. “Faulkner and the Politics of Incest.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 4, 1998, 739–765. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2902390.

I found this journal article by searching “doubling and incest” on Google Scholar through the Hunter Library Portal. This was the fourth result. I had originally been searching for J.T. Irwin’s book Doubling and incest/repetition and revenge: A speculative reading of Faulkner, as suggested by Professor Allred. However, Hunter does not have access to a full copy of the book. Zender’s work comments on both Irwin and Faulkner, so it is slightly more recent and could also be useful.

What significance do the episodes of incestuous rape in Invisible Man and The Bluest Eye have?

On page 25 of Citizen, Claudia Rankine references Zora Neale Hurston’s quote, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Hurston’s quote emphasizes the power of juxtaposition, and brings to mind moments from many of the texts we have read. For example, the invisible man drops black drops into white cans of paint at Liberty Paint Factory, and the imagery of a small black entity in a larger white system that swallows it is reminiscent of his experience working for white bosses in the factory and navigating the offices of wealthy white men who only give him false hopes. The invisible man feels most different and most marginalized when those in power are largely white and he is stepping into their pre-established spaces, disrupting the order and asking for a job.

This “sharp white background” can also be seen in The Bluest Eye; however, in Morrison’s novel it is more invisible. As Yancy notes in his Foucauldian reading of the novel’s protagonist, white power controls Pecola when she is reminded of the white ideals she does not embody. She is not Peola, nor is she Mary Jane, nor Shirley Temple. Although there are few white characters with dialogue in The Bluest Eye, Pecola still feels the pressure of the white beauty ideal. She drinks white milk from a Shirley Temple cup, as if the young, white American sweetheart will nurse her to be similarly beloved. She begs Soaphead Church for blue eyes because she believes this will make her more beautiful in other’s eyes. Like the surveilled workers in Foucault’s panopticon, Pecola is controlled by the white beauty ideal regardless of whether a specific person in her neighborhood exemplifies it.

Finally, Rankine’s piece recounts Serena Williams’s experience with microaggressions throughout her tennis career. Williams’s “sharp white background” is exemplified by her fellow tennis players, who are depicted as comparatively innocent, calm, and competent. Firstly, her 2004 opponent Jennifer Capriati failed to return Williams’s legal serves, and umpire Mariana Alves apparently could not believe Capriati was comparatively incompetent, choosing instead to claim Williams’s serves were out of bounds. Later, Williams was in the position to lose against Kim Clijsters, and the line judge called her out for a violation that is usually not noted at such a critical point in the match.  Again, Clijsters was seen as the obvious winner, and enabled to just sit back as the win was decided for her.

Years later, when Williams did a celebratory dance in the middle of a majority-white stadium after winning a match, her celebration was reduced to the racist caricature of the “crip walk.” When Williams seemed to begin to contain her anger from microaggressions, she was compared to revered black tennis player Arthur Ashe, as if she has transformed from “savagery” and “black anger” to a member of the Talented Tenth. Williams is compared to black players who form the “background” because they “act white.” Williams’s “sharp white background” is not purely white; it can be white or black depending on who the media chooses to juxtapose her against, who the media paints as the calm to her storm.

In “Not So Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in the Bluest Eye,” Werrlein references Berlant’s idea of “surplus corporeality,” which is essentially the idea that a highly visible aspect of a subject’s body makes them vulnerable to rejection by others. Werrlein then goes on to argue that Pecola’s body embodies this “surplus.” I was especially intrigued by this idea in relation to our previous discussions of invisibility. The Invisible Man, for example, is invisible in the sense that many people he interacts with fail to see beyond his identity as fulfillment of their racial tropes. One might say that only his black body is visible to those who use him, who fail to see the thinking and feeling person within.

Similarly, Werrlein argues that Pecola has a highly visible body, so her internal struggles fail to be recognized by her community. She points to Pecola’s interaction with white immigrant grocer Mr. Yacobowski, who displays a “total absence of human recognition” (48). When he asks her what she would like to buy, he sees through her rather than looking at her. Pecola believes it is “the [her] blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes” (49). Her blackness is her surplus, it is associated with ugliness, and it is represented by her dark eyes. These eyes stand in opposition to the blue eyes of a white little girl that she longs for.

Other characters in The Bluest Eye also long to eliminate their surpluses: namely, as Werrlein notes, Geraldine, Maureen, and Soaphead. Both Geraldine and Maureen insult Pecola, perhaps because she represents the black part of themselves that they try to suppress. Morrison describes the “funk” that Geraldine and some other black bourgeoisie women try to hide as “the dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide nature of human emotions” (83). This description implies that the “surplus” is not actually a problem at all; it is simply a full expression of emotion that should be accepted and even celebrated. This characterization is reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston’s praise of her blackness as something that allows her to fully experience music, whereas her white companion does not possess this privilege.

Soaphead also wishes to eliminate his black “surplus,” as he comes from a long familial tradition of assimilation. His characterization as a ruthless and destructive pedophile who not only rapes little girls, but also forces one (Pecola) to murder a dog, paints him as the enemy. Not only is the attempt to suppress “surplus” useless, it also breeds resentment and internal deterioration. Even the innocent Pecola cannot cope with the white beauty ideals suffocating her, and descends into psychosis.