Tag Archives: toni morrison

Black and Silver: Pauline’s Self-Imposed and Cultural Trauma

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   The disruptions and shortcomings in Pauline’s upbringing, and indeed her whole life, reverberate outward through her coping mechanisms and the consequences they bring. Pauline herself considers “a rusty nail [that] punched clear through her foot during her second year of life” as the inciting incident to all of her miseries; the neglect that she endured as a result surely led to a repetition of the pleasure-denying pattern of her life (Morrison 110). The isolation she suffered throughout her childhood engendered an essential longing in her for human contact, which is most evident when she takes Ivy’s religious song for something much more secular. The conflation of a mysterious man, representing all of humanity, with the obvious analogue of Jesus partially explains her nearly immediate total love for Cholly, a savior in two senses; it is that sudden identification of him as not being that ideal “precious Lord” that worsens the effect when their relationship starts to sour (118).
   The souring of Pauline and Cholly’s relationship is what really establishes the pattern of heartbreak in Pauline’s life, as it also again comes as a result of outer societal pressures bearing down on her. Although she “merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way,” rather than the trappings of luxury themselves, this desire edges out her desire to sustain her and Cholly’s relationship (118). This tension is somewhat eased, however, when Pauline chooses to stay with Cholly when her white employer conditions her job on leaving him. The white woman acts as a symbol of denial, with her claim that Pauline “owed her for uniforms” invoking both the forbidding world of fashion, and its related costs, as well as the omnipresent racism that comes through on a fiscal and social level (120). However, the resurgence of compromised happiness is around the corner again, as the nostalgic green memories of june bugs are confronted by “the peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs” (121-122).
   Morrison characterizes “physical beauty” as “[p]robably [one of] the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought,” which tracks from how it initiates the most pronounced repetition of the joy-loss cycle of Pauline’s life (122). Her idea of beauty being “one she absorbed in full from the silver screen” of course meant a Eurocentric ideal of beauty, fully unchallenged by any alternate stream of culture (122). Her view of the day on which she lost her tooth as something she “don’t believe [she] ever did get over” is later sealed into place by the doctor’s statement to his peers that Black women giving birth feel “no pain… like horses” (123, 125). In her attempt to create a new life, for her an attempt to create beauty from a body where she sees none, she is reminded of the inherent cultural bias that puts a low ceiling on how beautiful she can be seen. The joy that her children could bring is curtailed by their blackness, so much so that the first impression we hear from her about Pecola is that she resembles “a black ball of hair” (124). Pauline’s existing dissatisfaction with her life is consistently magnified by learning about new expectations she did not know she was failing to meet, dooming the next generation raised by her to feel the ramifications of her emotional trauma.

Source of contemptible mind

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Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” is a tragic and beautiful fable of racial inequality and sexual abuse in the black community. The novel has more than five characters. Cholly Breedlove is a troublesome figure in the novel. In the novel, the author mentions that he was abandoned by his mother when he was young. “When Cholly was four days old, his mother wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad” (Morrison Kindle Edition, p.131). He is also rejected by his own father. After his both parents rejected him, and he has understood from an age that parent-child relationships are not necessarily. Later Cholly was raised by an elderly aunt, Jimmy. Aunty Jimmy really cared for him, but it is hard for him to have considered her as his real parent. He hated women after his mother abandoned him. Cholly grew up without knowing the sustained protective, unconditional love of family members. He didn’t have anyone to love him. In addition, the trauma of his first sexual experience was that he was forced to have sex, while white men watched him humiliate and demean him. After that incident Cholly started hatred toward the white men who consumed him. Later he became an alcoholic. He always abused his wife, Pauline, and then abandoned her as he retreated into the world of alcohol chaos. He also drank heavily and fought in front of his children. Then, he became despicable absent father in his family. All his entire life he tried to find the freedom. When this freedom became completely lost in life, he fell apart. Then, he started to ignore his social life. He has the right to take responsibility for his own life and to do whatever he wants. He was able to live his life free of his imagination and escape death. After his mother abandoned him and his father rejected him, he felt that there was nothing more to lose in his life. He hated himself for thinking about everything that had happened to him. By looking through Cholly’s past, I can see that he is a broken man. He was sent to the adult world without knowing the warmth of the family, the friendliness and the love from his parents. As Cholly got older, he found a way to express his emotions to someone which is expressing his feelings through sex. Sex is becoming a unilateral experience for Cholly. He could express his physical love for Pauline, but he left nothing for her to enjoy. Even in his relationship with Pauline, the violence that occurs between them as “Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove fought each other with a darkly brutal formalism that was paralleled only by their lovemaking” (Morrison Kindle Edition, p. 49). When looking into novel the author Morrison connects father and daughter. They both feel rejected by someone who deserves to be loved and cared for. Daughter Pecola also feel self-hatred and belief in its own ugliness.

Dolls

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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, explores the detrimental effects of the glorification of a certain image specifically to the black community. The images of “beauty” in this novel are exploited by the images of dolls, the images shown on television screens, and the images shown in movies. Dolls are a big part of society especially for kids and their perception of beauty. As a kid I played with Barbie dolls, she had blonde hair, blue eyes, skinny legs, slim waist, big boobs, pretty much what society thought was beautiful. I never saw an image of what real women look like in media until I became a teenager and the beauty norms changed. When I was maybe 8 years old, one of my friends was hosting an American Girl doll party and I was so excited because American Girl dolls were supposed to look like real girls and look like its owners. I remember going into American Girl doll and not being able to find a doll that looked like me, not one of them had light skin, curly hair, brown eyes, or glasses. As an eight year old, not being able to find a doll that was marketed as having a huge selection of different kinds of dolls, really hurt my self-esteem and caused me to think that I wasn’t pretty enough to have a doll look like me. Of course there were about 20 different kinds of white, blond hair, blue eye dolls that had different facial attributes like freckles or a mole but not one doll looked anything like me. I remember the catalog not having a big selection of black dolls either which just shows that companies truly hold the image of whiteness to the highest degree. Pecola in Morrison’s novel prays for blue eyes so that she can be called by her parents, “pretty-eyed Pecola”, and she wishes she can fit in with the other kids and their beauty. The images of dolls and the personification that these dolls take on when being played with, hold a great power over kids and their minds. Playing with dolls that are only white and are played with as being doctors or astronauts and not playing with black dolls and pretending they are doctors can seriously harm little black girls and their mindset. While reading the article by Debra T. Werrlein, the quote, “for power they need beauty, and for beauty they need whiteness”, really opened my eyes to the world of unfairness and marginalization of beauty in black communities. Whiteness is glorified in society from toys, books, movies, TV shows, etc and even today that still holds some truth.

The Citizen With a Twinkle of Blue in Her Eye

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     Claudia Rankine makes a risky, but ultimately effective move, by employing the second-person in her “lyric” Citizen. The second-person point of view creates a dream-like quality in Rankine’s writing which works perfectly when Rankine describes moments from her childhood in part I of the lyric. Claudia Rankine presents her young self as an amalgam of Pecola and Claudia’s characters in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. 

     Rankine’s childhood memories, as recounted in Citizen, are reminiscent of The Bluest Eye’s portrait of black girlhood. Rankine writes:  

Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would you call you by the name of her black housekeeper… you never called her out on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget…Do you feel hurt because It’s the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other (Rankine 7)?   

 Rankine questions her actions when remembering this microaggression. The moment is reminiscent of Claudia MacTeer’s encounters with her community’s idealization of whiteness. When she destroys the white baby doll, she recalls, “all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured… what made people look at [little white girls] and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me” (Morrison 20-22)? Both Rankine and MacTeer interrogate the ways they are rendered inhumane by the world as young black girls. For Rankine, her “friend” makes her replicable and indivisible from her race by calling Rankine the name of her black housekeeper. Rankine is simply “one of them.” For Claudia MacTeer, the world refuses to see her beauty, her specialness by viewing little white girls as the pinnacle of beauty. Claudia MacTeer does not accept the “white is right” mentality, as shown by how she questions little white girls’ beauty. Rankine tries to pin down precisely why her friend’s behavior bothered her. Both young Claudias subconsciously know that the societal behavior they encounter is wrong but can quite wrap their fingers around it. Neither is yet familiar with the history of white supremacy that might make the picture clearer for them. Both girls are constantly questioning, the passages scattered with question marks. However, neither girl receives answers in that moment. 

     Rankine also internalizes racism in a way that more closely mirrors Pecola’s character. Rankine writes that after incidents like the one quoted above:  

An unsettling feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your back… Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet (Rankine 8).  

 The racism Rankine encounters doesn’t just make  make her feel metaphorically sick but makes her feel that she as a person is sickening. The things Rankine endures (like the Freudian slip from her friend) damages her self image like how the things Pecola hears and sees feeds into her self hatred. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes and obsession with whiteness as the epitome of beauty proves the hatred she holds for her black self. Morrison illustrates throughout the novel how this self-hatred is produced by the Geraldines, Paulines, Shirley Temple cups, and overall societal obsession with Aryan looking little girls that Pecola encounters. Morrison also even writes, “The Breedloves… were poor and black and… believed they were ugly… it was as though some[one]… had given each one a cloak of ugliness, and they had each accepted it without question” (Morrison 38-39). The Breedlove, including Pecola, are all made to feel ugly (or sick, or disgusting, or wrong). Their ugliness is tied to their poverty, but more importantly their blackness. Their society rooted in white-supremacy – the magical creature with cloaks – cause them to feel this ugliness like the “wrong words” cause Rankine’s self-disgust.  

     Claudia Rankine’s childhood experiences mirror two divulging characters in The Bluest Eye: Claudia and Pecola. Rankine is interrogative at times like Claudia, but also susceptible to internalizing racism like Pecola. Rankine’s experiences exemplify how Morrison’s characters lie in real black women, and long past 1941 where Morrison’s novel takes place. Morrison’s novel shows that neither Pecola nor Claudia’s separate experiences define black girlhood, but that a little bit of each character can be found today in African-American women’s pasts.

The Bluest Eye, The Freest Women

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     Like most books, Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye includes a pivotal scene where an eleven year old girl is welcomed into the home of three sex workers. You remember reading about that trope in your high school English class, right? In reality, this provocative interaction between Pecola, Poland, China, and Marie shows Pecola an alternative form of physical beauty that is more carefree and motivated by the women’s sexually liberated lifestyle.

     Pecola’s interaction with the three sex workers revolves around their freedom from standards of beauty, freedom from femininity, and freedom of sexuality. However, the casual reader might think from the descriptions of China getting ready that she desires beauty in the same way other female characters throughout the novel. Morrison writes, “China had changed her mind about the bangs… She was adept at creating a number of hair styles, but each left her with a pinched and harassed look. Then she applied makeup heavily… Oriental eyebrows and an evilly slashed mouth” (57-58). China takes actions to control her physical appearance, but her vanity is different than other characters’ in the novel. For instance, Morrison describes that black women like Geraldine, “hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free… they never cover the entire mouth [with lipstick] for fear of lips too thick” (83). Women like Geraldine represented in the novel take efforts to make sure their beauty hides their blackness. However, the only concern China has about her hair is that she doesn’t look “pinched or harassed;” she does not want to look weak or inferior.  She is a free woman and intends to look that way. Unlike the ideas of femininity that call for women to look beautiful to appease a man, China employs her physical beauty to make herself look strong – a trait women are never encouraged to emulate – even adorning an “evilly slashed mouth.” She does not primp herself to look “white” or even appealing. In addition to the above excerpt, the novel also mentions how “China [sat] in a pale-green kitchen chair, forever and forever curling her hair” (52). Rather than straightening her hair to emulate a white woman’s hair texture, she curls her hair. China also deliciously takes her time while getting ready. China is free to fuss over her appearance “forever and forever” unlike women who have socially acceptable lifestyles. China’s life is not spent caring for someone else like a spouse, a child of her own, or a white woman’s child. Her profession gives her the free time to care for herself frivolously and in a way that is not tightly bound to social conformity.

     Morrison employs the sex workers’ liberated primping to show the reader and alternative, and better relationship women can have with  physical beauty. However, some may claim that Morrison vehemently objects to all physical beauty without exception, including the sex workers’ primping. She writes in the section Spring, “[Pauline] was introduced to… physical beauty. Probably one the most destructive ideas in in the history of human thought… [which] originated in envy, thrived in insecurity” (122). Morrison critiques physical beauty but only disapproves of it in its most common form. Pauline’s relationship with physical beauty  is diametrically opposed to the sex workers’ more unusual relationship with it. Morrison writes that one of the problems with physical beauty is that it “thrive[s] in insecurity.” However to say that that China, Poland, and Marie’s beauty is “thriving” is a long shot. The women are described as old and fat (52); they do not fit the socially prescribed ideas of what it means to be beautiful. And though ugly, the women are confident, not insecure. Marie doesn’t care about her “bandy legs,” and believes she is attractive (53). Morrison asserts that the problem with physical beauty is that to look beautiful to others, a woman must first be insecure about her looks and desire outside validation. The sex workers don’t have this problem: they are “ugly,” confident women who can employ makeup and hair products either purely for their own pleasure and desires.

     Toni Morrison bravely writes about the appealing aspects of sex work; not only do China, Poland, and Marie refuse to conform to certain standards of femininity and womanhood, but the primping China does do is for personal satisfaction rather than to appease the patriarchal, white-supremacist society. Readers and critics alike shouldn’t sell Toni Morrison short and ascribe the author a simplistic, “burn your bra, burn your makeup” second-wave feminist philosophy. Morrison’s writing is admirable because she explores the complexities of feminine physical beauty without automatically bashing women if they want to put on lipstick or curl their hair.