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 The Bluest EyeToni Morrison (1970) This first novel from one of America's most important living writers is set in Lorrain, Ohio in 1939. An adult narrator, named Claudia MacTeer, recalls her childhood, especially the year when another family, the Breedloves, had been put "out doors" and the daughter, Pecola Breedlove, had to come to live with the MacTeers. Although Claudia and her sister Frieda uneasily befriend Pecola, the desperate poverty and domestic violence of the Breedlove household signify a world beyond their experience and understanding. The relative normalcy of the MacTeer household is contrasted to the imploding violence in the Breedlove household, and with the deterministic grimness of a Thomas Hardy or Richard Wright novel, Morrison's story proceeds toward the final tragic fate of the young Pecola, whose mother dotes on the white family she works for and whose father (Cholly) has been racially humilated, socially defeated, and made violent by the sociological violence of his life. In the novel's horrible central scene, after Pecola has been returned to her family, Cholly rapes and impregnates his daughter. There is no refuge from such devastation for Pecola, who seeks to escape her reality by fantasizing that she, like Shirley Temple and the ubiquitous white-skinned, blue-eyed dolls Pecola so adores, might become white and be spared her fate. Pecola's wish becomes a metaphor for the black community's self-contempt, for the consequences that follow from a society that holds whiteness as a standard for beauty and interprets blackness as ugliness and deformity. The psychological consequences of sexual assault are not particularly explored by this novel, and we should certainly understand by now that sexual violence happens across economic and racial lines, so that Pecola's whiteness would not necessarily have saved her. Nevertheless this is a compelling novel that connects sexual assault to other basic modes of social oppression and degradation such as poverty and racism. |