Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye - Pecola's Mother is to Blame

Many unfortunate events took place during Cholly’s upbringing that had a direct negative affect on the relationship he holds with both Pauline and Pecola. The challenges and experiences Cholly faces throughout his life continually shape him into the adult he has become and help clarify the reasons for his actions.

Slavery, segregation, and discrimination are commonly viewed as some of the primary struggles African Americans contended with. However, in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eyes, it reveals struggles not commonly discussed about, such as internalized racism within black society and the internal conflict with one’s own blackness. Throughout the novel, characters repeatedly try to consume whiteness as a mean to escape their own blackness. They submerge themselves with the notion that the white, Eurocentric culture is the superior culture, and being white means being beautiful and powerful. In doing so, they gradually disconnect and disassociate themselves from their own African American heritage.

Pauline Breedlove, like her husband Cholly, is-at first-portrayed as just another antagonist in the novel, helping push Pecola further and further to insanity. Morrison makes it a point to illustrate how Pauline arrives in her state as an antagonist; she does not just create empty monsters; she tries to make all of the antagonists sympathetic in some way to justify how they become so. After moving up north with Cholly to find work Pauline, quickly becomes isolated and depressed. Pauline tries to “fit in” by attempting to adapt to the northerners’ speech, fashion, and appearance that is modeled after the white beauty standard, unfortunately she could never perfect or change herself enough to be accepted which leads to her isolation. “Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying “chil’ren”) and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes.” (Pg. 116). It was through this isolation during her pregnancy that she began to take refuge at the movie theaters. In films, we are shown society’s current vision of what beauty is, what we should find aesthetically pleasing in people. Pauline begins to go to the movies on a nearly daily basis to escape the reality of her real life and it is here that she is introduced to what

In doing so, Cholly connects the image of his daughter in front of him, to the first time he sees her mother. “When he met Pauline in Kentucky, she was hanging over a fence scratching herself with a broken foot” (160). Taken by Pauline’s tenderness, Cholly finds himself “bending down tickling her broken foot and kissing her leg” (115). He applies the emotions he feels in that moment to when he sees “Pecola [standing] on one foot scratching the back of her calf with her toe” (162). When Cholly tickles Pauline’s leg, he “started Pauline into laughter. [So] he did it now” (162). Cholly’s actions show his inability to separate the love of a father and the love of a

Actions such as Cholly “poking fun”(123) at Pauline when she lost her tooth or when they started fighting again after the baby. Maybe it was because “Cholly was truly free. Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose”(160) Or “while he moves inside her”(84), she wonders why they did not put the “necessary but private parts in a more convenient place”. She does not love him, but she knows that these intimate acts are those required of a wife. The lack of love is exhibited “as Pecola put the laundry bag in the wagon, we could hear Mrs. Breedlove hushing and soothing the tears of the little pink-and-yellow girl”(109) Mrs. Breedlove enver soothed Pecola and never held her and told her that everything was fine. But somehow the little white child that she worked for received her attention, was this

Cholly was abandoned when he was only four days old, and was raised up by his great Aunt Jimmy. When he was young, he had his first sexual encounter with a girl and was caught by two white men when he was in the middle of the sexual act. Instead of getting angry at him, the two men urged Cholly to keep going. Cholly felt powerless when the white men came and told him to keep going, so he took his anger out on the girl because she was more vulnerable than him. “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white armed me. He was small, black, helpless.” (p. 150) Cholly had little control in his life because of the society he lives in, and he tries to take his anger out on anyone he can who is weaker than him. Cholly also never had actual parents because his father left before he was born and his mother abandoned him when he was only a baby. Society’s white standards of having a stable nuclear family never happened in Cholly’s family. “Having no idea of how to raise children, and having never watched any parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a relationship should be.” (p. 160) Cholly never felt the affections of a parent so he did not know how to show affection to his children. As a

We are told certain facts about Pecola Breedlove from the perspective of different characters. One being, “Here was an ugly little black girl asking for beauty...A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes” (Morrison, 174). White beauty

Her mother does not initially believe her when Pecola goes to her for comfort and understanding and the community blames both Pecola and Cholly for her pregnancy. While the mother’s love should be the first comfort sought for after such a tragedy, Pecola is confronted with a mother who “didn’t even believe me when I told her” (Morrison, 200). The family does not live up to its last name, breeding everything but love in their home. The relationship between Pauline and Pecola is destructive, as Pauline shows nothing but indifference toward her daughter while smothering the white child that she cares for with love. Patrice Cormier points out that Pauline gained her ideas of social standing from the silver screen itself, assigning everything to a category on the scale of ultimate beauty she believed was portrayed in the movies she loved so dearly. Because of this scale, Pecola’s life began at the bottom of the social ladder when Pauline decides that baby Pecola is “irretrievably ugly” (Cormier, 120). While Pecola calls her mother Mrs. Breedlove, the child that Pauline cares for refers to her as Polly. In her attempts to leave her desolate life and family behind, Pauline puts all of her energy toward a family that embodies the ideals she hopes to live up to but knows that she can’t. Having nothing left to give to her family, Pauline shows nothing but contempt and disregard for them, especially the daughter that she finds so unappealing. Knowing that her mother doesn’t love her nor will she admit what happened to her, Pecola is left to find solace only in

He hated her. He almost wished he could do it-hard, long, and painfully, her hated her so much. The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile,” (Morrison 148). The consequence of the men interference brings two factors into the characterization of Cholly. A feeling of impotence in Cholly. Similar to Pecola, Cholly learns to self-hate his own blackness and young Darlene blackness along with her image of being a female. The second is the feeling of impotence that he is able to carry into his adult life and has yet to vanquish as he meets Pauline and begins to form family. The feeling impotence enables Cholly to later on not only deconstruct Pauline physically and psychologically. Cholly fails to become stable enough to provide his family with the basic necessities and turns to alcohol a source of relief and igniting fights with his wife in front of his children. Often, he causes his problems than resolutions and in his moment of insanity he commits an ultimate sin, the raping of his

Breedlove’s fundamental misinterpretation of her role in white society is representative of every African-American in the novel and how they fail to “reality-test”. Similar to how Mrs. Breedlove cannot meaningfully distinguish between her two worlds, Cholly also fails due to his traumatizing childhood and Pecola even has a conversation with an imaginary figure at the end, showing her confusion of internal and external reality. The African-American characters exhibit a misunderstanding of their reality, incapable of comprehending their roles in their community versus the oppressive white one that surrounds them. Although it might seem like there are some seemingly unaffected African-American characters, such as the narrator Claudia, they also demonstrate abnormal behavior. Claudia, for example, has an irrational hatred of things, such as the Fishers’ daughter and dolls, because she cannot separate their external existence from her internal opinions. Through closely analyzing Mrs. Breedlove’s portrayal as an animal while in white society, one can recognize how every African-American character in the novel is like Mrs. Breedlove in that they share an inability to fully understand how their role in white society is different from their

“To GO BACK to the original hunger was impossible. Luckily for Denver, looking was food enough to last…it was breaking through her own skin to a place where hunger hadn’t been discovered. It didn’t have to happen often, because beloved seldom looked right at her…Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked at Denver with attention. It was lovely…being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other…Denver’s skin… become soft and bright like the lisle dress.” (139). The hunger that Morrison presents is not the literal hunger that humans feel but the hunger for love and attention that Denver lacked all those years living in 124 with her mother Sethe. Denver has always felt lonely because no one would come to their house because

In Conclusion, the characters did not achieve the beauty they desired. Pauline gave up on her quest to become beautiful, the harder she tired the worse things got. Pecola did not really get her blue eyes , although she thought she got them and that was fulfilling for her. If the characters had not worried about becoming beautiful , I think they would have been better of in

A common thought process that most people have been experiencing within the past decade is the idea that racism is an occurrence of the past. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Overall violent crime has been declining since 2005, but the percentage of violent crime victims amongst the African American population hasn’t exactly followed this pattern. The percentage of violent crime victims in this demographic fell from 1.7 to 1.3 percent from 2005 to 2013, but from 2013 to 2014 rose from 1.3 to 1.4 percent (US D.O.J, 6). Because of this slight increase in violent crimes against African Americans, it is still important for us teachers to educate the younger generation about the disparity our society has established between the different

Second, Cholly’s lack of a mother, and abusive father leave him with the inability to understand love or how to love. Being only four days old, Cholly had no chance of surviving when his mother abandoned him, but was saved by his great aunt Jimmy. Cholly grows up with Jimmy, but finds himself alone again when his aunt dies while he’s still only a teenager. In hope that Cholly can escape his lonely life, he heads out on a journey to find his father who left before he was born. Consequently, Cholly finds his father, but when trying to speak with him is mistaken for a money collector and is belligerently cussed out by his father, Fuller. As a result Cholly stumbles away and finds himself “pulling every nerve and muscle into service to stop the

Toni Morrison perceives a vacuum in American white male dominated literary discourse which excludes black presence. “Black people have a story, and that story has to be heard.”7 Therefore, she endeavors to break the silence by telling the black people’s story, and bridge the gap between white male-centered literature and black subjugated culture.