Marginalization in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Marginalization is the social process in which a person is made to stand out and made to be different from everyone else and they can therefore feel like they are all alone & marginalized from the rest of the society. The main reasons are often political, economic, religious or idealistic, ignorance and fear. Marginalization takes on many faces and can result in fanaticism, with dire results.
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison shows a Black who searches for her true identity, feels frustrated by her blackness and yearns to be white because of the constant fear of being rejected in her surroundings. Pecola Breedlove longs to be loved and accepted by her own community as well as in a world which rejects and diminishes the values of the members of her own race and defines beauty according to an Anglo Saxon cultured standard. The standard of beauty that her peers subscribed to is represented by the White child actress, Shirley Temple, who has the desired blue eyes. She marginalizes herself by the white standard of beauty. She believes that if she has blue eyes which is the symbol of white beauty; she will be beautiful just like Shirley Temple, and will be loved by everyone. Each night she prays for blue eyes without fail.
Pretty eyes. Pretty blue eyes. Big blue pretty eyes. Run, Jip, run. Jip runs, Alice runs. Alice has blue eyes. Jerry has blue eyes. Jerry runs. Alice runs. They run With their blue eyes. Four blue eyes. Four pretty Blue eyes. Blue-sky eyes. Blue-like Mrs.Forrest’s Blue blouse eyes. Morning-glory-blue-eyes. Alice-and-jerry-blue-storybook-eyes (Morrison.40).
She had prayed for a year. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. She convinced herself that to have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time. But her yearning to have blue eyes culminates in madness.
The novel starts with the description of an ideal white family but in the near-parodic style of a school reading primer, where Dick and Jane and their lovely parents live in a nice and comfortable house with a lovely dog and a cat. The Dick and Jane text functions as "the hegemonizing force of an ideology by which a dominant culture reproduces hierarchical power structures".
In contrast to this hegemonic identity, the main black characters are depicted as various and very different characters located in three hierarchical families: "first Geraldine's (a counterfeit of the idealized white family), [then] the MacTeers and at the bottom [of the social order], the Breedloves". The novel shows how these black characters respond to the dominant culture differently and this refutes easy binary social distinctions. Pauline Breedlove, Geraldine, Maureen Peel, and Pecola are Black characters who try to conform to an imposed ideal of femininity.
They are absorbed and marginalized by the "cultural icons portraying physical beauty: movies, billboards, magazines, books, newspapers, window signs, doll, and drinking cups" (Gibson, 1989, 20). Pauline Breedlove, for example, learns about physical beauty from the movies.
Geraldine, represses her black characteristics which are not 'fitted' to white femininity as she strives "to get rid of the funkiness". She also rejects Pecola when she sees her in her house as Pecola seems to embody all the negative aspects of her views of black girls. Being well educated and having adopted Western ways of life, Geraldine draws the line between coloured and black. She deliberately teaches her son the differences between coloured and black: "Coloured people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud" (Morrison, 1970, 1990, 67, also in Bouson, 2000, 37). Maureen Peal, light-skinned girl at school, also thinks that she is pretty and Pecola is ugly and Morrison sets up a hierarchy of skin tone marking proximity and distance in relation to idealized physical attributes. As "a high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back" (Morrison, 1970, 1999, 47), Maureen is treated well at school. Finally Pecola has treated very badly by most people surrounding her, and she yearns to have blue eyes in the hope that people will love her.
The novel also shows black people who are aware of the danger of adopting Western standards of beauty. Claudia, the young girl narrator, at the very beginning of the novel, describes herself as indifferent to both White dolls and Shirley Temple.
Some Black characters in the novel are constantly haunted by their own ugliness. They crave to be beautiful. They long for acceptance and acknowledgement by the White, but they fail because they are not biologically White. For example, Pecola Breedlove, the central character of the novel, prays frequently to God every night without failure for the blue eyes. She thinks that if she had blue eyes, things would have been different. She would have been taken along by Sammy, her brother, loved and recognized by her peers and her parents would not have quarreled before her. She is considered ugly by everyone she encounters. The boys on the playground tease her by calling her black. Her teachers do not glance at her and ask only when everyone is required to speak. She sits all alone on a double desk in the class. The shopkeeper, yocobowski, does not notice her as if she does not exist at all. Geraldine looks down on her and expels her from her house. Even, her mother thinks her to be an ugly child at her birth. Now, all these incidents tend to plant the seeds of inferiority in Pecola's heart. After receiving such a treatment, she might have felt as if she was an outcast or a pariah. She might certainly have thought that it was her colour which was responsible for such a neglect. It is not that she is ugly, but the fact is that she comes from a section of society that is perceived to be inferior.
Had she come from the dominant section of the society, that is the White, things would have taken a different turn altogether. Literally, she is not ugly, but the prevailing stereotypes regarding the colour of skin, eyes and hair never let her imagine herself as beautiful.
The characters have internalized this myth of ugliness in such a way that they start hating themselves. They imitate the ways of the white community. For example, Geraldine, a coloured woman, teaches her son about the differences between the coloured and the niggers. For her, the coloured are akin to the white. Similarly, Pauline, Pecola’s mother, dresses and combs herself like the white Hollywood actresses whom she has seen in magazines.
There are many Afro-American characters in the novel who believe that long, stringy hair, preferably blonde; keen nose, thin lips; and light eyes, preferably blue these standards to be themselves ugly. Hence, they lose their own identity. For example, Pecola wants to look like Shirley Temple, an icon of beauty. She fervently prays for the blue eyes which will make her not only beautiful but also acceptable in the racist society. W.D. Samuels and C.H. Weems maintain, “Pecola, a young girl, in quest of womanhood, suffers an identity crisis when she falls victim to the standard set by an American society that ascribe what is beautiful to a certain image of white women”. Similarly, Pauline also tries to behave like the white actresses. When she realizes that she nowhere fits on the scale of beauty, she, in order to gain acceptance, becomes an ideal servant.
In The Bluest Eye, all the major characters come from marginalized section, that’s why their growth is hampered by racism. Instead of ending with self fulfillment and completeness, their narratives end in disaster. For example, Cholly, when forced to copulate with a girl for the white men’s pleasure, feels humiliated and castrated. His growth stops there and then. Earlier his life was characterized by zest and enjoyment. He used to learn things from his friends and admired a person named Blue jack. But now, the exploitation which he has to undergo, undermines his growth. It bruises his psyche leaving him helpless and impotent.
Similarly, Pecola, who exhibits the talent of decoding the world around her, fails miserably when she encounters racism. The neglect, she receives at the hands of various persons in her life, leaves her mad and isolated at the end. Pauline tried to make herself look like Harlow but is crushed when, despite her best efforts at mimicking her hair and grace, her tooth suddenly falls out, reminding her that she is not a beautiful white woman and making her hate herself even more.
Her self-hatred is enacted on her children and this cycle of violence and self-hatred is perpetuated and is evidenced in situations such as when Pauline chooses to comfort her employer’s white child (who calls her by her name, even when her own children cannot) as opposed to the burned Pecola.
Through these passages, Morrison shows the roots of where these issues of black inferiority in the mind of African Americans stem from and how, because of frustration with being unable to live up to such standards, hatred is born and cycled on husbands and children. In The Bluest Eye, despised by her mother and ignored by her father, Pecola is a tragic example of the destructive power of accepting white beauty standards. Pecola accepts a self-hatred and embraces all things white: Shirley Temple, white baby dolls, the white Mary Jane on the candy wrapper, and eventually, her quest to attain blue eyes.
References:
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye (1970). London: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Gibson, Donald B. (1989), Text and Coutertext in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1-2, pp. 19-32.Print.
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