Toni Morrison’s Depiction of Black Women’s Pain in The Bluest Eye.

Toni Morrison’s Depiction of Black Women’s Pain in The Bluest Eye.

J.FelciaGnanaTheebam M.A.,M.Phil.

Assistant Professor Dept. OF English

ArumugamPillaiSeethaiAmmal College

Tiruppattur

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison depicts several sources of black women’s pain: old age, death and the collective memories of suffering and triumph; middle age and thwarted desires; and childhood with its concomitant hurts.  Just as Claudia and the omniscient narrator have primary responsibility to recount scenes of suffering, so do other characters provide direct access to their troubled interior worlds.  The novel also records black women’s discrete and collective experiences that negatively impact their lives.

Aunt Jimmy’s illness and death provide opportunities for women to reiterate their lived experiences as objects of the community’s power and subjection.  These women, who seem to have “edge(d) into life from the back door.  Becoming “with only one group from whom they do not have to taken orders – their children,” offer us some insights into familial and personal relationships through the conflation of black women’s pain with Aunt Jimmy’s illness, or with what M’Dear, the “competent midwife” and “decisive diagnostician,” terms a “cold in (her) womb”.  The literal and metaphorical coalesce in Aunt Jimmy’s womb: it is both the repository of physical life and the symbolic site of femaleness; it is at once the organ of fertility and the sign of loss and separation – the source of connection and disconnection between the mother and child.  The womb can bear fruit and signal barrenness.  So the cold in Aunt Jimmy’s womb accrues polysemy as it signals Aunto Jimmy’s death and the beginning of Cholly’s independence.

After M’Dear’s pronouncement and departure, Aunt Jimmy is visited by two other friends, Miss Alice and Mrs.Gaines, whose “voices blended into a threnody of nostalgia about pain.  Rising and falling, complex in harmony, uncertain in pitch, but constant in the recitative of pain”.  Aunt Jimmy’s deathbed becomes the site of memory and loss – a moment for recollection and release.  The three women recite a condensed history of pain that includes perseverance and a necessary distinction between what was and what is. The element of triumph stems from their having endured the miseries of their youth and middle age: “They hugged the memories of illness to their bosoms… licked their lips and clucked their tongues in fond remembrance of pains they had endured.” 

Their pain is expressed in a pre-eulogy for Aunt Jimmy and a shared knowledge that constitutes both litany and praise song: “childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles.  All of the bruises they had collected from moving about the earth – harvesting, cleaning, hoisting, pitching, stopping, kneeling, picking – always with young ones underfoot”.  The narrator hastens to add details that render this pain race and gender specific.

These women have risen above the humiliations and pain, even though “everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders.  White women said, ‘Do this.’  White children said, ‘Give me that’.  White men said, ‘Come here.’  Black men said, ‘Lay down.’  When white men beat their men, they (the women) cleaned up the blood and went home to receive abuse from the victim.”  The violence these women have endured from their own men invites our scrutiny of the double bind in which African-American women often find themselves: objects of male abuse and surrogates for white men who go unpunished by their victims – black men.

Aunt Jimmy’s death opens a space for black women to reflect on their lives and it is an occasion to assess black women’s lives, a process the narrator encapsulates in one sentence: “The lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes – a puree of tragedy and humour, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.”  The passage stresses both suffering and pleasure.  Instead of sentimentalizing their pain, the narrator valorizes their strength and perseverance.  Margaret Wilkerson notes that this description “implies the rise and fall of the women’s voices and the nuances of their dialogue”  Wilkerson hears in “the tone of their speech… the ritual of the wake,” which she terms “a muted prelude to the joy of the funeral banquet that follows.”

After Aunt Jimmy’s interment, the narrator comments that “there was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of nature in the graveyard.”  The living are left with the pain and emptiness of death.  The litany concludes with the acceptance of suffering and death and the continuation of life.  For Aunt Jimmy’s female friends, one solution to pain and suffering is living with the knowledge of both and holding on in spite of them.  The narrator’s summation of this illuminating moment – Thus the banquet (at the home of the deceased is) the exultation, the harmony, the acceptance of physical frailty, joy in the termination of misery.  Laughter, relief, a steep hunger for food” – suggests that the desire to live overwhelms the shadow of death.

Bibliography

Primary Source

            Morrison Toni, The Bluest Eye, Surjeet Publications, New Delhi, 1970. Print

Secondary Sources

            Berkman A. Anne, The Quest for Authenticity: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Putnam,                                London, 1987. Print.

            Mason Amanda, Return of the Repressed : Forms of Fantasy in the Novels of Toni                          Morrison.Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1987. Print.

            Sumana.K, The Novels of Toni Morrison : A study in Race, Gender. Oxford Press, 2000.                          Print.