Blue eyes and pedophiles - The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (Review)

 A/N: This review contains mild spoilers for The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. This is your spoiler warning.

Am I trying to trick you into thinking that this post totally was written and uploaded when it was supposed to be? Absolutely. Trust me, it is necessary for the aesthetic. This book was a difficult one to review for multiple reasons - most of which pertain to my three brain cells being incapable of understanding fancy literature but also because it took so long to process and put into words what I did understand from this book without sounding like Sparknotes. 

(P.S: I did not refer to the Sparknotes for this review, I promise. Though I was tempted to because Toni Morrison is an intellectual writer. I don’t know if it does exist for this book but it probably does because it is a widely read classic text.)

This book is about the self-hatred inherited by children of an oppressed community because of the internalized hatred of the adults due to their oppression. It’s the story of a child-Pecola, dealing with the beauty standards thrust upon her by an unjust world told through the perspective of another child-Claudia, who refuses to agree to the standards because she’s stubborn. It’s a sad and moving story about the intergenerational trauma bequeathed by slavery and racism and its long-lasting effects. The book is divided into four parts- Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer and is set during the forties just after the Great Depression. 

It starts with the ruin of the Breedlove family at the hands of their abusive patriarch- Cholly. The family is separated and that is when Pecola comes to live with Claudia’s family. And the kid has been through some sad shit. She’s been ripped apart from her family, molested by her own father and has been taught insecurities by her own mother. She yearns for blue eyes. She hopes and prays to God, every waking moment consumed by the hope that the next day she'll magically have blue-eyes and the world will treat her better because of them. And these white-washed standards of beauty is what makes Claudia, our sassy narrator, want to punch people with passion.

Abandoned by her own family, Pecola finds solace in the three women who live on the floor above her who also happen to be involved in sex-work. (These women had so much agency and I really appreciated that.) Claudia is a stubborn child and I loved that about her. Her view of the adults around her and their actions are so guileless. She’s well-cared for by her parents but is also subjected to tough-love and no physical affection which made me wonder if being hugged by our parents really changes our brain chemistry. 

It’s really fascinating how as the color of people’s skin darkens, the worse they are treated. Coloured people, as the author calls them, see themselves to be above the Black people and the White people rule them all. This shit is so disheartening because they’re all oppressed, the prior by other people and the latter by themselves. 

Toni Morrison is a master in storytelling as she gives you the reasons why people end up being the way they are. She gives you a reason to pity Pauline, the seemingly heartless lady who birthed Pecola. She’s abused and treated with disrespect by her husband and her employers (with a serious savior’s complex) which makes her so bitter. And it is equally hard to hate Cholly with all your heart because of all the trauma he carries, despite all the things he does to his daughter and wife.

I think I finally understood why Toni Morrison is an icon in the literary world. And as to why I picked The Bluest Eye as a feminist read for my solo-book club- it’s pretty simple - Claudia was fighting racism head-on, fists-first. That’s a feminist if I’ve ever seen one. For anyone looking for a book about racism, slavery and intergenerational trauma - I highly recommend this one. 

(Trigger warnings - SA, child abuse, domestic abuse, pedophilic butthole priests)

These are some of the quotes from the book that changed my brain chemistry-

We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.

When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of consideration. (Claudia describes how every illness is treated like an inconvenience by her mother, but then-)

So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody who does not want me to die. (Not me bawling about the tough-love)

-it never occurs to her that if in her sleep her hand hangs over the edge of the bed. “something” will crawl out from under it and bite her fingers off.

(This resonated with my soul. I will continue to keep my hands away from bed edges and no one can convince me otherwise.)

I had no interest in babies or the concept of motherhood.

(I vibe so hard with Claudia)

Misery coloured by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

Her voice was like an earache in the brain.

The tiny, undistinguished days that Mrs Breedlove lived were identified, grouped and classed by these quarrels. They gave substance to the minutes and hours, otherwise dim and unrecalled. They relieved the tiresomeness of poverty, gave grandeur to the dead rooms. To deprive her of these fights was to deprive her of all the zest and reasonableness of life.

(Pg. 39 in my copy. It made me feel things. All sad and melancholic.)

Hating her, he could leave himself intact.

(This. It just describes how trauma inflicts more hatred. Cholly was humiliated and traumatized and he chose to project his fears and insecurities onto his wife, a woman he could oppress.)

“And you look like the north side of a southbound mule.”

(Sick burn and you can’t deny it.)

Things Miss Marie (respectfully, the hoe) calls Pecola:

1. Dumplin

2. Chittlin

3. Puddin

4. Chicken

We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.

(This is after the children were bullied for being Black and Claudia goes on to note that the Thing to hate was not the bully but the standards that made the bully to be perceived tax beautiful in the way they weren’t. Not Claudia being a self-aware, intellectual girlboss.)

The line between coloured and nigger was not always clear; subtle and telltale signs threatened to erode it, the watch had to be constant.

(This is a direct quote, I did not take the liberty to modify it in any way because it’s not mine to censor. It’s such a powerful observation and I wanted to include it.)

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer. 

(This chapter made me cry for Pauline a.k.a Mrs. Breedlove)

“What good is he, Pauline, what good is he to you?” How you going to answer a woman like that, who don’t know what good a man is, and say out of one side of her mouth she’s thinking of your future but won’t give you your own money so you can buy you something besides baloney to eat?

(The white savior complex just blazing through)

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another- physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

(WORD.)

They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses.

I hurt just like them white women. Just ’cause I wasn’t hooping and hollering before didn’t mean that I wasn’t feeling pain.

(The fact that this whole myth about only white people experiencing pain still exists to this day is just ridiculous and upsetting.)

He wondered if God looked like that. No. God was a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes that looked sad when people died and mean when they were bad. It must be the devil who looks like that- holding the world in his hands, ready to dash it to the ground and spill the red guts so niggers could eat the sweet, warm insides.

(God is a person of undefined racial descent. Period.)

PAGE 136 of my edition. GOLD. (The picture I’ve included is of the edition that I read.)

Why did she have to look so whipped? She was a child- unburdened- why wasn’t she happy?

(Because she’s living in poverty and you’re a trash father, Cholly.)

Warning: Pedo-priest quotes

And since he was too diffident to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls. They were usually manageable and frequently seductive. His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness.

(Explaining away the pedophilia be like. He is a priest.)

“all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.”

(A racist priest)

God had done a poor job, and Soaphead suspected that he himself could have done better. It was in fact a pity that the Maker had not sought his counsel.

(A priest with a God-complex.)

Then he goes on to write in his letter that when he molested the little girls that he felt like he was being friendly?????? And then he killed a dog. This guy was a serial killer in the making.

A/N: This review was a difficult one to write because it’s a depressing book and it just makes it so obvious how we haven’t progressed much as a society in the past eighty years. And also because I had a massive writer’s block and my three brain cells did not want to cooperate. But here it is. I hope it helps people understand that equality is a major aspect of what intersectional feminism is all about and that it’s not man-hating, bra-burning or gold-digging.

Thank you for reading the fourth installment in my ‘Women of Words’ series where I read feminist literature by a new feminist author each month. I hope at least some of the things I talk about encourage you to pick up more books by feminist authors. And also that it erases the whole narrative that feminist books can only ever be Serious Literature. (Though this one was because racism is no joke but it was heartwarming at the same time.)

To read the previous installment, here’s my take on When Women were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill.