Writing Off the Victim in The Bluest Eye
Topic: books, general fiction|Writing Off the Victim: The Manipulative Language of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
presented at the College English Association 70th Anniversary Conference
March 2009
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is Toni Morrison’s first novel. A brutal portrayal of the sad life of a little girl growing up in Northeastern Ohio in the 1940’s, it effectively depicts the results of both sexism and racism on the children of the black community. More importantly, Morrison forces her readers to feel the impact of institutional racism on these children and how such prejudices affect the future of an ethnic group.
Pecola Breedlove, the child of a troubled couple, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove, does not come from a home that breeds love. She learns at an early age that she is ugly, and not because the white community frowns upon her blackness; in fact, the white community takes as little notice of her as possible. It is her own community that imparts this self-hatred upon Pecola, and her life and dreams become centered on the one thing she believes would make her pretty and therefore loved, the blue eyes of a white girl. The dolls her friends receive as Christmas presents are white, with the shining, vacant blue eyes that see no evil.
Pecola is certain that with blue eyes, she will see a different world where parents love each other and their children, where her schoolmates will play with her rather than taunt her, and where teachers will look upon her with approval and not disdain. Unfortunately, those blue eyes are unattainable in spite of the prayers she sends forth. Her life is spent absorbing the anger felt by those of her community who are frustrated with their own lives and make her an easy target because she is, in their eyes, weaker and uglier than they are. Ultimately, she withdraws into her own private world where her eyes are indeed blue, and what she sees outside of her is exactly what she wants to see. With the vacant blue eyes of the white baby doll, Pecola sees a world where she is not neglected by her mother, raped by her father, ignored by other adults, and pushed around by her peers. She spends the rest of her life after that withdrawal wandering around with her mother, talking to the other self she has created in this fantasy world, and ignoring the stares of onlookers who see only a crazy young woman.
Morrison uses Pecola’s story as a means to an end, that is, to educate the reader on the effect of institutionalized racism on a people and their future. She does not do this by eliciting sympathy for the little girl, the victim, but rather quite the opposite. She employs multiple points of view to describe the events as they happen, offering the story from the perspective of several characters, most of whom are Pecola’s abusers. This is accomplished using either the represented speech and thought (RST) of the chosen character(s), thus bringing the reader into an empathetic experience of the inner mental world of that character, or a first person account from the characters themselves, which allows the reader to identify with the character in question. Pecola’s chance to speak amounts to less than two percent of the novel, which makes it easy for readers to forget her, as her own community does. The other characters have their points of view represented and have a forum for explaining their situations, and their feelings, and ultimately for explaining away their actions.
The author creates linguistic empathy with characters other than Pecola in her construction of The Bluest Eye to show the lack of accountability for the treatment the child victim endures. Who is responsible for Pecola’s fate, if not her abusers? Morrison’s point appears to be that no one in particular is responsible, but rather everyone, as a community and a society, is for the perpetuation of behavior that eventually hurts the community as a whole. According to Gurleen Grewal, Morrison’s novels “aim to redistribute the pressure of accountability from the axis of the individual to that of the collective” (11). By using narrative strategies and constructions useful in eliciting empathy, Morrison draws the reader into the mind and heart of the abusive characters and prevents readers from condemning them for their actions, instead empathizing with them for their pain.
Linguistic empathy is a way of identifying with the person represented in a sentence, to varying degrees. Susumo Kuno states that the degree of empathy can range from a total lack of identification to total identification (206). Various principles of sentence construction contribute to the degree of linguistic empathy, such as the use of passive construction (205) or reciprocal verbs (209). Kuno discusses several of these in his consideration of empathy perspective, but the one most relevant to this work is the idea of the Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy, which states that the speaker cannot empathize with someone else more than with himself. The effect of this rule is that when one is a narrator, he/she cannot place another person ahead of himself or herself in terms of the degree of empathy generated by relating the information in the sentence. According to Kuno’s theory, it is not possible to successfully create a greater degree of empathy for someone other than the speaker in that situation. The reader or hearer identifies more closely with the speaker because the information is offered through the speaker, which creates a more intimate relationship between the receiver of the information and the speaker than that between the hearer and anyone else represented in the sentence.
It is important to note that Kuno’s discussion focuses primarily on speaker/hearer relationships, rather than on that between a narrator and reader. However, the principles he applies to speaker/hearer interactions apply equally to those of a narrator/reader. A further extension of the rule needs to be considered in conjunction with the literary construction of represented speech and thought, where a character’s thoughts and perceptions are “represented” (rather than simply narrated, or reported). Extended to this context, Kuno’s Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy rule would say: empathy with a character whose thoughts, speech, and perceptions are being represented is greater than the empathy with other characters.
Ann Banfield explains that “narrative fiction is structured linguistically by the conjunction of two unspeakable sentences, the sentence of narration and the sentence representing consciousness” (257). Banfield’s sentence of represented consciousness is discussed by Sylvia Adamson as the form of narration in an empathetic narrative. The empathetic narrative, which, according to Adamson functions “to create an image of selfhood or the illusion of events as experienced rather than reported” (Empathetic Deixis 196), is developed by using deictic locating terms such as “now” or “this” to express “the position, beliefs, or feelings of a character within the story rather than of the narrator who tells it” (196). Using the present tense and essentially adopting the reader’s time frame (equating the reader’s and the characters’ time frames) changes a narrative into an experiential event for the reader that creates an empathetic deixis. John Lyons explains this practice as a momentary shift of the field of reference from that of the speaker to the addressee or referent of his or her discourse (677). Morrison successfully uses both of these practices (deictic locating terms, present tense) to forge a connection between her characters and the reader.
Morrison creates a fragmented and confusing world in The Bluest Eye with the use of two alternating narrative styles, one of which is the first person account of characters in the novel and the second of which is the representation of a character’s speech and thought. The characters involved are Pecola, the title character; Claudia, Pecola’s childhood classmate and sometime friend; the Breedlove family, consisting of Cholly, the father, Pauline, the mother, Sammy, the brother, and Pecola; Geraldine and her son Junior, representatives of the community; and Soaphead Church, a medicine man of sorts and pedophile. By virtue of Kuno’s Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy principle, those characters that do have a voice in narration elicit greater empathy from the reader than anyone else. Claudia and Pauline have the greatest amount of first person narrative, followed by Soaphead Church and finally Pecola. While Cholly does not have the opportunity to speak, he is given a generous amount of represented speech and thought to speak on his own behalf, or to plead his case, so to speak. Morrison’s decision to allow some but not all of the characters a narrative voice marks her intent to create empathy for some characters but not for others. Banfield’s theory of represented perceptions works alongside Adamson’s empathetic narrative idea in the novel, when Morrison uses past tense within her narrative cotemporally with “now.” This construction, as Banfield explains, is a “sign of a shift to represented speech or thought” and “can be interpreted as the data of the (character’s) senses instead of the narration or objective description of them” (200).
Morrison uses these devices within the narrative portions of the novel that are not in the first person and thus appear to be led by an omniscient narrator. This omniscient narrator, however, is non-existent in favor of the represented consciousness of Banfield’s theory. The framework of the novel illustrates the discontinuity of narration and, thus, the confusion of the reader in deciding which character deserves the most, if any, empathy. With twenty-four shifts in narration, back and forth from first person to RST, it is difficult to remain emotionally distant from any of those represented by either narrative style.
Pecola’s peers make fun of her at school, teasing her about her blackness while they are dark-skinned as well, and her only friends eventually abandon her because there is nothing more they can do for her since they are but children themselves. The only adults in the black community who pay positive attention to her are the prostitutes shunned by the rest of the neighborhood and the self-proclaimed mystic who is an admitted child molester. His influence on Pecola is the final push she needs to complete her descent into insanity. She desperately believes and clings to his promise that God will grant her the beautiful blue eyes that will change the world she sees into one that accepts her.
As Pecola is forgotten and ignored in the story, she is neglected in the structure of the novel. Morrison deliberately reflects Pecola’s experience as she denies her protagonist a voice, and in doing so stylistically and artistically mimics the refusal of Pecola’s community of family and social peers to allow her to speak and be heard. Everyone who has an influence on her life, however positive or negative, is offered a forum to share his or her experience and emotions prior to and including the time of the story. The choice to extend a voice to everyone but Pecola has a profound effect on the way readers react to her and to the other characters. Morrison uses the narrative structure and point of view in this way to create empathy for some characters and detract empathy from others in conformity with Kuno’s Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy.
The brief view of Pecola’s world is offered beginning on page 47, as a six page description of an everyday event in the life of a child; buying candy at the local store. Four of these six pages, or about two percent of the novel, are in the present tense, creating an empathetic deixis with Pecola, according to Adamson’s theory. The represented speech and thought works to explain the habitual neglect Pecola faces from her community, and the use of the present tense makes it even more clear that this treatment (the lack of attention paid to Pecola) is a continuous experience for her, something that never ends and thus is never truly in the past.
Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, the shopkeeper’s eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. . . She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition – the glazed separateness. . . But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. (48-50)
Pecola’s attempt to buy candy, which should be an activity full of anticipation and pleasure, and the shopkeeper’s sale of the candy, which he should appreciate and encourage, are exactly the opposite of that. Mr. Yacobowski, the shopkeeper, cannot even see Pecola as a human being, a sentiment echoing that of virtually everyone in the little girl’s life. The lack of closure felt in the absence of past tense is obvious and compelling, bringing the reader close to the continual oppression this child feels on a day to day basis. Morrison even goes so far as to include the proximial temporal expression “now” (“Now, however, she moves down an avenue gently buffeted by the familiar and therefore loved images” 47) to pull us nearer, which as Adamson notes, “is one of the most commonly cited indicators of empathetic narrative” (199).
Unfortunately, this interlude is all too brief and too soon in the novel, for 143 pages later, when Pecola returns, neglected, abused and insane, we have just returned from empathy-extracting narratives about the perpetrators of that abuse. It is too easy for us to write her off, as the people of the town do, as a crazy girl puttering about the city in the wake of her working mother. After all, it is the mother who has explained Pecola’s plight to us, in the first person, present tense, no less, and not Pecola. Pecola’s terse vignette is long forgotten, and we are left with the schizophrenic babblings that lead into her friend Claudia’s closure of the story.
Although Pecola Breedlove is the title character and the implied protagonist of The Bluest Eye, her thoughts and feelings are the least explored of all the characters in the novel. One might expect the primary focus to be on Pecola’s personal view of the events that shape her future, but Morrison chooses instead to present her story through the eyes of the friends and family who abuse and abandon her. When Pecola is given the chance to speak, it is too late – her madness has engulfed her in a fantasy world that she shares with the reader.
Works Cited
Adamson, Sylvia. “From Empathetic Deixis to Empathetic Narrative: Stylisation and (De)subjectivisation as Processes of Language Change.” Subjectivity and Subjectivisation. Ed. Dieter Stein and Susan Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 195-224.
Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences. Boston: Routledge, 1982.
Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle – The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998.
Kuno, Susumo. Functional Syntax. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Lyons, John. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin, 1970.
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