In the book, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison gets across a very powerful idea that is found in every society today. Although the book is written during the 1940’s and most of the events that occur mirror that time period, the main idea transcends to this day and age. With a persuasive argument in mind and a poor, innocent black girl to appeal to the reader’s pathos, Morrison craftily writes her story. She uses the rhetorical knowledge that “arguments are often improved through the use of sensory details that allow us to see the reality of a problem or through stories that make specific cases and instances come alive”(Ramage 155). Morrison’s argument is how influential society can be on an individual and how strongly it’s ideas and views are impressed upon that individual. The ideas and views that she speaks of mostly pertain to beauty and what makes an individual beautiful. This idea of beauty can turn someone’s life upside down and in the end lead them to madness. Thus, Morrison is trying to impress upon her reader’s what a negative effect society’s ideas and views can have on an individual and how that individual’s life is changed forever.
The protagonist in The Bluest Eye is Pecola Breedlove. By society’s standards, Pecola is ugly. Morrison takes this poor, innocent, ugly, little black girl and shows the devastating effects of daily events. Morrison tries, ”to show a little girl as a total and complete victim of whatever was around her”(Stepto 17). People, in many cases, whites, would comment and say things without even thinking twice about their effects. For example, at one part of the book, Pecola has three pennies in her shoe which she has been saving to buy Mary Janes with. In the store, the owner, Mr. Yacobowski: looms up over the counter....Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his 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....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....Yet this vacuum is not new to her. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness....Phlegm and impatience mingle in his voice(Morrison 49).
When she leaves the store “Pecola feels the inexplicable shame ebb.” She is then filled with anger. An innocent act of going to the store and buying candy, an act usually filled with happiness and anticipation, has turned into one of shame and anger. All of these horrible feelings because Pecola is a ugly black girl who does not meet society’s standards. “Pecola, certainly, is expunged from human society even before she has awakened to a consciousness of self. Pecola stands for the triple indemnity of the female Black child: children, Blacks, and females are devalued in American culture”(Holloway 34).
While viewing this persuasive argument, the reader also encounters another type of rhetorical argument, the causal argument. The causal argument is “one in which X causes/does not cause Y. It is often used when trying to show how one event brings about another”(Ramage 230). In The Bluest Eye, the entire book is one causal argument with all of the events resting on the initial idea that society influences the individual. Society’s standard of beauty at that time was white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. The Shirley Temple’s of the world were adored and cherished, many sought after their beauty. Baby dolls with these blue eyes and blond hair were all the rage. However, Pecola didn’t meet the standard, she was ugly. Soon, Pecola began to realize this and began wishing for beautiful blue eyes. She was no longer satisfied with herself and became consumed with the idea of beauty and what it meant to be beautiful. Each night before she went to sleep she would fervently pray for blue eyes. After getting the Mary Janes she looks at the pale yellow wrapper with a picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named.
Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane (Morrison 50).
Poor Pecola thought that only if she had those beautiful, blue eyes she would no longer be thought of as “ugly” or “dirty”, but rather as “pretty” and “beautiful”.
Many people looked down on Pecola, treated her differently. This led to her isolation. Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike. She was the only member of her class who sat alone at a double desk. The first letter of her last name forced her to sit in the front of the room always. But what about Marie Appolonaire? Marie was in front of her, but she shared a desk with Luke Angelino. Her teachers had always treated her this way. They tried never to glance at her, and called on her only when everyone was required to respond (Morrison 46).
This is also a good example where Morrison is again appealing to the reader’s pathos. How terrible it must be for Pecola to have to go to school and know that her teachers (young children’s most influential adults) despise her and do not care for her in the least. In addition, we see how the children mocked Pecola.
She also knew that when one of the girls at school wanted to be particularly insulting to a boy, or wanted to get an immediate response from him, she could say, ‘Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove! Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove!’ and never fail to get peals of laughter from those in earshot, and mock anger from the accused (Morrison 46).
In addition, after school one day, a group of boys circle around Pecola and begin making fun of her chanting, ”Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo...”(Morrison 65). Here we see “her schoolmates name her darker shade of skin as too ugly to accept”(Holloway 33). With both her teachers and classmates being so cold to her, it is inevitable that Pecola would feel alone and isolated. She was often left with her thoughts which mostly consisted of her desire for blue eyes. With blue eyes she would be beautiful and popular, people would like her and treat her better. In essence, beauty equaled happiness.
This lack of beauty even intruded upon her family life. Pecola’s first encounter with her lack of beauty comes from her mother.
Living in a grubby storefront, taunted and alienated by her classmates and either beaten or ignored by her parents, Pecola is a tragic figure who begins life at the bottom the moment her mother, brainwashed by the white movie industry, decides her daughter is irretrievably ugly: Pauline Breedlove ‘was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen’(Cormier-Hamilton 5).
Her parents, Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, fought frequently. These outbursts greatly upset Pecola and she often wished she could disappear when they occurred. “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes’”(Morrison 46). “Mrs. Breedlove spends all her energy on her employer’s home and children and leaving her own home a cruel, bleak, and ugly place. Pecola’s mother finds her too ugly to love”(Holloway 33). Although her parents had their own problems and issues to deal with, perhaps if Pecola was beautiful, they may have treated her better. They may have paid her more attention or taken greater investment in her happiness. They may have been less critical and abusive of her. However, she was not, and although they tended to her needs, they did not express their love for her.
Pecola is led to further isolation by the harsh reality that no one encourages or loves her. All of the supports that a young child needs are not there. Her family does not support her, her teachers abhor her, classmates ridicule her, and people in the town ignore her. She has more or less has no one to turn to. Her adult rolemodels are three uncouth, prostitutes that were looked down upon by all the women in the town. Although these women, Miss Marie, Miss Poland, and Miss China, provided her with some entertainment, and enjoyment in her rather depressing, mundane life, they did not advise her or listen to her troubles or problems. “The only kindness Pecola finds is the offhand acceptance from the three prostitutes, themselves outcasts who do not bother to intervene between Pecola and the destruction visited on her”(Holloway 33). She was only reprimanded for her negative actions, no positive encouragement or praise ever was instilled in her.
Her only real friends are the other two main characters in the story, Frieda and Claudia MacTeer. However, they are relatively powerless in helping her and her situation. All they can do is pray for her and hope that everything will turn out ok. At one point on the playground they stick up for Pecola and save her from the taunting boys. “You cut that out, you hear?...Leave her ‘lone...”(Morrison 66). That is the extent to which they can save Pecola.
All of the isolation, self-blame, and negativity of Pecola’s life finally escalates when she in the kitchen washing dishes and her father, who is extremely drunk, becomes overwhelmed with sexual desire and rapes his young daughter. This incestual act does nothing but bring out more sympathy for the protagonist. In using the causal argument one sees that this terrible act is brought on by Pecola’s ugliness and her inability to meet society’s standard of beauty. Cholly is full of rage from his unhappy childhood and his unsatisfying life.
He drowns this consciousness of this rage in drink. It is this rage that poor Pecola inherits, and it is this rage that rapes her. The result is that a child who had sought so desperately for acceptance and friendship and escape from the frightening scenes of her parent’s battles is raped by this rage; what voice she had is ripped away from her in this tremendous and overwhelming act of paternal violence (Holloway 44).
Pecola than becomes pregnant and is asked to leave school. It is during this time that she begins to slip into her madness. She develops an imaginary friend to whom she speaks about her “new blue eyes.” She was given these blue eyes by Soaphead Church, the town Psychic and Spiritualist, who convinced her that if she fed an old dog some food, which actually had poison mixed in it, and he had an erratic reaction, she would be given blue eyes. She fed the dog and after convulsing for several minutes, he died. “Soaphead Church validates Pecola’s wish for blue eyes affirming the correctness of her rejection of her race”(Holloway 33). With her new friend, Pecola talks about how blue and beautiful her eyes are and how jealous everyone is of them. The reader learns, ”that even this internal dialoguing of Pecola does not bring her solace, because she is afraid the eyes given her by Soaphead Church are not blue enough”(Holloway 45).
Throughout the book, the reader mostly sees Pecola as others see her. People see her as an ugly child and this one label is the most significant aspect of her life. Pecola also sees herself as others have seen her, and for this reason thinks of herself as being ugly. It is important for the reader to understand that this is her reality. “It is the overriding factor that pushes her fantasy of blue eyes from a black girl’s wish to have things white to a neurotic fantasy to make things right”(Holloway 44).
When she was raped, some people even tried to put the blame on her, saying that she didn’t fight her father. They also say that it’s, ”Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.....Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground” (Morrison 190). The only way in which some sympathy is expressed is the shaking of their heads. Pecola ends up delivering a stillborn, probably as a result of her young age and the beatings she received after her impregnation. She ends up going crazy, “walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent hands on shoulders, she flailed her arm like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly”(Morrison 204).
At the end of the book she is isolated from the town both physically and emotionally. Mrs. Breedlove and Pecola moved to the edge of town in a little brown house. Adults looked away when they saw her and children who were not frightened, laughed at her outright. A young girl’s life ruined as a result of society’s placing of beauty on such a high standard. And making that standard and the importance of it known to all.
“Morrison has written of desolation and decay, because this is where, as victims of our environments, we are left”(Holloway 39). It is a tragedy that the things that happened to Pecola happened. Again redressing the causal argument, society has a standard of beauty, Pecola does not meet this standard. Her life is plagued by event after event which impress her ugliness upon her. She becomes the object of hatred by all of the members of her town. Her unstable family life leads to her rape which further enhances the problem. Pecola then becomes pregnant and begins her descent towards madness. Her life is then changed forever, she will never be the same. At the end of the book, one of the main characters, Claudia, reflects as an adult that people need someone like Pecola in their lives.
All of us-all who knew her-felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent.....We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength (Morrison 205).