The Bluest Eye

1
The Bluest Eye

• (The Bluest I)

2
Quiz

• 1. What conclusions does Claudia come to when
  she thinks about being ill in the autumn?
• 2. Why does Pecola drink 3 quarts of milk?
• 3. Describe the Breedloves home.
• 4. How does Mrs. Breedlove end the fight between
  herself and Cholly?
• 5. What are the names of the three whores Pecola
  goes to visit?

3
Dick and Jane . . .

• Morrison claims that she had used the primer,
  with its picture of a happy family, as a frame
  acknowledging the outer civilization. The primer
  with white children was the way life was
  presented to black people.
• In this way, she forces us to find our place, ask
  about our relationship to the primer.
• She also makes us wonder what the degeneration of
  the primer material means.

4
Morrisons Comments on the Beginning

• Quiet as its kept, there were no marigolds in
  the fall of 1941.
• Its conspiratorial it implies a secret between
  people, being kept from people.
• She says the book is the public exposure of a
  private confidence.
• You must remember the time the book was written,
  she says. In order fully to comprehend the
  duality of that position, one needs to think of
  the immediate political climate in which the
  writing took place, 1965-1969, during the great
  social upheaval in the life of black people. . .
  . The writing was the disclosure of secrets,
  secrets we shared and those withheld from us by
  ourselves and by the world outside the community.

5
More Morrison

• Its anecdotal, its the beginning of a story. It
  suggests gossip, intimacy.
• She wanted to set up an intimacy between the
  reader and the page. She writes I didnt want
  the reader to have time to wonder What do I
  have to do, to give up, in order to read this?
  What defense do I need to maintain?
• She says that she wanted certain important facts
  to be emphasized its just before the war
  (1941), its fall, or just before it, in the
  temperate zone, the speaker is a child.
• Foregrounding the absence of marigolds, the
  trivia of that, and backgrounding the information
  about Pecolas baby makes the reader ask about
  the narrator. Can we trust the child?
• P. 22 of Unspeakable Things Unspoken.

6
Morrison summing up

• She wanted to use a language that was speakerly,
  aural, colloquial
• She wanted signal that the language would be
  coded in black culture that whites might be
  other to it and not fully understand it
• She wanted to create an intimacy with her reader
• She wanted to give voice to women and to girls, a
  point of view that she says was missing from
  African American literature
• She wanted to shape a silence, while breaking it

7
Doreatha Drummond Mbalia

• Claims that there are three beginnings to the
  text
• 1. The Dick and Jane Primer beginning, in its
  three manifestations. She says this represents
  the three classes of people well meet in the
  novel the rich, or well off, white or nearly
  so, Claudias family and other home-owning
  blacks, and the Breedloves.
• 2. The marigold page which tells the whole
  story, presenting the outcome of the story to be
  told. Of Pecolas suffering and her familys
  dissolution.
• 3. Then the novel begins with Nuns go by quiet
  as lust . . . An introduction to the
  neighborhood, the story, the how of Pecolas
  demise.

8
Shelly Wong

• Claims that Mbalias reading is naive. She
  believes that the breaking down of the Dick and
  Jane narrative isnt about setting up class
  divisions, but instead the breaking up and
  down of conventional syntactic hierarchies,
  conventional ways of ordering private and public
  narratives signals her intention to
  defamiliarize the signifying terrain. Wong
  claims that In refusing the terms of the
  dominant cultures patterning of experience, one
  is in a position to restate the familiar, that
  is, to retrace the particular contours of ones
  own experience, to regain the practice of ones
  own narrative.
• In other words, the breaking down of the Dick and
  Jane narrative is a signal that this is a new
  kind of story, a reconstruction of truth from a
  new perspective a black perspecitve.

9
Why start with Autumn?

• Spring usually symbolizes the beginning of
  things. To start with autumn is implies death
  and decay, the end.
• She ends with summer, commonly associated with
  life in full bloom, but in her conclusion, there
  is death, dissolution, destruction.

10
Time?

• How does Morrison use time?
• Theres the adult Claudia, in the present.
• Theres the child Claudia, in the past.
• Theres a slippage in past time. Does the piece
  narrated by the omniscient narrator come
  chronologically before or after the story about
  Pecolas coming to live with the McTeers?

11
Narrators Clues to

• If there are no chapter headings, then the story
  is told by Claudia either child or adult
• If there is a chapter heading, then the story is
  told by either an omniscient narrator or, in
  Paulines section, by Pauline herself.
• How does this work for you in terms of story
  telling?

12
Pick a Line-Paragraph

• Why was this significant to you as a reader?