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Setting in The Bluest Eye

Transcript of Setting in The Bluest Eye
Setting in The Bluest Eye By Carl Wolf Analysis of houses Analysis of location
Kentucky Lorain, Ohio Georgia More 'perfect' houses Lorain, Ohio The migrants'
houses (or lack thereof) The House Comparing the father to winter Summer The
Spring Analysis of nature "His eyes become a cliff of snow ready to avalanche;
his eyebrows like black limbs of leafless trees..." 61

The father is being compared to winter itself, bringing out both the setting of
winter and the characteristics of the father. Through this, a little life is taken out
of the book. As the setting becomes cold and lifeless (this is winter), so does the
father and therefore, so does the family. "It was in the spring, a very chilly spring,
that Aunt Jimmy died of peach cobbler." 135

This spring is described as "Very chilly". Springs, usually, are considered to

represent new life and beginnings, but this obviously is not the case in this short
setting. Instead, this spring is cold, much like its winter counterpart. In this case,
it contrasts with its typical meaning as this spring has not brought new life at all.
"The parched days and sticky nights are undistinguished in my mind, but the
storms.. both frightened and quenched me." 187

For a young girl, a summer should be an time of activity. A child should be

enjoying their childhood. Instead, the defining characterizations of this summer
are the storms, showing how the events have scarred this childhood, ruining the
potential for a normal life "It does not recede into its background of leaden sky,
nor harmonize with the gray frame houses and black telephone polls around it"

An important facet is conveyed right off the bat about this town in Ohio; the
houses are gray and probably ugly, as opposed to the colorful and pretty house
created in the first scene. This condition is the opposite of what the narrator
desires; when she wishes to live in a pretty lovely house she must contend with
these gray nondescript frame houses. "They don't have townhouses, just places
where they were born." 81

Houses twice now have been used as a setting to describe things that are
socially preferred or not, and by making these people without town homes, which
are generally not preferred, a preference is placed on these people by the author.
"The Streets changed, houses looked more sturdy, their paint was newer, porch
posts straighter, yards deeper...the sky was always blue" 105

Again, an image of what the narrator considers a perfect house is shown. These
waterfront houses are better built and maintained, and because of that the sky
there seems 'blue' all the time, as a reference to the blue eyes which are seen to
be the most pretty. Again, this setting shows the narrators emphasis on
stereotype and how important preconceived notions are to her "In Kentucky they
lived in a real town, ten to fifteen houses on a single street, with water piped
right into the kitchen." 112

Kentucky, the south, is seen as a better place to live as contrasted to the

northern setting soon to be presented. In fact, the case could be made that for
this book the narrator actually preferred the racist south over the more socially
equal north. This likely stemmed from a preconceived notion that racism was a
way of life, unhealthy to the narrator who is often shown to have disjointed views
of social structure. "side streets, even were paved with concrete, which sat on
the edge of a calm blue lake... what could go wrong?" 117

Suddenly, a jump is made from southern Kentucky to northern Ohio. The most
obvious jump, for the context of this work, would be the change in social
attitude. Racism is not the norm in the north, where class is the more
predominant factor of social structure. This is from the industrial atmosphere,
where everything would be made of concrete. Most people were in the poor
working class, and it is that working class which replaced the race factor from
the south. "Running away from home for a Georgia black bot was not a great
problem." 152

Again, it is obvious that locations are used throughout the book to create
different social structures, each with different attitudes toward blacks. In this
Georgian city, the farthest south in this novel, little attention is paid to this
escaping boy. In this particular passage, care is made to specify that the boy is
black, inferring that a white boy would be more cared for and would find it harder
to run away. With this assumption, it is showed that racism is more pronounced
here, that even an escaping child is shown no notice because he is black. "Here
is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. Ir it very pretty."

Within the first few sentences, the book already throws a thematic idea though
the use of setting. The house is described as pretty, only because it is green and
white and has a red door. From this very first passage, it is hinted that
stereotypes of what is

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CHARACTER ANALYSIS

Pecola Breedlove
In portraying this young girl, Morrison is faced with the task of maintaining the sense of the
childs innocence--that is, her acceptance of color ideology at face value--and demonstrate
how that ideology destroys her. Pecola is presented always from a third person narrative point
of view, either by the omniscient narrator or by the first person narrator, Claudia, until the last
chapter of the novel, when she is given voice in a first person dialogue with her imaginary
friend.

Pecola is first portrayed as she is seen by Claudia when she comes to live with the MacTeers
as a "case" for charity. Pecola acquiesces to anything the girls want her to do. When she gets
her period, she is shocked. When she finds out someone as to love her in order for her to have
a baby, she wonders how to make someone love her. The second time we see her, she is lying
in bed paralyzed with fear and aversion as her parents and brother fight viciously. As an
eleven year old girl, she is the weakest member of her family and her society. She cannot act
to end the domestic violence of her household, she cannot speak up to stop it, she can only try
to disappear by an effort of the imagination. It is here that Morrison begins the portraiture of
this childs strong imagination. As her parents fight, she concentrates all her imaginative
energy on disappearing, and can succeed in imagining all her body dissipated except for her
tightly sealed eyelids. The focus on eyes is thus subtly introduced.

The next time the reader sees Pecola she is surrounded by a group of boys in her school who
are taunting her by calling her ugly because she is black and by intimating her fathers
inappropriate sexual freedom around her by saying he sleeps naked. Like her response to her
parents violent confrontation, Pecola responds to the bullies by hunching her shoulders and
attempting to make herself small. When she is unexpectedly rescued by Frieda MacTeer, she
finds herself in the company of the beautiful because light skinned Maureen Peel. Her
conversation with Maureen reveals her love of the cinema, a love presumably learned from
her mother, and her admiration of European-American film stars. When Maureen turns out to
be stringing her along only to accuse her of premature sexual knowledge in seeing her father
naked, Pecola does stand up for herself. She protests her innocence. This is the first and last
time Pecola resists her oppression.

Her next independent act is to go to Soaphead Church and ask for blue eyes. Her childs
logic--if beauty is blue eyes and God performs miracles, then I can ask God to give me blue
eyes--is touching in its innocent trust of the truth of what she has been told. Her final image,
wandering around town talking to her imaginary friend, is piercingly sad. Her only concerns
are praising her blue eyes and pushing down the image of her father raping her and her
mother disbelieving her story. She is tragically destroyed by taking the communitys
internalized racism to its own logical extreme.

Claudia MacTeer
Morrison uses Claudia as a narrator only sporadically in the novel. She comes in and out of
voice. She is a better taken care of child than Pecola, but only one step up. That slight
advantage gives Claudia the ability to fight back against the color ideology of white
beauty/black ugliness. Her age also is presented as a reason for her ability to see clearly
through the falseness of color ideology. It is assumed that ideology needs time to work, and it
has not fully taken Claudia in by the time she witnesses what happens to Pecola.

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Claudia, as a narrator-character, is only subtly drawn. The reader is aware that her words are a
recounting of the past. She is remembering the summer when she and her older sister, Frieda,
found out that their acquaintance, Pecola Breedlove, was raped by her father and
impregnated. From her mature point of view, she recognizes the crime was more than just
that perpetrated by Cholly, but more pervasively, that perpetrated by the community against
its own children. The community rejects the beauty of its own children, encouraging them to
recognize the beauty standard of the dominant media--the Shirley Temple blonde and blue-
eyed privileged image--as the only kind of beauty. Blackness is regarded as ugly; the blacker
a person is, the more ugly. Claudia resists this color ideology, this internalized racism,
vehemently. Morrison depicts the thinking of children in Claudia as at least temporarily clear-
visioned. Claudia knows something is wrong with the message she gets that she is not pretty
because she does not look like Shirley Temple. She is intensely curious about what makes the
white doll so precious and investigates by tearing her dolls apart. Claudia senses that what
happens to Pecola has happened on a symbolic level to all the African American children of
her community. In this, her perceptiveness is sharp.

Cholly Breedlove
Morrison is careful not to portray a simple villain in Cholly. By giving his traumatic
experience with racism during his first sexual exploration, Morrison enables the reader to see
how Cholly has been hurt. Her portraiture of Cholly, however, is not a central concern in the
novel. Therefore, it is done in too hasty a manner. While the reader is given a poignant
narrative of Chollys childhood years up until the time he is inadvertently rejected by his
father, the reader is not given an account of Chollys adult life with Pauline, his degradation
by drink and gambling. Chollys adult life experiences also informed his final act of raping
his eleven year old daughter. Morrison neglects these experiences in favor of depicting
Chollys early years.

Cholly is first presented as a drunken and lazy father and husband whose wife hates him
intensely and who engages in continuous low intensity warfare with him. He and his wife
brutally fight one another and in the first scene of his character portrait, he is knocked
unconscious by his wife and wished dead by his son. Morrison quickly informs the reader of
Chollys beginnings thereby humanizing the demonized image of the dysfunctional black
man. As a child, Cholly is shown as sensitive and caring, tender in his desire to explore
sexual pleasure with a girl named Darlene. This exciting and tender encounter is interrupted
by the brutal joke of two white racists who force Cholly, a fourteen year old boy, to perform
sex on Darlene for their viewing pleasure. Being powerless against the white men, Cholly
turns his hatred onto one who is more powerless than he, Darlene, the person who witnessed
his degradation, and who embodied it at the same time.

Chollys hatred of the weak and powerless--in his society African American women and
children--resulted from the cycle of oppression. He was oppressed as a child and, never
having found a way out of the system of oppression, he began to oppress those weaker than
he. His rape of his daughter is depicted oddly as a failed return to tenderness. He sees her
scratching the back of her leg with the toe of her other foot, a gesture just like the one her
mother performed which initiated his love for her. In his befuddled state, he collapses his
image of mother and daughter, he desires to protect and cherish her, and, at the same time, he
cannot control his sexual desire for her. Instead of protecting and cherishing her, he rapes her
and then leaves her lying in an unconscious state. The reader hears nothing more of Cholly
except that he left, and perhaps before he left, he raped his daughter a second time, and then
that he died in a work camp.

Pauline Breedlove
Pauline is first presented as an ugly member of an ugly family, fighting viciously with her
husband, disregarding her childrens feelings, and giving all her love and care to the child of
her white employers. Then, Morrison shows Paulines beginnings and the reader gains
sympathy for her, sees the roots of her degradation by the institutionalized racism of the
media which presents European beauty as the standard and epitome of beauty. The last
picture of Pauline returns to the degraded version, a woman who is so psychically damaged
by internalized racism that she severely physically abuses her daughter when she finds out
her daughter has been raped. She adds insult to the injury of the abuse by not believing her
daughter when she tells Pauline that the rapist was her father, Cholly Breedlove.

Morrisons skill at character portraiture is especially evident in the history she gives to
Paulines present manner of life. Her early adolescence was spent fantasizing about a vaguely
kind man who would take her by the hand and lead her to happiness. This fantasy was evoked
by the songs sung in her church depicting Christ as a sort of lover who leads the lost and
lonely to wholeness and happiness. The lonely person passively accepts this leading; no
active virtues are inculcated. Thus, Pauline was sold on an ideology of passivity, especially as
it was gendered. As a woman, she had only to wait for a man to come along and take her into
his care. This first false belief system got her married. The next two to which she was
exposed were much more dangerous--the ideology of physical beauty and the ideology of
romantic love.

As an African-American woman from the South living in the new culture of the north,
Pauline went to the movies to escape her problems and ended up gaining more problems in
the process. She learned internalized the ideology that there is one standard of beauty and it is
white and economically privileged. She also learned that love is a possessive, individualistic,
and private emotion, divorced from sexual pleasure and simple caring. Her marriage fell apart
partially because of her inculcation into these two ideologies. The fact that she despised of
her daughter, Pecola, also resulted in part from these two systems of belief.

Soaphead Church
Though a minor character, Soaphead Church deserves some analysis here since he is the
catalyst for the final outcome of the plot. Soaphead Church is a flawed character he is not
fully drawn; he is the repository of all the sickness of internalized racism; his insanity is
drawn in unfortunate homophobic language; and he comes into the narrative only at the end
of the novel, where Morrison attempts to give his full history in too short a space before
continuing the narrative about Pecola.
Soaphead Church is the one demonized African-American character in the novel. He is a
child molester who believes he is better than God. The source of his malaise is in his familys
long history of internalized racism. Since its inception in the early 1800s, the Whitcomb
family practiced racial exclusivism in marriage practices, marrying only light skinned African
Americans. In this depiction, Soaphead Church is an extreme version of another minor
character in the novel, also cruel to Pecola, Geraldine.

Claudia MacTeer: The child of Pecola's foster parents and narrator of much of the
novel.

Pecola Breedlove: One of the main characters of the novel, Pecola is a young African
American girl who comes from a financially unstable family. Between a combination
of facing domestic violence, bullying, sexual assault, and living in a community that
associates beauty with "whiteness", she suffers from low self-esteem and views
herself to be ugly. The title The Bluest Eye refers to Pecola's fervent wishes for
beautiful blue eyes. Her insanity at the end of the novel is her only way to escape the
world where she cannot be beautiful and to get the blue eyes she desires from the
beginning of the novel.

Cholly Breedlove: Cholly is Pecola's father. Abusive and an alcoholic, Cholly's

violent and aggressive behavior reflects his troublesome upbringing. In addition to
being rejected by his father and discarded by his mother as a four-day-old baby,
Cholly's first sexual encounter is ruined when it is interrupted by two white men, who
force Cholly to continue while they watch and sneer. Traumatic events like these
influence Cholly to become a violent husband and father who beats his wife and
eventually rapes his daughter. These gesture of madness are said to be mingled with
affection, as they are his way of showing love.

Pauline "Polly" Breedlove: Pecola's mother. Mrs. Breedlove is married to Cholly

and lives the self-righteous life of a martyr, enduring her drunk husband and raising
her two awkward children as best she can. Mrs. Breedlove is a bit of an outcast herself
with her shriveled foot and Southern background. Mrs. Breedlove lives the life of a
lonely and isolated character who escapes into a world of dreams, hopes and fantasy
that turns into the movies she enjoys viewing. After a traumatic event with a foul
tooth, however, she relinquishes those dreams and escapes into her life as a
housekeeper for a rich white family who give her the beloved nickname "Polly".

Sam Breedlove: Pecola's older brother. Sammy, as he is more often referred to in the
novel, is Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove's only son. Sam's part in this novel is minimal.
Like his sister Pecola, he is affected by the disharmony in their home and deals with
his anger by running away.

Auntie Jimmy: Cholly's great aunt, who takes him in to raise after his parents
abandon him. She is friends with a Miss Alice and is briefly ill, tended to by the
medicine woman whom the locals call "M'Dear". Aunt Jimmy dies suddenly when
Cholly is still a young boy during a meal of peach cobbler that was made by a friend,
Esse Foster.
 The Fishers: The rich, white couple who employ Pauline as their servant and as the
caretaker of their little girl.

Geraldine: A social conscious upper class black woman in the community who
exaggerates the fact that she is above traditional black stereotypes and is more
"civilized" than other black families in Lorain, Ohio. When she feels that her husband
isn't fulfilling her need for love, she finds a cat and pours her affections into it. Her
lack of attention to any but the cat causes unintended hatred for the cat from her son,
whom she neglects often.

Louis Junior: Geraldine's son who bullies Pecola and blames her for accidentally
killing his mother's beloved cat.

Maginot Line (Marie): Prostitute. She lives with two other prostitutes named
China and Poland in an apartment above the one that Pecola lives in. These ladies
are ostracized by society, but teach Pecola a lot about being a social outcast, and offer
her the support that few others do.

Rosemary Villanucci: The MacTeers' next-door neighbor who constantly tries to get
Claudia and Frieda in trouble.

Mr. Yacobowski: The discriminatory white immigrant, owner of the grocery store
where Pecola goes to buy Mary Janes.

Maureen Peal: An African-American girl Pecola's age, who considers herself and
other people "of color" to be above black people. Frieda and Claudia mock Maureen,
calling her "Meringue Pie".

Soaphead Church: Born Elihue Micah Whitcomb, he is a light-skinned West Indian

misanthrope and self-declared "Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams". He hates
all kinds of human touch, with the exception of the bodies of young girls. He is a
religious hypocrite.[4]

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Initial Situation

Pecola's home environment is abusive and tumultuous.

As the novel begins, we see that Pecola's family life is violent and lacking in structure, love,
and support. When Cholly hits Pauline and nearly burns their house down, Mrs. Breedlove
moves in with her employer, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Pecola gets sent to
stay with the MacTeers while she waits for her parents to handle their problems.
Conflict

Pecola believes that blue eyes will change her life.

Pecola begins to believe that if she only had blue eyes, her family life would be completely
different and people would love her. This erroneous belief that by changing your physical
appearance you could change your familial, psychological, and social situation in life
consumes Pecola throughout the novel.

Complication

Pecola is repeatedly teased and abused.

It's going to take far more than blue eyes to change this girl's life. She is teased at school, gets
punched in the face, Junior attacks her with a cat, and she ruins her mom's berry cobbler.
Pecola's victimization is building here.

Climax

Cholly rapes Pecola.

As if things couldn't get any worse for Pecola, when she is raped by her own father, all hope
that she might actually develop self-esteem or self-sufficiency flies out the window.

Suspense

Pauline and Pecola move to the edge of town.

Pecola spends her days talking to herself in the mirror, flailing her arms like a bird and sifting
through garbage. It's unclear whether or not she is crazy, and how much she actually
remembers of being raped by her father. It's also unclear how many times he raped her.

Conclusion

Claudia and Frieda ignore Pecola.

At the novel's end, Claudia acknowledges that she and all of the townspeople of Lorain are
partially to blame for what happened to Pecola. They do not ignore her out of fear or disgust,
but because they feel responsible for what she has become. They have failed her.

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Point of View
The point of view of The Bluest Eye alternates between the first-person observations of
Claudia MacTeer, who befriends the main character, Pecola Breedlove, and an omniscient
third-person narrator. Most of Claudias narration comes from the viewpoint of her 9-year-old
self, while an older, wiser Claudia offers perspective and corrects youthful misapprehensions.
Morrison employs a third-person omniscient perspective for those portions of the novel not
narrated by Claudia. The third-person omniscient explores the back stories of principal
characters like Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's parents, and narrates sections like
Chapter Fives disquisition on black womanhood. Pecola herself narrates a brief section of
the final chapter through an interior dialogue.

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Plot summary

In Lorain, Ohio, 9-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their
parents, who take two other people into their home: Mr. Henry, a tenant, and Pecola
Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house is burned down by her unstable and
alcoholic father, Cholly: a man widely gossiped about in the community and who raped
Pecola. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl who grows up with little money and whose
parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually reminded
of what an "ugly" girl she is, fueling her desire to be white with blue eyes. Most chapters'
titles are extracts from the Dick and Jane paragraph in the novel's prologue, presenting a
white family that may be contrasted with Pecola's. The chapter titles contain sudden
repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations.

The novel, through flashbacks, explores the younger years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly
and Pauline, and their struggles as African-Americans in a largely White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant community. Pauline now works as a servant for a wealthier white family. One day
in the novel's present time, while Pecola is doing dishes, a drunk Cholly rapes her. His
motives are largely confusing, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. After raping
her a second time, he flees, leaving her pregnant.

Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community that hope for Pecola's child to survive
in the coming months. Consequently, they give up the money they had been saving to buy a
bicycle, instead planting marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the flowers
bloom, Pecola's baby will survive. The marigolds never bloom, and Pecola's child, who is
born prematurely, dies. In the aftermath, a dialogue is presented between two sides of
Pecola's own deluded imagination, in which she indicates conflicting feelings about her rape
by her father. In this internal conversation, Pecola speaks as though her wish for blue eyes has
been granted, and believes that the changed behavior of those around her is due to her new
eyes, rather than the news of her rape.

Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and
suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may have shown Pecola the only love he could by
raping her. Claudia laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, have
used Pecola as a scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and happier.[3]
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Breakage and separation
Author Phillip Page focuses on the importance of duality in The Bluest Eye. He claims that
Morrison prevents an "inverted world", entirely opposite from the Dick and Jane story that is
at the beginning of the novel.[34] The idea of breaks and splitting is common, as seen in the
context of the war occurring in the time period of the story, the split nature of Pecola's family,
and the watermelon that Cholly observes break open during a flashback.[34] Page argues that
breaks symbolize the challenges of African American life, as seen in the rip in the
Breedloves' couch that symbolizes poverty, or the break in Pauline's tooth that ruins her
marriage and family. He goes on to identify how each of the characters are broken personally,
since Cholly's former and present life is described as chaotic and jumbled, and Pauline both is
responsible for her biological family as well as the white family she works for. The epitome
of this, Page argues, is seen in Pecola at the end of the novel. The events of her life, having
broken parents in a broken family, have resulted in a totally fractured personality which
drives Pecola into madness.[34]

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Next

Blue Eyes
The Bluest Eye Symbols

Blue Eyes

To the characters of The Bluest Eye, Blue eyes stand as the definitive symbol of
whiteness and beauty. Characters who possess whiteness and beauty are
privileged, empowered, and secure. This fact leads to Pecola's (read full
symbol analysis)
 Next

Marigolds
Blue Eyes Symbol Analysis

To the characters of The Bluest Eye, Blue eyes stand as the definitive symbol of
whiteness and beauty. Characters who possess whiteness and beauty are
privileged, empowered, and secure. This fact leads to Pecola's desires for blue
eyes, as she believes blue eyes would change the way others see her, allowing
her to transcend her horrible situation at home and in the community. Likewise,
she thinks that blue eyes would give her the ability to perceive what she sees in
a different way. Through the course of the novel, however, the symbolic nature of
blue eyes changes. Pecola's attainment of blue eyes comes at the expense of her
sanity, and only causes the community to "see" her in a more damaging way. In
this sense, the "bluest" eye could also take on the association of blue with
sadness and symbolize Pecola's sadness, defining her as the saddest character in
the novel, or in a larger sense, the sad realities of racial self-hatred stemming
from obsession with white beauty.

Marigolds

Marigolds symbolize life, birth, and the natural order in The Bluest Eye. Claudia
and Frieda plant marigolds, believing that if the marigolds bloom, Pecola's baby
will be born safely. Symbolically, the marigolds represent the (read full symbol
analysis)

Marigolds Symbol Analysis

Marigolds symbolize life, birth, and the natural order in The Bluest Eye. Claudia
and Frieda plant marigolds, believing that if the marigolds bloom, Pecola's baby
will be born safely. Symbolically, the marigolds represent the continued wellbeing
of nature's order, and the possibility of renewal and birth. But the flowers never
bloom, and Pecola's baby dies, suggesting that the natural order his been
interrupted by the incestuous nature of her pregnancy. Claudia also states that
marigolds did not grow anywhere in the nation because the earth was hostile to
certain kinds of flowers. Metaphorically, the flowers represent the black
population, who are unjustly denied the opportunity to live freely. Racism,
therefore, also stands as an interruption in the natural order.