Resistance
Dr Manisha Patil
Although Pecola is doomed right from the beginning and there is no redemption for her at the end; although the novel is tragic in structure, it is far from pessimistic in essence. Deep beneath all the grief and sorrow for Pecola lays a strong sense of hope in the form of Claudia, the narrator. In fact, in accordance with the text and counter-text narrative structure of the novel, Claudia emerges as a foil to Pecola. If the main cause of Pecola’s downfall is her loveless life than the main cause of Claudia’s survival is ‘love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup.’ (7) Mrs. MacTeer often speaks harshly to her daughters but beneath these harsh words lie her caring and will to protect her children from all harm and danger. In sharp contrast to Polly who is more concerned with her messed up floor than the burns of her daughter, Mrs. MacTeer is angry with whatever messes up with her children. When Claudia is sick, her mother nurses her on one hand and expresses her rage at Claudia’s sickness at other. Claudia says, “My mother’s voice drones on. She is not talking to me. She is talking to the puke but she is calling it my name: Claudia…My mother’s anger humiliates me; her words chafe my cheeks and I am crying. I do not know that she is not angry at me but at my sickness…in the night when my coughing is dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repined the flannel, readjusted the quilt and rested a moment on my forehead. So, when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.” (7) Mrs. MacTeer extends this maternal love to a foster girl like Pecola as well. When Pecola drinks three quarts of milk, obviously Mrs. MacTeer is angry. However, again she is not angry at Pecola’s drinking milk but at her shortage of enough milk. But when Pecola starts menstruating, she draws Pecola near her as her own daughter (‘Then she pulled both of them toward her, their heads against her stomach. Her eyes were sorry.’ [22]) and the music of her laughter drowned her anger.
Mr. MacTeer too is a foil to Cholly. Though his appearance is very short in the novel and it is overshadowed by the presence of his wife Mrs. MacTeer, one short scene is enough to prove his stature as the Vulcan guarding the flames of the home fires. When their roomer Mr. Henry tries to molest Frieda, Mr. MacTeer (Daddy) ‘threw our old tricycle at his head and knocked him off the porch…Daddy was cussing and everybody was screaming…and Mr. Buford came running out with his gun and Mama told him to go somewhere and sit down and Daddy said no and give him the gun and Mr. Buford did and Mama screamed and Mr. Henry shut up and started running and Daddy shot at him and Mr. Henry jumped out of his shoes and kept on running in his socks.’ (77)
Absorbed by the white consumerism, Pecola assumes that love is proportional to one’s beauty and richness. The equation goes – if you are white and beautiful, then you are rich and then worthy of others’ love. Polly’s rejection of Pecola for the blonde Fisher girl is responsible for this wrong assumption. However, for Claudia this equation does not hold true. For her love has nothing to do with money. She dislikes the expensive white doll gifts given to her on Christmas. Adults consider them to be the best gift for any girl child. ‘Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs – all the world agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.”‘ (14) However, Claudia is not flattered by those dolls. On the other hand, she dismembers the white baby dolls: ‘To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.’(14) She gives more importance to an experience of emotional security than any material gift however expensive it might be. She says, ‘I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, “Dear Claudia, what experience you would like on Christmas?” I could have spoken up. “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of lilacs, the sound of the music and since it would be good to have all of senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterwards’ (14-5)
In sharp contrast to Pecola who ‘hears Poland singing, and she listens to China signifying on Marie’s story, but she lacks the cultural knowledge necessary to understanding; [who] is exiled from the collective consciousness; it is as though she doesn’t speak the language of the blues, although she most certainly lives the blues.’29 Claudia has developed ‘a sharp-edged humor’ an ‘adaptive laughing-to-keep-from-crying perspective’ characteristic of the signifying game. ‘When Mr. Henry molests Frieda and Frieda explains to Claudia the nature of his transgression, Claudia attempts to insert her voice into this tradition, and Morrison emphasizes the humor and naïveté in the guileless child’s attempt. Claudia enthusiastically asks, “‘Really? How did it feel?’” (99). She then asks if it didn’t feel good, and displays an innocent jealousy at Mr. Henry’s choosing Frieda instead of her, aligning herself with the blues singer who complains of an empty bed.’30
Claudia is a part of larger African American community, so she is privy to the community’s secrets and gossips like Soaphead’s dirty habits towards small girls. This informal knowledge protects her from many mishaps which befall Pecola and against which she does not have any safeguards. As Claudia herself puts it, ‘There is a difference between putout and being put outdoors. If you are put out you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.’(11) Her membership of the larger African American community also develops two most important survival strategies in Claudia (which again Pecola lacks) – namely blues and signifying. Her mother Mrs. MacTeer is her guide in blues. According to Cat Moses, Mrs. MacTeer’s blues singing ‘forms a bridge between childhood (the milk consumption represents Pecola’s effort to consume – and become – Shirley Temple) and womanhood. The blues to which Claudia refers exemplify the cultural knowledge and values transmitted orally to Claudia that ease and assist her transition into womanhood – folk wisdom that is not conveyed to Pecola. The blues are first represented in the text in Claudia’s reminiscence about the Saturdays when her “mother was in a singing mood.” Claudia recalls snatches of lyrics from “hard times” songs her mother frequently sings…lyrics [which] convey a wealth of folk knowledge and cultural values. Hearing her mother sing the blues, Claudia finds herself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin di-ime to my name.” I looked forward to the delicious time when “my man” would leave me, when I would “hate to see that evening sun go down...” cause then I would know “my man has left this town.” Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.’31
Talking further about the blues songs which are referred in the novel, Cat Moses says, ‘The speaking subject of the “St. Louis Blues” constructs a striking visual image of the desired man as “Blacker than midnight, teeth lak flags of truce/Blackest man in de whole St. Louis.” She then employs this image in a direct inversion of the dominant caste hierarchy, closing the verse with a popular aphorism, passed down through generations of African Americans, that assigns the highest aesthetic value to the darkest skin: “Blacker de berry, sweeter is de juice....” While Claudia is regularly serenaded – on Saturdays, when her mother was in a singing mood – with this concise, confident, and lyrical deconstruction of the Shirley Temple aesthetic, Pecola is rejected by Pauline, who embraces the “corn-yellow”-haired child of her white employers…Claudia’s defiance of and Pecola’s internalization of the Shirley Temple aesthetic are illustrated in the Maureen Peal “six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie” episode (61-73). In rejecting Maureen and “calling her out of her name,” Claudia rejects the intra-racism implicit in the privileging of Maureen’s “high yellow dream” complexion and her “two lynch ropes” of long brown hair (62). Pecola desires what Claudia rejects: light skin, straight hair, blue eyes, and the social status they represent. Claudia’s defiance is a learned and nurtured defiance, encouraged by a severe but loving mother who sings to her on Saturdays. Pecola internalizes the caste aesthetic that the “St. Louis Blues” mediates against, an aesthetic that Morrison argues has insidiously infiltrated not only families like the Breedloves but whole communities.’32
As mentioned earlier, African American community’s internalization of white aesthetics is reflected in their reaction to the white dolls. When Claudia dismembered those dolls, ‘Grown people frowned and fussed: “you-don’t-know-how-to-take-care-of-nothing. I-never-had-a-baby-doll-in-my-whole-life-and-used-to-cry-my-eyes-out-for-them. Now-you-got-one-a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with-you?”‘ (14) In contrast to this mythic love for white dolls, they displayed utter indifference, worse still disgust and scorn for Pecola and her unborn child. Claudia recalls,
They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl” or “Poor baby”, but there was only head-wagging where these words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern but saw only veils.
I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark wet place, its head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live – just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples and Maureen Peals. (149)
Because nobody else would pray for Pecola and her child’s safety, Claudia and Frieda take on this responsibility. Like innumerable fairy-tale heroines like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, like Christianity’s ultimate faith in ‘belief’ and like Pecola’s magical gain of blue eyes, Claudia and Frieda believe that by planting the marigolds correctly they can influence Pecola’s fate. When they fail, they blame themselves for not performing the rites correctly, for not having the right amount of belief. But adult Claudia, with her realistic judgment, realizes the futility of such magic solutions. She recognizes that measuring one’s world with black-and-white scales and trying to find easy solutions to the drudgery of daily life can cause a person to lose his/her grounding not only in one’s heritage but also in reality. Ultimately, the price such a person pays is the loss of one’s self. So while Pecola completely steps over in the world of fantasy, Claudia returns back to the world of reality, to its hard problems and lack of easy solutions. But at the same time she also realizes the importance of telling Pecola’s story, testifying it: ‘To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility – in speech – for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (non-personal) validity and consequences.’33 By telling Pecola’s story, Claudia takes on the responsibility of finding realistic solutions to the problems. The situation cannot be changed either by an individual or by magic. What is needed is collective efforts and political action. Laurie Vickroy writes, ‘In a world where the social, racial and political exercise of power creates destruction of the human psyche so that it cannot oppose domination, Morrison’s emphatic message is that the traumatized responses of individuals must not be relegated to the domestic sphere but should instead be seen as a clear signal that destructive forces are at work. For Morrison, the act of narration can be one means in the process of collecting and sharing knowledge heretofore held by “discredited people,” a means of resisting the urge to see collective victimization only as individualized (“Memory” 388; Davis Interview 146).’34
Cat Moses radically claims that Claudia is ‘the narrative’s blues subject, its bluest “I” and representative blues figure, and Pecola [is] the abject tabula rasa on which the community’s blues are inscribed…[R]ather than singing Pecola’s blues, Claudia “sings” the community’s blues. Claudia bears witness, through the oral tradition of testifying, to the community’s lack of self-love and its transference of this lack onto the abject body of Pecola.’ She also states that like a traditional blues lyric, The Bluest Eye moves ‘from an initial emphasis on loss to a concluding suggestion of resolution of grief through motion.’ Her views are worth quoting at length.
Morrison constructs Claudia as a blues subject: sensuous, brutally honest, poetic, ironically humorous, and adept at call-and-response, signifying, and testifying. She learns to sing from her mother, and her blues is The Bluest Eye...Blues narratives, like blues lyrics, never end on a closed note, and The Bluest Eye is no exception. At the end of a “typical” blues there is affirmation, as there is in “St. Louis Blues” (of the beauty in blackness), and there is movement, or a statement of intent to move, but there is no closure, no neatly wrapped-up ending…the construction of ironic distance [of blues subject from loss] and open-endedness is a primary function of the blues, which codify a means of resistance to oppression and a call to “move on” up and out. Claudia’s blues narrative may be understood as a sustained signifying on the master aesthetic of physical beauty and the racial self-loathing that this master aesthetic produces. Hers is a complex and polyvocal signifying, involving a call-and-response dialectic with her community…Claudia’s narrative traces a trajectory from the childhood experience and naming of lack – her community’s lack of a sense of the intrinsic beauty of blackness and hence its scapegoating of the Breedloves and of Pecola, in particular – to a sense of resolution through movement.
At the novel’s close, Claudia...has stood at a blues crossroads and resolved to assert her independence. She has distanced herself from Pecola and from her community in order to engage the community in a dialectic…The Bluest Eye is her testifying to Pecola’s pain and the community’s shame.35
In Representation, Race and the Language of the Ineffable in Toni Morrison’s Narrative, Abdellatif Khayati states that, ‘In the social world that this novel depicts the cultural values of American consumer industry are totalized to a degree that what we are left with are various ways in which the distortion and denial of the black self are produced. As a result of this, The Bluest Eye is built upon a dualistic perspective of the ‘dominant’ versus ‘dominated’, leaving little space for resistance.’36
However, this extreme view neglects the basic dialectical – text and counter-text – structure of the novel. Donald Gibson in his essay, Text and Counter-text in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye says, ‘the novel argues with itself, clarifying rather than simplifying, uncovering and grappling with the most problematic facets of the subject and undercutting easily held values in order to reveal complication. The novel’s text is inscribed with a counter-text, an oppositional discourse so intricately intertwined with text as to render it finally incapable of independent existence, transforming each by turn into the counter of the other. While text and counter-text contend for dominance, the one melds into the opposite and at midpoint between the exchange neither is independently discernible though both are present, like an optical illusion which may alternately assume one form then, another, then perhaps varying degrees of both and neither depending upon the disposition of the observer’s eye and mind.’37
The primer text provides the white hegemonic framework to the novel and to the characters in the novel and also reveals the role of education in the colonization of mind. ‘One cannot simply learn to read without being subjugated to the values engraved in the text.’ [Gibson: 161] But by gradually removing the punctuation and spacing from the primer text and thereby making it illegible, Morrison turns itself into a counter-text. When the reader tries to read the third version, s/he is forced to participate more actively in the process of reading, identifying, misinterpreting, correcting and then reinterpreting the text. Though s/he initially tries to stick to the first neat and clean version, s/he soon realizes that such an effort is futile. In reading the third version, s/he re-reads the first version as well and becomes the ‘resistant reader’ (Judith Fetterley’s term), the one who resists the hegemonic intentions and designs in order by a ‘revisionary re-reading’ to bring to light and to counter the covert sexual and racial biases written into a literary work.
Morrison’s use of primer text to introduce her novel also re/visions the tradition of authentication. Historically, the slave narratives were prefaced by the white writers stating that the black writer’s experiences, views and opinions though strange are none-the-less not only authentic but are also up to the mark of white audience level. So, the book should not be dismissed beforehand (because the author is black) but should be given a fair and sympathetic hearing by ignoring its crudeness of experience and lack of elegant style. This condescending attitude on one hand gave a black write a license to publication but on the other hand re-inscribed his/her inferiority to the white masters. But when in The Bluest Eye, Morrison herself introduces her text with the white primer she, in fact, ‘seizes the authority of the authenticator by appropriating and subverting the role of authenticator’ [Gibson: 161] in other words, Morrison asserts her own authority and authenticity of black experience in the very act of subjugating that experience to white framework. Gibson writes, ‘The implication of the novel’s structure is that our lives are contained within the framework of the dominant culture and subjected to those values. We have all (there is reason to believe the author does not exclude herself nor anyone else) internalized those values and to the extent that we have, we are instruments of our own oppression. The text says we are oppressed by the values of the ruling class; the counter-text says we participate in our own oppression usually to the extent of being the very hand or arm of that oppression.’38
So, by further implication it means that to stop our oppression, we should stop our subordination to the dominant culture and to its values. The way to do so is to tell our own stories in our own way. At one place, Morrison commented, ‘I wrote Sula and The Bluest Eye because they were books I had wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so I wrote them.’39 As a student, she had read Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Ralph Ellison. But from these literary works, she found herself, a small black girl from rural Ohio, curiously absent. Even when the story is about a black girl (e.g. Trueblood episode in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), it is not only narrated but also commented upon solely through a male consciousness with a white cultural bias. When Trueblood rapes his own daughter Matty Lou, he is shown to have a reverie in which he dreams having sexual intercourse with a white woman. In Black Skin, White Mask, Franz Fanon states that, ‘for a black man there is only one destiny and it is white.’ To attain that destiny, black man desires the love of a white woman: ‘Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me, she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.’40 In this process a black woman is reduced to a passive and negative object on which only fears and frustrations of both white supremist and subjugated black cultures are projected. Matty Lou becomes a substitute for a white woman whom Trueblood cannot attain due to social restrains because the intercourse between a black man and a white woman is considered to be a violation of racial code by the dominant ideology. Trueblood can only dream to possess a white woman sexually but he can actually violate the moral code by raping his own daughter without any fear or shame. He even justifies his action by urging the people to distinguish between ‘blood-sin’ and ‘dream-sin’. His horrified wife can neither punish him nor undo the harm done to her daughter because she lacks the material resources to do so. When the black school administrators wish to remove him from the community for his shamefully repugnant act, white males come to his rescue. Those who would have lynched him, if he would have dared to touch a white woman, let alone raping her, the same people (white males) provide him with all the material goods because they want to hold him up as an example of black barbarism. In this whole episode, Matty Lou is curiously both absent and silent object. When Morrison rewrites this incest plot in The Bluest Eye, she brings Pecola center stage. For the world, even Pecola is both absent and silent. But for the readers, her absent presence and silent communication (her hallucination) become larger than life. In Invisible Man, Trueblood says, “Except that my wife an’ daughter won’t speak to me, I’m better off than I ever been before.” He also rationalizes that ‘Matty Lou won’t look at me and won’t speak a word to anybody’ is that she is ashamed of being pregnant. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison tells us the meaning of this reaction of the rape victim: complete breakdown of psyche. Morrison strips off the ‘male glamour of shame’ given to Trueblood by Ellison and instead shows the father-daughter incest as the most devastating loss to both an individual and the entire community. Michael Awkward rightly comments,
Morrison, finally, seems to be taking Ellison to task for the phallocentric nature of his representation of incest which marginalizes and renders as irrelevant the consequences of the act for the female victim. The Bluest Eye serves as a revisionary reading of the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man. Morrison writes her way into the Afro-American literary tradition by foregrounding the effects of incest for female victims in direct response to Ellison’s refusal to consider them seriously. And so while the victims of incest in both novels ultimately occupy similarly silent, asocial positions in their respective communities, Morrison explicitly details Pecola’s tragic and painful journey while Ellison in confining Matty Lou to the periphery suggests that her perspective contains for him ‘no compelling significance.’41
As a black woman writer, Morrison selects those stories which perhaps have ‘no compelling significance’ for the dominant white male world but which address the life-and-death questions of black women. Echoing Claudia’s words, ‘Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves.’ (150) black women writers have created the whole new cannon of literature which is not about pleasure but about survival. Alice Walker has said, “It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about…we do it because we care…we care because we know this: the lives we save is our own.”42 Through The Bluest Eye and her other subsequent novels, Morrison does exactly this: she cares and makes her readers care for her characters and thereby saves all of them from the ‘disinterested violence’ of capitalism which in long run affects all people irrespective of their race, sex and place. Morrison’s ultimate aim is to build human solidarity across the lines of race, sex, class and place which in long run would replace the divisions created by capitalism and bring about total human freedom. In the meanwhile, in Sula, she places race and sex, individual and community, rootedness and displacement side by side and posits solidarity among women irrespective of their differences as a means of achieving freedom for black women.
Dr Manisha Patil
