Wasted Beauty

 Wasted Beauty

Dr Manisha Patil 

The Bluest Eye is an enquiry into the reasons why beauty is wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed to murder possibilities...

– New York Times

The discussion of white hegemony has shown us that notions like beauty, morality, success and happiness are not natural products but social constructs. In America these notions are invariably linked with whiteness and when black people accept these notions undoubtedly and also try to imitate white people, what they achieve is not salvation but their own destruction.

Polly 

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it and collected self-contempt by heap. (95)

As a young girl, Polly always fantasized herself waiting for her Prince Charming. ‘He was a simple presence, an all-embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest...She had only to lay her head on his chest and he would lead her away to the sea, to the city, to the woods...forever.’ (88) So when Cholly first tickled her foot, she felt as if her dream has come to life. Cholly did love her then and he did take her away to city (Lorain, Ohio). But they did not live happily ever after. In a Northern city, full of white people and away from her own family, Polly started feeling lonely. Cut off from her family and deprived of emotional support from other black people, Polly fell an easy prey to materialism and consumerism. Unlike the communal spirit in the South, where people feel genuine concern for each other, up North people are judged by the way they dress and talk. ‘Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying “children”) and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes…The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and make up. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.’ (92) The increasing need for money made Polly seek a job but it did not end her hardships, but rather increased them.

In a racist and sexist world, black women’s suffering is multiplied. Not just white men but also white women and black men have their own share in the troubles of black women. It is as if they compensate their own powerlessness in relation to white men by displaying their power over i.e. causing trouble to black women. Furthermore, we also see white women and black men competing with each other in their power over black women. Polly’s representative example makes it very clear. 

To make the ends meet, Polly started doing day work for a white woman. She was working hard both at home and at her job and, Cholly, her husband and her employer were harassing her. Cholly was troubling her for money and her employer was constantly lecturing her how to clean and do. ‘Look like working for that woman and fighting Cholly was all I did. Tiresome.’ (92) One day Cholly came to white woman’s house drunk wanting some money. There followed a quarrel between the two, causing Polly to lose her job. Her employer was generous enough to let her stay if she left Cholly but not generous enough to give Polly, her hard earned 11 dollars so that she could cook food. She lectured Polly over having more self-respect and not letting a man take advantage of herself but bluntly refused to pay her 11 dollars and again that too under the pretext of caring for Polly and her future.

This particular episode echoes the clashes between the Black Civil Rights’ Movement and the feminist movement in 1960s. Both the movements wanted to enlist black women in their camp but none the less marginalized them. The Black Civil Rights’ Movement was pronouncedly macho which challenged white masculinity by asserting black masculinity. Black men felt that slavery and racism had emasculated them. So, to repossess their manhood, they expressed hyper-masculinity. They also felt that it is black women’s duty to stand by black men in their struggle. However, their hyper-masculinity was often expressed against black women – abusing and beating black women was the most common behavior pattern. On the other hand, feminist movement prioritized the middle-class white women’s concern at the cost of black women. The white feminists ignored the fact that a black woman’s experience is fundamentally different from that of a white woman. For a middle-class white woman who is financially well off, single parenthood may be the assertion of individuality but for poor black woman single parenthood obviously means further oppression. In such a case, she will always try to keep her man. Polly says, “No good, ma’am. He ain’t no good to me. But just the same, I think I’d best stay on.” (94) Bell hooks comments,

As a group, black women are in an unusual position in this society, for not only are we collectively at the bottom of the occupational ladder, but our overall social status is lower than that of any other group. Occupying such a position, we bear the burnt of sexist, racist and classist oppression. At the same time, we are the group that has not been socialized to assume the role of exploiter/oppressor in that we are allowed no institutionalized ‘other’ that we can exploit or oppress…White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined the struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.5

Caught like this between devil and the deep sea, Polly sought escape in the silver screen. Hollywood movies depict an idealized white world: ‘white men taking such good care of the women and they all dressed up in big clean houses.’ (95) The life which Polly could not have in reality, she fantasized in the movies identifying herself with the heroine. Susan Willis writes that ‘in mass culture many of the social contradictions of capitalism appear to us as if those very contradictions had been resolved.’ Commenting on it Jane Kuenz says, ‘In other words, economic, racial and ethnic differences is erased and replaced by a purportedly equal ability to consume even though what is consumed are more or less competing versions of the same white image.’6 She further says, ‘Like the Dick and Jane story, Pauline’s movies continuously present her with a life again presumably ideal, which she does not now have and which she has little, if any, chance of ever enjoying in any capacity other than that of “the ideal servant” (101) In the absence of alternate images which might validate and endorse a kind of virtue not tied to physical beauty or ones offering competing definitions of beauty itself and in the absence of a network of family and friends, especially women friends, whose own lives would provide a differing model and the context in which to erect her own, Pauline succumbs to the “simple pleasure” of “black and white images projected through a ray of light” and “curtailing freedom in every way.” (95)’7 Her movie education had taught her to grade each and every face she saw ‘in the scale of absolute beauty’ and ‘all there was to love and all there was to hate.’ (95) She herself tried to pass this beauty examination by dressing up like Jean Harlow but terribly failed when her tooth fell down. Then she stopped caring for herself and ‘settled down to just being ugly’ (96) She concluded that, ‘she is destined never to be so beautiful or cared for as those women on the screen. She does not understand that her rotten tooth is the physical embodiment of her inability to be an unmarked citizen who has the economic power to erase the unwanted traces of her body by purchasing a new artificial tooth. Instead, she directs blame inward and loses interest in her physical appearance and her home: “Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style and were absorbed by the dingy storefront.” (101) Not understanding this system aspect of her situation, Pauline imagines that her inability to be beautiful or stylish stems from some inherent fault; in so doing, she fails to account for the economic barriers to her attainment of the privileged home maker position in one of those white houses.’8 

However, the more tragic part was yet to come. When she went to the hospital for delivery, the white doctor dismissed her labor pain saying, “now these here women you don’t have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses.” (97) She was also subjected to the dehumanizing gaze of other young white male doctors who looked at her stomach and between her legs and said nothing to her. Her musing, ‘I hurt just like them white women. Just cause I wasn’t feeling hoping and hollering before didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling pain’ (97) became representative thought of all the silent/silenced black women in America. Unfortunately, this experience did not make her rethink her criteria of beauty, virtue and happiness. She judged even her new born baby Pecola according to white beauty scale and found her ugly and therefore unworthy of love and happiness. Instead, she found pink-white Fisher baby worthy of her love. ‘When Claudia witnesses Pauline’s mothering of the Fisher girl, she recalls, “The familiar violence rose in me. Her calling Mrs. Breedlove Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove” (86) That her role as Polly distracts from the quality of mothering Pauline gives her own daughter is not surprising given the historical precedent set in the plantation household. The mistress-mammy relationship allowed the white woman to maintain the idealized status of mother, while freeing her from the actualities of mothering. In turn, this transference of mothering established a burden of superhuman mothering on the black woman. Thus, Mrs. Fisher, like plantation mistress, remains associated with the “universal qualities of nurturance and self-sacrifice” despite the fact that she leaves the mothering to Pauline (Bridenthal 232; Fox – Genovese 113). Because the mammy is represented in Hollywood films as “satisfied, even pleased, with this inequitable arrangement”, Jeremy G. Butler argues, the mammy “does not just represent nurturing; she also promotes black women’s exploitation as nurturers of white characters who hire and use her” (292) Thus the viewer is led to believe that this seemingly familial relationship cannot be exploitative’.9

For Polly herself this relationship seemed far from exploitative. Rather she believed that ‘[i]t was her good fortune to find a permanent job in the home of a well-to-do family whose members were affectionate, appreciative, and generous. She looked at their houses, smelled their linen, touched their silk draperies, and loved all of it. The child’s pink nightie, the stacks of white pillow slips edged with embroidery, the sheets with top hems picked out with blue cornflowers. She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs…Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style, and were absorbed by the dingy storefront. More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man…Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise…The creditors and service people who humiliated her when she went to them on her own behalf respected her, were even intimidated by her, when she spoke for the Fishers...Power, praise, and luxury were hers in this household. They even gave her what she had never had – a nickname – Polly. It was her pleasure…[h]earing, “We’ll never let her go. We could never find anybody like Polly. She will not leave the kitchen until everything is in order. Really, she is the ideal servant.” (98-9)

Jennifer Gillan remarks, ‘Embodying the role of Polly becomes a substitute for what Pauline wants: a satisfying and substantial self. When she cannot access that self on her own, through her family or the black community, she accepts the self-imposed upon her by the Fishers. Pauline wills herself not to know her own history because it is too painful. She seems to forget her own role in creating the seeming naturalness of Hollywood’s image of “white men taking such good care of the woman and they all dressed up in big clean houses” (95)…Because she believes that she is squalid and dark like her apartment and the Fishers are stately and clean like their house Pauline can only maintain a positive self-perception by affiliating herself with the Fishers. Yet houses such as theirs are clean because she and others like her labor in them; they are big because white employers can still find black labor to exploit.’10 

Dr Manisha Patil