I recently read The Bluest Eye. What follows is a response to the novel that I submitted for a class assignment:

The Metaphysical dance of sexualization, racialization and socialization in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The coming of age of Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove is inclusive of a coming of sexuality, of racial identity and of social positioning. These maturations are accomplished incrementally, simultaneously, and rhythmically, in supportive/destructive conjunction with one another, as each girl is shaped by family, community, and society. Early in The Bluest Eye the adult Claudia recalls that:

The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll…. I had only one desire: to dismember it. 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…. “Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it…." But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye pp. 19-21

In just a couple of pages, Morrison’s narrator successfully describes the processes that are already underway, calling into question Claudia’s place in a society that places no value on her, that closes off any path to value. Claudia is being acculturated to her place, of being not-beautiful, of being not-desirable, of being not-worthy, and hence, of being not-loveable as a black female. Since this formula “escaped [her], but only [her]” in her immaturity, she is set upon the path prepared for her by family, community, and society that will lead her to understand, if not fully accept, her place. The clarity and intensity of the memories from that time testify to the power of the lesson and how indelibly it was written into her psyche. In her telling of the story, complex and circular, Claudia demonstrates that she successfully resisted the sexualization, stereotypical racialization and socialization, forces.
For Pecola, the lessons of meaninglessness and valuelessness were begun at birth, when her mother saw her and thought, “But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.” Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, p. 126. The processes of her coming –of age as a sexual object, of her coming –to racial awareness, of coming – to a growing awareness that she does not and cannot have the attributes that society values, is brought to fullness in her awareness of, and lack of, blue eyes, the eyes of the whites, wherein lies the distaste for her blackness.

The gray head of Mr. Yacobowski looms up over the counter. He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Blear-dropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. 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. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.
""Yeah?"
"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. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, pp. 48-49.

On the cusp of girlhood and womanhood, Pecola can sense the conflict in men, the sense of her sexuality diminished by her blackness that creates a distance simultaneous with an interest. In her inculcated ugliness, this awareness only deepens the confusion and frustration at the mysterious forces shaping her life. In these vacuous glances she is made intimately aware of her ugliness. In the coupled sentences, “All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread.” Pecola’s adolescent “growing” and “coming” that are a part of who she is, and that contain the potential for what she can become, are confronted, and stunted, by society’s application of race with all its limitations and exclusions based solely upon her blackness.
In the end, it is the adult Claudia [Morrison?] who tells us that the fault, or blame, for the failure of “the land” to bear fruit, for the sterility of the edges, those margins where the disenfranchised and dispossessed are banished to pick through garbage, lies with “the land”.

And now when I see her searching the garbage— for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye p. 206.

“The thing we assassinated?” was hope, the anticipation contained in “coming” of age, accomplished by not only the narrators of The Bluest Eye and the reader implied in that we, but “the soil…bad for certain kinds of flowers” representative of the societal soil of America, where blackness is the basis for exclusion from nurturing.
For these girls, Claudia and Pecola, and for the women they were to become, the lessons taught in this land, of racial differentiation, of the objectification of women, and of social stratification, were lessons of a gender deemed subordinate, of a color (race) ugly and devoid of value, and of a place, of a position on the margins of “white” society.

The social lesson of racial minoritization reinforces itself through the imaginative loss of a never-possible perfection, whose loss the little girl must come to identify as a rejection of herself. The Melancholy of Race by Anne Anlin Cheng; Oxford University Press, 2000. P. 17.

In her reading of Pecola’s rejection of herself and of her “self,” Cheng makes a strong case for the explication of “The Melancholy of Race” in the works of black writers, including Morrison:
This is racial melancholia for the raced subject: the internalization of discipline and rejection "and the installation of a scripted context of perception... a nexus of intertwining affects and libidinal dynamics" a web of self-affirmation, self-denigration, projection, desire, identification, and hostility.Morrison’s characters are invested with a discipline of beauty ever unattainable and with a rejection of self that affects their every thought and action. They are tragic in a sense, but the flaw that they see in themselves is a flaw imposed upon them and incorporated into them by a society divided and stratified by artificial and destructive constructs of race and beauty.