Dec 7, 2008

More thoughts on Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

The Role of the Clean / Dirty Binary Opposition in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison utilizes the binary opposition of clean / dirty, as defined by and reified by white society and accepted and internalized by the black community, to support the oppression of blacks by whites in early twentieth century America. This binary supports and reinforces the Beauty / Ugliness binary that is a significant source of power for the white, clean, beautiful privileged in the novel. The concept of cleanliness in the novel is marked as positive and as the term is used in the novel it often carries connotations of “whiteness.” Dirtiness and nastiness provide a mask or negative mark for the undesirable black people who, while they are no less clean (or on occasion cleaner) than white people, must be maintained in their role as less than their white counterparts. Morrison’s use of the ideas conceptualized in these binary oppositions enables her to utilize a set of concepts inscribed in a binary opposition that is already clearly established in twentieth century America as a power to oppress. She tells her story through a young girl in Lorain, Ohio who lives with her loving, whole, and connected family.

The primary narrator of the novel, Claudia MacTeer, struggles with the privileged elevation of cleanliness over dirt. Her characterization of cleanliness as irritable and unimaginative make it clear very early in the novel that clean and dirty are words charged with value both for Claudia and for the white society that places such a high value on cleanliness. The difference in the value she places on cleanliness and what she perceives as the privileged standards imposed by whites is evidenced in the negative experience of bathing associated with the Christmas she endures instead of the Christmas of her dreams.

Instead I tasted and smelled the acridness of tin plates and cups designed for tea parties that bored me. Instead I looked with loathing on new dresses that required a hateful bath in a galvanized zinc tub before wearing. Slipping around on the zinc, no time to play or soak, for the water chilled too fast, no time to enjoy one's nakedness, only time to make curtains of soapy water careen down between the legs. Then the scratchy towels and the dreadful and humiliating absence of dirt. The irritable, unimaginative cleanliness. Gone the ink marks from legs and face, all my creations and accumulations of the day gone, and replaced by goose pimples. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 22.

Claudia’s experience of cleanliness is one of separation from the extended family and of a foreign cleanliness cloaked in discomfort. It is in the absence of dirt that Claudia’s naked blackness, an innate and inescapable fact, is characterized as dreadful and humiliating. She immediately shifts from very intense personal feelings to a statement almost philosophical in tone that speaks to the importance of cleanliness in the novel. Her blackness unmasked is irritable in its cleanliness, not irritating, but irritable. It is irritable because she realizes that she will never be clean enough. That no number of hateful baths will make her more acceptable to a society that has determined her dirty and she cannot wash away the stain of blackness from her frangible self as she does the stains of ink she has inscribed upon herself. Her blackness, unmasked is made uncomfortable, and the moment of her coming of age as a black woman is foreshadowed. The word moment in this statement is multifaceted because in addition to its marking of a single small increment of time, it carries the meaning of a tendency or measure of a tendency to create motion. Claudia is moving toward submission to the privileged view of cleanliness as desirable and necessary to fit in. When Claudia speaks of cleanliness as unimaginative one might ask whose cleanliness is she talking about, and is it cleanliness at all, or is it rather some other quality or characteristic that she has chosen to attach to the word. Cleanliness is unimaginative in its representation of mindless conformity to values that have little to do with life in the poor black community. There is a sense of resignation in Claudia’s bathing. While she is clearly not invested in the system that reveres cleanliness, it is evident that she is resigned to the process of becoming clean. Her relationship to cleanliness is in flux and is a factor in the process of her socialization.

In her work that explores the grief that pervades the black experience in America, The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng examines the inability of African Americans in American society to fully participate in the “white ideal.” Cheng finds in Claudia MacTeer’s late found “delight in cleanliness” an ambivalence born of the damage done to black identity by the imposition of standards that even when accepted can never be met.

‘I learned much later to worship her, [Shirley Temple] just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.’ Is the concluding claim a statement about the self’s continued inability to assume fully that white ideal, a reminder of the “fraudulence” that in fact conditions this adulation, an acknowledgement of the self-harming that such “preference” engenders, or even a larger allusion to the idea of African American social progress itself.
--- The Melancholy of Race. Anne Anlin Cheng: Oxford University Press. New York. 2000.

Cheng has identified Toni Morrison’s technique of developing characters who live their lives in the world as drawn by the privileged white society that define the words, draw the lines and allocate the work while acknowledging all through the novel that the picture is clear only for those who view it from the position of privilege. Cheng has captured an excellent example of Morrison’s technique for providing hints to the reader that the view from the dark side of the binary is warped and ugly. Claudia learns that her change, her coming to accept the standard of beauty cannot be reconciled with the reality of her life and that adopting that standard may impede her survival in a society openly hostile to her since she can never fully accept something that so blatantly defines her as ugly.
The sentences that precede the line that Cheng quotes give insight into the painful path that Claudia had to follow to come to the fraudulent love for Shirley Temple and what she represents.


When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence [that she harbored first toward white dolls and then toward little white girls] was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 22.

For Claudia, the worship of Shirley Temple, the inculcation of the oppressive value system that equated her blackness with dirtiness exists concurrent with the learned delight in cleanliness. What saves Claudia from Pecola’s fate, death of beauty by the imposition of ugliness, is her awareness that this change, this conforming to a value system is not improvement but an adjustment in order to survive.

Pecola Breedlove has a very different relationship with cleanliness. For Pecola, the world of clean comfort is separate and unattainable. She understands that the clean world, that environment where blond and blue-eyed Shirley Temple and Mary Jane live, is no place for a dirty little black girl. Pecola’s world is a voiceless world of invisibility. She lives unnoticed and unnoticeable and her world is a world of cracked sidewalks and weeds. Her world is so cold and isolated that even her anger flares and dies in a moment for in anger there is being, and Pecola cannot sustain it. She retreats instead into simple pleasure, orgasmic in its intensity, as she literally consumes the beauty she seeks and takes it into her body in the cheap candy with Mary Jane’s eyes.

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 50.

Perhaps Pecola, of all Morrison’s characters in The Bluest Eye has been the most perfectly inseminated with the clean /dirty binary and its implications for her life. She can clearly see that the world of “Mary Jane” like the world of “Dick and Jane” has nothing to do with her, that it is foreign and separate. She is already fully aware that she inhabits an/other world than the world of clean comfort that is home to all the blond, blue-eyed Jane girls. Pecola lives in a world where she is born ugly, invisible to whites in her community, abandoned by her mother, despised by her schoolmates and stripped of her very existence as a unique human being by her father.
Pecola’s mother, Pauline Breedlove, has virtually abandoned Pecola to the dirty world of ugly reality and spends most of her time and almost all her energy in the clean comfort of the kitchen in the home of the white Fisher family. She relegates her family to the margins of her life and they are not even deserving of conscious consideration.

More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man— they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. Here she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows. Here her foot flopped around on deep pile carpets, and there was no uneven sound. Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise…. Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private world, and never introduced it into her storefront, or to her children. Them she bent toward respectability, and in so doing taught them fear: fear of being clumsy, fear of being like their father, fear of not being loved by God, fear of madness like Cholly's mother's. Into her son she beat a loud desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life…. All the meaningfulness of her life was in her work. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 127.

Pauline Breedlove made good her escape from the dark margins of society in her work. She found fulfillment and she found access to the privileged existence from which she was barred in her own home. In the Fisher’s home she was powerful, exercising authority over her dominion of the kitchen, she became Polly, the ideal servant, revered, respected, and valued. But, it is in the Fisher’s kitchen that Polly backhands Pecola, knocking her down, and it is there she then soothes the tears of the “little pink-and-yellow” daughter of the house. When she is in her kitchen in the Fisher’s house, she is as intolerant and hateful toward the ugly black Pecola as if she were white.

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— they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. Here she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows. Here her foot flopped around on deep pile carpets, and there was no uneven sound. Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 127.

Pauline accepted the values imposed by the oppressor. She accepted the ugliness and dirtiness of her family and attached herself to the white family in whose home she worked and truly lived. She put her life on hold each evening to go and perfunctorily discharge her familial duties.
Soaphead Church completes the task of alienation and destabilization of Pecola that her mother had begun. A perverted man, once a man of the cloth, of mixed parentage and heritage, Church used his education to attach himself to the black community and prey upon their superstitions as well as their children. His abuse of Pecola was perpetuated not only upon her defenseless body, but also upon her mind. It was his promise of blue-eyes as her reward for her part in the death of a tired old dog whose unclean presence offended Church that eventually drove Pecola to madness and complete dissociation.

And since he was too diffident to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls. They were usually manageable and frequently seductive. His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness. He was what one might call a very clean old man. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p.166- 167.

Soaphead Church is the agent of Pecola’s slip into madness. In his “cleanliness,” in his being partially white and devoid of adult sexuality,
Church delivers his impact on the community and fulfills his role of oppressive marking of black children as valueless. Church in his cleanliness plants no seeds but sows only destruction and devastation.
Pecola believed. And in this belief she finally saw the world through blue eyes and she created the perfect friend and ally, her alter ego who though prone to ask too many difficult questions, proved a reliable and constant companion.

How could somebody make you do something like that?
Easy.
Oh, yeah? How easy?
They just make you, that’s all.
I guess you’re right. And Cholly could make anybody do anything.
He could not.
He made you, didn’t he?
Shut up!
I was only teasing.
Shut Up!
O.K. O.K.
He just tried, see? He didn’t do anything. You hear me?
I’m shutting up.
You’d better. I don’t like that kind of talk.
I said I’m shutting up.
You always talk so dirty. Who told you about that, anyway?
I forget.
Sammy?
No. You did.
I did not.
You did. You said he tried to do it to you when you were sleeping on the couch.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 198-199.

Pecola was a victim of her ugliness, of her blackness, of her poverty, and of her dirtiness. The agents of her destruction were a fragmented family with a heritage of ugliness and abandonment and a sick “clean” old man who used her as a means to his own ends without regard for the costs to Pecola. Claudia MacTeer saw all of this and she learned from it.
In the second introduction to the novel, the narrator offers up a clue about blackness and dirt. In Claudia’s early value system blackness and dirt are a rich soil where dreams could hope to grow
We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994, p. 5-6.

For Pecola and her family, blackness and dirt are never seen as potential and in fact prove to be a media wherein ugliness, madness, and death grow and emerge.

And Pecola is somewhere in that little brown house she and her mother moved to on the edge of town, where you can see her even now, once in a while. The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world— which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us— all who knew her— felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, P. 205

Throughout The Bluest Eye cleanliness, associated with white privilege surrounds the lives of the young black narrator Claudia and her friends, family and community. In addition, dirtiness and oppression proves to be their inescapable lot in life. For Pecola, the inability to find her place leads to madness and degradation. Claudia manages to develop an understanding of the system that maintains the order of the clean / dirty, white / black and beauty / ugliness binaries and yet retain her own selfhood.

No comments: