Bluest Eye:In Search Of Identity

In search of Identity

Most of African-American literature appears in the American canon as a literature of revolution and protest against a "white" world of supremacy. Yet many African-American authors have explored, analyzed and criticized "white" supremacy while, at the same time, exploring its affect on African-American life and individuals. In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the main character Pecola becomes a victim of world that enforces definitions of beauty which exclude Pecola and all other "black" individuals for that matter. Also, Morrison beautifully explores the influence of a "white" world on other "black" characters and how those individuals deal or not deal with their personal struggle of "identity" as well as with each other.

As a starting point we should consider James Baldwin's claim that "definition is death." In brief, Baldwin's personal struggles with the question of "identity" lead him to argue that when a social definition is constructed it soon becomes an "identity" of its subject and it is an "identity" that cannot be easily, if at all possible, discarded or avoided. Here, it is important to think about the difference between the words "description" and "definition." Many people often find it hard to avoid the word "black" when referring to African-American or Afro-Latino-American individuals because they say that the word "black" helps to describe the specific individual. On the other hand, a close look in the history of the United States will reveal the fact that the words "black" and "white" are ideologies constructed and continued by social perceptions and not a mere color description. This leads us to argue that "black" and "white" are therefore definitions and not descriptions. When examining the American canon we will see as a reflection and testimony of social perception that being "black" has always meant for many to be unintelligent, wild, troublesome, lacking complexity, subservient and unimportant among other problematic attributes. This specific "black" identity of African-Americans was used as a means of social control by a "white" world marginalizing thus both socially and literary the African-American life.

In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the problems of social definition and "identity" take shape and form as the main character Pecola is obsessed with getting white skin, blond hair and "the bluest eyes" of all. The story of the novel is set in Ohio in the late 1940s. The world that Pecola and the rest of the characters grow up in promotes "mainstream" definitions of beauty that exclude Pecola and other young "black" girls like her; they do not have "white" skin, blond hair, red-pink cheeks and blue eyes like Shirley Temple. Throughout the novel, Pecola prays for blue eyes thinking that this would end her life's suffering. Even more disturbing is the fact that Pecola starts drinking gallons of milk thinking that it would turn her skin white since her own skin was, as she believed, ugly.

Yet the "white" society's construction of what is "beautiful" and "normal" in the world is not only promoted through media in the face of Barbie dolls or Shirley Temple, Mary-Jane and Marilyn Monroe. When Pecola goes to the candy store the owner, Mr. Yacobowski, refuses to touch Pecola or even treat her as a real person and the reason is her forced identity: "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." (49) As the narrator suggests, Pecola's outer appearance prevails her inner world in the eyes of other people, especially "white" people. The words "static" and "dread" refer to the problem of "black" or "blackness" as a definition, as an identity. In a world that promotes "white" skin, blond hair and blue eyes as "normal," "blackness" is the exact opposite. Similarly, if being "white" means being accepted, loved and recognized as an individual, then being "black" is, again, the exact opposite.

In addition to people like Mr. Yakobowsky, Pecola has to deal with the harsh contrast between her and Maureen Peal. At school, Pecola, as well as Claudia and Frieda, is always ignored by teachers and tormented by students, "black" and "white" alike, while Maureen is admired and envied:

She enchanted the entire school. When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didn't trip her in the halls; white boys didn't stone her, white girls didn't suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls' toilet, and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids. (62)

As the lines suggest, girls like Pecola and especially Pecola herself, had to deal with the daily abuse of both "white" and "black" boys, the disregard from their teachers and the sings of disgust from "white" girls. Yet Maureen escaped all that and the reason was her desirable "white" features. Make no mistake, Maureen was "black" but she was a "light-skinned black" girl and that put her in a much more respectable position in school than Pecola. In the children's eyes, everything "white" or "white-looking" is part of the "normal" world. Pecola, who does not look "whitish," does not fit in that world either in her eyes or in the other's eyes.

Yet, what creates Pecola's problem of identity and her ensuing downfall is not only the social perceptions of the "white" society but also, her relationship with the rest of the "black" characters of the novel. Truly, in Pecola's life there is much ugliness yet not