99 pages • 3 hours read
The Bluest Eye
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BetaForeword-PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Morrison prefaces The Bluest Eye with a Foreword about what prompted her to write the novel. Morrison was first of all inspired to write the book by a conversation in which an African-American friend's desire for blue eyes repulsed Morrison and led her to think about what was beautiful. She wondered about the origin of the desire for blue eyes.
Years later, Morrison decided to write a story about "racial beauty" and the impact of "racial contempt" (xi) on the most vulnerable person Morrison could imagine—a little black girl. Morrison felt challenged by the task of representing the people responsible for this character's "psychological murder” (x) without dehumanizing them as well.
Finally, Morrison also embraced the challenge of writing a novel based on "reliance for full comprehension on codes imbedded in black culture" (xii) to create a work to "transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture” (xiii).
Prologue Summary
[Morrison does not use traditional chapters and subdivisions in her novel. Aside from the four seasons, section names and numbers have been assigned for ease of reference only.
The Bluest Eye opens with two untitled, Prologue sections. The first section reproduces lines from the Dick and Jane books, primers that were used to teach early readers during the 20th century. In the first version, Jane, Dick, Father, Mother, and their pets are described in the third person in simplistic sentences that capture their happy lives. In the second version of the primer text, these same sentences are repeated without end punctuation separating the sentences. In the last version, the sentences are repeated again, this time without spaces between words and with no end punctuation.
In the second untitled section, Claudia MacTeer recalls that no marigolds bloomed in Lorain, Ohio, her home town, in the fall of 1941. The narrator speculates about why the seeds failed to grow. The narrator and Frieda, her older sister, were distracted because Pecola, an 11-year-old girl, was pregnant with her father's child. Perhaps the flowers never bloomed because the sisters argued too much. Looking back from the present, the narrator recognizes that the seeds—the marigold seeds and those by which Pecola's father impregnated her—were simply incapable of producing life. Unable to explain why the flowers failed to grow and what happened to Pecola, the narrator decides to "take refuge in how" (4).
Foreword-Prologue Analysis
Morrison's Foreword explains in explicit detail what it was she hoped to accomplish with the novel. Morrison identifies the novel as one about a "psychological murder" (x) of a vulnerable black girl as a result of racism, internalized racism, and the dehumanizing gazes that teach people to see themselves as ugly instead of beautiful. Morrison also explains that one of the dangers of her subject matter and approach was of reproducing this dehumanizing gaze, especially in her handling of the characters responsible for Pecola's downfall. In the end, Morrison argues that her biggest challenge was an aesthetic one. She wanted to create a novel deeply rooted in African American culture by creating a language that honored that culture. Morrison's Foreword is an excellent introduction to the major themes of the novel.
The novel opens with the Dick and Jane primers and then introduces characters and experiences that defy the rosy portrait of family life and childhood portrayed in these primers. Morrison's removal of punctuation and fusing of the words from the primer signal that one of her central aims in the novel is to tell a story that deconstructs the idealized notions introduced in the primers.
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