The Bluest Eye

“There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

I read the Bluest Eye in high school as part of a summer program (Telluride) at the University Of Michigan that focused on the representation of people of color in media. I would later major in rhetoric which held media studies as half of my degree. One scene stuck with me all these years later, that of Pauline spitting her teeth out at the movie theater. I am not sure why that image stuck with me for over a decade, but I could not recall the context. I really couldn’t remember the book other than that it was sad. I figured I would return to it to see what I had missed 

So what had happened was…

The novel opens on a few sentences drawn from an early reading series that becomes a refrain in the book, however it slowly deteriorates into becoming something almost unreadable. A metaphor for the life of the main character, Pecola Breedlove. The book opens on Claudia Macteer, a childhood friend of the main character, explaining that Marigolds did not bloom in 1941, likely because Pecola was having her father’s child. The book then uses the community of Lorain, Ohio to tell Pecola’s story. Claudia recants the story of how she and her sister discovered Pecola’s early start of puberty while she was briefly living with them because Pecola’s father had burned down their home and how Maureen Peal, a beloved light skin character, feigns being Pecola’s friend for a day, but ultimately leaves Pecola hurt both physically and emotionally. We also hear the story of Geraldine, who is an embodiment of respectability politics, but has a sadist son who tortures her cat and blames it on Pecola. We then learn the background stories of Pecola’s parents, which helps to elucidate the treatment of main character herself.  Pecola’s mother Pauline was once a woman who dreamed of beauty and love, like the movies she adored, but after marriage the only comfort she found was in working in the home of a white family where the world around her was not crumbling, like her teeth into her hand. Pecola’s father Cholly was abandoned by his mother and raised by his aunt who died at an early age, after her death he was alone and ran into several misfortunes including an embarrassing first sexual experience caused by White men and a rejection by the father he worked so hard to find. After this tragic back story, we learn that Cholly gets drunk one night and rapes his daughter. The novel then shifts to Pecola asking Soaphead Church, a local child molester and false miracle worker, for the blue eyes she always wanted which would grant her access to love like all the little white girls she had seen. Soaphead tricks Pecola into believing that the miracle had worked which causes her to spiral into insanity. Pecola lost her baby and the marigolds did not bloom in 1941.

Aiight so boom…

I initially did not register Pecola as going insane. After Soaphead Church fakes his miracle and Pecola believes it to have worked, we hear her internal monologue for the first time. She is arguing with someone who only exists in her mind about her new blue eyes and whether she has the bluest eyes in the world. We go on to learn that Pecola lost the baby and is now regarded in the community basically as an untouchable. Pecola thinks that people stay away from her due to jealousy surrounding her blue eyes. I knew that her eyes had not been turned blue by a child molester in a shack who tricked her into killing a dog as her “miracle”. However, I was more focused on her peace. She was pleased with her new eyes that others could not see. She had found something in herself to love in a world that clearly did not love her. It wasn’t until I began to read other peoples summaries and takes on the Bluest Eye that I realized there was a consensus that Pecola had been pushed to far and finally had a mental health breakdown. As someone who is recovering from his own mental health breakdown maybe I understood her differently in this moment. Maybe I understood the break and moved onto the peace as was the case in my own mental health journey. Maybe I understood that you have to be crazy to love anything about yourself in a world that does not love you.  Maybe Pecola was right.