64 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
THE CRITICS
SEEING THINGS
Toni Morrison’s profound and unrelenting vision.
BY HILTONALS
B
efore closing the book on that
town and those people, the au-
thor has us pause for a few final
images and thoughts framed by regret,
shame, and horror. The book? Toni Mor-
rison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye,”
which turns fifty this year. As the story
ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted
Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less
abandoned by the townspeople, who
have treated her with scorn for most of
her life; now she’s left to wander the
streets in madness:
The damage done was total. She spent her
days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up
and down, up and down, her head jerking to
the beat of a drummer so distant only she could
hear. Elbows bent, hands on her shoulders, she
flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, gro-
tesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a
winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue
void it could not reach—could not even see—
but which filled the valley of the mind.
Spectacular even alongside other early
novels bathed in the blood of gothic
dread—William Faulkner’s “As I Lay
Dying” (1930), say, or Flannery O’Con-
nor’s “Wise Blood” or Ralph Ellison’s
“Invisible Man” (both published in
1952)—Morrison’s book cut a new path
through the American literary land-
scape by placing young black girls at the
center of the story.
Like all the principal characters in
“The Bluest Eye,” Pecola lives in Lorain,
Ohio, where Morrison, who died last Au-
gust, was born in 1931. When we meet
Pecola, she is eleven years old but already
ancient with sorrow. Her only escape
from the emotional abuse that her fam-
ily and her classmates heap on her is to
dream. And the dream is this: that some-
one—God, perhaps—will grant her the
gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes
Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie
star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue
eyes that she imagines lighting up the
face of the girl on the wrapper of her fa-
vorite candies, Mary Janes. Pecola feels,
or the world has made her feel, that if
she had blue eyes she would, at last, be
free—free from her unforgivable black-
ness, from what her community labelled
ugliness long before she could look in a
mirror and determine for herself who
and what she was. Not that she ever looks
in a mirror. She knows what she’d find
there: judgment of her blackness, her fe-
maleness, the deforming language that
has distorted the reflection of her face.
Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or be-
lieves she acquires, blue eyes. But in those
harrowing final images, Claudia MacTeer,
Morrison’s spirited nine-year-old narrator,
sees what Pecola cannot, what her mad-
ness, the result of all that rejection, looks
like to the rest of the town: “Grown peo-
ple looked away; children, those who were
not frightened by her, laughed outright.”
In this short, intellectually expansive,
emotionally questioning, and spiritually
knowing book, the act of looking—and
seeing—is described again and again.
One example of many: Peering through
a window in their family home, Claudia
and her older sister, Frieda, catch a first
glimpse of sex. A beloved boarder is con-
sorting with a notorious prostitute. What
can it mean, him sucking on that wom-
an’s fingers? Is that love? Or is it what a
man does to, and not with, a female? An-
other example: When Pecola goes to buy
some of her treasured Mary Janes, the
white shopkeeper sees her but can’t fix
his attention on her; nothing in his ex-
perience has prepared him to recognize
a little black girl as an entity.
Despite all this looking, few people,
aside from Claudia, bear witness to
much. To do so would be to think crit-
ically about the society that formed them
and be moved to effect change. Instead,
there’s a great deal of condemnation and
parochial disapproval. And it’s mostly
aimed at black women—especially those
mothers who don’t keep their home or
their children clean. Cleanliness, of
course, is next to godliness, and who
would want to commit the double sin
of being black and dirty? Pecola’s very
presence exacerbates some of the other
characters’ not so buried feelings about
their own race and poverty—liabilities
that push these Ohioans apart, rather
than unite them: no one wants to be
confronted with her own despair, espe-
cially when it’s reflected in the eyes of
another despairing person. And the truth
is, by the time we leave Pecola, pecking
at the waste on the margins of the world,
we, too, may feel a measure of relief at
no longer having to see what Morrison
sees, her profound and unrelenting vi-
sion of what life can do to the forsaken.
M
orrison said that she wrote “The
Bluest Eye” because she wanted
to read it. She began the book in 1965,
when she was thirty-four years old. She
had majored in English at Howard Uni-
versity, after which she did her M.A. at
Cornell. (Her thesis, which she described
as “shaky,” was about suicide as a theme
in the work of Virginia Woolf and Wil-
liam Faulkner.) Morrison went on to
teach at Texas Southern University, and
