The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
This book is art. It's incredibly poetic, beginning with a children's story of a perfect house and family assumed to be white but never stated. It isn't enjoyable—it's a hard read for the level of tragedy, shame, and disgust. It was very difficult to process. Honestly, I'm not sure I've really taken it all the way in, even after several weeks.
I think this story will live forever in my back of my mind. For its unpleasantness and shame, but also for its prose. When I read these final paragraphs of the introduction, I sat back in awe of the tragedy I was about to embark on. I had to read it aloud to Hubs because I just had to share this poetry with someone.
We had dropped our seeds in our own little pot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too. There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
You'll find lots of spoilers beyond this point.
The story centers on Pecola but is told from many different perspectives. I don't think we see Pecola's perspective until the very end, after she seems to have been driven mad, talking to herself, walking up and down the street arms flailing and head jerking every which way.
She's not a pretty girl, and she isn't loved. Her mother cares more tenderly for the white girl she tends to for work. The white girl's blue eyes haunt Pecola, and she yearns for them as though they're the only way a girl can be beautiful—as if blue eyes alone are worthy of love. Pecola is broken. The book nearly ends on a conversation she has with herself, or an imaginary friend of some kind. She believes her eyes are blue now, and that's the reason no one will look at her (not because they know of the trauma she suffered). She's obsessed with her new blue eyes, and whether they're the bluest in the world. The imaginary friend mocks her for her abuse. She argues with them. You see the shame she feels, the understanding intertwined with confusion, and the lack of love. It's all she wants—and she hopes that the blue eyes she now looks through will allow someone in the world to love her. Or for her to love herself, if no one else will. She wants to be better than someone, anyone. Everyone compares themselves to her to make themselves feel better. She wants to compare herself to someone else and be able to look down on them the way everyone looks down on her.
Her peers pity her at best. In the end, sisters Claudia and Frieda see the lack of caring the community has for Pecola. As word gets around that she's pregnant with her dad's baby, they hear adults gossiping and it confounds them. They're saddened and feel sympathy, recognizing that what has been done to Pecola must have been profoundly devastating. The community, however, stops at disgust. Disgust for her father's "nastiness", but also for Pecola's ugliness. Her own mother didn't believe her when she told him about the abuse she had suffered, and beat her when she found out Pecola was pregnant. Claudia and Frieda wish people would show more compassion. But they also can't bring themselves to console Pecola and find themselves avoiding her forever after.
There is so much pedophelia in this book, and the reader is placed behind the eyes of the pedophile on multiple occasions. You get the background behind Pecola's dad. You see the wheels in his mind turn as he drunkenly finds himself attracted to his daughter, unable to feel anything else for her after never having been shown what else there might be to feel. Lust is the only affection he knows. Morrison doesn't seem to want you to excuse his abhorrent behavior, but she does provide some background giving you insight into why he's so despicable. He feels shame for what he's done, even as he does it. When she becomes pregnant he runs off, presumably unable to face the evidence of his sins.
We also get a brief glimpse into a local spiritualist, as he markets himself. He's a fraud, and he uses the trust young girls place in him as a pretense for abuse. He feels that they want it, they like it. Pecola goes to him after she has a miscarriage and asks him to turn her eyes blue. He doesn't lay a finger on her, but convinces her that her wish will be granted. He pens a letter to god, claiming some sort of sainthood for not hurting Pecola. He knows what he's doing to little girls is wrong but tells himself, and god in this letter, that he isn't hurting them. He's saving them, somehow. He's actually better than god because he saves these young girls the lord has abandoned. He claims to have given Pecola what god wouldn't. How dare the lord make Pecola such an ugly thing? He's a hypocrite, blaming god for the atrocities he commits against young girls.
I'm honestly not sure what Morrison was trying to do by imparting the perspective of these predators upon the reader. My heart breaks for Pecola, and it's difficult for me to reach past the disgust I have for her abuser into the picture Morrison is trying to paint. Maybe she's trying to display the cycle of trauma often laid upon young Black girls—it doesn't come out of nowhere, but it lands on poor innocent Pecola and destroys her. All she wants is to be beautiful and to be loved. All she knows in life is tragedy and misery, and the only way she can imagine to conjure love from within or from others is to be impossibly changed to look like the little white girl she's seen her mother dote on.