Is there a quote or scene in The Bluest Eye that stood out for you? Why do you suppose it resonated?
Is there a quote or scene in The Bluest Eye that stood out for you? Why do you suppose it resonated?
“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom,” was spoken by one of the characters. I think it jumped out at me in this reading because of all that’s currently going on in our politics and the effect it has had on many. Scary…
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There were so many… Geraldine, a middle class black, when she found her cat…They were everywhere…the entire paragraph about what she considered to be lower class blacks than herself.
It resonated because it revealed the many layers of racism that not only blacks encounter; but whites, those of lower socio-economic status, if you weigh too much…
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There were too many to list here, but the final paragraph breaks the heart with its metaphor for Pecola and the whole culture: “And now when I see her searching the garbage—for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth,the land, our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’tmatter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late.”
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The scene where Pecola was washing dishes and Cholly came in drunk was a difficult one to read. On one hand I felt sorry for Cholly for the hard life he had lived. But, that in no way justified what he did to Pecola. This was a heartbreaking scene. Pecola was starved for parental attention and love and what Cholly did was unforgivable. It was hard to read the pleasure he was feeling while he raped his daughter.
“The line between colored and n***** was not always clear …” Growing up as a white girl in the 50s and 60s in a predominantly Black neighborhood I kept that phrase in mind all the time. My parents were racist and I wanted to like or dislike people because of how they acted and not the color of their skin. I live in the same city and I I’m sorry to say that I see the same prejudice in 2024.
p. 122, regarding Pauline and her response to the movies: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."I don’t agree with it at a universal level, but it certainly summarizes how Pauline ended up in the relationship situation in which she found herself.
“The master had said, ‘Your are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves, saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance…and they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.” It straightforwardly highlights one of the effects of racism: self-loathing and a sense of unworthiness.
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The chapter when M’Dear came to Aunt Jimmy’s house to attempt to cure her of her illness. Morrison describes the lives of old black women and all of the pain they endured during their lifetime like childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, etc. Finally when they were old they could actually do as they pleased without worries. They had suffered enough when they were young. The description prior to this was so touching and so sad too.
“They alone could walk the roads of Mississippi, the lanes of Georgia, the fields of Alabama unmolested. They were old enough to be irritable when and where they chose, tired enough to look forward to death, disinterested enough to accept the idea of pain while ignoring the presence of pain. They were, in fact and at last, free”
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I agree with you. This scene was extremely difficult to read.
Everywhere they looked they saw themselves as ugly. It was almost as if they had absolutely no control over this feeling of being ugly. Morrison repeats this theme many times.
One of the scenes that really stood out to me was Frieda’s parents’ reaction when their boarder touched her inappropriately. They acted. This contrasted with Pecola’s mother who beat the girl when she found her on the kitchen floor. I thought how interesting it was to see how each family reacted to a similar situation without the author drawing attention to it.
When Pecola says, “. . .if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.” I thought this quote was a one sentence summary of the novel.
P 20. “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs–all the world had agreed that blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” Well, isn’t that the truth. When I was doll-age in the 1950’s, there were no black skinned dolls on the shelves. Then to solidify this, the Barbie doll came out in 1959.
Morrison writes that only musicians could make sense of Cholly’s life.
“Only they would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all of that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final and pervading ache of freedom.”
It’s that “final and pervading ache of freedom” that says the most to me about Cholly. He feels free to do the things he does but the freedom aches because the things he does do not make him feel valued or wanted or happy. It is the thought of that “final and pervading ache of freedom” that seems so poignant.
When the white children were treated so sweetly while the Black children were fussed at and treated as inferior, I felt the confusion of the Black children. I couldn’t understand why Claudia’s mother treated her own children so poorly but the white children with such sweetness.
There is a scene near the end of the book where Pecola, having fallen into madness, speaks to herself in fragments and delusional dialogue, convinced she has finally obtained her blue eyes. Reading this was devastating. It shows Pecola’s total breakdown. She sees an illusion instead of finding validation or acceptance. Readers see the cruelty of society that made her unworthy.