The Bluest Eye (The Bluest I)

Quiz 1. What conclusions does Claudia come to when she thinks about being ill in the autumn? 2. Why does Pecola drink 3 quarts of milk? 3. Describe the Breedlove’s “home.” 4. How does Mrs. Breedlove end the fight between herself and Cholly? 5. What are the names of the three whores Pecola goes to visit?

Dick and Jane . . . Morrison claims that she had “used the primer, with its picture of a happy family, as a frame acknowledging the outer civilization. The primer with white children was the way life was presented to black people.” In this way, she forces us to find our place, ask about our relationship to the primer. She also makes us wonder what the degeneration of the primer material means.

Morrison’s Comments on the Beginning “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.” It’s conspiratorial – it implies a secret between people, being kept from people. She says the book is the “public exposure of a private confidence.” You must remember the time the book was written, she says. “In order fully to comprehend the duality of that position, one needs to think of the immediate political climate in which the writing took place, 1965-1969, during the great social upheaval in the life of black people. . . . The writing was the disclosure of secrets, secrets “we” shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the world outside the community.”

More Morrison It’s anecdotal, it’s the beginning of a story. It suggests gossip, intimacy. She wanted to set up an intimacy between the reader and the page. She writes: “I didn’t want the reader to have time to wonder “What do I have to do, to give up, in order to read this? What defense do I need to maintain?” She says that she wanted certain important facts to be emphasized: it’s just before the war (1941), it’s fall, or just before it, in the temperate zone, the speaker is a child. Foregrounding the absence of marigolds, the trivia of that, and backgrounding the information about Pecola’s baby makes the reader ask about the narrator. Can we trust the child? P. 22 of “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.”

Morrison – summing up She wanted to use a language that was speakerly, aural, colloquial She wanted signal that the language would be coded in black culture – that whites might be other to it and not fully understand it She wanted to create an intimacy with her reader She wanted to give voice to women and to girls, a point of view that she says was missing from African American literature She wanted to shape a silence, while breaking it

Doreatha Drummond Mbalia Claims that there are three beginnings to the text 1. The Dick and Jane Primer beginning, in its three manifestations. She says this represents the three classes of people we’ll meet in the novel – the rich, or well off, white or nearly so, Claudia’s family and other home-owning blacks, and the Breedloves. 2. The marigold page – which tells the whole story, presenting the outcome of the story to be told. Of Pecola’s suffering and her family’s dissolution. 3. Then the novel begins with “Nuns go by quiet as lust . . .” An introduction to the neighborhood, the story, the “how” of Pecola’s demise.

Shelly Wong Claims that Mbalia’s reading is naive. She believes that the breaking down of the Dick and Jane narrative isn’t about setting up class divisions, but instead the breaking “up – and down – [of] conventional syntactic hierarchies, conventional ways of ordering private and public narratives” signals her intention to “defamiliarize” the signifying terrain. Wong claims that “In refusing the terms of the dominant culture’s patterning of experience, one is in a position to restate the familiar, that is, to retrace the particular contours of one’s own experience, to regain the practice of one’s own narrative.” In other words, the breaking down of the Dick and Jane narrative is a signal that this is a new kind of story, a reconstruction of “truth” from a new perspective – a black perspecitve.

Why start with Autumn? Spring usually symbolizes the beginning of things. To start with autumn is implies death and decay, the end. She ends with summer, commonly associated with life in full bloom, but in her conclusion, there is death, dissolution, destruction.

Time? How does Morrison use time? There’s the adult Claudia, in the present. There’s the child Claudia, in the past. There’s a slippage in past time. Does the piece narrated by the omniscient narrator come chronologically before or after the story about Pecola’s coming to live with the McTeers?

Narrators – Clues to If there are no chapter headings, then the story is told by Claudia – either child or adult If there is a chapter heading, then the story is told by either an omniscient narrator or, in Pauline’s section, by Pauline herself. How does this work for you in terms of story telling?

Pick a Line-Paragraph Why was this significant to you as a reader?