Black Women In The Bluest Eye

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In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the means by which black women deal with their place in society manifests itself in primarily two ways. Some characters, such as Pecola and Pauline Breedlove, desire to shed the characteristics that make them black. They feel that if they are able to shed these qualities, they will be accepted by white society. Other characters, like Claudia and Mrs. MacTeer, tend to embrace their role as black women. Though they may long for change, they do not actively seek it and instead are able to endure the hardship they face on a daily basis. In order to fully capture this divided community, Morrison compares and contrasts mother-daughter pairs, uses imagery related to the color blue, and employs symbols such as flowers …show more content…
This explanation, however, is only partial. Pauline’s life, because of her disconnection from the motherline and its teachings, lacked a proud and strong sense of self that would have enabled her, in the words of the text, “to stand erect and spit the misery out on the street instead [of holding] it in where it could lap into her” (61). In “Black Girlhood and Black Womanhood” Jan Furman contends that “the problem at the center of Morrison’s writing is how to maintain an Afro-American cultural heritage once the relationship to the black rural south has been stretched thin over distance and generations.” As a young girl in Alabama, Pauline’s life was, literally, full of color: “My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out the fields. It be cool and yellowish. … And that streak of green them June bugs made on the trees” (92). Down home, “all of them colors was in [her]” (92). Newly married, she and Cholly move north to Ohio where Pauline experienced, in the words of the text, “the lonesomest time of [her] life” (93). Pauline talks about how with moving north “everything changed”: “It was hard to get to know folks up here, and I missed my people. I weren’t used to so much white folks” (93). The few women she meets snicker at her way of talking and are amused by her unstraightened hair (94). Alone and lonely Pauline turns to her husband Cholly for “reassurance, entertainment, for things to fill the vacant places” (93). It would seem that geographical dislocation, and the resulting separation from one’s heritage and family, are at the heart of Pauline’s emotional estrangement, which drives her to the movies and eventually leads her to a hatred of her black self. Separated from her
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