Case Study: Toni Morrison ("The Bluest Eye")

I am a huge fan of Toni Morrison. Morrison is the last American to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1993. The Swedish committee that gave her the prize cited her many works of fiction, especially "The Bluest Eye," her first novel. (If you get a chance and you like ~~magical realism, please read it. "The Bluest Eye" is really life changing-- without exaggeration.) (**WARNING: in order to understand how her literature connects to the Civil Rights Movement, I have to spoil some of the books, so if you plan on reading them and would like to be surprised, stop reading here.)

"The Bluest Eye" is set in Lorain, Ohio in the years following the Great Depression and before World War II. Pecola Breedlove, a little black girl who is considered by many to be monstrously ugly, wishes beyond anything that she could have blue eyes so that she can be considered pretty like all the white girls. She wishes and prays, and she even goes to her local priest to make a bargain with God. In the end, though, a gut-wrenching twist of fate flips her life on its head, and she's raped by her father. When he splits, she has the child and goes mad.

How does any of this, you may wonder, connect to civil rights?

One of the aspects of "The Bluest Eye" that makes it absolutely brilliant is the way the Morrison analyzes and shows why Pecola is raped by her father. She delves deep into the history of slavery and the segregated South and crafts a story-line for Pecola's father in which he is born to a single mother and goes on a search for his estranged father in Ohio. When his father rejects him (a practice common in the African American community at the time), Pecola's father turns to alcohol. The night he stumbles home drunk, some 20 years later, and finds Pecola cleaning the dishes is when everything spirals out of control.

Morrison is bold in her analysis of Pecola's father's character. She links his abandonment to the dynamics of slave culture that were popular in the South. One of Morrison's conclusions is that because of the way that fathers were separated from their children when slave-owners traded slaves (but mothers were more often allowed to keep their children), a dynamic of paternal abandonment took hold in the African American community.

She then goes on to say that the way he abused her is a result of a psycho-sexual desire that is, in itself, a result of confusion. Black men were taught by white men to hate sex for fear that black men would impregnate white women. On the other hand, black men are humans, and, as humans, desire sex to the same degree as anyone else.

What sets Morrison apart from her contemporaries is her brash and often non-linear command of time in her novels. "The Bluest Eye" opens at the end of the crisis with Pecola, and then goes back in time, goes forward in time, and then back again. The furthest back the novel goes is into 1901, when Pecola's father runs away from a sharecropping collective to try and find his father. What this allows her to do is the assign each horrible thing that happens to Pecola some sort of historical origin.

Morrison does not just say that these things happen. She brings every negative part of segregation and racism to an extreme and shows how these extremes are a result of behavior and social dynamics popular during the times of slavery and Jim Crow.

If you're interested in how the Civil Rights Movement has influenced and is conveyed in popular culture, you should definitely check out Morrison's books. Most, if not all, of her stories explore the roots of racism in America and how that racism drives social dynamics.