Transcript The Bluest Eye - Colorado Mesa University

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?