SHIRLEY TEMPLE: THE WHITE GIRL’S WHITE GIRL

Idealization of the White Race

            Think back to that cheesy old movie, The Little Princess.  Shirley Temple was so cute you wanted to squeeze her.  Squeeze the very life out of her, in fact.  Morrison addresses black and white race relations through this metaphor of the darling/insufferable Shirley Temple, who embodies the white ideal that the black race aspires to but can never attain.  Pecola longs for Shirley Temple’s blue eyes, believing that whiteness (blonde hair and of course blue eyes) is synonymous with beauty, spiritual purity, and a sense of belonging. 

DON’T HATE ME BECAUSE I’M UGLY

Black People’s Degradation of Themselves

            Admit it: at some point in the course of The Bluest Eye, you really wanted to kick Pecola for allowing herself to be so helpless and self-hating.  And then you wanted to kick yourself for wanting to kick her. And so it goes.  Throughout the novel, black people isolate themselves from their white counterparts as a result of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, i.e., ugliness.  For example, Pecola’s mother, Mrs. Breedlove, works as a housekeeper for a white family that gives her the nickname of Polly, which she gratefully accepts because it fulfills her lifelong dream of “belonging.” Mrs. Breedlove’s home life eventually reaches a point where she prefers the fantasies of movie screens to the traumatic existence she endures with her drunkard husband; and the life she leads at her white family’s household is as close as she can get to a stable place in her unstable life.  At the same time, she demands that her own daughter call her the formal name of Mrs. Breedlove.  The nickname Polly, although affectionate, is also extremely patronizing. The title means that she has ceased to be herself and has chosen a role of submission; by not using her real name she accepts the role and the condescension that goes with it. By accepting it Mrs. Breedlove diminishes herself, and Morrison uses her as a symbol of the willing dminishment of the black race to roles that are something less than human.

EVERY MAN IS AN ISLAND

(Self) Isolation

            Black and white people see the differences among themselves in black and white....black and white, wink wink nudge nudge, roight, roight???  Through their idealization of whiteness, blacks effectively cut themselves off from whites, just as whites’ perception of their own superiority removes them from blacks.  Humanity is thus divided into two groups, with further divisions within each.  The black group makes distinctions on the basis of economic status, filial conflict, beauty, and “blackness” (i.e., value of skin tone; the whiter the better).  Pecola becomes an outcast of white and black society due to her poverty, dysfunctional family, internalized ugliness, and very dark skin. But Pecola is just an example; a representative of thousands of other ostracized blacks who are forced into the web that Morrison projects in her novel’s web of self-denial and hatred.           

STAND BY YOUR MAAAAAAYAN

Masculine vs. Feminine Roles in Society

            Whips, chains, and handcuffs...it’s all about submission!  Morrison outlines the role of women as one of submission, and the role of men as one of domination and tyranny. These roles are automatically forced upon women by societal convention; they never have a choice.  Nearly every male character is involved in the subjugation of women, whether individually or as a group.  Women are equally active in this process, as they allow themselves to be debased by their fathers, husbands, schoolmates, etc. Women also tend to subjugate other women whom they consider to be less than themselves. For example, the prostitutes are looked on as trash by Claudia’s mother. All of this this parallels the blacks’ willing subservience to whites and to their own conception of the “white ideal.”  The prostitutes, the strongest female characters, are ironically the most dependent on men since they must please men in order to survive. They act as if they have control over men, but they do this to achieve a state of illusionistic control over their lives which keeps them somewhat sane and stable.