What The Bluest Eye knows about Them: culture, race, identity

(Christopher Douglas)

Caroline Souza

Most of the characters family history establishes their motivations

Geraldine typological genealogy

“Funkiness” losing one’s funkiness is a fundamental part of the whitening process (white people no

longer carry this quality, whereas black people still do)

The body is what most threatens their (Geraldine’s and the type of people she represents) pursuit of

whiteness. It has to be constantly cared for.

Junior Resistance his body seems to resist his mother’s attempts to erase or mitigate racial

difference (almost an innate desire for blackness)

Performative Culture

(Geraldine and Junior do certain things and hold certain values believing that this

might define membership in a culture)

X

Essentialist Culture

(However, the text devalues such membership in favor of an essentialist culture which has its origin and true

value in race)

Geraldine “Them” rather than “One”

Typology of cultural loss (as she can’t change her race, she tries to change her culture, a

process described by Morrison as loss rather than gain)

It’s a Black Arts novel in the sense that it reclaims a “racial pride”. Given her race, Geraldine’s cultural

behavior and values are inappropriate Assimilation (which Morrison fights, believing that it’s not the

solution for “the Negro problem)

Zora Neale Hurston X Richard Wright

(Boasian anthropology) (Parkian sociology)

Two antagonist models (1940’s and 1950’s):

Cultural assimilation of racial minorities

(Civil Rights Movement)

X Race as the real origin of and authorization for cultural identity

(Hurston, Black Aesthetic and Black Power movements)

This dilemma formed the intellectual ground for The Bluest Eye, in the 1960’s

Pecola pathology of self-loathing

Clark’s dolls test “school segregation was distorting the minds of the black youngsters to the point of

making them self-hating”

Claudia diverges completely from these black students. She escapes the pathology identified by this

experiment, whereas Pecola is absolutely engulfed by it.

Morrison’s point Clark’s social constructions of white beauty indeed exist and exert an overwhelming

pressure, BUT the application of this phenomenon is bumpy, incomplete, complicated and resisted. (see p.

151)

She also criticizes Brown’s answer of integration (in the book, they go to a partially integrated school,

and the problems still exist, and are still strong)

Morrison and the Black Aesthetic reject Park’s assimilationism and the portrayal of Negro pathology

implied in Clark (see p. 152)

The Bluest Eye a Black Arts novel (rejection of protest, realism, and the premises of Brown)

Alliance between literary realism and social science conceptual circuit (social-science findings

influenced the composition of literary texts, which were then read as evidence of the original theory)

Morrison and the Black Arts movement refute this alliance in favor of separatism and racial authenticity

Funk (-iness) this word has a racial history

Morrison invites us to see funk as human in general (whiteness produces itself as non-funk; and

Geraldine struggles to lose this quality through sexual repression and body denyal)

Her work, especially in what concerns Geraldine’s typology, tries to affirm the insufficiency of the

sociological type and other deterministic ideas. In this sense, The Bluest Eye tests the limits of typology in

Geraldine just as it does its literary cousin, the stereotype (see p. 159)

The novel rehearses its own hermeneutic disappointments tries to put people into one kind of group

identity or another but finds that they don’t exactly fit (see p. 160)

The novel shows as that the concept of culture is as problematic as the typological division, as long as it

also works by eliminating a certain amount of alterity