The Look of The Bluest Eye

a pictorial aid to envisioning Morrison’s world

Dr. Nick Melczarek ● ENGL 252 ● Aspects of the Novel

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LORAIN, OHIO, AND THE “GREAT MIGRATION” The Great Migration began in the 1910s and continued through World War II in the 1940s. During this thirty year time period, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the South to the North. In the South, most African Americans had few rights and opportunities. Many of these people worked as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or as day laborers. With the beginning of World War I, a number of jobs opened in Northern industries. Many businesses increased production to meet wartime needs. Many white men joined the armed forces of the United States military and were sent to Europe to fight. While some African American men also enlisted in the armed forces, many others migrated to the North to fill these positions. Estimates vary, but possibly as many as 500,000 African Americans moved from the South to the North during the 1910s and the early 1920s.

Most African Americans who moved from the South to the North settled in cities, where the available jobs were located. Many Northern businesses advertised in Southern newspapers or sent recruiters to the South to hire African Americans. The businesses commonly offered to pay the workers' moving expenses as well as their first month's rent. Fewer people moved from the South to the North during the 1920s and the 1930s. But with the coming of World War II, there was another surge in the number of people moving from the South to the North. Thousands of African Americans who participated in the Great Migration settled in Cleveland, Youngstown, Toledo, and Akron and other Ohio cities. In 1920, African Americans made up only three percent of Ohio's population. Their numbers increased dramatically to five percent of the population by 1930. The growing new population of Ohio dramatically altered the state. Most African Americans in Ohio lived in segregated communities. [...] Violent encounters between African Americans and whites occasionally occurred in Ohio and other Northern states as well.

From the Ohio History Connection http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Great_Migration

Updated November 2017

cf The Bluest Eye, p.117

From the 1930s-1970s, the Dick and Jane series was an immensely popular and widely-distributed reader for children. Besides its simplified stories and language, the books presented an idealized image of children, families, and life — from an explicitly White, middle-class, nuclear (non-extended family), heterosexual perspective.

— In the opening section, how does each quotation of the same passage differ from the previous quotation? What happens to the meaning in each version? Which version opens most of the other sections of the novel? — What’s the effect of each section of the novel opening with a D&J quotation? What do they set us up for? — From Pecola’s perspective, what’s the further impact of such books and images?

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson starred as a Black butler opposite Shirley Temple in such films as The Little Colonel (1935), The Littlest Rebel (1935), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) and Just Around the Corner (1938). Their pairing—commercially and popularly successful, and THE FIRST INTERRACIAL PAIRING IN U.S. FILM HISTORY—highlighted idealized relations between two sets of social outsiders: children, and African-Americans. For children like Claudia and Pecola, though, what or whom do such images leave out?

Jane Withers played “tougher,” disrespectful, tomboy, less saccharine-sweet girl characters than Shirley Temple (especially in 1934’s Bright Eyes). Shirley Temple, idealized child-

star of early motion pictures

“Frieda brought her four graham crackers on a saucer and some milk in a blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup. She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face. Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never slid down under their heels. So I said, “I like Jane Withers.” They gave me a puzzled look, decided I was incomprehensible. And continued their reminiscing about old squint-eyed Shirley.”

—Claudia, The Bluest Eye (19)

Commodifying White girlhood: Shirley Temple merchandise

--What notions of childhood, girlhood, and “family” does such merchandise and its advertising project? --What effect does it have on the Black children of The Bluest Eye? --What kind(s) of consumption is/are at play here?

Representation = visibility & recognition

The Bluest Eye, pp.20-21 c.1941-1942

Early USA: slave-produced dolls from whatever materials were available. Pre- and post-Civil War: Black “Mammy” dolls (for almost exclusively White consumers) 1947: JACKIE ORMES, the first black female cartoonist, creates PATTY-JO, the first stylish African-American doll, including stylable hair and (then-)chic wardrobe 1968: CHRISTIE, the first black Barbie doll. Mattel Company originally used the same hair, head and body mold as for (White) Barbie

?

In John Stahl’s 1934 film adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s novel IMITATION OF LIFE, White widow Bea (megastar Claudette Colbert) and young daughter Jessie take in Black housekeeper Delilah (Louise Beavers) accompanied by a daughter named PEOLA whose light skin belies her being mixed race. Bea and Delilah go into business together, and time passes and complications ensue. Peola grows up, and because of her skin passes for White and rejects her Black heritage—fatally breaking her mother’s heart. At her mother’s funeral, Peola recants and embraces her Black heritage, despite her visible Whiteness. After some problems, Bea and Jessie reconcile, remembering Jessie’s obsessive love for a toy duck in her childhood.

The 1934 IMITATION OF LIFE is culturally significant for a number of reasons. Primarily, the film production went against the Hollywood HAYS ACTS, a 1927 series of injunctions against depictions or use of the following in films:

● Profanity (real or suggested) ● Nudity (real or suggested) ● Illegal drugs (use, selling, etc) ● Sex, any kind or situation (real or suggested) ● Sex organs, anybody’s or any kind (real or suggested) ● MISCEGENATION (sex or marriage between races) ● STDs (real or suggested) ● Childbirth (explicit or suggested) ● Ridicule of clergy ● Explicit offense to any race, nation, or creed

To the Hollywood HAYS OFFICE, Peola being visibly White but considered Black because of her parentage, made her an emblem of MISCEGENATION which they thought would offend (White) audiences—thereby also enforcing a specific negativity toward not only sexual desire across race boundaries, but also multi-racial self-identification.

The original script also included some profanity, and violence concerning the

scene of a near-lynching.

Other White film actors held up as examples of beauty in the novel.

Greta Garbo Ginger Rogers Clark Gable Jean Harlow What power does the novel indicate that movies and books have—especially on children? Who holds these figures up to children as examples? What are the effects, not only on children, but also on adults? If such constructed and artificial images carry such power, what is the result for those who do not (and never could) match them? What’s the effect of simply not being represented at all?

p.49-50 – the Mary Jane candies in Yacobowski’s store. -- Of what value are they to Pecola? -- When she consumes them, what does she believe she is also consuming?

Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882)

Quoted in The Bluest Eye p.168

Early race-theorist Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s four-volume Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines [Essay on the Inequality of Human Races] (1853-55) proposed the thesis of racial degeneration, whereby initially necessary admixtures of bloodlines that compensate each respective line’s essential deficiencies amount, eventually, to pollution. This schema not only perpetuated a hierarchy of racial ability and worth, but also established the standard essentialist “types” on which much racist thought still depends today. The ambiguities that riddled such theories guaranteed their use by U.S. white supremacists who pored over English translations of the first volume of de Gobineau’s Essai […] each of [whom] “scientifically” claimed not only the (simultaneous and contradictory) inferiority of Blacks and the threat they posed to White American society, but also the dangers of miscegenation and the necessity of maintaining racial “purity” (the “race instinct” defense). Racist groups in 1930s and 1940s Germany publicized and promoted de Gobineau’s studies, culminating in the adoption of his works, adjusted under Hitler’s approval, as primary school texts[.] Selections from [Madison Grant’s Gobineau-inspired 1916 text The Passing of the Great Race] found their way, with little alteration, into Hitler’s Mein Kampf.1

1 Melczarek, Nick. “Race and Ethnicity Studies” in The Encyclopedia of Literature & Politics: Censorship, Revolution, Writing. Vol2. Edited by Keith M. Booker. London: Greenwood P, 2005, pp.593-597.