tragedy of the self-splitting—a psychological reading of toni morrison’s the bluest eye

Front. Lit. Stud. China 2010, 4(2): 298–320 DOI 10.1007/s11702-010-0014-9

Received November 20th, 2009

DING Yang ( ), KONG Xiangguo College of Humanities, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing 100029, China E-mail: [email protected]

RESEARCH ARTICLE

DING Yang, KONG Xiangguo

Tragedy of the Self-Splitting—A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

© Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag 2010

Abstract In the novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison digs out the negative impacts the mainstream culture exerts on the black people through the depiction of the tragedy of the Breedlove family. The Breedloves are always after their dreams of building an ideal ego in their self-pursuit, but the adverse circumstances in the white-dominated society give them no “Other” to project in their self-building, thus making their frail efforts all in vain. Under such a hostile environment, they are mentally forced to linger in their prolonged mirror stage and this is just the reason for their self-splitting. The Breedloves are stuck in the permanent contradiction of the Mirror Stage, and the insurmountable conflict between their ideal ego and their real life sets the tone for their tragic life. This article attempts to present the mental sufferings the white society sets for the blacks through an analysis of the life track of the Breedloves in accordance with Jacques Lacan’s theory. Keywords ideal ego, self-building, self-splitting, mirror stage, Toni Morrison

Introduction

As an eminent fighter for the blacks, Toni Morrison steps onto the world stage with the coming and flowering of American black literature. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison has always been regarded as a major twentieth-century black woman writer. Toni Morrison is working for and proud of her black people and her black culture.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison emphasizes that when black women accept white

Tragedy of the Self-Splitting—A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 299

middle-class values of beauty and strive to look like the white lady, the inevitable result will be destruction and silence.

The first scholarly article on Morrison did not appear until five years after the publication of The Bluest Eye, but during the past three decades a substantial body of scholarship has been published on Morrison’s works. Close analyses of The Bluest Eye abounds and critics comment on this novel from different perspectives. Many critics approach this novel from the sociological point of view: Linden Peach in his famous work Toni Morrison argues that “the success of The Bluest Eye lies in the approaches and perspectives it brings to an exploration of the impact of prevailing white ideologies on the black community” ;1 in Toni Morrison’s Fiction, Jan Furman proposes that The Bluest Eye is “about black girlhood and black womanhood”; 2 Kenneth Millard emphasizes family value in his analysis. He maintains that family is “perceived as fundamental to the happiness and success of the individual”3 and in the novel “Pecola is shown to be the victim of, even the product of, violent tensions within her family, the Breedloves, who perceive themselves to be ugly beyond redemption.” It is from her parents that Pecola inherits a profoundly negative self-image and becomes a victim to it herself. Other critics interpret this novel from the point of view of black feminist criticism and holds that Pauline and Pecola are “Morrison’s sympathetic study of violations of the soul and perversions of potential perpetrated by racism and sexism.”4

Psychoanalysis, as a branch of human knowledge, can also be used in the interpretation of literary works since “The writing of fiction inevitably addressed the material conditions, the cultural context and the psychological terms of its own production,”5 writes Michele Wallace. In fact, psychological complexity of a literary work is also an attraction for the reader, and theories of some giants in psychoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud’s “Oedipus Complex” or Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage,” which are already widely employed in literary criticism, provide insightful clues for analyzing these psychological problems. Daniel Gunn’s Psychoanalysis and Fiction published by Cambridge University in 1988 contributes a lot in the application of psychoanalytical theories to literary works.

Recently, some critics attempt to apply some psychoanalytical theories in their analyses of The Bluest Eye. For example, J. Brooks Bouson in his Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, And Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison emphasizes the impact of shame and trauma on the individual psyche and the family structure. 1 Linden Peach, 1995, p. 22. 2 Jan Furman, 1996, p. 12. 3 Kenneth Millard, 2000, p. 8. 4 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 1997, p. 122. 5 Michele Wallace, 1990, p. 226.

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He illustrates that The Bluest Eye “dramatizes an extreme form of the shame-vulnerability and shame-anxiety suffered by African Americans in white America.”6 Pin-chia Feng interprets the novel as a story for girls “constantly under the gaze of the blue eye of dominant ideology.”7 Barbara Hill Rigney’s The Voices of Toni Morrison devotes one entire chapter “Hegar’s Mirror: Self and Identity” to an analysis of the psychological problems in some of Morrison’s novels, The Bluest Eye included, but the problems discussed are mainly about issues like the function of naming or black community in the characters’ growth.

All the above works provide some insights into the understanding of the Breedlove family’s story, but a common problem among them is that they focus only on a particular point such as the “shame” or “gaze,” some of their arguments are subjective ones not based on the life experiences of the characters, so they cannot give a comprehensive and convincing analysis, such as the reasons for the tragedy of the Breedlove family.

Commenting on the novel The Bluest Eye in her article “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Morrison says “The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the content of The Bluest Eye.”8 This immediately reminds readers of Jacques Lacan’s theory of “Mirror Stage,” and indeed this theory is also appropriate in a psychoanalytical reading of The Bluest Eye in that the Breedloves’ self-splitting results from their prolonged mirror stage.

Lacan’s theory of mirror stage shows the permanent spiritual conflict between people’s ideal ego and his real existence. As this kind of conflict is typical and prevalent to those black people in the white mainstream cultural oppression, the theory of Lacan is helpful in depiction and analysis of the black people’s mental problem, such as the problems the Breedloves suffered in the novel. So, in this article, the theory of mirror stage of Jacques Lacan is introduced to the textual analysis in order to mirror the mental problems of the black people through the analysis of their life experience.

Black people’s quest for the self is a recurrent theme in Toni Morrison’s novels, as she once declared that “The search for love and identity runs through almost everything I write.”9 This article attempts to explore the tragedy of the splitting self in Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye in the light of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage.

6 J. Brooks Bouson, 2000, p. 25. 7 Pin-chia Feng, 1998, p. 51. 8 Toni Morrison, 1984, p. 385. 9 Dana Micucci, 1994, p. 278.


Psychoanalysis and Its Applicability in the Analysis of The Bluest Eye

With the development of the black people’s civil rights movement and the progress of black literature, more and more critics have come to realize that the psychological well-being, apart from the physical health and the satisfaction of the basic living requirements, is much more important and urgent for the black people to get. Being oppressed by the unfriendly environment for such a long time, the Afro-Americans who have shattered the slavery system now face the much more challenging problem of gaining an equal world and enjoying healthy mental state by shattering the omnipresent mental oppression inflicted by the white people and the mainstream society. For them, the true “freedom” can be achieved only on the basis of the indispensable part of the “psychological well-being.” So, digging out and presenting the existing mental state of the black people is becoming something of great importance nowadays. Through the method of psychological reading, one can get the measurement of one’s mental health state and find out the problem of one’s mental world.

Psychoanalysis was born in Vienna by the end of the 19th century and spread with the contribution of Freud and his students and opponents, among whom Jacques Lacan is one of those Freudian followers who plays the most important role in the further psychological development. Among his many psychological theories which exert far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities, Jacques Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” theory expounded in his article “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” which was published in English in Écrits: A Selection, first translated by Alan Sheridan in 1977, is universally considered as his most famous center contribution to the whole world. The key word “mirror stage (le stade du miroir)” is the point in an infant's life when he may recognize his “self” in a mirror.

The “Mirror Stage” theory concerns the behavior of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this stage, Lacan believes that the child is developing a capability of recognizing his mirror image. To Lacan, baby in his first few months has no notion of the complete concept of “I” and is unable to clearly separate “I” and “the Other.” In the baby’s eyes, the body is only something in bits and pieces instead of being something whole. So, in this period, the baby has no sense of self at all. Lacan argues that one of the formative moments of a child’s development is when he catches sight of himself in a mirror. As time goes on, the child passes through “the mirror stage,” he catches sight of himself in a mirror, either actually or figuratively, and identifies the image as himself. In Lacan’s words, “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification,


in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.”10 Seeing his own reflected image allows the child to hypothesis his own identity, and to view that identity as unified and stable. However, Lacan regards this identification of self with the image in the mirror as “misrecognition” because “the image is a substitute for the self, a signifier of the self, not the self itself.”11 Whatever the “mirror stage” is, “it marks a fundamental gap between the subject and its own self or imago which can never be bridged”12 and “This stage, called the mirror stage by Lacan, is not really a stage because it is never really over.” 13 Commenting on the use of mirrors in Toni Morrison’s novels, Barbara Hill Rigney’s words are much the same as Lacan’s: “but the greater lie is that illusion of unified selfhood, which mirrors also perpetrate, for the ‘self’ in Morrison’s fiction…is always multiple, contradictory, and ambiguous—if, in fact, a self can be said to exist at all.”14 Nonetheless, it is until this recognition of his image in the mirror that the child comes to have his first anticipation of himself as a separate individual, differentiated from the rest of the world.

This is a natural phenomenon to the infants and it also should happen in the early years of a child. Possessing a single coherent image, even if the image is a kind of lie, is a necessary stage in the formation of one’s subjectivity and identity. But according to Lacan, there can also be some exceptions due to the unfriendly environment or other forces which hamper the child’s passing through the “mirror stage,” thus influencing the natural mental development of human beings. Lacan argues that people’s sense of self is more fully constituted in the infant’s relations with others. The infant is dependent upon others to provide him with a mirror, just as the adult he will later become is dependent on others to provide a mirror stage. This constitution of people’s sense of self comes in “the dialectic of identification with the other,”15 whereby for a child, there is “no sense of a separate self, since the ‘self’ is always alienated in the Other.”16 The identity of the child is shaped in profound and enduring ways by his adopting the visual identity offered by other people (in particular, by mother, father, and siblings), thus linking his identity to socially elaborated situations. Unfavorable social situations will definitely have some very severe consequences on one’s sense of self, it can even bring some negative effects on one’s mental state permanently and lead to a split self. It is just the problem that troubles the black people. So the

10 Jacques Lacan, 1989, p. 2. 11 Ruth Robbins, 2000, p. 114. 12 Slavoj Žižek, 2003, p. 12. 13 Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon, 2003, p. 308. 14 Barbara Hill Rigney, 1991, p. 35. 15 Jacques Lacan, 1989, p. 2. 16 Toril Moi, 2002, p. 98.


theories of Lacan give a perfect viewpoint for the perception of human beings, and they are especially helpful in depicting those mentally suffering black people in the novel of Toni Morrison.

Pauline Breedlove’s Failure of Self-Pursuit

In this novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows what can happen to a person alienated from positive black traditions through the image of Pauline Breedlove. The story is “a story for girls growing up without positive images of themselves reflected in the mirror held up by mainstream society, and constantly under the gaze of the blue eye of dominant ideology.”17 Pauline Breedlove, mother of the family, who is obviously such a victim of the suppressive circumstances, serves as a contrast to the normal mother figure who nurtures the family. She is not only a victim of the oppressed world who suffers from a splitting self, but also the one who inflicts more sufferings to her family members, especially to her daughter Pecola Breedlove.

Pauline’s tragic life story can be categorized into four stages according to the theories of Jacques Lacan. As to this famous French psychiatrist, the psychological phase of “Mirror Stage” in an infant’s self-development process is not an absolutely positive factor. Lacan argues that the “mirror stage” of a child is not limited within the phase of infanthood. On the contrary, it stands for a kind of permanent contradiction in her mental world. That is to say, the subject is permanently captured by his image.18 So the “mirror stage” can be a lasting phase, through which a concept of “I” is made by means of identification with his fellow-beings. Without a reflected image for reference, the infant cannot grow out of that psychologically shattered image of “I” and cannot form a proper notion of “Self.” This process can be affected by the social circumstances and other unfriendly factors. As a sufferer of the oppressive world, Pauline’s trial of self-building fails and her tragic life of the splitting self become natural.

Experts in psychoanalysis often pay great attention to the early experiences of a person, for they can exert an everlasting influence on one’s psychological state. So an analysis of Pauline’s psychology as a child is of great importance. Physically speaking, Pauline Breedlove is a disabled one:

Although she was the ninth of eleven children and lived on a ridge of red Alabama clay seven miles from the nearest road, the complete indifference with which a rusty nail was met when it punched clear through her foot during

17 Pin-chia Feng, 1998, p. 51. 18 Dylan Evans, 1996, p. 115.


her second year of life saved Pauline Williams from total anonymity. The wound left her with a crooked, archless foot that flopped when she walked—not a limp that would have eventually twisted her spine, but a way of lifting the bad foot as though she were extracting it from little whirlpools that threatened to pull it under.19 This disability makes her drift apart from her family, because Pauline is pained

that she does not have a nickname and blames it on the family’s pity for her, for this “slight deformity” she suffers. This lack of a nickname is a very important factor in the development of Pauline, just as Trudier Harris says “Other traditions relevant to the shaping of black character are nicknaming and name calling, which again reflect patterns of caring and incorporation into community.”20 Toni Morrison also says that “That’s a huge psychological scar”21 for a black without name. Nicknaming is an old tradition in the black community. As the only child who has no nickname and no funny jokes and anecdotes to tell, Pauline feels excluded. Nobody in her house had ever remarked on her food preferences and she is definitely ignored by her family members. Her relatives try to avoid any possible hurt to her by bringing her up in a way different from other kids of the family. But this special care to her from the relatives makes her lose her sense of belonging to the family. “She never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged to any place.”22 To her, this special care which makes her a special member of the family only deprives her of the right of belonging to her family and makes her an outsider of the family.

According to Jacques Lacan, the child’s development of the notion “I” and the sense of a complete “Self” depend on an effort to find “the Other” as a reflection of his identity. Although “the child at this point is relatively uncoordinated, and if ambulatory, is still striving to improve its sense of balance and muscular control,”23 the child is also able to recognize the image in the mirror. Through this effort, the infant can form a complete picture of the “Self” psychologically. If this indispensable situation cannot be achieved, the process of self-building is surely to be prolonged.

Although Pauline has parents and relatives in her house, she dose not enjoy the parental love from them. This state of spiritual orphanage is the key reason for Pauline’s psychological tragedy. According to Jacques Lacan, a child used to regard his mother and himself as an inseparable unit, but with the development of his self-consciousness, the split and separation between “the mother” and the “I” 19 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 88. 20 Trudier Harris, 1988, p. 71. 21 Thomas Le Clair, 1994, p. 126. 22 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 88. 23 Jean Michel Rabate, 2003, p. 225.


become self-evident. The child loses his unity with “Mother” and thus comes his “primordial lack.”

So at this growing phase, Pauline Breedlove’s struggle for self-building from her family members fails. For the family members do not give her anything to depend upon as a reflection to confirm her identity and do not give her a clear sense of identity. Her desire of being accepted and loved by her family is opposite to her real solitary living state. So in Pauline’s world, there is an insurmountable contradiction between her real physical and psychological solitary state and the harmonious family atmosphere and the sense of belonging that she dreams of. And this kind of contradiction is just the psychological state of the infant in his “mirror stage.” That is to say, this insurmountable contradiction on her mind makes Pauline linger in her psychological infanthood and forms her “primordial lack.” That is the basic reason for her life-long tragedy.

Pauline’s ideal self in her mind is a healthy person who lives in a harmonious family. That is the perfect image she always longs for. She wants to set some rules for her family to live by in order to avoid the chaotic state in her house. She likes to arrange things:

She liked, most of all, to arrange things. To line things up in rows—jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step, sticks, stones, leaves—and the members of her family let these arrangements be. When by some accident somebody scattered her rows, they always stopped to retrieve them for her, and she was never angry, for it gave her a chance to rearrange them again. Whatever portable plurality she found, she organized into neat lines, according to their size, shape, or gradations of color. Just as she would never align a pine needle with the leaf of a cottonwood tree, she would never put the jars of tomatoes next to the green beans.24 This kind of addiction shows her desire for clear rules. Pauline is tired of the

confusion she lives in and tries to rearrange things and put them in order. After her family moves to Kentucky, Pauline assumes the responsibility of house-cleaning for her working mother. She enjoys doing this kind of job, because “[t]he stillness and isolation both calmed and energized her. She can arrange and clean without interruption until two o’clock…”25 But born in such a black family with low social status, she is too fragile to do anything with her disabled body. This unsolvable problem puzzles her, and forces her to step out of her family to find a substitute in order to rebuild her ideal self. That is the first

24 Toni Morrison, 1970, pp. 88–89. 25 Ibid., p. 90.


phase of her life track and also sets the tragic tone for her whole life. The second life-stage of Pauline Breedlove starts from her falling in love with

her future husband Cholly. Pauline gives her heart to the man the moment she meets him, because he “was bending down tickling her broken foot and kissing her leg” (p. 91). This is something of great significance to Pauline, as she used to blame her foot as the key reason for her sense of alienation and unworthiness. And to her, Cholly’s kissing and touching her broken leg are much better than her family member’s kindly avoidance of the fact, because he faces up to her disabled living state.

He talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time, Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset.26 This kind of honest acceptance makes Pauline believe that she could build up a

real family with this man and establish a sense of self from him. According to Jacques Lacan, a person’s self-building is a kind of process that

depends on the reflection of other people to build a successive sense of self. The so called character and personality are just built on this assimilation of the self from others. Without this, one cannot form a real sense of self. And now, to Pauline, meeting Cholly is just giving her a chance to face this kind of possibility.

As a girl in her puberty, Pauline puts her enthusiasm to the fantasy of love naturally. She becomes more sensitive and care-laden and sets her hope of self-building onto love and man: “Fantasies about men and love and touching were drawing her mind and hands away from her work. Changes in weather began to affect her, and did certain sights and sounds. These feelings translated themselves to her in extreme melancholy.”27

The youthful dream of Pauline makes her put her craving for self-building on the target of her love. Pauline’s infatuation for Cholly cannot be simply interpreted as a matter of love. To Pauline, Cholly is much more like a “Presence” or a “Code”:

The someone (Cholly) had no face, no form, no voice, no odor. He was a simple Presence, an all-embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest. It did not matter that she (Pauline) had no idea of what to do and say to the Presence—after the wordless knowing and the soundless touching, her

26 Ibid., p. 92. 27 Ibid., p. 90.


dreams disintegrated. But the Presence would know what to do. She had only to lay her head on his chest and he would lead her away to the sea, to the city, to the woods … forever.28 The beautiful picture in Pauline’s mind is a vivid description of her dreamed

future. The man in front of her, Cholly, is merely a powerful symbol to her to bolster her up in the process of self-pursuing. “He came big, he came strong, he came with yellow eyes, flaring nostrils, and he came with his own music.”29 And he came with a hope for her to build up a normal life with him.

But unfortunately, Cholly himself is only a member of the suppressed group of the black people. He can not assume the tough responsibility of supporting the dream of Pauline. After their marriage, Pauline and Cholly went to the North to earn their living. The mainstream culture of the white society leaves them no room for shelter. The pressure of work and life dealt a heavy blow on Cholly’s hope for a better life and shattered his fragile sense of self. The unhealthy mental state of Cholly makes him fail to maintain a healthy family life and even more difficult for him to bolster Pauline’s dream up. Pauline is despised by snooty black women who snicker at her lameness, her unstraightened hair, and her provincial speech. So the second phase of Pauline’s self-building is bound to fail just because she builds her dream of the perfect family life and living state on the basis of the reflection of Cholly who turns out to be an impotent man.

The third stage of Pauline’s tragic life is during her period of pregnancy. The unexpected coming of her first child gives Pauline not only another chance for establishing her identity, but also gives her an opportunity to rebuild her family life:

One winter Pauline discovered she was pregnant. When she told Cholly, he surprised her by being pleased. He began to drink less and come home more often. They eased back into a relationship more like the early days of their marriage, when he asked if she were tired or wanted him to bring her something from the store.30 But the mainstream culture changes everything for her. In order to avoid the

sense of loneliness when Cholly is out to work, Pauline goes to the cinema and that seals her fate. With the movies, “her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was

28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 91. 30 Ibid., p. 96.


introduced to another—physical beauty.”31 The world presented by the movies to Pauline is so attractive that she can find her dreamed life in it. The harmonious family life and the pure love of the white people in the movies are just the ideal life Pauline cares for. She refreshes her dreams of romantic love and becomes initiated to the standards of physical beauty represented by the white visual icons on the silver screen and she even learns “all there was to love and all there was to hate.”32 She is seduced by glamorous illusions produced by the Hollywood film industry into an identification with the white ideology of beauty.

Pauline’s identification with the white ideology of beauty is troublesome, because “this manner of identification would uphold both positionalities of desire, both active and passive aims: desire for the other, and the desire to be desired by the other.”33 With all the illusions the movies give her, Pauline tries to fill the aching void with the “white picture shows” and after she absorbs “in full”—that is, internalizes—the white beauty standards conveyed in Hollywood films, she is “never able … to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty.”34 Pauline identifies with white movie stars—she even affects a Jean Harlow hairstyle, she gradually sinks into some more severe problems. “Them picture gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard.”35 According to the standard shown in the movies, Pauline finds her own family life unbearable for her. She tries to change the situation. She does some makeup to make herself look like the lady in movies in order to continue her dream in real life, as if the appearance of a white lady is the key point for gaining an ideal life. She quarrels with Cholly all the time when he shows disapproval of her efforts. This is a dangerous sign for Pauline, for she cannot distinguish between the real living state and her ideal life. She just willingly mixes them into one. Pauline’s confused mental state is just a sign of her splitting self. According to Lacan, a person’s “desire is desire of the Other”36 rather than “desire the Other.” It is obvious that in order to find a substitute for her lack, Pauline builds up an idealized image of self as an object for her to project: she wants to be a lady in perfect family life with good order which is also the desire of the white ladies in the movies. The contradiction between her idealized self and the reality makes her self split and also renders it impossible for her to establish a normal relationship with other people since she cannot accept them as what they are. Even in high heels, makeup, and a Harlow hairstyle, Pauline is a failure. “In equating physical beauty with virtue, she 31 Ibid., p. 97. 32 Ibid. 33 Teresa de Lauretis, 1984, p. 143. 34 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 97. 35 Ibid. 36 Jacques Lacan, 1989, p. 345.


stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap”,37 which she deposits on her husband and children who fail by “the scale of absolute beauty … she absorbed in full from the silver screen.”38 The reason for this is that Pauline still lingers at the “mirror stage,” she cannot surpass this process because she is still trapped into the contradiction between her ideal ego and her real living state and needs an “Other” to confirm her own identity.

At this time, although there are signs of Pauline’s self-splitting, she still has the power for self-examination. She feels uneasy for what she has done to her family, she feels sorry for her husband and son and tries to change the situation. So, when she is pregnant for the second time, the coming birth of her second child provides her with another chance for confirming her identity as a mother. When she gets her second child, Pecola, Pauline tells herself to love the girl no matter whether she is beautiful or not. She wants to rebuild a harmonious family with the coming of this child:

When I had the second one, a girl, I (Pauline)’member I said I’d love it no matter what it looked like. She looked like a black ball of hair. I don’t recollect trying to get pregnant that first time. But that second time, I actually tried to get pregnant. Maybe ‘cause I’d had one already and wasn’t scared to do it. Anyway, I felt good, and wasn’t thinking on the carrying, just the baby itself. I used to talk to it, whilst it be still in the womb. Like good friends we were.39 But her experience in the hospital devastates her dream. Pauline’s feeling that

she is “ugly”—that is to say, inferior and defective—is reinforced during Pecola’s birth. When she is about to deliver Pecola, Pauline overhears the white doctors at the hospital when they refer to black women like her as animallike: “They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses.”40 The doctors do not speak to her as they do with the white women in their nice friendly talks. Although she tries her best to behave like a white woman, to give birth to a child in a big hospital and even to moan awfully to show her pain like white woman, she still cannot gain the respect or sympathy from the white people to a pregnant woman. At that time, Pauline is deeply hurt. She comes to realize that even if she got a child, she is totally different from those white women and cannot enjoy a life of order like them. The gap between her idealized self and her real situation expands and from that time on, she is forced to give up her hope of establishing her self through the child. Shamed by the doctors, who view her as an object of

37 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 97. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 98. 40 Ibid., p. 99.


contempt, Pauline unconsciously equates her child with excrement: that is, with something dirty and disgusting. And the fact that Pauline describes her newborn baby as ugly—“Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly”41—suggests that from the outset, Pauline projects her own sense of ugliness onto her daughter.

The fourth stage is the determinative part of Pauline’s life. Because of her assimilation of the values from the movies, she becomes a prey to the mainstream white culture. At that stage, the white people’s ideal life full of love and joy in the movies becomes the image in the mirror as “the other” for her to project in her self-building: “She developed a hatred for things that mystified or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and harked back to simpler times for gratification.”42 The mainstream culture, the white standard of beauty and love become the things she craves for. She finds it much easier for her to accept the white people’s convictions than to create a new set of rules by herself.

Then, she goes back to the church and learns to be a pious woman. She views herself as an upright Christian woman, and her family members, especially her husband, become the evil things for her to endure, to punish to set off her holy responsibility. She is even in urgent need of their degeneration and regards enduring and punishing these downfalls as a holy religious task God sets for her: “At prayer meeting she moaned and sighed over Cholly’s ways, and hoped God would help her keep the children from the sins of the father… Holding Cholly as a model of sin and failure, she bore him like a crown of thorns, and her children like a cross.”43

Up to now, Pauline is completely captured by the white culture. She wants to live the way the white people live and to resist her black identity. The white people’s ideal life becomes “the Other” for her to project. As Lacan put it, the child regards the image in the mirror as himself. He finishes the process of self-building through the identification with the reflection in the mirror. So “the Other” is an indispensable object on which the child relies for self-building. To Pauline, the reflected image in the mirror she craves for in her self-building is white-standardized. Physically, she is a black woman, but mentally, she feels more comfortable with the white. That insurmountable conflict between the reality and the idealized life greatly suppresses Pauline and speeds up the process of her self-splitting.

The conflict is deepened after her acceptance to work as a servant in a well-to-do white family. She finds everything in her dreamed life there and pours all her enthusiasm into her new job and her “new family.” Now, the well-ordered

41 Ibid., p. 100. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.


white family becomes “the Other” for her ideal ego to project. She loves her white master’s family much more than her own one. She finds her new identity there: “She (Pauline) looked at their houses, smelled their linen, touched their silk draperies, and loved all of it… She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs.”44

That is, only when Pauline embraces her black shame by assuming the inferior role of the ideal servant at the home of the white Fishers is she able to meet the goals of her ideal self and win the approbation she desires. When she acts as the representative of the Fishers, the creditors and service people—who would normally humiliate her—respect her and even find her intimidating. She tries to keep the “white family” neat and tidy while leaving her own “black house” in a dirty and chaotic state. Pauline finds haven, hope, life and meaning as a servant to the white, blond, blue-eyed, clean, rich family to which she dedicates her love and her respect for an orderly life that poverty does not afford. Conversely, she comes to view the reality of her own family with disgust and almost hatred:

More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man—they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. Here she could arrange things, line things up in neat rows. Here her foot flopped around on deep pile carpets, and there was no uneven sound. Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise… Power, praise, and luxury were hers in this household.45 She finds everything she longs for here in her master’s house. She is trapped

into an illusion of being a member of the family. Her desires in her childhood which cannot be satisfied in her black family find their way here in the white house. She even fulfills her dream of lining-up things to reach a neat order. This illusion of being accepted by her ideal family life gives her another identity. She even gets a nickname “Polly” here and that is one thing she never had in her black house. Without a nickname, Pauline feels unclaimed by her family in any special way. When her white masters gives her a nickname, “they gave her what she never had”46 and thereby claim her attention and her loyalty more so than anyone in her family had done. This contrast illustrates the potential identity-shaping purpose such naming provides. Being “Mrs. Breedlove” even to her husband and children, she is “Polly” to the white family for whom she works. This contrast shows that Pauline has diminished herself through her obsequious

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 101. 46 Ibid.


dedication to whiteness. Pauline desperately clings to her relationship with the Fishers, she becomes more and more alienated from her family, from the black community. By giving up her family and retreating into the private world of snow-white beauty and order in the Fisher household, Pauline cuts the final link to her racial identity.

The harmonious family life of the Fishers is the goal for Pauline to pursue in her self-building, but as an outsider of the mainstream culture, it is impossible for her to blend in with the white family and gain an identity there. When Pauline loses a tooth and gives up trying to imitate white movie heroines, she resigns herself to poverty and ugliness. Once she loses faith in the possibility for change, she gives up beliefs that have tied her to black communities. Giving up her efforts to get her ideal ego in her own black family reflects, in part, her ultimate transference of identification from blacks to whites, as illustrated in her worship of the “little pink-and-yellow” Fisher girl. Her severing of ties to the folk culture in turn short circuits any connections she could pass on to Pecola that would aid her in reconnecting to that culture. She suffers from the conflict between her status quo and her dreamed ideal self all the time. Her unsatisfied desire separates her from her black family, makes her forget the natural love to her husband and children and sets a tragic life for herself and her family members. In her life track, Pauline tries to find “the other” to confirm her own identity in her mirror stage and tries to accomplish her self-building four times, but all of her efforts lead to nowhere. It is her splitting self that is mainly responsible for her tragic life.

Pecola Breedlove’s Tragedy of Self-splitting

Jan Furman’s comment that “The Bluest Eye directs a critical gaze at the process and symbols of imprinting the self during childhood and at what happens to the self when the process is askew and the symbols are defective”47 undoubtedly refers to the identity crisis of Pecola Breedlove, a little black girl who longs for a pair of blue eyes — “symbols of imprinting the self”, when she falls victim to the standard set by an American society that ascribes what is beautiful to a certain image of white women.

Compared with her parents, the life of Pecola Breedlove is a total and complete tragedy. She is more of a victim to the dominant white mainstream culture. During her short life, she never has any opportunity to have a taste of the love and respect she so earnestly desires. Instead what she has to face every day is her unloving childhood, her repudiation by nearly everyone she encounters. In

47 Jan Furman, 1996, p. 12.


her self-imposed escape and self-abnegation, she gradually steps on the road to insanity. She can find her desired happiness only in her mere illusions.

From the moment of her birth, Pecola’s life is bound to be a tragedy. The fact that her mother Pauline describes her as ugly—“Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly”48—suggests that from the outset the mother projects her own sense of ugliness onto Pecola. Pecola’s ideal family life is the kind of harmonious life described in the white’s primer, and her ideal self is like Jane in the primer who enjoys parental love in a happy family, yet her family fails to conform to the standards by which the beauty and happiness of the primer family are measured: the relationship among her family members is indifferent, and her parents often fight each other in her presence. She craves for love and care, her question to her friend Claudia and Frieda “how do you get somebody to love you?”49 is a salient example for it, yet she cannot get true love from her parents, and this mental orphanage contributes to her tragedy. Little Pecola cannot understand this, she can do nothing about it but to blame the family’s miserable life on her ugliness: she looks down upon her self, she even hates herself, and she always wants to change herself for a better life.

Like her parents, Pecola wrongly takes white people’s life as her ideal, as the “other” to project in her self-pursuit. But unlike her parents, she does not have the ability to undertake any effort in self-building—no matter how futile they are. Due to her lack of self-consciousness, she is accustomed to obedience and acceptance. She always judges and evaluates herself according to the white people’s standard, thus falling into a serious mental crisis caused by the conflict between her ideal and her reality.

Pecola is a victim of her “crippled and crippling family.”50 Her personal experience is marked by violence and lovelessness, as represented by the brutal but darkly formal “battle” between her parents in their storefront home. The emptiness of her parents’ lives and their own negative self images are particularly hurtful. Ironically named since they breed not love but violence and misery, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove eventually destroy their daughter, whose victimization is a bold symbol of their own despair and frustrations.

Pecola’s conclusion that people with white skin and blue eyes are superior is reinforced by her mother, who becomes infatuated with white women’s beauty and so disdainful of her own race that all she can see is her daughter’s “ugly” blackness. When Pauline transfers her attention and love from Pecola to the “little pink-and-yellow girl”51 she cares for, she permanently fixes in her

48 Ibid., p. 100. 49 Ibid., p. 29. 50 Toni Morrison, 1994, p. 210. 51 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 87.


daughter’s mind the notion that love is reserved for little white girls with blue eyes as Phyllis R. Klotman aptly points out that “Through her mother’s blurred vision of the pink, white, and golden world of the Fishers, Pecola learns that she is ugly, unacceptable, and especially unloved.”52 Pauline ultimately transfers to her daughter her own general feeling of separateness and unworthiness and also her borrowed ideas of beauty, which lead inevitably to self-contempt. From her mother, Pecola learns to love and internalize white ideology. Like Pauline, Cholly transfers his own stigmatized racial identity—his own feeling of humiliation and defeat—to his daughter. He remains incapable of providing the fertile, parental soil a child needs to grow and develop a positive sense of self. His rape of Pecola is disastrous, which speeds up the process of self-splitting on the part of Pecola.

For Pecola, Cholly’s love is corrupt and tainted, but Pauline is unloving. After the rape Morrison subtly alludes to the difference: “So when the child regained consciousness, she was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her.”53 Although it is Cholly that physically raped Pecola, Pauline has ravaged the child’s self-worth and left her vulnerable to assaults of various proportions.

What Pecola learns from her parents—that like them she is ugly—is confirmed by the hostile gaze and insulting speech of others. Pecola repeatedly encounters people who confirm her belief that blackness is a curse. Noticing that the white shopkeeper who sells her candy is reluctant even to touch her by taking money from her hand, she concludes that the “distaste must be for her, her blackness.”54 Further contributing to Pecola’s decline is the prejudice that divides not only blacks and whites but members of the black community from each other. The light-skinned Maureen Peel briefly befriends Pecola, and then turns on her, yelling “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”55

As a little black girl, Pecola is unseen because people refuse to see her. Pecola’s invisibility is an evidence of her lack of self image when facing the dominant white society. Pecola regularly stares into her mirror “trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike.”56 The irony here is that the secret is not to be found within herself, but within the culture that defines her as ugly. Pecola is destroyed by this vision of herself as self that the mirror reflects. The mirror lies in telling her that she is not beautiful, for mirrors represent only white standard of beauty which she accepts blindly. In Pin-chia Feng’s words, Pecola is 52 Phyllis R. Klotman, 1979, p. 124. 53 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 129. 54 Ibid., p. 42. 55 Ibid., p. 61. 56 Ibid., p. 39.


“educated by the sense of racial ‘lack’ through a mirror stage of racial inferiority into unconditional admiration of white beauty.”57 She attributes the reason why nobody cares or loves her to her blackness, and wishes to get rid of her black identity: “‘Please, God,’ she whispered into the palm of her hand. ‘Please make me disappear.’”58 Here, Pecola’s attempt to bodily disappear also marks the beginning of her experiences of her depersonalization: that is, her “estrangement from world and self.”59

But her eyes would not go away. She longs for blue eyes like those of the white girls—“symbols of imprinting the self.” Obsessed with her own ugliness and with an overwhelming desire to be white, blue-eyed, and beautiful, Pecola concludes that such beauty would bring her love. For the first time in the novel Pecola’s intense desire for blue eyes, which is implicit in her insatiable consumption of milk from the Shirley Temple cup, and her rationalization for this desire are revealed: she wants blue eyes so she can be beautiful and her family will be transformed miraculously into a loving one. In her imagination, if she got a pair of blue eyes, all the people around her would love her and there would be nothing bad in her life: “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they say, ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.”60

Yet the society deals a heavy blow to her beautiful dreams. Toni Morrison says that “in The Bluest Eye, I try to show a little girl as a total and complete victim of whatever was around her.”61 It is not difficult to see Pecola as a victim of the external society. Patrice Cormier-Hamilton, for instance, claims that The Bluest Eye serves as an example of “black naturalism” and in the character of Pecola, Morrison most emphatically “incorporates the naturalist theme of the ‘waste of individual potential’ due to environment circumstances.” 62 Little Pecola gradually finds that all the people around dislike her and almost everyone is hostile to her: Little black boys jeer and taunt her with “Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked,”63 defensively ignoring the color of their own skins. Teachers ignore Pecola in the classroom, giving their attention to a “high-yellow dream child with long brown hair”64 and “sore green eyes.”65 And even this same high-yellow Maureen Peal declares to Pecola and the MacTeer sisters that

57 Pin-chia Feng, 1998, p. 71. 58 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 39. 59 Léon Wurmser, 1994, p. 53. 60 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 40. 61 Robert Stepo, 1994, p. 17. 62 Patrice Cormier-Hamilton, 1994, p. 115. 63 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 55. 64 Ibid., p. 52. 65 Ibid., p. 53.


“I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos.”66 Put in such a miserable situation, the blossoms of her dreams are doomed to wither away.

The critic Michael Awkward discusses the “purgative abuse” of Pecola in terms of the black community’s guilt about its own inability to measure up to some external ideal of beauty and behavior. Pecola objectifies this failure and must be purged. She becomes the black community’s shadow of evil. “In combating the shadow … the group is able to rid itself ceremonially of the veil that exists within both the individual member and the community at large. To be fully successful, such exorcism requires a visibly imperfect, shadow-consumed scapegoat”67 like Pecola.

Toni Morrison herself is not ignorant of the black community’s negative influence in the tragedy of Pecola. At the end of the novel, Morrison delivers her comments through Claudia:

I talked about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.68 Feeling unloved by her parents and ugly in the gaze of others, Pecola defends

herself by withdrawing. She withdraws into the refuge of insanity. In madness she simply substitutes her harsh reality with a better one: she has blue eyes which everyone admires and envies. In pathetic conversations with an imaginary friend, Pecola repeatedly elicits confirmation that hers are “the bluest eyes in the whole world.”69 Pecola’s sad fantasy expresses Morrison’s strongest criticism of a white standard of beauty that excludes most black women and that destroys those who strive to measure up but cannot. As Ho Wen-ching aptly argues, since Pecola is trapped in “the bifurcate situation of ‘I’ versus ‘them,’ Pecola in her endeavor to transcend the I/them bifurcation has come to equate ‘I’ with ‘eye.’ ”70 She pays for this mistaken identification with her own insanity. In desperation Pecola believes that nothing bad could be viewed by such eyes. Cholly and Pauline would not fight; her teachers and classmates would not despise her; she would be safe. She even can find consolation in the cat’s “blue eyes” after being bullied by Junior. 66 Ibid., p. 61. 67 Michael Awkward, 1989, p. 75. 68 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 160. 69 Ibid., p. 157. 70 Ho Wen-ching, 1987, p. 4.


Pecola is the ultimate victim of “the bluest eye.” The bluest eye symbolizes the biased concept of American society that perceives black people as the “Other” and privileges only a white physical standard of beauty. This bluest eye represents what bell hooks calls “the imperial gaze—the look that seeks to dominate, subjugate, and colonize”71 generated from a white supremacist culture. Significantly, Pecola’s final appearance in the novel is metaphorically “a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of the mind.”72 This “blue void” represents a “lack” inside Pecola that has grounded her fledging development—a desire for “the bluest eye” that is impossible to fulfill because it originates in an external standard imposed by the dominant culture and impossible to forget since Pecola has fully internalized her own deficiency.

The “void” in Pecola’s life reflects what bell hooks calls the “gaps” in the psyche of black people—the gaps “where mindless complicity, self-destructive rage, hatred, and paralyzing despair enter”73—conditioned by this relentless monovision. This “void” is created by an experience of “mirror stage” in Lacanian terms. While looking into the mirror that the white society holds up to her, Pecola cannot see “the ideal image,” that is, one with blue eyes, in her own reflection. From her own experience and her mother’s influence, Pecola has internalized the dominant ideology of ideal beauty so deeply that the unbridgeable difference between her and the ideal image of standard beauty obliterates what little self image she has, thus creating a “blue void” around her which marks her mental destruction. In their critical assessment of The Bluest Eye, Wilfred Samuel and Clenora Hudson-Weems hold that the Breedloves are characters who try to live up to an external image imposed on them by mainstream society. Pecola’s self-abnegation is an especially castrating act of “Bad Faith” because she objectifies herself into a “being-for-the-other” instead of being a subjective “being-for-self.”74

According to Lacan, “by internalizing the way the Other sees one, by assimilating the Other’s approving and disapproving looks and comments, one learns to see oneself as the Other sees one, to know oneself as the Other knows one.”75 Take Pecola’s tragic life experience into consideration, it is safe to draw the conclusion that the direct reason for her self-splitting is her failure to reach “the ideal image” as reflected in the mirror that the Other—the dominant white society holds up to her, thus she cannot pass through her “mirror stage” smoothly which will inevitably hamper her healthy development. Only in insanity can she 71 Bell Hooks, 1991, p. 7. 72 Toni Morrison, 1970, p. 158. 73 Ibid., p. 4. 74 Wilfred D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems, 1990, p. 19. 75 Bruce Fink, 2004, p. 108.


fulfill her identification with “the ideal image,” tragically, her self-actualization can be achieved only in illusions.

Conclusion

In her maiden novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores the devastation caused by the black people’s self-splitting—the sense of the self as stained and defective—through her presentation of the Breedlove family’s tragedy, which is typical of the psychological oppression black people suffers in a white-dominated society.

The adverse environment does not provide the black people with the possibility of building up a mentally healthy self. Instead, the black people learn from their own experiences to accept and internalize the prevalent white people’s ideology as their ideal principle in life. While looking into the mirror that the white society holds up to them, they see an ideal image in it as the “Other” to project in their self-building. They try to live up to this external image imposed on them by the mainstream society, but their failure to reach this “ideal image” results in a conflict that can never be bridged between their reality and their dreamed ideal, thus entrapping them in a permanent psychological dilemma which is just the contradiction man suffers that Jacques Lacan expounded in his famous theory of the “Mirror Stage.” The inability to identify the self with the ideal image in the mirror, either actually or figuratively prevents people from passing through this phase smoothly. Ultimately, this prolonged mirror stage leads to their self-splitting just like the Breedloves in The Bluest Eye.

This psychological tragedy of self-splitting of the black people has its severe outcomes not only on those black people and the black community, but also on the whole society. Obviously, the society is responsible for their self-splitting, but as an integral part of the society, their state of being also has much bearing on the society.

For Morrison, the efforts of self-pursuit on the part of the black people are also significant to all people’s struggle in adverse circumstances, the special life experiences of the Afro-Americans give her a good standpoint to dive into and further explore the nature of the whole human society and the physiological and psychological state of all human beings.

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About the Contributors

Ding Yang 丁扬, currently Lecturer at College of Humanities, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, obtained her Master’s degree in literature from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2006. Her academic interests lie in American novel and Western literary theory. She has published such articles as “Yihua ziwo de rensheng beiju—Zui lan de yanjing zhong Buleidalafu furen de houxiandai xinli qianxi” 异化自我的人生悲剧——《最蓝的眼睛》中布雷德拉夫夫

人的后现代心理浅析 (Life tragedy of self-alienation—An analysis on the post-modern psychology of Mrs. Breedlove in The Bluest Eye) and “Lun Xun A Q zhengzhuan de xushi shijiao chutan” 鲁迅《阿 Q 正传》的叙事视角初探 (An exploration into the narration perspective in Biography of A Q by Lu Xun). Kong Xiangguo 孔祥国 , now Lecturer at College of Humanities, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, graduated from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics with a Master’s degree in English language and literature, specializing in English novels. His main publications include: Yiqu zhipu chengzhi de aiqing shiyan—Shixi Luobote Pengsi de yiduo honghong de meigui 一曲质朴诚挚的爱情誓言——试析罗伯特彭斯的“一朵红红的玫瑰” (A simple yet sincere oath of love—An analysis of Robert Burn’s “A Red Red Rose”) and “Maolaier taitai: Erzi yu qingren zhong zhenzheng de huimiezhe” 毛莱尔太太：《儿子与情人》中真正的毁灭者 (Mrs. Morel: The real destroyer in Sons and Lovers).

tragedy of the self-splitting—a psychological reading of toni morrison’s the bluest eye

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