"Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941."  This sentence sets the moving stage for The Bluest Eye, a sorrowful play of prayers and suffering.  Morrison exposes her story on the first page in the exposition: "We thought, at the time, that because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow."  The narrator, Claudia MacTeer, says.  "There is really nothing more to say-except why.  But since it is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how."

Autumn
The year begins with an inspection of life from a young girl named Claudia.  She lives with her mother and father and her older sister Frieda.  Claudia shows the love that her family has for her when she becomes ill and has to be taken care of.  But she soon recovers and tells us of the other things that happened in August.  A man named Mr. Henry Washington came to live with the family as a roomer.  He was a nice older man that liked to entertain the girls with treats and tricks.  Also in that time, a little girl named Pecola Breedlove came to live with the MacTeers' for a short time.  Her father, Cholly "that old Dog" Breedlove had burned up his house and beat his wife, so the county placed Pecola with the MacTeers until the family got back together.  Mrs. Breedlove was staying with the family she worked for; Pecola's brother, Sammy was with some relatives; and Cholly was in jail.  Claudia reminisces about how she hates all things blond haired and blue eyed.  Including dolls, movie stars, and even real little white girls.  It is also while staying with the MacTeers that Pecola gets her first menstrual period.  "Is it true that I can have a baby now?", Pecola says.  "Sure you can.", Frieda tells her.
 Pecola and her family lived above an old abandoned store on Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio.  The narrator says that it is a place they lived because they were poor, black, and considered themselves ugly.  Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove fought regularly, and was "paralleled only by their lovemaking".  Sammy was known to run away but Pecola could only watch and hope for death.  Or for something only God could grant, blue eyes for a black girl.  Pecola prays for blue eyes so the children at school will not make fun of her, so the teacher will call on her, and her parents would love her because she would not be ugly.  Above Pecola's apartment live three prostitutes: China, Poland, and Miss Marie.  "Pecola loved them, visited them, and ran their errands.  They, in turn, did not despise her."

Winter
"Winter tightened our heads with a band of cold and melted our eyes."  This season introduces a character named Maureen Peal.  "Disrupter of the seasons", as the narrator calls her, she is white and rich.  "It was a false spring day" when Maureen says she will walk home with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola.  Frieda had to stop the boys of the school from relentlessly teasing Pecola before they could leave the playground.  To Claudia's and Frieda's surprise, Maureen buys Pecola some ice cream, only to humiliate her as much as the boys did earlier.  On their way home, Claudia and Frieda get another surprise when they see their roomer, Mr. Henry kissing the hand of Miss Marie (The Maginot Line) and shows a side of himself they never suspected and later discover.  This chapter also introduces us to two more characters who torture Pecola.  Geraldine, a black woman who wants to be white, and her spoiled son Junior, caste a another shade of gray on Pecola's shadow, making it all the more black.

Spring
This season begins with the eviction of Mr. Henry.  Claudia's father beat him up for touching the young breast of Frieda.  After that, the two sisters decide to walk over to Pecola's house, but instead encounter The Maginot Line.  A "ruined" woman that Frieda was deathly afraid of becoming.  She loftily throws a root beer bottle at them after they inform her of her social status.  They then go to see Pecola at the house of the rich white family Mrs. Breedlove lives at.  When Pecola accidentally knocks over a berry cobbler, we learn that Mrs. Breedlove, or "Polly" as she is known to the whites, cares more for the family she serves than her own.  This carries the reader into the past of a woman named Pauline Williams a.k.a. Mrs. Breedlove, a.k.a. Polly.  It is a history of a girl who loved housework, but soon developed a gap in her life.  One that was filled by a young Cholly Breedlove.  In her own words, Mrs. Breedlove tells her past.  They were married and moved to Ohio where Cholly got a job in a steel mill and she could keep house.  The couple began to separate until Pauline discovered she was pregnant.  This brought them back together for a time.  Cholly didn't drink as much and came home more often.  But it didn't last, and Pauline had to find solitude in the movies. After the children were born she had to find work and lands a job with the Fishers and becomes "the ideal servant", neglecting her house for the dignity of their's.
 The story of Cholly is sad from the very beginning.  His mother tried to throw him away when he was four days old, and his father had left town before he was born.  Cholly was raised by his old Aunt Jimmy,a woman who later died of peach cobbler.  He worked for a time with a man named Blue Jack, a man he shared with and loved.  At the funeral of his aunt, Cholly has his first sexual experience with a girl named Darlene.  But they are horrified when two white hunters with guns discover them and make them continue for entertainment.  Cholly never goes to live with another relative, and decides to look for his father.  But when he finds him in the town of Macon, his father scorns him and Cholly becomes more than lonely, he was alone.  That was when he met Pauline Williams.  And it is one drunken evening when his own daughter Pecola reminds him of that day when he met his wife and he proceeds to rape her-"tenderly."
 Pecola goes to see a man named Soaphead Church, Dream Interpreter.  He was also a man who had a fondness for used things and little girls.  But when an ugly little black girl came to him and asked for blue eyes, he did not try to molest her but gave her a poisoned piece of food to give to an old dog that he despised.  "If the animal behaves strangely, your wish be granted on the day following this one."

Summer
This concluding chapter brings us back to the lives of Claudia and Frieda, who have begun their own seed selling business.  It is while they are on this entrepreneurial venture that they learn about Pecola, "...a secret, terrible, awful story."  Everybody in Lorain wanted Pecola's incest child to die because it would be so ugly.  Claudia and Frieda agree to try and make a miracle by praying for the baby to live, when everyone else wanted it dead.  They plant all of their seeds and bury their money in hopes that everything will be alright.  Pecola gets her white  girl's blue eyes, but her father's child is stillborn.  Pecola never recovers from the shock, and remains in poverty searching through garbage on the edge of town.
    Many intricate conflicts bind the stories of this novel together.  Claudia, who is the narrator for most of the book, tells the anguish she feels in the very beginning, as if she is looking back from several years in the future.  "But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola's baby that we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and everything would be alright.
 "It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds.  Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame."  It is a conflict that Claudia cannot resolve.  She realizes that all the prays in the world wouldn't make their seeds grow.  She says, "Our innocence and faith were no more productive that his [Cholly's] lust or despair."  The earth was and is unyield-ing, for no marigolds grew that fall.  Claudia says that the "why" is too difficult to handle, somethings you cannot explain, you can only try and figure out "how".
 Claudia hates all of the Shirley Temples of the world.  Her character is in stark contrast with Pecola's.  Claudia hates the fact that she lives a poor and segregated life.  She has to have socks that won't stay up straight while white girls' do.  Her hair has tough plaits, white girls' hair is straight and shiny.  Her loathing is apparent when she describes her treatment of the white doll her parents gave her for Chirstmas.  She twisted it's head off and smashed the voice box in it's back that "sounded like the bleat of a dying lamb".  "The truly horrifying thing was the trans-ference of the same impulses to white little girls," Claudia says.  Those traits that Claudia hated so much were personified in Maureen Peal, a girl of undeserved wealth and prestige.  And it was the things that Claudia and her sister both despised that Pecola most coveted.  There was one trait in particular: "It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes held those pictures, and knew the sights-if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.
 "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.  Fervently, for a year she prayed.  Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope."  All of the rejection and torment she had to go through in her life she thought could be resolved if only she had the bright blue eyes of a white girl.  She wonders why people call dandelions weeds and prefer sharp blades of grass instead.  The dandelions are a metaphor for blacks, the one's the white's don't want.  "Nobody loves the head of a dandelion," she says.  "Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon."  The author says that one needs to be reminded of the political climate of the time when the novel was published: 1965-69, when segregation was a big issue and blacks were fighting to get all of the rights that whites enjoyed.  "She owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into.  And owning them made her a part of the world, and the world part of her."
 Pecola finds her ideal eyes in many different places.  She at first feels shame when she goes to the store to buy some candy.  The white proprietor, Mr. Yacobowski does not want to touch her black hand.  When she goes back outside, she looks at the dandelions again: "They are ugly.  They are weeds." she thinks.  But before she can cry, she remembers her candy, Mary Janes.  On the wrapper is Mary Jane, with blond hair and blue eyes.  Pecola eats the sweet candy and pretends she is eating the blue eyes.  To Pecola, blue eyes would give her much more than acceptance, it would give her a soul she can love.  "She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people."  When Junior locks Pecola in a room after throwing a cat in her face, she feels anger and shame and again finds solace in blue eyes.  This time it is in the eyes of the cat.  "The blue eyes in the black face held her."  Here was not a pink girl on a paper wrapper, but a living thing.  But soon the cat resembled Pecola more closely: "He pointed to the radiator, where the cat lay, its blue eyes closed, leaving only an empty, black, and helpless face."  When Pecola goes to see Soaphead Church, it is after her father has raped her.  It is a time when she needs the blue eyes most.  His card advertisement: "If you are overcome with trouble and conditions that are not natural, I can remove them..." followed by the "Satisfaction guaranteed" probably made Soaphead a last resort since her prays had not been answered.  His false portent gave Pecola the delusion that her eyes really would turn blue, even if nobody else noticed.  The day after she feed the dog the poison, she looks in the mirror and sees blue eyes.  It is as if Pecola has finally found her soul, a vital part of her that had always been missing from her life.
 Cholly and Pauline have distanced themselves from the reality of their lives.  Nothing interests Cholly, he can find console only in drinking.  He has given up on trying to figure out what gave him the desire and curiosity he had when he was young.  Not having the ability to raise children gave him a feeling of powerlessness against his wife and against his own better judgment.  But, that feeling is not a new one for Cholly.  It came to a dreadful climax when he was young.  The experience Cholly had with Darlene and the white hunters made a major change in his personality.  Instead of hating the white men who caused such embarrassment, he turned his hatred toward the girl, Darlene.  "Such an emotion would have destroyed him.  They were big, white, armed, men.  He was small, black, helpless.  His subconscious mind did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke."  He hated Darlene because he could not protect her, because he was too weak to fight the white men.  His feeling of impotence and pent up anger will carry on into his marriage and fatherhood.  Pecola's life can be seen much as a parallel  to her father's.  As he was "raped", so was she.  As he felt inferior to the whites, so does she.  They both wanted something they could not have, Cholly wanted a father, and Pecola wanted blue eyes.
 Pauline has a similar, depressing life.  But she does find something that consumes her and gives her a purpose.  Unfortunately it is against the good of herself and her family.  She once found comfort in Hollywood movies, she dreamed of a white world.  "In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.  She forgot lust and simple caring for."  Pauline's experience with movies made her value the material possessions of the Fishers' and compared it to her pitiful shell of a dwelling making the decision to fabricate the life of an "ideal servant" as her primary function.  "Into her son she beat a loud desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat a fear of growing up, fear of her people, fear of life."  So from her mother also, Pecola inherited traits that shaped her personality.
    It is truly difficult to examine all of the delicately placed and wonderful elements that make The Bluest Eye such a superb novel.  Every sentence radiates a message to the reader.  From the gradeschool reading primer to the words of Mrs. Pauline Breedlove we see the emptiness in Pecola's life left by the racial segregation and degradation that white America had on both of her parents.  The effect is still present in her time, and resonates into her being.  Her yearning for blue eyes shows how us what we think of as valuable and beautiful and what we consider to be disdainful and ugly.

Back