Zhang, John Zaixin. Notes on The Bluest Eye
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. (With a New Afterword by the Author). Plume, 1994.
3-4
Passage meaningful (governed by grammar) with marks of time and space (punctuation): ? (The question mark marks a spatial relation to sb.) , ., (commas and full stops mark a temporal relation). Time less important than space. Indoors/outdoors (p.17).
Chapters – four seasons. But time downplayed, space foregrounded – time stands still like a wound that never heals (nothing good about the four seasons: illness in autumn, cold in winter, changing whipping style in spring, and violent storms in summer) - sections started with scrambled up phrases
10 Gloomy scene: house, old, cold, peopled by roaches and mice
12 Autumn – sick, and when Mr. Henry came
15 Kids pointed out as if subjects, treated as furniture.
16 Garbo and Rogers as standard beauty
17 “If you are outdoors, there is no place to go” – Our peripheral existence.
18 Outdoors – bred in us a hunger for prosperity for ownership. “Dead doesn’t change, and outdoors is here to stay.” – Cholly Beedlove – outdoors joined the animals – “a ratty nigger”
19 Milk in a Shirley Temple cup
20 Claudia’s desire to dismember a Baby Doll
21 Dismembering the doll – secret of the sound – “A mere metal roundness” – dismembering white space (doll) by taking off the punctuation marks – white discourse
21-2 Claudia wanted rather to feel something on Christmas, not to own or possess any object
22 Details that appeal to the five senses – feeling something still tied up with material possession – tin places and cups, zinc tub and scratchy towels made her feel bad about the day – ironic
23 Claudia: “We didn’t initiate talk with grown-ups; we answered their questions.”
24 Claudia’s mother: Nothing I do is going to keep me out of the poorhouse.
26 Took grief out of the words
32 The only living thing in their house – the coal stove
33 Words scrambled up, broken up in the wrong places, meaningless. Spatial significance.
36 No memories among furniture to be cherished
38 The Breedloves live in a storefront because they are poor and black, and believe they are ugly. – wear their ugliness that doesn’t belong to them
39 As though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear (skin color as a social marker, as a dress)
40 Working like a mule doesn’t give her the right to be warm – what is she doing it for? (Mrs. Breedlove)
42 Mrs. B interested in Christ the Judge [where there’s justice], not the Redeemer [no sin to save her from] – Cholly “poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted dreams” [as a result of social injustice] – didn’t hate the two white men shining a flashlight on his behind, but hated the girl
42-3 Humiliations, defeats, and emasculations could stir him into flights of depravity that surprised himself
43 Sammy has run away from home no less than 27 times (by the time he was 14)
43 Fought back in a purely feminine way – Mrs. B sneezed, just once – anger
43-4 Fight with a dishpan, then a round stove lid (feminine way)
45 Pecola wants God to make her disappear (disembodied in her imagination), but could never get her eyes to disappear
46 Prays for blue eyes
48 Mr. Yacobowiski doesn’t see Pecola because for him there’s nothing to see
47, 48, 50 Dandelions, cracks, beautiful, and later ugly (problematic nature of symbolism or signification)
48-9 Vacuum (black reflected in a vacuum) of a glance in a white man – black in space, not being seen.
50 Mary Jane wrapper – candy – blue eyes – white supremacy – signification – eating a Mary Jane is to be Mary Jane (you’re what you eat)
51 “the stove lid triumph” – Marie calls Pecola by names of different dishes
57 They were no young girls in whores’ clothing – They were whores in whores’ clothing [clothing matches their heart, their identity]
61 Claudia’s dad’s face is winter
61-2 Effect of the penetrating cold on the family
62 “This disrupter of seasons” in winter – Maureen Peal (a mulatto). A hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk. (Time invaded by space, by a “white” girl’s place in society)
65 Boys harassing Pecola – their contempt for their own blackness – their learned hatred…, and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds
71-2 Our father – when he had moved on, his nakedness stayed in the room with us – spatial terms
73-4 Claudia wants Pecola to spit her misery out on the streets – spatial terms – but Pecola held it where she could lap up into her eyes
74 Dolls can be destroyed, but not what people think about us - the thing that made Maureen Pearl beautiful.
81 Meridian – the sound of it opens the windows of a room – spatial terms - change of point of view
83 Middle-class black women – feel secure
84 Space (yard) and body
84-5 Woman like Geraldine – no feelings for husband
85 “Lips” – multiplicity – husband’s “violation” of her body (inside her) - Affections for a cat
86 Husband as “intruder” – cat, the first in her affections
87 Neat colored people vs dirty niggers – Geraldine doesn’t want Junior, her son, to play with niggers – double consciousness
89 Pecola in Junior’s home – what a beautiful house!
89-90 Junior throws cat at Pecola – scratches her face (abuse both cat and Pecola) – relation between cat and mother
90 Held a prisoner in his house
92 End of the world and beginning lay in their eyes (girls like Pecola), and all the waste in between – time and space – spatializing time in body – boys announced their manhood by turning the bills of their caps backward – Geraldine: “Get out of my house” – Jesus looking down at Pecola with sad and unsurprised eyes
93 Snowlakes falling and dying on the pavement (winter – time to enhance sadness)
97 Twigs – change in whipping style – beat us differently in the spring
101 Freda molested by Mr. Henry – Like the Maginot Line, she’s ruined – body and soul
105 The lakefront houses – the loveliest – Blacks not allowed in Lake Shore Park
107 Claudia’s mom, Mrs. MacTeer
112 Relocation
113 “Presence” in Pauline’s dreams.
113 Ivy seemed to hold in her mouth all the sounds of Pauline’s soul
114 Ivy’s song: Lord… Hear my cry hear my call…
115 Pauline’s narrative (black English) vs. narrator’s good English (well-educated) – Colors from Alabama home when Cholly tickled her foot
116 Pauline and Cholly married and moved to Lorain, Ohio – Pauline lost her front tooth, first a brown speck (stain, cavity, eating away to the root) – conditions that would allow the brown speck in the first place – looking for the real cause [social injustice as cause in terms of body parts]
117 Pauline – turned to husband for reassurance – to fill the vacant places (her loneliness) – only two rooms, no yard to keep or move about in – lack of space (both geographical and emotional)
122 Pauline’s education in the movies – romantic love and physical beauty (white culture)
123 worship white culture in movies – lost her tooth eating candy in a picture show – giving up hopes for beauty
124 Pauline sorry – to beat her children
126 New-born Pecola was ugly - Pauline – older, no time for dreams and pictures, passed the stage of “presence” and relocation – young dreams (112-3)
127 Sharp contrast between Fisher house and Pauline’s – Pauline stopped trying to keep her own house – ideal servant in Fisher’s house
128 Power on loan from the Fishers – class - Keeping the Fisher house for herself, “a private world”, a space of power, praise, luxury, which is not her own.
129 Seldom thought about old days.
129-31 – having sex with Cholly all those colors (from the past, 115) rushing back as a rainbow (embodying past) – body, passage to her memory of love and home
134 Cholly (when he was a child with Blue) wondered what God looked like – white, and old man Blue was nothing like that – loved Blue and remembered the good times with him
135 Cholly’s Aunt Jimmy died in spring
137 Aunt Jimmy’s friends – nostalgia about pain, memories of illness
138 Black women’s position in society – under whites and black men – take orders from all but black children
139 Lives of these black women synthesized in their eyes (memories written in bodies)
150-1 Black – a mark of inferiority, humility.
151 Cholly hated the one (Darlene) who created the situation and witnessed his failure and impotence
158-9 Three women gave Cholly back his manhood, which he took aimlessly
159 Cholly dangerously free – free to do anything
161 Cholly drunk – Spring – saw daughter in the kitchen
162 Confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him - release of emotions from the unconscious – memories of past desire and present lust drive him to mixed feelings of love and hatred that thrust his violence into Pecola’s body – past and present and bodily desire (time/body)
167 West Indian old man, Soaphead Church – English nobleman, white strain into the family
168 White supremacy (De Gobineau’s hypothesis) – “marry up” – lightening the family complexion and thinning out the family features
172-3 Soaphead: God has done a poor job, created evil
175 Soaphead asks Pecola to feed the dog with poisoned food, as a sign from God
177-8 Soaphead’s letter to God: Criticism of white characteristics - hotel room (limited to a time you need it) vs. a home (living in space)
179 Soaphead: lift my eyes from the contemplation of Your Body and fall into the contemplation of theirs? – the buds – they stuck out at me (from divine Body to girls)
180 Moses asked God for His name – God afraid to give out his name – would know him and wouldn’t fear him
181 God, you forgot about children, forgot how and when to be God
182 Soaphead makes Pecola believe she has blue eyes
187 Summer – a season of frightening violent sudden storms to me
189 Pecola ruined body and soul – “ugliest thing walking”
190 I felt a need for the black baby to live (Pecola’s baby) – counteract the universal love of white baby dolls: Shirley Temples, Maureen Peals
191 We remembered, or maybe we didn’t remember; we just knew - Memory against everything and everybody considered all speech a code to be broken by us – decided to change the course of events, alter a human life – pray for a miracle to let Pecola’s baby live
192 to prove their faith in God – give up something – bury the money and plant the seeds as a sign from God when they “come up”
204 The baby died
205 Years folded up like handkerchiefs – time in spatial terms – love of a free man (Cholly’s love for his daughter) is never safe – much too late to realize we are wrong (to acquiesce)
206 Pecola – mad. Blue eyes – “rearranged lies”.
“The land of 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.” (Echoes back to p. 5) – past “land,” present “soil” – time frozen in space – racial discrimination in this land from past to present with no progress (time stands still) – the passage of time (the four seasons) reminds us only of the pains the body feels
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