Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Dick-and-Jane Narrative
The novel opens with a narrative from a Dick-and-Jane
reading primer, a narrative that is distorted when Morrison runs
its sentences and then its words together. The gap between the idealized, sanitized,
upper-middle-class world of Dick and Jane (who we assume to
be white, though we are never told so) and the often dark and ugly
world of the novel is emphasized by the chapter headings excerpted
from the primer. But Morrison does not mean for us to think that
the Dick-and-Jane world is better—in fact, it is largely because
the black characters have internalized white Dick-and-Jane values
that they are unhappy. In this way, the Dick and Jane narrative
and the novel provide ironic commentary on each other.
The Seasons and Nature
The novel is divided into the four seasons, but it pointedly
refuses to meet the expectations of these seasons. For example,
spring, the traditional time of rebirth and renewal, reminds Claudia
of being whipped with new switches, and it is the season when Pecola’s
is raped. Pecola’s baby dies in autumn, the season of harvesting.
Morrison uses natural cycles to underline the unnaturalness and
misery of her characters’ experiences. To some degree, she also
questions the benevolence of nature, as when Claudia wonders whether
“the earth itself might have been unyielding” to someone like Pecola.
Whiteness and Color
In the novel, whiteness is associated with beauty and
cleanliness (particularly according to Geraldine and Mrs. Breedlove),
but also with sterility. In contrast, color is associated with happiness,
most clearly in the rainbow of yellow, green, and purple memories Pauline
Breedlove sees when making love with Cholly. Morrison uses this
imagery to emphasize the destructiveness of the black community’s
privileging of whiteness and to suggest that vibrant color, rather
than the pure absence of color, is a stronger image of happiness
and freedom.
Eyes and Vision
Pecola is obsessed with having blue eyes because she believes
that this mark of conventional, white beauty will change the way
that she is seen and therefore the way that she sees the world.
There are continual references to other characters’ eyes as well—for
example, Mr. Yacobowski’s hostility to Pecola resides in the blankness
in his own eyes, as well as in his inability to see a black girl.
This motif underlines the novel’s repeated concern for the difference
between how we see and how we are seen, and the difference between
superficial sight and true insight.
Dirtiness and Cleanliness
The black characters in the novel who have internalized
white, middle-class values are obsessed with cleanliness. Geraldine
and Mrs. Breedlove are excessively concerned with housecleaning—though
Mrs. Breedlove cleans only the house of her white employers, as
if the Breedlove apartment is beyond her help. This fixation on
cleanliness extends into the women’s moral and emotional quests for
purity, but the obsession with domestic and moral sanitation leads
them to cruel coldness. In contrast, one mark of Claudia’s strength
of character is her pleasure in her own dirt, a pleasure that represents
self-confidence and a correct understanding of the nature of happiness.
