All of our waste which we dumped on her
and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and
which she gave to us.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
Two voices are in dialogue: Pecola and an imaginary
friend, whose voice is in italics. The friend criticizes Pecola
for looking in the mirror constantly, but Pecola cannot stop admiring
her new blue eyes. The imaginary friend wants to go out and play, and
Pecola accuses her of being jealous. Pecola agrees to go outside,
however, and brags that she can look at the sun without blinking.
Pecola tells her friend that now that she has blue eyes, no one
looks at her, not even her mother. She thinks they are jealous.
Pecola wonders why the imaginary friend has not come before, and
the friend tells her that she did not need her before. Pecola explains
that she no longer goes to school because people are prejudiced
against her blue eyes. She asks her friend if her eyes are the very
bluest, and her friend reassures her. She asks her imaginary friend
where she lives, and the friend rebuffs her. Pecola worries that
her mother does not see her new friend.
The imaginary friend begins talking about
Cholly. She speculates that Mrs. Breedlove must miss him. She observes
that they had sex a lot, but Pecola counters that he made her do
it. The friend says that Cholly made Pecola do it as well, and Pecola denies
this. The friend reminds Pecola that Cholly raped her again while
she was reading on the couch. Pecola explains that she did not tell
her mother because her mother did not believe her the first time.
Now both Cholly and Sammy are gone for good. The friend implies
that Pecola enjoyed Cholly’s sexual advances the second time, and
Pecola gets angry. They decide to return to the topic of her eyes.
Pecola worries that someone somewhere may have bluer eyes than she.
She wants her friend to examine everyone’s eyes to see if they are
bluer than hers. She wonders if her eyes are “blue enough” but cannot
say blue enough for what. The friend tells her she is being silly
and temporarily departs.
Claudia begins to narrate and describes Pecola’s
madness. Pecola wanders the street jerking her arms as if trying
to fly. Claudia and Frieda feel like failures because their flowers
never grow and Pecola’s baby is prematurely stillborn. Cholly dies
in a workhouse, and Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove move to a house on
the edge of town. Claudia feels that the town has dumped all its
garbage upon Pecola, and all her beauty. Pecola’s ugliness allowed all
the others to believe they were beautiful, healthy, and sanctified.
Claudia feels herself to be no better than the others and implicates
herself in using Pecola as a scapegoat. She believes that the Maginot
Line and Cholly loved Pecola but that love is only as good as the
lover, and therefore Cholly’s love killed her. It is too easy simply
to blame the climate of the town as inhospitable to certain kinds
of people or flowers. In any case, in the final words of Claudia,
“it’s much, much, much too late.”
Wicked people love wickedly, violent
people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly,
but the love of a free man is never safe.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Analysis
When Pecola is finally granted her wish for
blue eyes, she receives it in a perverse and darkly ironic form.
She is able to obtain blue eyes only by losing her mind. Rather
than granting Pecola insight into the world around her and providing
a redeeming connection with other people, these eyes are
a form of blindness. Pecola can no longer accurately perceive the
outside world, and she has become even more invisible to others.
Pecola has managed to write a new narrative about her life, an act
that is sometimes healing for other characters in the novel, but
this narrative reinforces her isolation from the world rather than
reconnects her to it. Her new friendship is only imagined and does
not protect her from old suffering or insecurity. She is worried
by the fact that others will not look at her, and she has not escaped
her jealousy of what others possess—she worries that someone has
bluer eyes than she. Her belief in her blue eyes is not enough,
and she requires constant reassurance. As is made abundantly clear
when the imaginary friend brings up the painful subject of Cholly,
Pecola has not escaped her demons. She has merely recast them in
a new form.
The closing section of the novel is written
in the first person plural, and Claudia does not permit herself
any escape from her vivid and total criticism of the community.
This is somewhat surprising, given Claudia and Frieda’s efforts
to save Pecola’s baby by sacrificing money and marigold seeds. Nevertheless,
looking back, Claudia understands that Pecola has been a scapegoat—someone
the community could use to exorcise its own self-hatred by expressing
that hatred toward her. She explains that Pecola’s ugliness gave
the community, herself included, a false sense of beauty: “We were
so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.” Moreover, Pecola’s
suffering made the community feel comparatively happy, and her failure
to speak for herself allowed them to feel articulate. This last
criticism leads us to question Claudia’s reliability as a narrator.
It is possible that her version of Pecola’s story is secretly self-serving
and that the true meaning of Pecola’s life remains unexplained.
Just as the novel begins with two prologues,
perhaps the best way to think of the ending of The Bluest
Eye is to understand it as two endings. The first ending,
the close of the previous chapter, is a hopeful one: Claudia and
Frieda selflessly sacrifice their own desires to help Pecola, planting
seeds to suggest that nature always promises rebirth, saying magic
words and singing to suggest that lyrical language can redeem a
fractured life. The second ending is a despairing one: Claudia too
is capable of selfishly using Pecola to reinforce her own sense
of worth, the earth is cruel, and, in any case, nature cannot redeem
human failings. The book closes on this second, bleak vision.
But the lyric beauty of Morrison’s language, which picks up momentum
in this final section, suggests that there may be a kind of redemption
in remembering, in telling stories, and in singing, after all.
