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Toni Morrison’s writing does not support the American Dream because her themes insinuate that racism blocks minorities from having equal opportunities, proper growth, and necessary development.

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In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, she conveys that discrimination prevents the minority youth from having equal opportunity to achieve the American Dream. This specific novel is said to be “the first powerful collection of stories that Morrison has told about women and children who are too often forgotten or dismissed as crazy and worthless.” (Gale Books, The Bluest Eye) Since society neglects minority children on the basis that they are worthless, the children miss out on the opportunity to learn how to become successful and therefore are given unequal opportunities to achieve the American Dream.

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Source: Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970. Reprint, New York: Plume, 1994, 9-16.

About the Author: Toni Morrison (1931-) was born in Lorain, Ohio. She earned a B.A. in English and Classics from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1953 and an M.A. in English from Cornell in 1954. Morrison taught and worked as an editor at Random House before she began to publish. In 1993 Toni Morrison was the first African American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is currently the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

Introduction

Toni Morrison began writing The Bluest Eye as a story in 1962. It evolved into an idea for a novel in 1965, five years before it was published. Morrison frequently reflects on her writing practices in interviews and in articles. In the Afterward to the 1994 edition of The Bluest Eye, she writes about a child she knew in elementary school who wanted blue eyes, like Pecola Breedlove in the novel. She writes that "it was the first time I knew beautiful. Had imagined it for myself. Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do." The concept of the beautiful and the ugly are integral in her first novel. Cultural understanding and expectations for how one looks and acts influence the characters actions and self-respect. The cycle of poverty and abuse that the Breedlove family experiences adds to the rejection they feel in the community of Lorain. These are the themes that become common in Toni Morrison's work.

The Bluest Eye is set during 1940-1941. Claudia and Frieda McTeer befriend Pecola Breedlove when she is sent to stay with them after being "put outdoors." This, the reader quickly learns, is the worst thing that can happen because it means that there is nowhere to go. Through Claudia's narrative, Morrison weaves the story of lost innocence through the passing seasons. The girls, especially Pecola who is later raped by her father, are contrasted with the little white blonde girls who society honors for their outward beauty. Claudia and Frieda lose their innocence, but their souls and sense of character are preserved by their family home. Pecola is lost and goes mad because nothing can help her cure her unnatural life.

Significance

Toni Morrison depends upon the "ruse of memory" to evoke characters because "it ignites some process of invention" and because she "cannot trust the literature and sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources." Her memory provided the prayer for blue eyes heard from another child in her youth. This prayer became Pecola's prayer. The details of memory, setting, and language set Morrison apart from other novelists. She transports the reader to a distinct place and time while simultaneously remarking on the oppression of a people.

Ruby Dee, in McKay's collection of essays, wrote, "It's all I can do not to lie down and cry myself into some kind of relief from the life-pain of Pecola." She recognizes that Morrison has written a "series of painfully accurate impressions" about the lives of her characters. In The New York Times, John Leonard stated that Morrison exposed the negative images of reading primers in "prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." He goes on to praise her depiction of society at a certain moment in history.

Toni Morrison assesses the success and failure of Pecola Breedlove's story in the Afterword of the 1994 edition. She notes that even thirty years after she began this book, it is still difficult to translate the pain of a child like Pecola into language. Although The Bluest Eye was not an outstanding success at its publication, readers and critics gradually realized the power of her story and longings. The Bluest Eye is the first of a powerful collection of stories that Morrison has told about women and children who are too often forgotten or dismissed as crazy and worthless. She shows the reader the worth in every character's story and life.

Primary Source: The Bluest Eye [excerpt]

SYNOPSIS: The McTeer's home is cold and not in the best shape, but the people who live there care about one another. Conversation swirls over the children's heads in a "gently wicked dance." Through the language the good and the bad of the families in the novel are revealed.

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Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's café, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. When she comes out of the car we will beat her up, make red marks on her white skin, and she will cry and ask us do we want her to pull her pants down. We will say no. We don't know what we should feel or do if she does, but whenever she asks us, we know she is offering us something precious and that our own pride must be asserted by refusing to accept.

School has started, and Frieda and I get new brown stockings and cod-liver oil. Grown-ups talk in tired, edgy voices about Zick's Coal Company and take us along in the evening to the railroad tracks where we fill burlap sacks with the tiny pieces of coal lying about. Later we walk home, glancing back to see the great carloads of slag being dumped, red hot and smoking, into the ravine that skirts the steel mill. The dying fire lights the sky with a dull orange glow. Frieda and I lag behind, staring at a patch of color surrounded by black. It is impossible not to feel a shiver when our feet leave the gravel path and sink into the dead grass in the field.

Our house is old, cold, and green. At night a kerosene lamp lights one large room. The others are braced in darkness, peopled by roaches and mice. Adults do not talk to us-they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information. When we trip and fall down they glance at us; if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of consideration. How, they ask us, do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick? We cannot answer them. Our illness is treated with contempt, foul Black Draught, and castor oil that blunts our minds.

When, on a day after a trip to collect coal, I cough once, loudly, through bronchial tubes already packed tight with phlegm, my mother frowns. "Great Jesus. Get on in that bed. How many times do I have to tell you to wear something on your head? You must be the biggest fool in this town. Frieda? Get some rags and stuff that window."

Frieda restuffs the window. I trudge off to bed, full of guilt and self-pity. I lie down in my underwear, the metal in the black garters hurts my legs, but I do not take them off, for it is too cold to lie stockingless. It takes a long time for my body to heat its place in the bed. Once I have generated a silhouette of warmth, I dare not move, for there is a cold place one-half inch in any direction. No one speaks to me or asks how I feel. In an hour or two my mother comes. Her hands are large and rough, and when she rubs the Vicks salve on my chest, I am rigid with pain. She takes two fingers' full of it at a time, and massages my chest until I am faint. Just when I think I will tip over into a scream, she scoops out a little of the salve on her forefinger and puts it in my mouth, telling me to swallow. A hot flannel is wrapped about my neck and chest. I am covered up with heavy quilts and ordered to sweat, which I do-promptly.

Later I throw up, and my mother says, "What did you puke on the bed clothes for? Don't you have sense enough to hold your head out the bed? Now, look what you did. You think I got time for nothing but washing up your puke?"

The puke swaddles down the pillow onto the sheet-green-gray, with flecks of orange. It moves like the insides of an uncooked egg. Stubbornly clinging Page 11 to its own mass, refusing to break up and be removed. How, I wonder, can it be so neat and nasty at the same time?

My mother's voice drones on. She is not talking to me. She is talking to the puke, but she is calling it my name: Claudia. She wipes it up as best she can and puts a scratchy towel over the large wet place. I lie down again. The rags have fallen from the window crack, and the air is cold. I dare not call her back and am reluctant to leave my warmth. My mother's anger humiliates me; her words chafe my cheeks, and I am crying. I do not know that she is not angry at me, but at my sickness. I believe she despises my weakness for letting the sickness "take holt." By and by I will not get sick; I will refuse to. But for now I am crying. I know I am making more snot, but I can't stop.

My sister comes in. Her eyes are full of sorrow. She sings to me: "When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, someone thinks of me...." I doze, thinking of plums, walls, and "someone."

But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it-taste it-sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base-everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.

It was autumn too when Mr. Henry came. Our roomer. Our roomer. The words ballooned from the lips and hovered about our heads-silent, separate, and pleasantly mysterious. My mother was all ease and satisfaction in discussing his coming.

"You know him," she said to her friends. "Henry Washington. He's been living over there with Miss Della Jones on Thirteenth Street. But she's too addled now to keep up. So he's looking for another place."

"Oh, yes." Her friends do not hide their curiosity. "I been wondering how long he was going to stay up there with her. They say she's real bad off. Don't know who he is half the time, and nobody else."

"Well, that old crazy nigger she married up with didn't help her head none."

"Did you hear what he told folks when he left her?"

"Well, he run off with that trifling Peggy-from Elyria. You know."

"One of Old Slack Bessie's girls?"

"That's the one. Well, somebody asked him why he left a nice good church woman like Della for that heifer. You know Della always did keep a good house. And he said the honest-to-God real reason was he couldn't take no more of that violet water Della Jones used. Said he wanted a woman to smell like a woman. Said Della was just too clean for him."

"Old dog. Ain't that nasty!"

"You telling me. What kind of reasoning is that?"

"No kind. Some men just dogs."

"Is that what give her them strokes?"

"Must have helped. But you know, none of them girls wasn't too bright. Remember that grinning Hattie? She wasn't never right. And their Auntie Julia is still trotting up and down Sixteenth Street talking to herself."

"Didn't she get put away?"

"Naw. County wouldn't take her. Said she wasn't harming anybody."

"Well, she's harming me. You want something to scare the living shit out of you, you get up at five-thirty in the morning like I do and see that old hag floating by in that bonnet. Have mercy!"

Frieda and I are washing Mason jars. We do not hear their words, but with grown-ups we listen to and watch out for their voices.

"Well, I hope don't nobody let me roam around like that when I get senile. It's a shame."

"What they going to do about Della? Don't she have no people?"

"A sister's coming up from North Carolina to look after her. I expect she wants to get aholt of Della's house."

"Oh, come on. That's a evil thought, if ever I heard one."

"What you want to bet? Henry Washington said that sister ain't seen Della in fifteen years."

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"I kind of thought Henry would marry her one of these days."

"Well, Henry ain't no chicken."

"No, but he ain't no buzzard, either."

"He ever been married to anybody?"

"How come? Somebody cut if off?"

"He ain't picky. You see anything around here you'd marry?"

"He's just sensible. A steady worker with quiet ways. I hope it works out all right."

"It will. How much you charging?"

"Five dollars every two weeks."

"That'll be a big help to you."

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warmpulsed laughter-like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.

So when Mr. Henry arrived on a Saturday night, we smelled him. He smelled wonderful. Like trees and lemon vanishing cream, and Nu Nile Hair Oil and flecks of Sen-Sen.

He smiled a lot, showing small even teeth with a friendly gap in the middle. Frieda and I were not introduced to him-merely pointed out. Like, here is the bathroom; the clothes closet is here; and these are my kids, Frieda and Claudia; watch out for this window; it don't open all the way.

We looked sideways at him, saying nothing and expecting him to say nothing. Just to nod, as he had done at the clothes closet, acknowledging our existence. To our surprise, he spoke to us.

"Hello there. You must be Greta Garbo and you must be Ginger Rogers."

"We giggled. Even my father was startled into a smile."

"Want a penny?" He held out a shiny coin to us. Frieda lowered her head, too pleased to answer. I reached for it. He snapped his thumb and forefinger, and the penny disappeared. Our shock was laced with delight. We searched all over him, poking our fingers into his socks, looking up the inside back of his coat. If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy. And while we waited for the coin to reappear, we knew we were amusing Mama and Daddy. Daddy was smiling, and Mama's eyes went soft as they followed our hands wandering over Mr. Henry's body.

We loved him. Even after what came later, there was no bitterness in our memory of him.

Further Resources

BOOKS

Bjork, Patrick Bryce. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place Within the Community. New York: Lang, 1992.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison's World of Fiction. Troy, N.Y.:

McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988.

PERIODICALS

Leonard, John. "Three First Novels on Race." The New York Times, November 13, 1970, 35.

Morrison, Toni. "Memory, Creation, and Writing." Thought 59, no. 235, December 1984, 385-390.

WEBSITES

AUDIO AND VISUAL MEDIA

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Abridged. Original release, 1994. Random House AudioBooks, CD/Audiocassette.

Source Citation

Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3490201439

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Page 9 Source: Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970. Reprint, New York: Plume, 1994, 9-16. About the Author: Toni Morrison (1931-) was born in Lorain, Ohio. She earned a B.A. in English and Classics from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1953 and an M.A.

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Toni Morrison’s Sula portrays racism as a blocking force on the American Dream. In the story “The people themselves are often portrayed as ‘divided’ -- longing to escape the dismal environment for a better life and, at the same time,  determined to stay and fight the bigotry and oppression that plagues their communities.” (SIRS Issues Researcher, Toni Morrison’s Sula)  If the community is oppressed, there is little opportunity to become successful while living there. Becoming successful is a large part of the American Dream, and bigotry prevents the proper development of children by clouding their minds with doubt and self confidence issues. Both Sula and The Bluest Eye show that Morrison believes racism prevents the American Dream from being true. However, there is one more work that really shows Morrison’s negation of the American Dream.

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http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/taressay.htm

Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby is anexample of how Morrison works racism into her works to present a situation where minorities can not live the American Dream. Tar Baby is said to have biases within it “on a race level, gendre level and class level.” (Luminarium.org, The Inauthentic Tar Baby). Conflicts within the community over race cause little opportunity for the minority to achieve success. A class level conflict causes discrimination against the poor, meaning that there is little room for proper development among the poor. Overall, Tar Baby shows that racism and classism, the minorities are prevented from living the American dream.