Deconstructing the Master Narrative in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Deconstructing the Master Narrative in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The Destructive Impact of the Master Narrative
In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison deconstructs the “Master Narrative” by presenting an ideal standard of beauty and the damaging ripple effect of destruction it can have on a Black family subjected to its unyielding rigidity over multiple generations. Morrison shows how the Master Narrative affects those who don’t fit in as the victim (mainly through Pecola), how those exposed to it not only experience racism but also perpetuate the tradition through feelings of self-loathing (through Pauline and Cholly), and finally how people can fight against it (through Claudia).
Claudia’s Voice and Pecola’s Silence
Although Pecola Breedlove is one of the main characters of the novel, The Bluest Eye is narrated by her peer, Claudia. One of the ways Morrison undoes the idea of the Master Narrative is by allowing Claudia to be the voice of the novel. Since she rejects the Master Narrative as the only standard for beauty, she can be interpreted as the lone voice of reason amongst a brainwashed community. As such, one of the ways hegemony is displayed is through the lack of voice in minority narratives, and Morrison illustrates this through Pecola’s lack of dialogue.
The few speaking parts Pecola does have make her questions more poignant because the only time she calls attention to herself with her voice is after she starts “ministratin” (31) and discovers that she’s able to create life. When she hears that you first need to be loved in order to make a baby, Pecola then vocalizes a question that she struggles to answer throughout the entire novel, “how do you get someone to love you” (32)? She speaks again near the end of the novel when she asks for blue eyes from Soaphead Church after she determines that white skin and blue eyes are the standards of beauty and easiest to love. All the other times in between, she tries her hardest not to call attention to herself and, in fact, aims to be invisible.
The”Dick and Jan” Ideal and the Perpetuation of the Master Narrative
Morrison illustrates the ideal standard of beauty with the simple sentence structure of the well-known “Dick and Jane” stories. From a young age, children use these words to practice how to read, but Morrison points out that they also become ingrained as a heteronormative mantra of acceptable behavior. “Family” is comprised of “Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane (who live) in the green and white house” (1) with two pets: a cat and a dog. Unlike Pecola, Jane has a plethora of options to choose from for attention: her pet cat, her “nice, laughing” mother, her “big, strong, smiling” father, her pet dog, and her friend.
On the other hand, Pecola doesn’t wear red dresses and is shunned by her family and peers because she is ignored by many people. By using the Dick and Jane stories to begin her novel, Morrison goes on to repeat Jane’s quest for a playmate over and over like a broken record until the words are no longer separated by spaces or punctuation and they form an undistinguishable mass. This action suggests that the Master Narrative is such a forced hegemonic ideal that it doesn’t leave much room for any type of variation.
The Master Narrative and the American Literary Canon
The Master Narrative relates back to the construction of the American Literary Canon because it, too, is a type of standard that doesn’t leave much room for diversity. She made Pecola’s struggle as a little Black girl trying to fit in with the white aesthetic of beauty the subject of The Bluest Eye. Pecola thinks that having blue eyes (and light skin) will solve all of her problems because she equates blue eyes with “good” and her dark ones as “evil.”
As with the Dick and Jane story, Morrison chooses to highlight two episodes that parallel each other and illustrate Pecola’s obsession with the white aesthetic. The first one is when Pecola drinks three quarts of milk, and Claudia notes that Pecola was “fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face.”
Claudia’s Resistance and Pecola’s Tragic Fate
The final example of how Morrison undoes the Master Narrative is through Claudia, who seems to be the only character that has any voice whatsoever. As the narrator of the novel, her perspective is mixed with a child’s honesty and an overarching clarity that only comes in hindsight after living through certain experiences.
Claudia is confronted with the same pressures of the Master Narrative as Pecola, but unlike her, Claudia goes against the grain and questions its authority over her life. One Christmas, she receives a “blue-eyed Baby Doll” (20) and destroys it. Although she is unable to clearly articulate why she did it, other than because it disgusted her, like the Dick and Jane story, the doll was a physical representation of the Master Narrative. The adults not only gave her a prescribed standard of what was considered “beautiful,” but also began to try and groom her for the expectation of her gender role: motherhood. Although Claudia admits that she does learn to “worship” (23) iconic figures like Shirley Temple much later on in her life, she’s able to see the pervasiveness of the white aesthetic from a very young age and have enough strength to question its existence.
As she narrates the ending of the novel, we learn from Claudia that Pecola believes that she has obtained blue eyes because she has lost her mind. Through her clear perspective of hindsight as an adult looking back, Claudia is able to articulate that, ironically, Pecola was the one who made others feel “beautiful” when they “stood astride her ugliness” (205). This idea implies that she became a pariah who absorbed the entire community’s feeling of self-loathing and, at the expense of her own sanity and well-being, helped to lighten the load of the white aesthetic.