LITR 4332 American Minority
Literature
Sample Student Midterm Answers 2008
Topic 2 (literary style): self-selected text analysis related to Literary Style Objectives 5 & 6
Best Answers for The Bluest Eye
Land Kills--
I choose the last two paragraphs in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. When I first read them, I was not quite sure what she meant. I did not understand what the point of the seeds where or why she was talking about the land, and how that tied into the meaning of the story. But after a few reads I began to piece the true meaning behind Morrison’s words. After I understood what was meant, I found the paragraphs absolutely stunning. I do not think I have ever felt that way with any literature I have read up to today. It brought the whole meaning of the book together.
The first paragraph is strong. I cannot quiet explain it but the way Morrison puts the words and the words she chooses is so sad but fascinating at the same time. I enjoyed the way she put the many different terms of love. It explains how Cholly loved her. Cholly being her father loved her not in the way a father should love his daughter but in a sexually abusive way. “Love is never any better than the lover” and that is true. Cholly loved Pecola wickedly and violently and that was exactly the kind of person he was. Pecola did not have the “nuclear” family that most of the dominant culture had. As explained in Objective 5, the social structures for those of minority narrative is “shattered, non-nuclear, “alternative” or improvised. This is exactly the type of narrative that The Bluest Eye is.
I loved how Morrison used the metaphor of the land and seeds to compare them to society and Pecola. In Objective 6b we are to understand how all speakers and writers use literary devices such as narrative and figures of speech. I believe Toni Morrison does an excellent job in portraying society and the troubles with Pecola’s concept of being a minority. The land was society and the seeds were Pecola. “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”. (206) Pecola was that “certain” kind of flower. Frieda and Claudia were the kind that would grow. They were happy in their bodies. They did not allow the white dominant culture overtake them.
Pecola wanted nothing but to have blue eyes. She truly believed that the blue eyes would fix everything. Pecola allowed the land to overcome her as a seed and did not let her nourish and bear fruit or bear her child. And because the land did not allow the seeds to live they feel it had no right to live. But in Pecola’s case they see it is wrong. The land is wrong. The society is wrong. [AG]
Pure Emotion Portrayed by Imagery and Language
In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, there is a passage near the end of the book that seized my attention and struck a chord deep within my heart when I read it. The passage is Claudia speaking of Pecola Breedlove and comparing Pecola to the world around her. The passage begins in the middle of the paragraph,
…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. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us thing we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength (pg. 205).
I was captivated by the way Morrison fills the page with pure emotion and unadulterated truth of the way people act and think about others. Morrison describes Pecola and her entire family as ugly. Yet, it is this paragraph that makes you feel truly sorry for her. My first impression upon reading it was that this poor little girl was despised by everyone, even those who proclaimed to be her friends. It is as if no one minded being next to her, because as they stood there, they became better just because she was the way she was. When someone began to feel sorry for themselves, they could remember poor Pecola and feel as if they were the most fortunate person in the world. Claudia justifies the world’s actions because Pecola never defended herself; and because she did not defend herself, she deserved what she got from the world. This portion struck me as quite harsh.
Literary Style Objective 6 is about Minorities and Language, how all speakers use literary devices such as narrative and figures of speech. Morrison is a master when it comes to the narrative and the language she uses is both thought provoking and full of imagery. As you read this passage, you can almost visualize this little girl, standing in the middle of a circle of vicious people, all waiting their turn to poke a stick at this poor, ugly, unfortunate soul. You can almost hear the taunts of the others as they make themselves feel better by making her feel worse. The structural pattern Morrison uses in this passage – how everything bad about Pecola made everyone else better – has a very rousing effect on the reader. The reader is able to become a part of the emotion aroused by this scene.
My analysis of this passage is purely a literary one; there is no sociological connotation, nor is there a cultural study aspect in it. The imagery and emotion evoked by Morrison’s language doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a society or a culture. The object of this passage could be anyone at all. One advantage to this analysis is that race does not become an issue. By looking at each text with an open mind, we can resolve the counter-tensions in our course when analyzing literary texts and sharing stories and insights about our racial culture. It is only when viewed in purely analytical terms that the emotions of race do not come into play and raise tensions. [MAK]
Red, Black, and Blue
The Bluest Eye, pp. 134-35
I chose this passage because of the impression it made on a multi-sensory level (134-35). As I read it, I could not separate the words from a visual image. I think her words are a visual image. Reading this passage is like looking at a painting. I can see intricate strokes on the canvas, and take in the vision of the whole picture and then I truly appreciate the artistry when I search for the meanings beneath the surface. The passage is beautiful simply because of the prose, but the direct application of her art to the African-American experience is masterful.
She uses color like shorthand. At the beginning of the passage we learn that Cholly loves blue. In the title, The Bluest Eye, and throughout the book, Morrison uses blue to represent the beauty and essence of racial whiteness. So by saying that Cholly loves blue, she is saying that Cholly loves that concept of whiteness. Next she says that blue hovers around the periphery of the circle, showing that a white world completely encircles the world of the African-Americans. The picnic is set on the Fourth of July, Independence Day. Actually, it celebrates only the independence of white Americans, because black Africans and African-Americans were still slaves at the time. In the passage, the father stands over the people with outreached arms holding a watermelon that blots out the sun. He crashes the watermelon on a rock to split it open and when it splits badly the red flesh of the heart spills on the ground at his feet. In these brief two pages, Morrison communicates multiple layers of the African-American perception of self.
She takes the colors of the American flag and applies them to the African-American people. A black man stands within a blue circle with the red flesh of a watermelon at his feet. Rather than red, white, and blue, this is red, black, and blue. Because it is set on the fourth of July, it places Independence Day within the realm of the black community. Cholly gets goose pimples looking at the black man towering so high over them and wonders if this is what God looks like. When he remembers that God is an old white man with a beard, he assumes this tower of beautiful black strength must be the devil. Here, he cannot accept the idea that god could possibly be a black man. Because he automatically equates white with good and black with evil he internalizes the position of his race with those “dark” forces. Next to the typical American Independence Day church picnic, Morrison places a profane image of the American Dream. Here sits the young black Cholly in the midst of a red, black, and blue scene under the eyes of either a devil or a black God. It is hard to say which portrayal is more blasphemous. Cholly decides that the dream of the black man in power is more important than his allegiance to a white God and chooses the black image even if it is evil. His rejection of the white God shows his empowerment as an African-American man.
The metaphors of the scenes flow into one another while the actors morph into different symbolic roles. For instance the black man, who is god, quickly turns back into a father at a picnic. After he breaks the watermelon badly, the impression of divinity fades in a flash. By doing this, the author shows how fleeting the moments of power are for a black man. He offhandedly gives away the almost obscene red heart to the old black man, Blue. Blue transforms from the nice old man who told stories about the Emancipation Proclamation to the representative of whiteness that devours the black man’s heart. As she portrays the devil and the black God in one body, she also portrays the white oppressor and the black ex-slave as the same man. This asks, “Who is the cannibal, the white man who oppresses or the enslaved soul who accepts it?”
These are complicated ideas. Morrison addresses the contradictory roles of victimization and personal responsibility for one’s own condition. She seems to suggest that no one will save the African-American people but themselves. Her alternative to the American Dream was not the Dream of Dr. King, and it was not the nightmare experience of the slaves. It was a different perception of power, brief, but as frightening for those within the circle as it would be for anyone outside who witnessed it. [CL]
Dolls
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, pages 19 – 21, where Claudia talks about the Caucasian baby dolls which were given to her as gifts stood out and left quite a deep impression after having read it. Growing up, there were few toys that shared my skin, hair and eye color; thus I made do with Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Superman for heroes and role models to emulate; finding no representation of myself in these Caucasian heroes, I strove to find representation elsewhere. Barbie’s twelve inch tall boyfriend proved no better, being blonde haired and blue eyed, but a birthday gift from my mother of a black haired, brown eyed male fashion doll by the name of Jordan helped me find representation and helped me solidify the idea that persons of my skin, hair and eye color, looking like persons of my ethnic background, were worthy of being heroes, just as much as the blonde haired Luke Skywalker was.
Claudia feels resentment at the doll, with no means of representation in the doll’s pale skin, blonde hair or blue lifeless eyes. Claudia has nothing in common with the doll, so she perhaps naturally feels the same towards young girls who share the doll’s hair, eye and skin color. Just as Claudia detests the doll, which adults find beautiful and also detests Caucasian girls, who adults also call beautiful. Later, she rationalizes what adults say about both dolls and girls and finds actresses like Shirley Temple to be beautiful. In a sense, Claudia feels part of The Ambivalent Minority in that she knows she is not part of the dominant group yet she has mixed feelings and contradictory attitudes.
To say that when Claudia rationalizes how adults feel about Shirley Temple, Caucasian dolls and Caucasian girls, that she assimilates herself into the dominant culture would be wrong. She rationalizes these ideas because they are all she hears around her. Just as a student writes in their 2007 midterm, “The lack of choice is not only limited to the slave.” This comment shows how while African Americans like Claudia may have good self-esteem and are sure of who they are, they are continuously bombarded by messages of their inferiority to Caucasians. That is, they lack the choice of even knowing or deciding what is beautiful. Claudia’s family and other adults even tell her on page 21, “Here, this [doll] is beautiful, and if you are on this day “worthy”, you may have it, They may have just as well been saying, “Here, this Caucasian girl is beautiful, and if you are on this day worthy, emulate her beautifulness”.
Claudia’s description of the doll and why she detests it clearly discover literature’s power to express the minority voice and vicariously share minority experience; if, that is, we take it as her account rather than Morrison’s story. Reading Claudia’s viewpoint on the matter, I was immediately drawn into her confoundedness, her anger, resentment and frustration at the doll and all it signified to her.
The passage is very well written; Morrison’s writing pops; her style of flows and completely envelopes the reader, pulling them into the story. The most engaging aspect of her writing style is how she writes seemingly contradictory messages but when one thinks about what she’s written, it boggles the mind at how well she’s brought up the matter to her readers. Such an example is at the end of the book, in the after word, where she says on page 216, her attempt to shape a silence while breaking it. Such a statement seems both paradoxical and yet awe inspiring when you think about the time this book was written and published. As a student said in class, the fact that the book was written during the 1960s gives the book a greater impact and meaning to the reader. Rather than being a book that takes a nostalgic look back on yesteryear, this book was written while the American Civil Rights movement was taking place around Morrison. Much as Samuel Clemens’ work, which was written when such horrific catastrophes such as slavery were occurring around the author, Morrison’s book is not merely akin to a newspaper story of then-current events; it is a living tapestry that speaks of the immeasurable hardship a nation went through. . . . [OS]
Literary Style
This passage in The Bluest Eye really stands out to me because it is written from the point of view of a young black child regarding another half black child. The tone is at times envious and at other times angry. The narrator begins:
This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich,…as the richest white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me…There was a hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk (62).
In objective 5a, “The Dream” is the alternative to the “American Dream”. This young black child (narrator) sees this mulatto child as living “The American Dream”. By their standards she is beautiful because of “The Color Code”, which in Objective 1, lighter means better then darker. Maureen is described as “high-yellow”. However, in American’s eyes Maureen still has “a single drop” of African in her so she is only actually living “The Dream” of minorities.
Also, in this passage there is great literary style in the feeling expressed from the narrator. The narrator is a minority. She is a young black child and her feeling expresses her group’s (African) voice and her group’s experience as stated in Objective 6c. She expresses feeling threaten. She describes Maureen Peal as a “disrupter of seasons”. Maureen Peal has the clothes the white girls have, and the comforts and cares the white girls have, yet Maureen seems to have no idea of the impact her presence has on the people all around her. White, black, adults, and even teachers seem to be obliging towards her. Maureen represents the “new American” she crosses race lines and is “brown” or “other” as Dr. White states in Objective 3. No one is sure what or how to feel about her, even her own people; white and black.
This passage to me is incredible because it shows the struggle of a minority so gracefully. How a minority struggles against the dominant culture and even against it own culture at times. As if the battle is not big enough against the Dominant Culture. To have to deal with both is enormous. Morrison draws a disheartening picture of this double struggle for minorities. [HT]
Toni Morrison’s Literary Techniques Used During Doll Dismemberment
Claudia from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is referring to white dolls when she states “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made.” This statement clearly shows the tone of the selection which is very physical and full of hate. She also explains her confusion due to the fact that she doesn’t know what she is supposed to do with them and why she could not love them. I chose this selection, beginning on page 20 and continuing through page 21, because of the vast use of literary elements and because of the emotional dialogue. The author is foreshadowing the importance of physical beauty which Claudia does not accept as her own, and it beings to emphasize the importance of blue eyes. My first impression upon reading it was amazement of the details of her anger and confusion, and the wonderful literary techniques used to show the reader these feelings. The passage also touched me personally, for I had the same feelings toward the “blue eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll” that I was supposed to treasure but that I did not resemble. Unlike Claudia, I was unable to destroy these dolls and reading through this passage, I felt aware of Morisson using objective 6d by “vicariously sharing this minority experience” of young girls with the reader.
Toni Morrison also used Literary Style Objectives 6b by using Claudia to narrate her own feelings of resentment and hatred. This technique was very effective at showing her thought process as she destroyed the dolls. Some of the similes used incorporated strong sound imagery such as “the thing made one sound-a sound they said was the sweet and plaintive cry “Mama,” but which sounded to me like the bleat of a dying lamb, or, more precisely, our icebox door opening on rusty hinges in July.” Morrison continues this imagery of the dying lamb in the following descriptions, “ it would bleat still, “Ahhhhhh”, take off the head...crack the back against the brass bed rail, it would bleat still.“ The dolls which were supposed to comfort and give her ”great pleasure” arose a different set of emotions such as “those dimpled hands scratched”, and “the bone-cold head collided with my own.” The supposedly beautiful doll was transformed into something ugly and scary by the literary devices. She continues to describe how bothersome the doll was as a “most uncomfortable, patently aggressive sleeping companion”. The strength and alliteration of the words she chose to describe the subsequent dismemberment make it almost gruesome, such as “fingered the face”, picked at the pearly teeth” “shake out the sawdust” , and the “mere metal roundness”.
This selection is important to the overall nature of the book since it is the first to discuss the vision of beauty portrayed by the dominant culture, and Claudia’s inability to accept this mainstream view, which includes African American adults who never had a doll and tell Claudia that she has “a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with-you?” The syntax used in the structure of this sentence is a method to distinguish Claudia’s dialogue from the adult dialogue and it emphasizes the tone in the adults scolding.
There is a vast contrast between studying minority literature as sociology or cultural studies and studying it as a literary work. The analysis of this text selection for example, does both, by including literary techniques and looking at the importance of this text within the book and in minority culture. Viewed as cultural study, this selection portrays the pain and anger that a young girl feels due to her minority class and social standards. The author’s literary techniques used to portray Claudia’s feelings can be studied from a literary point of view, due to its richness of literary themes. The advantage of studying minority literature is that the background of the author brings in unique views, sentence structures, and imagery related to that culture/race. The disadvantage is that some students may believe that the author is only being read because he/she is a minority and their work may be looked at only for its minority aspect. Personal insights and experiences shared, for example during our class, can bring in different points of view, enhance the literature selection, and create a connection between the reader and the book. They can also distract the focus of a literature course, if they are not related to the subject, and can take away from the experience that the author is trying to portray if misinterpreted. This counter-tension can be controlled carefully by achieving a balance of literary education and respect for personal views that directly relate to the literary texts. For example, I could have shared my hatred of white dolls during class, but it would not have had the same emotional appeal as a phrase that Morrison uses later on in the chapter:
“But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying
thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. “
My personal experience can be shared, but an author’s carefully written work can not be replicated or forgotten. [VV]
Pecola’s Conversation With Herself
The passage that caught my attention the most was from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I specifically remember it because it was written differently than the rest of the text. The passage occurred towards the end of the book, when Pecola was having a conversation with herself (193-204). Pecola rarely speaks and most of the book is spent with others commenting on her or the narrator telling of what she is doing. This is the first and only time in the reading that we read about Pecola’s innermost thoughts. Even though the dialogue was different from the rest of the text, Morrison still carried out the same language. The characters in the book do not talk in traditional English, and this continued even throughout Pecola’s thoughts. I think this was a good way to show that the characters didn’t only talk in a certain way, they also thought in that same language. If Morrison had let the characters talk in a traditional English manner, the dialogue would not have been believable for that time period and the poverty that these family’s were going through at that time.
This passage somewhat incorporates the Dream. All of Pecola’s life, she has wished for blue eyes. She felt that if she had them, she would be beautiful. After lots of hoping and praying, she still didn’t get her precious blue eyes. However, after visiting Soaphead Church, Pecola achieved her goal of obtaining blue eyes. She eventually acquired what she had been striving for, after suffering setbacks. This passage is also reminiscent of the American Dream because minorities found it to be more like the American Nightmare. Pecola may have gotten her beloved blue eyes, but she is still not seen as beautiful because she is still a dark, black girl. This causes her to sink further into depression because she thought the blue eyes would solve all of her problems. This reminds me of Countee Cullen’s poem, “From the Dark Tower“. The poem ends with the line, “So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds”. After Pecola becomes pregnant with Cholly’s baby, she recluses and doesn’t associate with the rest of the world because of the pain she has gone through. [SW]
. . . This is actually my first literature course, so I do not have much to compare to on the issue. But, I would have to say, that when I signed up for the course I assumed we would be learning about how to analyze the readings from a literary perspective, which we have with the objectives that you gave us. But, I feel that in class the cultural issues hit home really hard for a lot of students, and it turns into a more cultural debate than a literary analysis. During the lessons that the students present, the literary objectives are referred to, but the discussion always turns to a more personal, culture related topic. I think that with literary devices like these it would be hard to keep the discussions only literature based. I do not think there is really any way that you could resolve the issue of the discussion leading this way, because it is a very emotional subject and everyone is going to relate the stories to themselves or what they have heard from their families. [CW]