Tuesday, 23 September: begin Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (pages 1-93; through "Autumn" and "Winter")

Literary Style Reader: Christi Wood

Color Code:

Page 9, Paragraph 1: 

When she comes out of the car we will beat her up, make red marks on her white skin, and she will cry.

Page 19-20, Last Paragraph:

It had begun with Christmas and the gift of dolls.  The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll.  From the clucking sounds of adults I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish.  I was bemused with the thing itself, and the way it looked.  What was I supposed to do with it?  Pretend I was its mother?  I had no interest in babies or the concept of motherhood.  I was interested only in humans my own age and size, and could not generate any enthusiasm at the prospect of being a mother.

Page 20, Last Paragraph:

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

Page 22-23, Last Paragraph:

But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror.  The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulse to little white girls.  The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so.  To discover what eluded me:  the secret of the magic the waved on others. What made people look at them and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me?  The eye slide of black women as the approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them.

Page 46, Second to Last Paragraph:

Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.  Fervently, for a year she prayed.  Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope.  To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time.

Page 56, Paragraph 2:

There only respect was for what they would have described as ‘good Christian colored women.’ The woman whose reputation was spotless, and who tended to her family, who didn’t drink or smoke or run around.

Page 74, Paragraph 2:

We were lesser.  Nicer, brighter, but still lesser.  Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world.  What was the secret?  What did we lack?  Why was it important?  And so what?  Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then.  We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this in worthiness.  Jealousy we understood and though natural—a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange new feeling for us.  And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred.  The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

Question:

This final excerpt is very deep when the child is able to understand that it is not the child that she should be mad at, but the thing that made the child beautiful instead of her.  How do you think this kind of understanding can damage the young mind of a child, and do you think that some the children of today still feel the same way?

Voiceless and Choiceless

Page 15, Second to Last Paragraph

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.

Page 23, Last Paragraph

My mother knew that Frieda and I hated milk and assumed Pecola drank it out of greediness.  It was certainly not for us to ‘dispute’ her.  We didn’t initiate talk with grown-ups; we answered their questions.

The American Nightmare

Page 17, Paragraph 1

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life.  The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days.

The American Dream

Page 18, Paragraph 1

Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bread in us a hunger for property, for ownership.  The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor.  Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests.  Like frenzied, desperate birds, they over decorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses.  And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses.  Renting blacks cast furtive glances at these owned yards and porches, and made firmer commitments to buy themselves ‘some nice little old place.’  In the meantime, they saved, and scratched, and piled away what they could in the rented hovels, looking forward to the day of property.

Page 21-22, Last Paragraph

Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object.  I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day.  The real question would have been, ‘Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?’ I could have spoken up, ‘I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.’  The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.

Page 81, Paragraph 2

Few people can say the names of their home towns with such sly affection.  Perhaps because they don’t have home towns, just places where they were born.  But these girls soak up the juice of their home towns, and it never leaves them.

Page 89, Last Paragraph

How beautiful, she thought.  What a beautiful house.  There was a big red-and-gold Bible on the dining-room table.  Little lace doilies were everywhere—on arms and back of chairs, in the center of a large dining table, on little tables.  Potted plants were on all the windowsills.  A color picture of Jesus Christ hung on a wall with the prettiest paper flowers fastened on the frame.

Question:

The novel uses the threat of “outdoors” as being one of the biggest fears of the time.  How do you think this fear affected how the children behaved when it came to obedience to their parents?

Other

Page 47, Paragraph 1

The dandelions at the base of the telephone pole.  Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds?  She thought they were pretty.

Page 48, Paragraph 2

He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.  How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? Nothing in his even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.

Page 50, Paragraph 2

Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them.  But they do not look at her and do not send love back.  She thinks, ‘They are ugly.  They are weeds.’

Question:

It seems as if the child is using the dandelions as a comparison to herself.  Is this how you felt, and if so how does this analogy make you feel?