The Bluest Eye

One of the impacts of racism and internalized racism on the characters is that they embrace the idea of black respectability, a concept that sees black acceptance by society as being dependent on emulation of values mistakenly associated with whiteness, including claiming middle-class status, having conventional morality, and embracing family structures that have long been disrupted for African Americans as a result of the legacy of slavery. Morrison uses the Dick and Jane primers to represent the idealized notions of family and home associated with whiteness, then contrasts the reality of the lives of her black characters to reveal the damaging impact of accepting such ideas as reality.

The family and home are key sites where respectability shapes the black experience. The family in the Dick and Jane primers comprises a nuclear family with a father, mother, siblings, a beautiful home, nurturing relationships, and pets. Within the shallow representations of family presented in these texts, fathers and mothers play with children and smile at them, pets are beloved, and houses are beautiful.

Morrison opens her text with this portrait of home and family and then immediately deconstructs these concepts in the prefatory material, a process that is represented by her removal of intervening punctuation and then her removal of the spaces between the words of the primer. Morrison prefaces multiple sections of the novel with fragments of the text that are in all caps; in each instance, she represents the ways in which the experiences of the Breedloves give the lie to these notions of the respectable family.

The Breedloves' blackness and poverty are the primary reasons for their inability to fulfill these ideals of the respectable black family, and society's widespread acceptance of white supremacist notions of African Americans further prevents the Breedloves from creating their own version of the respectable black family. For example, Cholly does not smile upon his children like the father in the primer. Instead, he feels no sense of parental connection to his children, and he breaks the ultimate taboo within the family by sexually assaulting his daughter twice.

The Breedlove home is not beautiful like the house described in the primer. Instead, it is barren, violent, and loveless because of the Breedloves' physical and psychological poverty. The smiling mother in the Dick and Jane primer is nowhere apparent in Pauline Breedlove, who devotes her maternal energies to nurturing the white family for which she works. Instead of nurturing her children, Pauline "bent [them] toward respectability, and in so doing taught them fear" (128) rather than self-love.

Morrison is careful to emphasize that the Breedloves are the natural result of larger forces and that their failure to become that respectable black family is a foregone conclusion since that image is a myth. Pauline's treatment of her children is met with societal approval. The white family for which Pauline first works is miserable and slovenly despite having a nice home and the material means necessary to create such a home. Geraldine and Louis Junior, who have managed to attain the much-desired home and pet represented in the Dick and Jane primer, are cruel, violent people whose achievement of respectability does not extend to charity for others.

Pecola's stillborn baby and the displacement of Pauline and her daughter to the brown house by the town dump at the end of the novel symbolize, in the end, the bankruptcy of respectability. Claudia's statement at the end of the novel that the town was wrong to accept the ideas that "the land kills of its own volition" and that "the victim had no right to live” (206) is a condemnation that can be extrapolated to apply to all of society. The plot of the novel and the suffering of the characters show in the end that there is nothing natural about these myths of respectability and that ignoring this truth is destructive.

The Great Migration was the mass movement of African Americans from the South to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West during the early part of the 20th century. The Great Migration serves as an important part of the cultural and historical context of the novel; the lives of characters such as the Williams family, Cholly Breedlove, and Pauline Breedlove illustrate the pushes and pulls that led African Americans away from the South and the reality of life once they arrived in places like Lorain. Despite the aspirations that lead African Americans in the novel to leave the South, racism, sexism, and poverty are there waiting for them in the North.

Cholly and Pauline's paths north are typical of one of the important patterns of African American migration, migration from the rural to the more urban South followed by migration from the South. Cholly goes from a small southern town to a bigger southern town and finally to the more urban environs of Lorain, Ohio. His flight from Georgia is pushed by his fear of dealing with the consequences of racialized violence; Darlene's imagined pregnancy after the two white men force him to simulate sex with her symbolizes this push. Pauline and her family of origin, the Williams, migrate from Alabama to "a real town" (112) in Kentucky in search of greater opportunities for work and better housing. When Pauline and Cholly married, they migrated again "way up north, where Cholly said steel mills were begging for workers” (116).

While dreams of greater economic security pulled the Breedloves north, the reality was that they failed to thrive. Pauline never adjusted to the overwhelming presence of whites in the less-segregated town of Lorain, and even other African Americans treated her with disdain because her speech and appearance bore the marks of her Southern roots. Pauline's work as a domestic servant outside of the home and Cholly's eventual lack of employment or underemployment are accurate representations of the dynamics of work for African American men and women once they migrated, especially during the 1930s and 1940s.

Despite their migration north, characters in the novel think of the South with a certain degree of nostalgia that papers over the pushes that led them to migrate in the first place. Pauline's figure for her recognition of sexual desire, for example, is one composed of elements of memories from her childhood in the South—fireflies, her mother's lemonade, and berries she picked with her family of origin. Cholly recalls his time with Aunt Jimmy and the care with which his community treated him after her death as one of the last times that he was nurtured. The commonality in the characters' experience in both the North and the South, however, is that racism and poverty prevent the characters from achieving their dreams.