Here, the narrator announces that the Breedloves live in the storefront because they are poor and black, and they stay there because they think that they are ugly. They had shapely lips that drew attention to the face, and there you thought that they were ugly but you couldn’t tell why until you saw that they are ugly because they think they are ugly. This is a hint of what I thought the novel would be about at first glance, self-acceptance. If the Breedloves would be a little more confident, they would be a lot more attractive.

     Mrs. Breedlove is going to fight with Cholly today, because he came home drunk. She wakes him several times for coal, and tells him she better not sneeze once. Even though they fight violently a lot, the narrator says that the two need each other. Without Cholly, Mrs. Breedlove wouldn’t be able to assume the role of ‘martyrdom,’ as the narrator says she imagines herself as being. Cholly needs Mrs. Breedlove to take out his anger on her. He has had several instances of massive humiliation, and he is very angry very randomly, so much so that he surprises himself. The two have an unspoken agreement not to kill each other.

(Something strange, the children don’t call her mom or mother, they call her Mrs. Breedlove.)

     Of course, Mrs. Breedlove sneezes, so she pours cold water on Cholly’s head and they start fighting. The son, Sammy, joins in and knocks Cholly out, and encourages his mother to kill him.  Pecola sits silently and wills herself to disappear, but my bit, until only her eyes remain, like they always do. Pecola tells herself that if she had beautiful eyes, her parents wouldn’t fight, so she prays for blue eyes every night, without fail.

When Pecola goes to the candy store, the manager is frustrated with her because she is not communicating with her very clearly, and then he is afraid to touch her hand to get the money for the candy. Outside of the store, she feels ashamed, maybe for thinking the dandelions she saw on the way weren’t ugly, but now she sees that they really are.

     Pecola goes to see the prostitutes next. They are described not as hookers with hearts of gold or women whose innocence has been stolen. They just hate men. They aren’t ashamed of their job, or their ‘boyfriends.’

     The Breedloves aren’t ugly because of ugly faces. They have normal faces, with good and bad features. The narrator says it was like some “all-knowing master has said ‘you are ugly people.'” They accepted it. That is what makes them ugly. Their ugliness is given tot hem, but also chosen by them. This is similar to Mrs. Breedlove. She needs Cholly so that she can assume the role of martyr, so that her days are more dramatic, and that is why she accepts the abuse, even though she could leave if she wanted. She could have killed Cholly. She wants to give her life some meaning, but in doing so she has put herself in a destructive situation.

     Pecola thinks that if she had blue eyes, her life would be perfect like the girl on the candy wrappers. She wants new eyes so that she can change the way she sees and the way people see her. She temporarily abandons societies view of beautiful when she questions the assumption that the dandelions are ugly, but then accepts it again after her interaction in the candy store, as if interacting with the white man reminded her of what she was supposed to think beautiful was. This shows that she has the ability to accept herself as beautiful without blue eyes.

The Breedloves used to live in what is now an abandoned store. Last, it was a pizza shop, before that a bakery, before that a house of gypsies, but long before all of those, back when the narrator says probably no one remembers, the Breedloves lived there. There is a long paragraph describing the furniture, and how it is old, but not familiar. (Indifference is mentioned here, too, like it was in the last chapter, but I don’t know what the authors purpose of using this word frequently could be just yet.) The couch is the only piece of furniture that they seem to care about, but it really is only upsetting to Cholly, since it came with a rap in it, but the store refused to take it back. The Breedloves’ house doesn’t blend with the ones around them, and it has been suggested, not so subtly, so far, that whatever happens to them isn’t pleasant, so maybe their ugly house won’t blend because they have a particularly ugly story, something that sets them apart into their own little horrific world that doesn’t blend either.

Morrison, though, in her description of the house, shows that people put emotional stick in their objects. This reminds me of the definition of a symbol I was taught (a concrete object represents an abstract idea). Except here, Morrison writes it as abnormal that the Breedloves don’t have positive emotions that depend on their furniture. They do, however, have plenty of negative emotions that are triggered at the sight of a particular piece, which emphasizes the heavy foreshadowing, or rather, stating, that they have very unpleasant lives.

In this first chapter, we are introduced to Claudia. Right now, she is sick. She and her sister Frieda are supposed to go outside and collect the coal that falls off of the trains that are delivering it, so that they can warm their house in the cold. Claudia, apparently, didn’t cover her head well enough, and she caught a pretty nasty cold. There is a nice detailed description of her puke, but the main idea is Freida and her mother take care of Claudia, covering her with blankets and Vicks. Claudia doesn’t understand why her mother is mad at her, but she guesses she is mad at weakness, “for letting the sickness ‘take holt.'” She remembers her sister visiting her, “her eyes full of sorrow,” and singing to her. Claudia says she remembers love seeping into the room as thick as syrup, and she also remembers someone hearing her cough and coming into the room to recover her and check her fever. She says “when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”

The MacTeers are also welcoming a boarder, Henry Washington. The kids immediately take to him because he teases them a plays a magic trick. Pecola Breedlove is also joining the household, because her father burned her house down and she is in county custody. There is a healthy dose of drama that day as Pecola starts “ministraitin” and drinks too much milk for Mrs. MacTeers liking.

Claudia could be seen as powerless here, since she’s a sick, poor, female, black child in the 40’s, but the way she interacts with adults kind of contradicts this. She doesn’t really talk to them much, and she sees them as basically big people who need to be handled carefully in order to maximize safety for one’s self. Whether or not this view of adults is healthy or correct doesn’t matter much to me, because it is definitely a perspective which isn’t typical of a young child. She doesn’t think adults truly understand her, shown when she says that what she really wanted for christmas instead a doll was to sit in ‘Big Mamas’ kitchen with flowers in her lap while she listens to ‘Big Papa’ play violin.

Racism isn’t horrific in the book thus far, but the two older girls think Claudia is insane when she says Jane Withers is cuter than Shirley Temple. Claudia hates Shirley because her life is presumably perfect, and the two older girls have already either gotten over their jealousy or have accepted a somewhat racist attitude towards beauty, that being pale skin, yellow hair, and bright blue eyes. Claudia hates Shirley Temple, white dolls, and white girls. She hates the way adults rant about their cuteness, but not about Claudia herself. She hates the way grown black women act toward the white girls. She is terrified though, of how she acts toward white girls. She acts somewhat violently, like she does to the dolls, but she does so with indifference, which is the terrifying part. She is indifferent, then repulsed, then ashamed, so she seeks refuge, and she says the best place for that is love. I’m not sure what she means when she says “Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.” She does say that she ‘learned’ to love Shirley Temple, but not until much later. She pretty much calls out her community for worshiping white images given to them, labeled as the standard of beautiful.

Pecola asked: “How do you get somebody to love you?” Frieda was asleep, and Claudia didn’t know the answer. The girls think that the only way to have a baby is for someone to love them, so this may help Pecola later on, when she is carrying her fathers baby. Maybe she will think her father loves her even though he burned down her house.

 

Jane, I think, isn’t an active character, just a piece of imagination of one of the characters in the story that I’ll meet eventually.

I’m not sure what to make of Jane, but the story goes that there is a very pretty house with a family of four and a kitten and a dog inside. Jane asks most everyone in turn to play with her, or rather the narrator of the story does, and they just…don’t. The cat just news at her, her “very nice” mother laughs, her father smiles, until finally a friend comes and she will play with Jane. “Play, Jane, play.” The whole paragraph is repeated exactly, but without any punctuation, and then again without anything but the letters, no spaces, no punctuation.

Tenth grade english, if the author goes to so much trouble as to do (insert something the author did, like math or repetition) then it’s probably important. I’m pretty sure Jane is white, but it doesn’t specify, and it doesn’t say anything about blue eyes. The way the sentences are structured, the first paragraph remind me of a children’s book, except without pictures or having only one sentence per page. Which is why it struck me as odd that no one would play with Jane, or even talk to her, or be near her. The animals kept running away, and her parents just looked at her. I thought if a child were seeing this in a dream, or something like that, someone would play with Jane, or rather everyone would play with Jane whenever she asked, but that isn’t the case.

It is strange that Jane cannot find someone who will play her in this children’s book-type world, and I think that the author was trying to say that even the definition of perfect has something wrong with it, loneliness in Jane’s case.

In 1941, the marigolds didn’t bloom. Of course, the only logical explanation is that it’s because Pecola was having her fathers baby. Oh wait, that’s not normal. I admit, this was a little shaking after reading the whole thing with Jane, then the second sentence I read next is about incest. Anyways, it turns out that probably isn’t why the seeds failed, since all of the marigolds failed that year, too. I don’t know who the narrator is yet. I think it’s one of Pecola’s sisters. The narrator reveals that both Cholly and the baby are dead. She closed the unnamed section by saying “since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” This means that it’s much easier to understand what actually happened as opposed to what it’s purpose was, like why Cholly would impregnate his daughter, or why the earth didn’t let the flowers grow, or maybe why God didn’t let them grow, but I don’t know yet of these girls are religious.

I’ve already said that the marigold were probably important, and now there are none, so whatever beauty or safety the marigolds had brought each year in the past was gone now. It’s not hard to understand why the narrator linked the flowers with Pecola’s baby. They were both sources of hope, most likely, and both definitely beautiful things, so I can see why whichever girls is narrating would think that the flowers needed to be healthy for the baby to live.

Both of these unnamed sections in the book offer a little foreshadowing. The Jane scene was someone’s idea of perfect, or their dream, and that was ruined when Jane couldn’t find a playmate and no one would talk to her, making her lonely. The marigolds seemed like such a strong symbol, and all the seeds are dead, so that can’t be promising anything good. The narrator in the 1941 section is unable to say why she thinks things are going wrong, but her attitude suggests there are similarly tragic things to come.

I had no idea what marigolds looked like, but when I looked it up, I found out that they are quite stunning. They are very vibrant and full, any color from yellow to red to orange, anywhere in between, or a combination of any, many times like a vibrant scarlet with gold on the edges of the flower.

It occurs to me a picture is better than a description.

Like I said, pretty striking.

 From reading the back cover and a few things online, I know the Breedloves raise these flowers every year, and probably sell them to make their living. Now, if these flowers are their only substantial form of income, I imagine having not a single one bloom would be inconvenient.

Which is why I see this as at least a kind of important symbol. I mean, beautiful, flashy flowers, good enough to pay money to own for a week until it wilts, or to plant in your own little pot, maybe, none of these said flowers one year, and the little girl who raises the flowers is praying for beautiful, flashy eyes? I haven’t quite figured what the flowers could represent, but I’m guessing something to do with beauty or self-acceptance, or maybe something about nature. At this point I haven’t actually met any characters yet, so I’m sure that would help me start to figure it out.

This isn’t really a post, just the summary on the back of the book:

The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison’s first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom, Pecola’s life does change– in painful, devastating ways.

So there it is. Hopefully now you have as good idea about the book going in as I did.