99 pages • 3 hours read
The Bluest Eye
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“Autumn,” Section 1 Summary
The first section of this part of the novel opens with Claudia MacTeer's memory of the day she and her sister beat up Rosemary Villanucci, the daughter of a rich café owner, after she teased them by eating her ice cream in front of them. Following the Great Depression, times were difficult, particularly for the MacTeers. Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer were grumpy, the house was cold, and money was so tight they had to get coal scrap from the train tracks.
Claudia remembers how humiliated she felt when her mother scolded her for getting a chest cold and throwing up on herself. Claudia now wonders if things were as bad as she remembers. In the end, she concludes that her memory of that fall is ultimately one during which she was cared for by "somebody with hands who does not want me to die"(12).
Claudia also remembers this as the fall that Mr. Henry rented a room out in the MacTeer home. Claudia and Frieda were excited when Mr. Henry arrived. The adults were amused when the two girls (9 and 10, respectively) innocently ran their hands over him to discover a surprise he claimed to have for them: "We loved him. Even after what came later, there was no bitterness in our memory of him"(16).
Claudia then shifts to when Pecola first came to live with them after being placed in the MacTeer home by the county social service agency after Cholly, Pecola's father, burned down the family's home and beat up his wife. The Breedlove family was "outdoors," meaning that through poor self-management and financial decisions, they were left with "no place to go” (17).
The sisters liked Pecola because she went along with whatever they wanted to do. Claudia remembers the girls playing with a Shirley Temple tea set. Unlike the two older girls, Claudia (at the time) could not understand the fascination with little white girls like Shirley Temple and the blue-eyed and blonde-haired dolls given to girls. Claudia resented all the positive attention to little white girls and wreaked violence on girls and dolls alike when she encountered them. When she became older, she discovered that these attitudes were considered socially unacceptable, and her hatred was eventually transformed into love for white girls and dolls, "adjustment without improvement” (23).
Although the girls enjoyed being with Pecola, Mrs. MacTeer was stressed by the financial burden, especially after Pecola drank all the milk one Saturday. Mrs. MacTeer engaged in one of her angry rants, this time talking indirectly about the carelessness of the Breedloves and the greediness of their daughter. All three girls went outside to escape Mrs. MacTeer's words.
Once they were outside, the girls tried to figure out what to do. Their plan was interrupted when Pecola began to have her first menstrual period. Confident she knew what to do, Frieda tried to make a sanitary belt out of cotton and a napkin pinned to Pecola's dress. Rosemary spied on the girls as they made the attempt and ran to tell Mrs. MacTeer that the girls were engaged in "nasty" (30)play. Mrs. MacTeer took a switch to the girls, but she stopped once she realized what was actually happening. She sent her daughters away and helped bathe Pecola. That night, the girls talked about the significance of menstruation: it meant Pecola could have a baby if a man loved her. The girls were uncertain about what loving someone meant, and Pecola wondered how to get someone to love her.
“Autumn,” Section 2 Summary
The second section of "Autumn" is preceded by lines from the Dick and Jane primer, this time a description of a green and white house written in all capital letters and without intervening punctuation or spaces.
The second section opens with the description of the Breedlove home, a bland and ugly apartment that had once been a storefront. According to the third-person narrator, the coal stove, with its variable and unreliable flames, was the "only living thing" (37) in the house.
“Autumn,” Section 3 Summary
The third section is preceded by lines from the Dick and Jane primer that reference a happy mother and father living in a pretty house. These lines are written in all capital letters without intervening punctuation or spaces.
The third section describes the relationships between individual members of the Breedlove family. The Breedloves were thoroughly ugly, and each Breedlove responded to his or her ugliness in a different way. Mrs. Breedlove's ugliness was transformed into martyrdom when her husband beat her, Sammy's ugliness was expressed as bullying behavior, Cholly's ugliness was expressed in his frequent drunkenness, and Pecola's ugliness was something behind which she hid.
On this particular morning, the Breedloves were playing out a common drama that broke up the boring routine of their difficult lives. Mrs. Breedlove woke her husband by demanding that he get coal from the shed. The two argued violently until the fight turned physical. Cholly struck his wife, and she hit back. The fight ended when Sammy—as he frequently did—knocked out his father with a blow to the head. When Sammy insisted that his mother kill Cholly, Mrs. Breedlove demurred and told her son to get the coal.
During this fight, Pecola was so nervous that her stomach ached, and she imagined that she could make her body disappear entirely. Pecola was disappointed that her eyes always failed to disappear because her eyes were the means through which the ugliness and ugly people around her entered her mind.
Pecola believed that "[a]s long as she looked the way she did, as long as she was ugly, she would have to stay with these people," and she still couldn't figure out "the secret of the ugliness" (45) that made her an object of disgust and avoidance by her classmates and teacher.
Pecola imagined that if she had pretty eyes—blue eyes—the ill treatment would stop. Pecola recalled several simplistic lines from the Dick and Jane reading primer about pretty blue eyes. She prayed every night that her eyes would turn blue.
Later, Pecola walked to Mr. Yacobowski's store, observing inanimate objects like dandelions. At the store, Pecola bought three Mary Jane candies because she loved the sweet taste and the picture of the blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl on the candy wrappers. The store owner spoke to her, but Pecola could tell that she was invisible to Mr. Yacobowski as a person. Once she left the store, Pecola felt anger, shame, and anger in succession as she considered how the store owner looked at her. Her feelings were relieved when she eats the candies purchased with three pennies that gave her "nine lovely orgasms" (50) as she ate them.
Pecola returned to the storefront apartment and headed upstairs to see China, Poland, and Miss Marie, three sex workers who lived above the Breedloves. The three women talked jokingly and frankly about their sex work and past relationships. When Pecola asked Miss Marie how she managed to get so many boyfriends to love her, Miss Marie laughed and told Pecola it was because she was pretty and knew how to make money. Pecola listened in as the women talked about when they discovered they could make money by selling sex.
The narrator explains that these three women were "amused by a long-ago time of ignorance" (55). They were nothing like the idealized literary representations of sex workers. They despised all men and hypocritical married women who cheated on their husbands. The only women they respected were moral ones who were true Christians. They told Pecola fanciful stories because she was a child, but they did nothing to shield her innocence from the reality of their lives.
As Pecola wandered out of their apartment, she thought about what she did know of love—her father's moans and her mother's absolute silence as they had sex in the small apartment. Pecola looked back at the women through their window and wondered if they were real.
“Autumn” Analysis
Morrison's first major intervention is in the representation of childhood. Two of the central characters in this section are Claudia and Pecola, both girls who are firmly in the realm of childhood. Their childhood is one marked by their awareness of their family's poverty, but unlike Pecola, the MacTeer girls have the benefit of a stable family to counterbalance the negative impact of that poverty. Beyond economic issues, the girls also have a dawning awareness of the importance of physical appearance as one of the means by which they are judged. Claudia's awareness and rejection of these standards are symbolized by her destruction of the white dolls so highly prized by the adults in her life.
While the MacTeer girls struggle, their experiences seem relatively benign when compared to the life of Pecola. The earliest mentions of Pecola in the novel are ones that note the fracturing of her family and their homelessness. The blight on Pecola's childhood extends beyond the domestic space of the home, however. In her interactions with the three sex workers, Pecola brushes up against open discussion of sexuality that exceeds her ability to understand. In Mr. Yacobowski's store, Pecola is exposed to the storeowner's dehumanizing gaze, which it seems she has already internalized since she prays each night for blue eyes. The portrait that emerges in these early chapters is of a child who is innocent but assumed to lack innocence because she is African American as well as of a neglected child whose parents are too locked in their own drama to nurture her.
Morrison's second intervention is the representation of the family. The most loving family in the novel, the MacTeer family, is still forced to confront challenges such as sexual abuse, poverty, and childhood illness. Nevertheless, Claudia's reflection on how her mother cared for her during an illness shows that she was fully aware of how loved she was. This example of a successful black family is not the one represented by the Dick and Jane primers, however. While the family in the primers is free of conflict and child-centric, the MacTeer family suffers setbacks, and the parents hand out reprimands and physical punishment when their daughters inevitably fail to live up to their standards. Claudia and Frieda are cared for by their parents, but the girls and their opinions are treated as negligible because the Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer subscribe to a traditional form of parenting in which children are to be disciplined and guided rather than coddled.
The Breedlove family also counters the idealized Dick-and-Jane family. While the house in the primer is "VERYPRETTY" (33), Morrison describes the Breedlove home as being devoid of any life, and the Breedloves "lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly" (38). As the subsequent description makes clear, this ugliness is for the most part one of the spirit. The lack of nurture in the Breedlove family and the Breedlove parents' sense of alienation from their children result in a lack of resilience that makes it virtually impossible for the Breedloves to overcome their physical and spiritual poverty.
Pauline manages to provide for her family materially and attend to what passes for moral instruction in her household, but her efforts end in failure with the destruction of her family. Cholly makes no pretense that he is a nurturer, and Sammy merely becomes an adjunct to his mother's ongoing battles with Cholly. Pecola is simply invisible and does what she can to avoid seeing the traumatic experiences around her. In the Breedlove family, children are merely objects to serve the needs of their parents' egos or else they are simply ignored.
Morrison's portrayals of childhood and family subvert the idealized notions introduced by the Dick and Jane primers. The secret to a successful family is dependent on the love and the stability of the parents, not economic status, traditional morality, or centering the family around the child.
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