On her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison states that she wanted to explore the “tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident.” While some become dangerous and violent, “reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over,” others become invisible, melting away as they “collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or acknowledge” the impact of rejection. Through Pecola Breedlove, Morrison enters into “the life of the one least likely to withstand such damaging forces because of youth, gender, and race.”

From the outset of the novel, we know what takes place. Cholly Breedlove sexually assaults Pecola and gets her pregnant. We know this from the second sentence, so we enter into the text with this knowledge. With the novel, Morrison details the racism and oppression that led to Cholly assaulting his daughter and the ways that racism and oppression impacted each individual psychologically and physically. The seeds get planted, and what they do not grow, rather they die in the unforgiving soil, refusing to sprout and bring about new life.

The imagery of seeds and planting play a major role in The Bluest Eye. Claudia tells us how her and her sister were so concerned with the health of Pecola’s baby that they planted seeds and spoke over them in hopes that they would blossom. However, that didn’t happen. It took a while, but Claudia and Frieda realized “that no green was going to spring from our seeds.” Claudia blames herself, but eventually she sees “that the earth itself might have been unyielding.” They planted the seeds in their “own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt,” and nothing grew. Claudia’s use of “black dirt” has two meanings here, one refers to the soil but the other refers to herself, Freida, Pecola, and others. The seeds were not watered and nurtured; rather, they were ignored, beaten, and abused.

One of these moments occurs when Pecola goes to the store for some candy. Walking to the store, she takes in her surroudnings, and she looks at some “dandelions at the base of the telephone pole.” As she stares at them, she asks herself, “Why . . . do people call them weeds?” She thinks they are pretty. She thinks of Black women going into the fields and pulling the leaves, not the head, for dandelion soup or dandelion wine, and she ruminates, “Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.” This image mirrors Pecola and the Black women in the novel, specifically her mother Pauline who works for a white family and treats her white charge more favorably than her own daughter. The utility of the leave, not the beauty of the flower, becomes the focus, and Pauline’s utility, not her beauty or her strength, become the focus of the white family she works for.

Before entering the store, Pecola thinks about the dandelions and the sidewalk. “[S]he owned the clumps of dandelions” and in this fact she became “part of the world, and the world part of her.” However, this feeling changes when she goes into the store and Mr. Yacobowski, “a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper” looks right through as if she is invisible. How could he see this little Black girl standing in front of him? He couldn’t: “Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable of necessary.”

Yacobowski stares through Pecola, not even hinting that he sees her in front of him at the counter. She sees the lack of recognition and the distaste he has for her, just as “[s]he has see it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness.” Yacobowski’s lack of recognition, coupled with the ways that “white people” view Pecola causes her perceptions of the dandelions to change when she leaves the store. Instead of seeing them as beautiful, she comes to view them as ugly, as weeds, because they “do not look at her and do not send love back.” The ways that others view Pecola impact her, and that impact manifests itself in various ways. For her, she turns inward and loses her own identity.

At the end of the novel, Claudia talks about seeing Pecola scrounging through the “waste and beauty of the world-which is what she herself was.” Pecola embodies both waste and beauty, the beauty of promise and the waste of the oppression dumped upon her that stifled that beauty. Claudia comments that they had all dumped waste upon Pecola she she absorbed it, and in return she gave them beauty. The beauty that did not grow in her grew in them because, as Claudia puts it, “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.” Pecola became the image against which Claudia and others measured their own self worth. They, along with Yacobowski and white men and women, stifled her growth, causing the seed to remain in the soil, never penetrating the surface.

Claudia ends the novel by returning to the image of seeds and growth. As she watches Pecola search through the garbage, she thinks about how she didn’t plant the seeds to deeply and the earth failed to assist in their growth. She thinks, “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds 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.” The soil is a society that privileges whiteness and the image of whiteness, causing Pecola to wish for blue eyes and features like Shirley Temple or Judy Garland. It’s a nation that oppresses Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda, leading the latter two to turn on the former in order to feel better about themselves when in actuality they should turn on the soil. It’s the waste and the beauty wrapped in one. The waste of harm and the beauty one feels when standing next to the harmed. It’s all of this wrapped together.

There is much more to say, but I will leave it here for now. What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.