In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Pecola goes to see Soaphead Church, a self-proclaimed “Spiritualist and Psychic Reader” who could help individuals overcome things that impacted them. Pecola comes to Soaphead Church asking him to give her blue eyes so she can feel pretty and be like the white movie stars that she idealizes. After Pecola leaves, he sits down at the table and write a letter to God, telling God that he granted Pecola her wish, and he knows this because she believes it, and that is all that matters. Within his letter, Soaphead addresses numerous themes that appear in the novel, but one that stands out is when he questions the purpose of names.

Soaphead tells God about his own given name, Elihue Micah Whitcomb, but says he can’t remember how he got the name Soaphead Church. The women in Loraine, Ohio, gave him the name Soaphead Church because he would not pursue them or wish to engage in sex with them, and he ultimately accepted the name “and the role they had given him,” the role that placed him in a back-room apartment and led him to become a spiritualist. We do not get why they chose the name Soaphead Church, at least a specific reason for that name, and this is why he says in his letter that he doesn’t recall how that name came to be associated with him. However, now that is what he goes by. It is what he puts on his business cards. It is how people address him.

On the role of names, Soaphead asks God, “What makes one name more a person than another? Is the name the real thing, then? And the person only what his name says?” Soaphead asks God important questions here, causing us to think about the ways that names function to identify us, not just conjuring up a physical representation of ourselves in the minds of others but also calling to mind personality and actions, temperament and beliefs. Ultimately, Soaphead’s questions point out the ways that names construct identity, not just the ways we view ourselves but the ways that others view us.

The use of names to construct identity appears throughout The Bluest Eye in various ways. One instance occurs with the names that Pecola and Claudia use to refer to one of the women who lives above Pecola’s family. The women are sex workers, and Claudia’s mother tells her to stay away from them while Pecola frequently visits them and they treat her in a respectable manner. Pecola calls the woman Marie, and Marie tells Pecola stories, doting on the young girl when she visits. Claudia’s mother refers to the woman as the Maginot Line, and thus Claudia refers to her in the same manner. For Claudia, the Maginot Line and other women in the apartment must be avoided because they would “ruin” Claudia.

The Maginot Line refers to the defensive fortifications that France built in the 1930s to deter German invasion. In regard to the novel, Claudia’s naming Marie the Maginot Line refers to the line that her mother doesn’t want her to cross, a line where she would get introduced to sex and intimacy, thus becoming ruined. Claudia’s mother fears the independent Marie, using the guise of sex work to hide her admiration of Marie’s independence. She even tells Claudia that she “wouldn’t let [Marie] eat out of one of her plates.” Stories arose around Marie that she poisoned people, killed them, or set them on fire. These weren’t true, though.

Another instance occurs when Pecola, Claudia, and Freida walk home from school one day with Maureen Peal, “a high-yellow dream child” as Claudia describes her. At first, Claudia and Frieda dislike Maureen because Maureen acts like she is superior to them due to her skin color. They come up with another name for her, “Six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie.” They do this because they notice that even though she is “Black,” others in the school, from the white students to the Black students, treat her well due to her phenotype.

When Maureen asks Claudia if she can walk home with them, Claudia lets her and starts to use, in the narration, Maureen to refer to her. They become cordial. Walking out of the school, they see a group of Black boys taunting Pecola, and she says they do this because of “their contempt for their own blackness,” something that Claudia realizes she does as well when she gets older. Frieda confronts the boys, and Maureen steps forward. They back off when faces with Maureen’s “springtime eyes.”

Maureen takes Pecola to get some ice cream, and Claudia and Frieda hope she will buy them some, but she doesn’t. Walking home, the girls get into an argument, and Maureen starts throwing insults at Claudia and Frieda, commenting on their phenotypes and their parents. Claudia swings to punch Maureen but ends up hitting Pecola, and Maureen runs away. Frieda and Claudia stare after Maureen and shout, “Six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie.” changing the way they refer to Maureen. They move from showing a semblance of respect to disparaging her with the nickname they gave her.

Claudia realizes that they refer to Maureen by that nickname because they, like the boys who surrounded Pecola, feel “contempt for their own blackness.” If Maureen “was cute,” then Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola “were not,” they “were lesser.” Unlike the white dolls that Claudia would destroy each Christmas, Maureen was something she could not physically destroy. Claudia says, “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.” Claudia could not destroy the pervasive tentacles of Western ideas of beauty that those her around championed and that provided Maureen with a leg up in the community.

Claudia asks herself, “What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?” Claudia says she feels comfortable with herself, but when she encounters the ways that Maureen and other view her, she things about the thing that makes her feel the way that she does. She even understands that “Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred.” Maureen, while she did not deserve the hatred, represented all of the people who viewed Claudia as ugly. She embodied all of it. As Claudia says, “The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.” The amorphous Thing is society and the ways that society deems what is beautiful and what is not beautiful. Maureen did not deem herself “beautiful” until someone, based off of society’s standards, told her. Likewise, Claudia did not view herself as not beautiful until someone told her and she encountered individuals like Maureen.

This is not all I can say about this topic. I’ll continue this discussion in the next post looking at Pecola’s mother Pauline and Claudia’s thoughts at the end of the novel. Until then, what are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.