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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [Firs [15], Line —— -5.0 —— Norm PgEn [15], ⠕ CHAPTER 2 Black Boys, White Gaze A Respectful Publication of The Bluest Eye Twenty-three years after it appeared in 1970, The Bluest Eye was still mislabeled fiction for adolescents. Morrison’s afterword to the 1994 Plume edition describes the initial publication of her book to be “like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread” (216). In fact, The Bluest Eye represents its creator’s masculine manifesto. Morrison deliberately places her black male characters into situations where their behavior becomes virtually unredeemable, yet she simultaneously urges us to forgive them. Because we must “handle why” as we “take refuge in how” they react as they do, we learn that the earth itself resists the seeds of African American virility, that the blame for much of their self-destructiveness lies not with black boys but with American culture (5–6). Although Morrison praises Plume’s long overdue “respectful publication ,” the Library of Congress continues to offer two telling subject headings as part of its cataloging-in-publication data: 1. Afro-Americans— Ohio—Fiction. 2. Girls—Ohio—Fiction. Combined, the data suggest that Morrison’s debut novel depicts the lives of African American girls residing in Ohio, which, narrowly defined, it does. Reading any of Morrison ’s fiction carefully, however, trains us to notice absence. What remains stunningly excluded from the book’s cataloging information but vividly included on its pages is the story of African American boys living in Ohio. The cultural influences that shape the darkness at the heart of The Bluest Eye act on and are enacted by its female and male characters. An artist’s androgynous rendering of a dejected child on one jacket cover captures what even the Library of Congress misses: abuse destroys the black boys living in Lorain, Ohio, as well as the girls.1 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [16], Line —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [16], The novel opens by parodying canonical children’s literature. Visual contrasts between versions of the Dick-and-Jane primer suggest uncontrollable speed and disjointed sound, as uncooperative groups of letters topple over into one another so that individual signs appear to battle for placement. Like real life, reading beyond page 1 leads, in the beginning, to more questions than answers; we really can’t judge a book by its cover. Our initial instinct here is to blame the disorder of the black figures for our confusion when, in actuality, the distorted structures or lack of supporting structures surrounding the figures deprive them of meaning and cause our discomfort. Read by innocent, uninhibited children, the opening passages would seem an amusing picture and sound game. Read by experienced, more restrained adults in the context of the rest of the book, the increasingly chaotic text ridicules the banal and unrealistic “happiness” of the generic middle-class white family and foreshadows the inexorable disintegration of a specific lower-class black family, the Breedloves. Much of the novel’s powerful irony results from its call-and-response structure, its clash of race, gender, and class as the simplicities of the white-family primer are answered by the complexities of black-family life. The textbook editor-turned-writer inverts stereotypical details of typical 1940s textbooks, distorted excerpts from which reappear as mocking chapter headings, to take us beyond a first-page glance at her rendition of Dick and to answer the question of why the text—and African American boys—disintegrate. The Bluest Eye examines the destructive effects on black males of Western-imposed concepts of repressive sexuality, competitive ownership, physical beauty, and romantic love.2 It shifts the reader’s “gaze” away from the black figures to focus on the white power structures that cause those figures to battle each other for predominance. It uncovers the lack of supportive structures that would allow the figures to cooperate in the making of meaning. The childlike, deceptively innocuous language that encourages some naïve readers to view The Bluest Eye as “adolescent fiction” offers a sophisticated...

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