Toni Morrison’s Disrupted Girls and Their Disturbed Girlhoods: The Bluest Eye and A Mercy

There were no books about me, I didn’t exist in all the literature I had read … this person, this female, this black did not exist center-self.

—Toni Morrison quoted in Jill Matus

We never shape the world. . . . The world shapes us.

—Toni Morrison, A Mercy

It is the urge to find a “person,” a “female,” a “black” like herself in literature that sculpted Toni Morrison into a writer. As a reader, she could only absorb what was provided to her by the books she read.¹ So, it is only as a writer that she believed she could create what did not previously exist. As a reader, she had come across the special kind of knowledge of American literary historians and critics that held that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature” (Playing 4–5). Only in her writer’s capacity could she challenge and attempt to refute such predominant but misleading beliefs. A world in whose eyes black females like herself were insignificant to the extent of being “invisible” shaped her identity as a reader. As a writer, she decided to shape her own world of fiction.

Morrison, the writer, wages her war against an absence, a void—an absence of sympathetic attention to the underdogs of a racist social order, a (near-)void of kindly interest in their world. So, her mission is to cast the hitherto nonexistent into a compelling existence, to bring the hitherto invisible into full view. And, perhaps the most imperceptible members of an already invisible black society in a race-segregated world are the little black girls, shrunk in stature by the crushingly diminishing combination of their skin color, gender, and age. Morrison clearly states her incentive to start writing: “to construct a fiction of a group of people ‘never taken seriously by anybody—all those peripheral little girls’” (qtd. in Duvall 31). Thus, as her first novel The Bluest Eye confirms, she is here to speak of “all those peripheral little girls” who otherwise remain invisible. And, in speaking of these girls, she sheds light on a painful paradox: while they experience their girlhoods mired in physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, as well as neglect, these girls, more often than not, are robbed of their girlhoods in a struggle for survival. The disturbed girlhoods of Toni Morrison’s disrupted girls most powerfully register her angry protest against a gender system that designates a woman a secondary rank and against a social system that effortlessly overlooks what befalls a poor (black) female child. Thus, in her world of fiction, Heeds are seduced into unhappiness; Jadines are brainwashed by the assumed superiority of white culture; Sulas need to fight back to survive; Pecolas are raped; Sorrows are preyed upon; Beloveds are murdered.

This article examines in particular Morrison’s first and last (to date) novels: The Bluest Eye (1970) and A Mercy (2008). Her first novel depicts what Jan Furman terms “black girlhood” and what Agnes Surányi calls “black female experience from childhood to womanhood” (12, 11). However, Susan Neal Mayberry contests such a one-sided view by pointing out that it is equally “the story of African American boys” (15), proceeding to show the usually overlooked portrayal in the novel of the masculine side of black existence in a white society. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that black boyhood/manhood mostly runs as an undercurrent to shape and present black girlhood/womanhood in the novel. In fact, the main contribution of Morrison’s first work of fiction lies, Missy Dehn Kubitschek avers, not only in expanding American novels’ treatment of racism and incest by reorienting it from a symbolic level to a more realistic one, but also in acknowledging the fact that...