Unlike the Average Mental Disability as Narrative Form and Social Critique in Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Throughout her foreword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the language of disability to frame a problem of race. She speaks of "the tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate" (ix). "Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was?" she demands, recalling the childhood friend whose desire for blue eyes engendered Pecola's story (xi). She argues that "the extremity of Pecola's case stemmed largely from a crippled and crippling family" and insists that "some aspects of [Pecola's] woundability [are] lodged in all young girls" (xii).¹ What begins in the foreword as a figuration for, in turn, racism, internalized racism, and the vulnerability of young women to contingency becomes, in Pecola's manifestation of mental illness, a quite literal disability, accompanied by both the material consequences and the social ostracism that frequently attend the lives of impaired people.² Pecola's breakdown at the novel's end is, in many ways, the linchpin of the text; it makes visible the consequences of internalized racism, indicts her community for its failure to save her, and ultimately forces a reflection on the vulnerability of those with intersectional identities that resemble hers: namely, the other young, poor, black girls who populate The Bluest Eye.

Disability is at the crux of The Bluest Eye's inquiries, and yet it is rarely a part of the critical vocabulary scholars use to interpret this novel. Criticism of The Bluest Eye tends to focus on race, gender, and class, and when scholars have evaluated the novel with a critical disability vocabulary, they have focused on physical disability, namely Pauline Breedlove's limp.³ Yet nearly all scholarship notes Pecola's breakdown, frequently describing it as a "schizophrenic" episode, but elides the crucial role disability (as such) plays in the novel's exploration of sociopolitical oppression. Scholars give her "schizophrenia" a symbolic weight that is necessary but not sufficient to interpreting the impact of her disability on the text. To identify Pecola's disabled characteristics as schizophrenic is appropriate but not appropriately historicized. In the 1960s, when Morrison wrote this novel, the terms "childhood schizophrenia" and "autism" were used interchangeably and, in extensive popular discourse, denoted a reversion in or loss of normative identity—heralded by language anomalies and stemming from familial and social misunderstanding/distance/abuse—that often led to a schizophrenic break with reality.⁴ From this perspective, Pecola is psychologically impaired but has (some) agency throughout the novel and only transitions to incapacity in its final pages. This refiguration shifts disability from a narrative end point, a culmination of Pecola's familial and community neglect, to a category that pervades the novel from its outset and thus expands the possible interpretations for many of The Bluest Eye's narrative structures and themes.

A multivoiced narrative of multiple chronologies, The Bluest Eye sets the histories of the "crippled and crippling" Breedloves—Polly, Cholly, and especially Pecola—against the backdrop of their more normative neighbors, the MacTeers. The narrative culminates with Pecola's rape by her father, pregnancy, her psychiatric break fueled by a desire for blue eyes, and her ostracization from Lorain's black community. Throughout the novel, Morrison's experiments with form and language in ways that draw from or rely on Pecola's impairment. Morrison employs a fractured narrative form to accommodate a "delicate and vulnerable" Pecola, so as not to "smash" her (xii), and she depends on characteristics of Pecola's impairment and breakdown to explore "how the demonization of an entire race could take root in the most delicate member of society" (xi) and to evoke racial community and culture in her "struggle … for writing that was indisputably black" (xii). Formally, Pecola's disability functions as the opposite of a prosthesis. In some texts (of which The Bluest Eye is one), disability, often of a protagonist and often a mental disability, is either integral to or is inseparable/indistinguishable from the text qua text or is inherent its production. In this way, Pecola's...