Searching Maureen Peal’s Shadow: A Review of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

It’s easy, even enjoyable, to recognize Maureen Peal in the pages of Toni Morrison’s colorful depiction of black girlhood in mid-nineteenth century Lorain, Ohio. Her white skin edges up to her kelly green knee socks with familiarity. Her “tinkling laughter” and the quiet adoration that seems to follow her up and down sidewalks and school hallways hark back to literary heroines throughout time. You fall deep into her “sloe green eyes” and her long brown braids. You reach out to them. And then you realize they are as ephemeral as vapor rising from a pot set to boil. Maureen Peal exists and then she does not, she cannot.

In Maureen Peal's shadow is Pecola Breedlove, the soft spoken, dark skinned girl with an undying desire to have the blue eyes and white skin that Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye circles . Next to emotional layers and complexity Morrison constructs around Pecola Breedlove, Maureen and her kelly green socks are whipped bits of frosting melting on the tip of the tongue. Yet it is Maureen Peal who intrigues the world Morrison writes into motion in her first novel. Pecola is nearly neglected by her community aside from the watchful eyes of Frieda and Claudia, sisters who attend school with Pecola. Claudia watches Pecola’s life disintegrate under severe hardship and provides unerringly innocent dissent to beauty worship, renaming Maureen Peal, Meringue Pie in order to combat her luster and even swinging to hit the girl after she pokes fun at Pecola during a late afternoon walk home from school. Still the obsession seeps into Claudia herself. “If she was cute – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not,” Claudia observes from the harbor of childhood where the seemingly inevitable dismantling of self has yet to sink in its teeth. “And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser.”

The eyes of black girlhood have never been dewier, never more detailed than when penned by Morrison. The girls live in a world obsessed with beauty and wealth that is unattainable for them and The Bluest Eye explores the confusion, anger and even delusion that this obsession causes with prose so steeped in poetry that it sings. Morrison opens the novel with the storybook tale of Mother, Father, Dick and Jane the white emblem of Americana and retells the story two more times, first eliminating punctuation then the spaces between words. The result is a visually and conceptually deluded blur of beauty and conformity that follows the reader from description of Claudia’s distinct desire to dismember her blue-eyed Baby Doll as a child to the “big, white, armed men” that flood Cholly Breedlove with a hatred for his own culturally cultivated weakness, a hatred of self that plagues his family.

At the heart of the novel is visually striking scene in which the storybook Jane encounters Pecola, Claudia and Frieda in the kitchen of a large lakeside home where Pecola’s mother, nicknamed Polly, works days cooking, cleaning and caring for a white family. The kitchen, where Polly leaves the girls momentarily, is a temple of shining “white porcelain.” A young white girl enter the kitchen in a “pink sunback dress and pink fluffy bedroom slippers with two bunny ears point up from the tips,” encounters the black girls and draws back in a fear that fills the room with an anxiety and tension. The tension culminates in the accidental shattering of a fresh-baked berry cobbler Pecola reaches out to examine. Polly comforts the “little pink-and-yellow girl” and abuses her own daughter who cries over burns from hot purple juice. Instead of identifying the girls when the white girl asks Polly hushes her, “the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake.”

Pecola’s cries of pain are never heard, not before or after the pivotal scene, and results in a novel that slowly but resolutely punches holes into the staple images of a society where so many girls and young women are unheard and bound by unrealistically white porcelain walls. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye breathes life into the world that juxtaposes the world of the white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired purity princess that media, political parties and religious sects exalt on a pedestal. The novel grounds the reader in the lungs, heart and brain of Pecola Breedlove, the quiet black girl who is never a victim because she lies outside the realm of justice. We can’t ignore her, the girl whose baby should die so as not to be a reminder of the injustice that fuels her obsession with melting her brown irises into the bluest eye. Morrison’s message waits in the perfect exaltation of the imperfect, of the ashen knees, the half-circles of dirt under fingernails and the seeds that die in dry soil. She makes you notice it, love it and makes sure that you know Maureen Peal does not and should not live in these spaces.

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