The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye / Toni Morrison, 211 pgs.

Toni Morrison's classic is beautiful and horrifying. Pecola Breedlove is the central character yet we see her only through others.  She is ugly, she knows she is ugly, she just wants to be pretty.  She wants blue eyes because all of the examples in her life are of pretty blue-eyed girls.  Pecola's life is not great.  Her family is poor and on the bottom end in every way.  She seems to be the thing people look at to think, "At least my life isn't as bad as Pecola's."  This isn't really an enviable position but then things just get worse for her.  Not easy to read but not easy to put down. Hard to believe this was Morrison's first book.  She is a national treasure.

Playing in the Dark

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination / Toni Morrison, 91 p.

Essays based on a series of Massey lectures given at Harvard, the topics explored here link strongly to ideas we hope to discuss this summer when we read Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Melville's Moby Dick.  We hope to see the ways in which a canonical work of 19th century American literature written by a white still contains what Morrison calls an "Africanist" presence, and how this awareness might change our understanding of that book, as well as inform our reading other more contemporary texts such as The Bluest Eye.  Some of Morrison's thoughts:

• “…until very recently…readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white.”
• “How is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction?”
• “Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer."
• “There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called “the power of blackness,” especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play…” 

And perhaps most importantly:

• “My project rises from delight, not disappointment.”