The magic man / preacher who tells Pecola he can give her blue eyes gropes (and possibly rapes) Black girls, and so too does the boarder who initially hosts prostitutes in his room and later touches Frieda. But even as pedophilia and the rape of children is central to the plot of the novel (Cholly Breedlove assaulting Pecola), it also proliferates in the margins. I felt that The Bluest Eye set up both Black girl power and love (Frieda and Claudia learning about menstruation when Pecola experiences it and burying their marigold seeds in an attempt to preserve her) and also the vulnerability/victimization of Black girls (not Pecola's rape, pregnancy, and madness, but also when Frieda is groped by a boarder and worries she's been 'ruined').

That was one of the major questions I was left with at the end of the novel. Pecola's encounters with violence and horror (the smashing of a cat against a wall, the smashing of a blackberry pie on a white family's kitchen floor, the poisoning of a dog) are all deteriorations, fragmentations, abjectifications that correspond with her Blackness and supposed 'ugliness.' Her father's violation by the white cops who watch him have sex and egg him on under the penetrating light of their flashlights lead to his violation of her. Breedlove whose contempt for her own disabled body and rotten tooth leads her to invest in a white fantasy of beauty and cherish her employer's daughter over her own. The prostitutes, including obese Maginot Line, who live above the Breedlove family, are more caring and truthful than Mrs. Rereading the book, I am struck by its investments in the abject and the excessive against the pure and the disciplined. The relationship between the girls in the novel sticks with me the most, the desire that Frieda and Claudia have to rescue or sustain Pecola and the impossibility of doing so. I'm rereading and reading anew Morrison's novels, and my plan is to do this chronologically, hence beginning with The Bluest Eye, which is also the first Morrison novel I ever read years ago.

Books like the bluest eye