ABSTRACT
In her powerfully compressed first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison scrutinizes the influence of the white-dominated culture industry on the lives and identities of black Americans. She tells the story of three young girls: Claudia and Frieda, who are sisters, and Pecola, who comes to stay with them during a period when her own brawling parents are cast out of their store-front home. The book’s setting is a working-class urban black neighborhood during the 1930s and 1940s, a time when it is already clear that American culture means white culture, and this in turn is synonymous with mass-media culture. Morrison singles out the apparently innocuous-or as Frieda and Pecola put it, “cu-ute” (Morrison, 1970: 19)—Shirley Temple, her dimpled face reproduced on cups, saucers, and baby dolls, to show how the icons of mass culture subtly and insidiously intervene in the daily lives of Afro-Americans. Of the three girls, Claudia is the renegade. She hates Shirley Temple, and seethes with anger when she sees the blue-eyed, curly haired child actress dancing alongside the culture hero that Claudia claims for herself: Bojangles. As she sees it, “Bojangles is [her] friend, [her] uncle, [her] daddy, [and he] ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with [her]” (Morrison, 1970: I). Claudia’s intractable hostility towards Shirley Temple originates in her realization that in our society, she, like all racial “others,” participates in dominant culture as a consumer, but not as a producer. In rejecting Shirley Temple, and wanting to be the one dancing with Bojangles, Claudia refuses the two modes of accommodation that white culture holds out to black consumers. She neither accepts that white is somehow superior, thus enabling her to see Shirley Temple as a proper dancing partner for Bojangles; nor does she imagine herself
miraculously translated into the body of Shirley Temple so as to vicariously live white experience as a negation of blackness. Instead, Claudia questions the basis for white cultural domination. This she does most dramatically by dismembering and tearing open the vapid blue-eyed baby dolls her parents and relatives give her for Christmas presents. Claudia’s hostility is not blind, but motivated by the keen desire to get at the roots of white domination, “to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped [her], but only [her]” (Morrison, 1970:20).
