1. Find one good website—other than Wikipedia—about Toni Morrison or The Bluest Eye. Give us the link and explain why you think the website is useful or interesting. What new information did you learned from the site?
Biography.com provides basic information about Toni Morrison and her career (http://www.biography.com/people/toni-morrison-9415590#synopsis). Their entry includes that Morrison won both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize fro literature, the two most prominent writing prizes that a novelist can win. The book we are reading now, The Bluest Eye and also Song of Solomon and Beloved are her most popular novels. According to the entry, Morison has also won, “Nearly every book prize possible.”
Her father was a blue-collar welder but had to work, other jobs in order to support his four children. Given the situation of Claudio in The Bluest Eye, her biography makes sense given the type of narrative she crafts with her fiction.
2. Find an example from the book that depicts a parent/child relationship and describe it. Is it a healthy or unhealthy relationship? Why? What do you think causes these relationships to be the way they are? What do you think could be done to improve the relationship?
The relationship between Claudia and her mother is fraught. Claudia becomes sick and because of the way that her mother treats the illness, believes herself to be to blame for becoming ill. She is so sick that she pukes on the bedclothes. But when she throws up her mother says to her, “What did you puke on the bed clothes for? Don’t you have the sense enough to hold your head out of bed?” (Morrison, 11).
Claudio is simply a sick nine-year-old, but her mother treats her harshly because of the added work that Claudia’s sickness has added to her already strenuous schedule. The problem is not that her mother does not love her but that her mother works too hard and struggles in poverty. Any additional strain to her situation is felt. The situation could be improved if the economic situation of the family were to be improved. No sick child should need to go to bed feeling not only sick, but feeling personally to blame for that illness.
3. Why do you think Morrison begins the book with the section “Here is the house”? What connection does the “Dick and Jane” reference have to the rest of the book so far? Did you ever read Dick and Jane books, or something similar, when you were younger? How did the books or stories you read as a child affect you?
While I did not read the “Dick and Jane” books, they have been parodied enough in pop-cultural contexts, that I am quite familiar with them. Dick and Jane represent the world in a simple and sympathetic way. They are like people’s idea of an idyllic family life of the 1950s. Dick and Jane live in an ideal world where they are always smiling. Their parents seem happy and stress-free. Their father works a well-paying job and their mother is a stay-at-home mom.
I believe the Morrison began The Bluest Eyes with “Dick and Jane” in order to contrast the ideal version of family life as presented in books like “Dick and Jane” and the reality of life as it is in Claudia’s family, where she lives with poverty, rodents and her mom struggles to make ends meet. The “Dick and “Jane” reference provides a good standard of comparison between life as ideally presented and life as it is in the no-always-easy reality.
4. How do most people treat Pecola? Do you think she is partly responsible for this treatment? Why or why not? Give an example from the book and analyze it to support your position.
Pecola is treated very poorly for how she is treated. She is called ugly by a number of people. Even her mom calls her ugly. She is always being criticized for what she does and is often bullied at school. There is a lot of physical and mental abuse and fighting in her house. Pecola carries both emotional and physical scars from this abuse; PEcola finger-traced some scars on her knee—her head cocked to one side” (Morrison, 24).
She runs away into the false belief that if only she were more beautiful than her life would be easier. Pecola is defensive around other people, but this can hardly be considered her fault. She is a product of her surroundings. Since others so frequently treat her poorly, it is natural for her to be defensive and have her guard up around people.
