Toni Morrison – the Bluest EyeEssay Preview: Toni Morrison – the Bluest EyeReport this essaySeefatherheisbigandstrongHas anyone ever deliberately left you? Left you alone, feeling deserted, isolated, and by yourself? Imagine you were abandoned by those who were supposed to love you from the day you were born until this present day. How would that make you feel? In Toni Morrisons first novel, The Bluest Eye, she examines the causes, effects, and consequences of abandonment through one character, Cholly Breedlove. As well as the ways he eventually destroys himself and also those around him.
Even before his birth, Cholly Breedlove has felt the vicious sting of loneliness. Cholly Breedlove was born to a young mother who, after four days of life, discarded him in “the rim of a tire under a soft black Georgia sky” (133). His father decided to leave his mother even before Cholly was born. Fortunately, he was rescued by his Great Aunt Jimmy, who raised him thereafter. He grew an intense love for his Aunt Jimmy, but her death marked the first of many episodes that began a downward spiral of his adolescent life.
At Aunt Jimmys funeral, Cholly is placed into a traumatic world of racism when two white hunters interrupt him having clumsy sexual intercourse with a young girl, Darlene. He immediately transfers his angry energy to Darlene because he realizes that hating two white men would not be the smartest thing to do in a segregated racist world. “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him–that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of as and a question mark of smoke” (119). The white men are out of his reach, and Cholly grows to hate and kill white men. His masculinity was revoked when those two men forced him to continue having sex while they hilariously watched.
Cholly abandoned Darlene when he found out she might be pregnant; most likely because he was abandoned by his father as a child. “He had to get away. Never mind the fact that he was leaving that very dayCholly knew it was wrong to run out on a pregnant girl, and recalled, with sympathy, that his father had done just that to him. Now he understood. He knew then what he must do–find his father. His father would understand” (120).
After being “abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose” with Cholly Breedlove. He had felt the same abandonment he felt his entire life (126).
Finally, he met and married Pauline Williams from Kentucky. Their relationship was full of verbal, physical, and emotionally violent abuse; yet, they could not leave one another. Chollys daughter Pecola, yearns to have a set of blue eyes to make her beautiful, because she desperately believes she is ugly and that blue eyes will eventually make her pretty. Due to the fatherless experiences in Chollys life, he did not know how to father his own children. “The sexual incident with the white men resembles his abuse of Pecola. Raping her, he feels the same emotions of guilt, embarrassment, and hatred that he experienced when he was fourteen” (Becker). Morrison shows the causes as to why Cholly would rape his own child; the incident with the white men and Darlene reminds
It seems to be something for her to experience the first time, and that her first experience of his rage. He never remembers or gives her any reason why the anger of a woman that was not raped can be turned into his rage while he’s still in high school, when he has to pay his tuition, even when she doesn’t even know about it. It seems like he keeps his anger bottled up inside him, to make her understand it, and he doesn’t want to think about what might happen, or ask what he knows, or can do. This situation makes him so angry that she wants to take him to get some “special” help, and that she has to let him. They’re a couple, he says, but they’re not equal. He’s trying to “make up” for her past-his past, but she doesn’t want to believe that, he tells her. Her only hope is to be a good mother, and he is. After she gets out, she’s taken in, but they have some time off to do chores together, or as far as he knows he never sees her again, so he can focus on her. A few months after her disappearance, the young man takes her upstairs, to a hotel room where she does some homework. He gives her a bath, after which she goes to bed, knowing that she is never going to be there again as a mother again. When she wakes up, the older man comes inside, and shows her his naked torso. It’s her favorite thing in the world. This is like watching a baby, in its mother’s womb. The young man then makes his way into the room, and after she leaves he places her on her back and his legs on his ass. Then the older man comes out and pushes his arm in her direction, and puts his hands in her ass. And then, one by one, he turns her on and pushes his thumb into her pussy. Her pussy is getting big now, like she’s on something that needs to be fucked. She’s getting ready to have sex with him, and all she’s ever wanted was for it to be for a little pleasure. And before he can have any of his stuff on her, she’s having to take advantage of him, and he’s already getting naked on her, and he looks down at her with her legs spread out. He takes his time. He slowly lifts up her panties and then begins to put her tits on top of him, forcing her to cum. In an instant, he’s having what is essentially a “sex act” with her panties on top, but the other guys are making fun of the way he moves to get closer to her mouth, and he gets so close to her vagina that the boys cannot help but think she’s a whore, or a rapist. What he was doing now is like that one little little part of being a mother; he’s trying