Before Toni Morrison introduces Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, she asks us to read a little story about a pretty house, a smiling father and a girl named Jane who wants someone to play with. Then she makes us read it twice more. First the punctuation and capital letters disappear. Then the spaces between the words disappear, too.
Morrison opens with the Dick and Jane primer because its picture of a happy white family also teaches a lesson about whose childhood counts as ordinary. As the passage grows harder to read, the ideal it presents becomes harder to take for granted. Pecola’s wish for blue eyes grows out of a world that presents one kind of girl as easy to love.
What the primer teaches about belonging
A primer is meant to teach children how to read. The one Morrison imitates also shows them what a home and family are supposed to look like. The sentences give no reason to question why the house is pretty or why its parents smile. Those details sit on the page with the same certainty as the names of the children.
By the third version, a passage designed for beginning readers is difficult even for a fluent reader to decipher. The words still describe a cheerful home, but the effort it takes to read them changes how we encounter that picture. The novel returns to fragments of the primer in later sections, placing its simple descriptions of houses and families alongside lives the schoolbook leaves out.
Why Pecola wants blue eyes
Pecola hopes blue eyes will make her beautiful and change how people treat her. If she can change what they see when they look at her, she imagines, perhaps she can change what happens to her at home and in public. Her wish carries a child’s hope that adults might become kinder if she could give them a reason.
Morrison shows how early girls learn which faces adults admire. Pecola drinks milk from a cup decorated with Shirley Temple. Claudia, meanwhile, takes apart a blue-eyed doll she receives as a gift, looking for whatever makes it so precious to the people who gave it to her. These are ordinary things a child might find in a kitchen or under a Christmas tree. In each scene, the adults’ admiration is already there for the children to absorb or question.
What Claudia’s narration asks us to notice
The grown Claudia looks back on the year she and her sister Frieda planted marigold seeds and hoped the flowers would grow. As children, they believed that if the seeds took root, Pecola’s baby would live. Their mistaken belief has something in common with Pecola’s wish for blue eyes. All three girls put their hope in something small and tangible because they have so little power over what is happening around them.
Claudia’s recollections are one part of a story that also reaches back into the lives of Pecola’s parents, Pauline and Cholly. Those shifts widen the reader’s view of how racism, poverty and violence shape the household. Watch what happens when Morrison returns to a family member you’ve already met. The later account can change how you understand a gesture or an attachment that seemed straightforward the first time.
The primer asks us to look at a girl who can expect someone to come and play with her. By the time we understand what Pecola is asking for when she wishes for blue eyes, that expectation is one of the most painful details in the opening.
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Further reading
- 7 Toni Morrison Books Every New Reader Should Start With
- What Does 124 Bluestone Road Symbolize in Toni Morrison’s Beloved?
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