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Eat Pecola Breedlove, Love Pecola Breedlove, Be Pecola Breedlove EKALAN HOU
Kara Walker, Vanishing Act, 1997. Brooklyn Museum.
Eat Pecola Breedlove, Love Pecola Breedlove, Be Pecola Breedlove: Digestion and Desire in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
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Ekalan Hou
IN HER ETCHING PRINT VANISHING ACT, KARA WALKER DEPICTS A BLACK WOMAN’S consumption and internalization of whiteness in front of an audience. The crouching African American woman swallows a white girl who appears to be a miniature model of herself— both are garbed in off-the-shoulder and bell-skirted dresses. The girl exhibits no sign of struggle and evinces the rigidity of a doll: her uncompromised straightness defies gravity, her arms fold serenely above her lap, and her feet extend like two invariable branches of a tree. The Black woman’s consumption of this symbol of white femininity may be interpreted as her belief in the fiction of her racial inferiority. As Walker admits in an interview with Jerry Saltz, “There is a little bit of masochism” involved in “wanting to have everything of the other person, body and soul” (Saltz). However, the woman’s apparent acceptance of racial inequality also facilitates its rupture and transgression. Rather than totally submitting to the doll that she aspires to absorb, the African American woman in Walker’s etching eats the white girl—an act that is, in Walker’s words, “very sexual, very sensual” (Saltz). Cannibalism shatters all fantasies of autonomy and self-containment. The white girl travels through the African American woman’s bloodstream and becomes the energy that moves her bones, tissues, and muscles. Their union extends beyond the semblance of their clothing and even beyond epidermal limits. The barrier that separates the self from the other is transcended through digestion.
What would it mean to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in Walker’s terms? In Morrison’s novel, Pecola Breedlove, an African American girl, accepts racial contempt as legitimate and self-evident, and ingests whiteness in the forms of milk in a Shirley Temple cup and Mary Jane candies from Mr. Yacobowski’s candy shop. Pecola assumes the advertiser’s language and borrows the “peanut buttery good” slogan from the Mary Jane wrapper (Fig. 1) to complete her thought that “its sweetness is good” (Morrison 50). Although she integrates the “lens of the dominant culture” into her own thinking, Pecola’s desire for Mary Jane overflows society’s prescription for her abjection, like the molasses from which the Mary Jane candies are made— excesses to the sugar crystallization process (Hebert 184-98; Mintz 22). Her passionate chewing of the candy and longing to contain the blue-eyed girl are not reducible to her victimization by
the vicious racism of a culture that deifies whiteness, but are rather expressions of her sexual agency.
Pecola purchases Mary Jane candies from Mr. Yacobowski’s shop to transport herself to a state of ecstasy. Morrison draws a parallel between Pecola’s ingestion of Mary Janes and medieval mystics’ acceptance of the Eucharist, and demonstrates that the consumption of and total union with one’s beloved is not a self-abnegating gesture, but an agential one rewarded by spiritual fulfillment. The blue eyes of the “Mary Jane” pictured on the candy’s wrapper serve a similarly synecdochic function as the body of Christ: while the latter is a “manductio leading all creation back to God,” the prior is metonymic of white beauty whose “doe-eyed” innocence renders it visible and cherished (Bynum 261; Morrison 48). The analogy is reinforced by Soaphead Church’s letter to God after he professed to have given Pecola two blue eyes. The self-declared prophet and healer justifies his assumption of divine authority, writing, “I have found it meet and right so to do” (182). Amy Hungerford points out that the apparently awkward syntax of “meet and right so to do” is a reference to the Sursum Corda—the opening dialogue to the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer in Anglican, Catholic, and Lutheran liturgies (Hungerford). The commemoration of Christ’s Last Supper with his disciples merges with a commemoration of whiteness. Jesus’ gift to humanity—salvation—takes the shape of blue eyes. The infinity of the Creator is condensed into the finitude of Caucasian facial features: God’s “blue heaven” is used to justify the divinity of “Blue-sky eyes” (182; 46).1 Pecola complies in practice and in ideology with a Christianity that has been distorted by her society to legitimize her racial inferiority. She prays each night, without fail, to a religion that pronounces whiteness as desirable, and hopes to be reborn in Mary Jane’s image.
But, while Pecola’s veneration of blue eyes may be read as her acquiescence to social mores that enforce her disenfranchisement, her orgasmic union with Mary Jane shows her to be an actant. Pecola’s consumption of Mary Janes is characterized as a pleasurable process of knowing: “She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane” (50). Not only does the candy’s goodness recall God’s creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, but the candy is also “sweet to her taste,” like the fruit of the lover to the beloved in the Song of Songs. Pecola replicates medieval mystics’ simultaneous savoring of divine sweetness and reception of divine wisdom
Eating Mary and eating Jane: In defense of Pecola Breedlove’s agency
1 Morrison does not critique Judeo-Christianity, but rather its appropriation used to uphold white divinity and supremacy. She resists the whitening of Christianity by comparing Pauline and Cholly’s outstretched arms during copulation to “Jesus on the cross.” Moreover, when she describes the “color picture of Jesus Christ” at Geraldine’s house, she ellipses the color of his eyes and writes only of how “sad” they were (130, 92-93).
Fig. 1. Mary Jane candy wrapper showing her blue eyes. “For the Love of Mary Jane,” Candy Favorites.
during the Sacrament—a twin motion underscored by the etymological proximity between sapere and sapientia (Richle 109).
Hadewijch, a 13th-century mystic and poet, writes of the interpenetration and dissolving of the Self and the Other through eating: “they abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, soul in soul” (Hadewijch 66). She theorizes chewing and digesting as the most intimate source of knowledge: beyond kissing is the containment of the beloved within one’s heart and bowels (Bynum 157). Hadewijch asserts in her poem “Love’s Seven Names” that “[L]ove’s most intimate union/Is through eating, tasting and seeing interiorly” (Hadewijch 353). Her definition of love resembles the one that the narrator offers on the final page of The Bluest Eye, whereby “the loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye” like a sacrificial lamb (Morrison 206). Pecola’s evocation of medieval mystics makes her a lover to Mary Jane and saves her from the passivity of the beloved for whom “there is no gift” (206). She exhibits sexual agency and has “nine lovely orgasms”—the opposite of the violent and unassimilable “love” that she receives from Cholly, her father, who eventually rapes her (50).2
Pecola destabilizes the concept of “internalization” through her Eucharistic engulfment of Mary Jane: her eating can be viewed as both her internalization of (acceptance of or conditioning by) her racial inferiority and her internalization (sensual mastication) of a beloved. The Mary Jane is at once a symbol of white superiority that renders Pecola abject and an object of Pecola’s love. Pecola’s ingestion of the candy leaves her and Mary Jane vulnerable to each other: the emblem that the “outside gaze” uses to assert its divinity is counteracted by Pecola’s gaze back with her “inward eyes” (xi; 206).
In addition to religious justifications—the “Mary” half of Mary Jane—the myth of white divinity is also perpetuated by children’s literature—the “Jane” half of Mary Jane. Soaphead Church’s letter to God reflects the dual forces of Christian catechism and fairytale used to universalize white experience as the human experience: immediately following “I have found it
2 Despite the ample sexual experiences that Morrison recounts in The Bluest Eye, “orgasm” is a word that she uses only twice: once for Pecola and a second time for how Geraldine pretends to have them.
meet and right so to do,” he writes, “She will live happily ever after” (182). Akin to her Eucharistic consumption of Mary Jane, Pecola’s emulation of white narratives may be self-contemptuous at first glance but reveals a rebellious agency that imagines a parthenogenetic alternative to her impregnation by her father. She creates a counter-story that forms a narrative escape hatch in a novel whose structure shores up the ineluctability of intergenerational trauma.
Morrison uses intertexts and rhymes to evince Pecola’s replication of white language. Pecola borrows words from an Alice and Jerry book when she describes Mary Jane’s eyes as “simply pretty” (50):
Pretty eyes. Pretty blue eyes. Big blue pretty eyes. Run, Jip, run. Jip runs, Alice runs. Alice has blue eyes. Jerry has blue eyes. Jerry runs. Alice runs. They run with their blue eyes. Four blue eyes. Four pretty blue eyes. Blue-sky eyes. Blue-like Mrs. Forrest’s blue blouse eyes. Morning-glory-blueeyes. Alice-and-Jerry-blue-storybook-eyes. (46)
Reading books not only offer children building blocks of language, but also regulate their experiences of phenomena through the repetition of words. The Alice and Jerry book takes responsibility for constructing the fiction of white supremacy, admitting that the “Pretty blue eyes” are “storybook-eyes.” Pecola internalizes and reenacts the Alice and Jerry book’s frequent reiteration of “blue” and “eyes” (Fig. 2). Her obsession with the facial feature is instructed by and reflective of their primacy in the storybook. In addition to blue eyes’ numerical dominance in
the story, they are attended by the qualifier “pretty.” The coupling of blue eyes with beauty is cemented into Pecola’s worldview through literary rehearsals; to call them “simply pretty” is as instinctual as knowing the verb “to run.”
Not only does Pecola mime expressions from Alice and Jerry, but she also tries to mold her life to a nursery rhyme, albeit with limited success. She uses assonance at the end of each punctuation when she describes Mary Jane’s image on the candy wrapper: “A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort.… Lovely Mary Jane, for whom a candy is named” (50). The /ei:/ rhyme of “Jane,” “named,” “face,” and “disarray” exhibits “Jane”’s compatibility with verse in storybooks—a rhyme that Pecola interrupts. Although “blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort” (emphasis added) belongs to the same sentence as “Blond hair in gentle disarray,” the rhyme is dropped with a breach in Mary Jane’s selfcontainment. The tidy rhyme for the immaculate white girl is ruptured by her interaction with Pecola, a stranger to the “world of clean comfort.” Despite Pecola’s efforts to bookend her eating
Fig. 2. Frequency of each word (in order of appearance) in Alice and Jerry as quoted in Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 46.
with Mary Jane’s name, the iconoclasm of her “nine lovely orgasms” cannot be restrained by the tautology of a nursery book (50). Morrison’s use of rhymes and intertexts demonstrates both Pecola’s desire to assimilate her life to white narratives and her incommensurability with them. Pecola’s transgressive and sensual consumption of Mary Jane is an excess that cannot be incorporated into the existing social order nor domesticated by children’s literature.
In her fusion with Mary Jane, Pecola conjures the unrealized potential of an alternative reality where her father is not violated by two white men’s voyeuristic gaze and she in turn is not by her father. Before she purchases the candy from Mr. Yacobowski, Pecola imagines her sensual union with the Mary Janes: “The resistant sweetness that breaks open at last to deliver peanut butter—the oil and salt which complements the sweet pull of caramel” (48). She portrays the trajectory of an orgasm: the anticipatory pleasure that precedes it, the finality and catharsis of its arrival, and the melding of the two bodies like two pools of water after the fact, each sweaty but delirious with the joy of containing another. The initial “resistant sweetness” that Pecola describes echoes Cholly’s adolescent desire for Darlene, “The restraint, the holding off, the promise of sweetness that had yet to unfold, excited them more than full ripeness would have done” (145). Not only does Pecola share the sexual agency of her eventual rapist, but she also consummates the act that Cholly was unable to complete. Pecola is more than Cholly’s victim: her nine orgasms are the opposite of his interrupted “explosion” (147). Her present is his paradise lost. Pecola’s eating of Mary Janes projects a possibility unlived by Cholly—an alterity of harmony and interpenetration, rather than climaxes stifled by racial violence.
In addition to an image of orgasm, Pecola’s description of the candy may be equally read as a parthenogenetic birth. The maternal connotations of “to deliver” transforms the “resistant sweetness that breaks open at last to deliver peanut butter” into a tableau of parturition. The sentence shows the happy ending that follows obstetrical dilemmas: a baby finally disburdened from the mother after much pelvic resistance. The resemblance of Pecola’s eating of Mary Jane to a scene of labor is foregrounded by Pecola’s nausea, which resembles morning sickness. Before she visits the candy store, Pecola speaks of a “sick feeling, which she had tried to prevent by holding in her stomach, [that] came quickly in spite of her precaution. There surged
in her the desire to heave” (44-45). Although her pregnancy is not chronologically possible at this point, Morrison’s opening of the prologue with “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow” presents Pecola’s pregnancy as a precondition that looms over and haunts The Bluest Eye (5).3 Moreover, the prologue takes place “in the fall of 1941,” which is conflated with Pecola’s trip to the candy shop in “Autumn” (5; 7). The year in between these two autumns, one before Pecola has become pregnant and the other after, is flattened, and the readers are presented with Pecola’s victimization and agency side by side. Pecola’s foretold impregnation by her father stands alongside and in contrast to her present in which the only “child” that she carries is the candy that has just given her nine orgasms. Her self-fertilization divulges a jouissance antithetical to the sexual violence that governs and prefigures her life. When a peal of anticipation for the candy “unsettles her stomach,” Pecola is making room to hold Mary Jane within herself and to love Mary Jane in the most intimate way that she knows: “to give one’s bodily fluid as food, to carry a foetus within oneself, to chew and to be chewed” (Morrison 48; Bynum 157). Pecola’s mastication of Mary Jane promises an offering of herself as nourishment—a mutual vulnerability and autopoiesis that pose an otherwise to her father’s “‘rape’ by the whitemen [and] his own of his daughter” (Morrison, UTU 150).4 Although Pecola attempts to shape her life according to an Alice and Jerry book, the engulfing capacity of her love for Mary Jane shows her to be an agent capable of rupturing nursery rhymes and defying her narratively predetermined rape.
What is the purpose of conceptualizing Pecola’s agency when Morrison herself has declared Pecola a “narrative void” (Morrison, TBE x)? The project is twofold: to contest the definition of a subject in the fictional world of The Bluest Eye and, in turn, to save the reader. Although in the foreword Morrison writes resolutely of Pecola’s “passivity” in “a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair” and seals “the journey to destruction,” she offers a much more ambiguous perspective than one of Pecola’s ineluctable annihilation at the
Strangers to ourselves: The universality of our (non)passivity
3 Although Morrison never explicitly spoke of Pecola’s pregnancy as the “precondition” to the rest of the novel, she admits that The Bluest Eye stands “exposed, before the cover is even touched, much less opened,” because the complete plot is revealed “on the first page - and finally on the cover of the first edition,” which replicates the second prologue beginning with, “Quiet as it’s kept…” Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature, 151. I am grateful to Casey Patterson for his conceptualization of Pecola’s pregnancy as a “precondition” for the novel and for pointing me to Unspeakable Things Unspoken. 4 I have intentionally avoided the term “immaculate conception” in my characterization of Pecola’s self- germinated pregnancy. I want to avoid any paternal figure, including God’s planting of his seed in her.
end of the novel (x). Through the voice of Claudia, Morrison challenges the delimitations of sanity and subjectivity regnant in her version of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison writes:
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.
She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end. (205-206)
Hiding from life and courting death are fitting metaphors for Lorainians’ proscriptions against passion and adherence to a flattening of affect. They define themselves negatively against any exhibitions of personality or genuine communication to conform with the monotony and temperateness of social mores. Their rejection of all adjectives with positive connotations in favor of adjectives that denote an obedience to structure is more symptomatic of “passivity” than is Pecola’s stepping into madness. Pecola is shielded from a system of apathy and humdrum whereby all answers are preordained. Her eating is in accordance with Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928), which joyfully chants: “Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud—reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries” (de Andrade and Bary). Pecola’s eating of Mary Janes betokens the “life” that the people of Lorain fear, suppress, and designate as “death.” Pecola’s agency that infringes upon and masticates the neat hierarchies constructed by white narratives is necessarily labelled as insanity. She is relegated as the foul rag upon whom the people of Lorain clean themselves, so they may maintain the “fantasy” of their wholesomeness and integrity of their social fiction. Pecola’s “passivity” is the necessary condition for the subjectivity of Lorain citizens. To consider her agency is to realize the irrationality of the world that she inhabits, and to reconstitute her as not-a-void is to collapse the foundations of a society that pathologizes her. While Morrison believes Pecola to be a character who “could not stand alone” and sees the novel as a “(failed) attempt to shape a silence while breaking it,” she speaks from the perspective of the society that reifies Pecola (TBE x; UTU 150). When afforded subjectivity, Pecola can simultaneously be the shaper and the breaker of silence: her internalization of Mary Janes signifies both her concurrence with her socially constructed racial inferiority and her rebellious sexual agency. She is the mad reference point against which Lorain justifies its “truth” and this “truth”’s transgressor. She is the negative proscription that completes Lorain’s self-image and the dehiscence at its heart (Wynter 155).
Theorizing Pecola’s agency not only crumbles the Lorainian definition of subjectivity, but also poses a critical intervention to the annihilation of the reader. The argument for Pecola’s passivity emphasizes her internalization of the exterior world, specifically the mundane affirmations of white supremacy on candy wrappers and in children’s literature, yet is this not precisely the position of the readers of The Bluest Eye—this absorber and plagiarizer of outside
voices? When scholars such as Hungerford ask, “How far can we go towards inhabiting the subject position of an abject person?” the paradox implied in the question may be untangled by a refusal to take Pecola’s abjection for granted (Hungerford). The stranger hereby depersonalized is closer to the readers than they think (Kristeva 188). To inhabit the subject position of someone who absorbs external literature is to be ourselves. However, the readers’ semblance to Pecola does not underscore their passivity, but her agency. As Rita Felski writes in “Remember the Reader: A Manifesto,” “The sense of being utterly absorbed by a work of fiction” is a reader response that demonstrates literature’s “usability” by the reader rather than the reader’s nihility. Felski advocates for a reassessment of literature’s “use” beyond a conceptual object and a consideration of literature’s intimate entwinement with our lives (Felski). When viewed through this framework, Pecola is not a vacuous vortex, but an agent who “uses” literature to break away from self-containment and to commit herself to a mutual transformation.
Pecola’s eating of Mary Jane models an interpenetrative mode of reading for the readers of The Bluest Eye, one that resembles “orificial reading” in Kyla Tompkins’ Racial Indigestion:
By reading orificially, critical eating studies theorizes a flexible and circular relation between the self and the social world in order to imagine a dialogic in which we—reader and text, self and other, animal and human—recognize our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are … politically productive. (Tompkins 40)
Tompkins’ use of “orificial” does not mean to limit the mouth [ōr-, ōs in Latin] as the site of transfiguration, but to emphasize the political opening—the aperture [ōrificium] to existing social orders—for which it aims. Soaphead Church tastes “salt-sweet” girls akin to Pecola; however, his desire for them is gustatory rather than digestive (179). His insistence on their cleanliness demonstrates that he is simply “flirting with other ways of experiencing the universe” (Torgovnick 157). He does not fuse with young girls like Pecola does with Mary Jane because he would never permit their infringement upon his autonomous ego. Soaphead’s superficial tasting of girls resembles the “many readers” who “remain touched but not moved” by The Bluest Eye (xii). Readers treat Pecola as a character to be pitied—a “new dish to enhance the white palate” and soon to be forgotten, in the words of bell hooks (hooks 39). However, a challenge to white supremacy is only possible when the readers make themselves vulnerable to Pecola, when they transcend the gap between the self and the other, when they suffer the effects of their own “smashing,” and become victims of their own “assassination” (xii, 206). As Judith Butler writes in Precarious Life, “To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other” (Butler 44). By eating Pecola Breedlove, loving Pecola Breedlove, and being Pecola Breedlove, the readers envision an otherwise to racial violence that saves both Pecola and themselves.
To return briefly to Kara Walker’s print at the opening of this essay, its title Vanishing Act can be interpreted as either the performance of making another disappear or the agency embedded in apparent self-effacement. The African American woman in the etching, akin to Pecola in The
Bluest Eye, does both in her mastication and assimilation of the white girl.
Yet one cannot help but notice that the element in the artwork that truly seems to be vanishing is the audience. They become blurry and obscure as they inhabit the body and soul of the Black woman upon whom their gaze is fixed, and they come to know her afflictions and pleasures, her rapist and her lover, her self-abnegation and her agency as well as their own. //
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2020. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. De Andrade, Oswald, and Leslie Bary. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review, 19, no. 38, (1991): 38–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20119601. Accessed 31 Oct. 2020. Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader: A Manifesto.” Chronicle of Higher Education 55, no. 17 (2008): B7-B9. Hadewijch. Hadewijch: The Complete Works. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980. Herbert, Kimberly. “Acting the Nigger: Topsy, Shirley Temple, and Toni Morrison’s Pecola.” In Approaches to Teaching Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons and Susan Belasco. New York: Modern Language Association, 2000, 184-98. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage International, 2007. Morrison, Toni. Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan, 1988. Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Riehle, Wolfgang. The Middle English Mystics. New York: Routledge, 1981. Saltz, Jerry. “Kara Walker: Ill-Will and Desire.” Flash Art 29, no. 191 (1996): 82-6. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Torgovnick, Marianna. Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Wynter, Sylvia. No Humans Involved. Hudson: Moor’s Head Press, 2016.
