Black Girlhood Persists: Pecola’s Persistence as Non/Child in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye¹

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Miranda Green-Barteet and Dr. Amanda Allen for their insightful feedback and vision as the editors of this important special issue and acknowledge the hard work of my research assistant, Emily Driscoll. I would also like to thank my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Thy Phu, for her guidance, and my husband, Brian, for his unwavering support. Finally, I would like to dedicate this article to my daughter—you are so loved.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This article draws on the third chapter, “Seeing and Believing Otherwise: Fantasy in The Bluest Eye and The Planet of Junior Brown,” of my SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded unpublished dissertation. A similarly titled version of this chapter was also accepted to the peer-reviewed MELUS conference (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) titled “Awakenings and Reckonings: Multiethnic Literature and Effecting Change—Past, Present, and Future,” scheduled for April 2-5, 2020 in New Orleans, Louisiana that was cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 11, 2020 - May 4, 2023). This project significantly extends my earlier work and nuances my original argument through its engagement with Black girlhood studies to more fully critique pathologizing readings of Pecola by examining her through the Afropessimist concept of the non/child.

² Ashley Smith-Purviance also uses “non/child” to describe Black girls (180, 189), a term that relies on necropolitics, social death, and Afropessimism as articulated by critical race scholars such as Orlando Patterson, Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, and kihana miraya ross. I similarly utilize the term non/child to refer to the paradoxical position of Black girls that causes them to be excluded from childhood, innocence, and humanity.

³ Missy Dehn Kubitschek highlights that “[f]ocusing on a twelve-year-old African American girl was an inherently feminist choice because few adult books up to 1970 had considered girls’ lives (especially those of black girls) important enough to be a novel’s central interest” (30). As a result, Morrison’s novel is a key text to consider in terms of its representation of Black girlhood. However, it is also important to note that Black girlhood studies emphasizes empowering Black girls to narrativize their own experience (Smith 27; Brown 115).

⁴ The Breedlove family acts as a scapegoat for the African American community in Lorain, Ohio to minimize their own ugliness, i.e. dehumanization, within broader U.S. society, as suggested when the narrator states “[a]ll of our waste which we dumped on her [Pecola] and which she absorbed […] We were so beautiful when we stoo astride her ugliness” (Morrison 205).

⁵ Ava Osterweil argues that Shirley Temple’s “infantile sexuality was both deliberately manufactured and scrupulously preserved” in order to “mobiliz[e] the pedophilic gaze to (insufficiently) suture the festering wound of racial violence that had defined the ideological parameters of American cinema since D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation” (2). Obscured under the guise of white childhood innocence, Temple’s body became an “intensely erotic spectacle” used to justify and realize white supremacy as the films “killed blacks with cuteness” (1, 30). In her reading, Temple’s dance scene with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson “attempted to normalize and domesticate the project of black male castration that Birth had literally enacted on screen” (4). Thus, while Claudia articulates how Temple undermines her Black girlhood, Osterweil reveals that Temple also insidiously undermines Black masculinity, because Morrison’s novel critiques the ways in which white supremacy fractures the Black family for its own ends. It is thus only through family and community that both Black girlhood and Black masculinity can be restored.

⁶ It is important to note that Cholly’s rape of Pecola replicates his own symbolic rape, when he is discovered at eleven-years-old having intercourse with Darlene by two white men holding flashlights and guns, which become phallic and violent symbols as Cholly describes the “clop of metal” of the gun aimed behind him and the ”flashlight worm[ing]” its way into his guts” (148). Thus, Cholly’s sexual violence toward his daughter is rooted in intergenerational trauma and his own disrupted boyhood, although it does not excuse his abuse.

⁷ The prevailing reading of Pecola in literary criticism is that she exhibits so-called mental illness or insanity after Cholly rapes her, which numerous critics have further pathologized and diagnosed as schizophrenia, including Richard Andersen (33), Michael Awkward (93), Claudine Raynaud (114), Ágnes Surányi (12–3), S.P. Swain and Sarbajit Das (90), and Susan Willis (86). Schizophrenia is a particularly problematic label for a Black girl given its history as a racialized diagnosis utilized to silence Black political protest, particularly of Black men, as argued by Jonathan Metzl (95, 128). Along similar lines, Jessica Horvath Williams asserts that the terminology of “childhood schizophrenia” and “autism” were used interchangeably in the 1960s, and that through the lens of autism, “Pecola is psychologically impaired but has (some) agency throughout the novel and only transitions to incapacity in its final pages” (92). I argue that this reading is also problematic because it similarly pathologizes childhood behavior and it negates Pecola’s agency. In contrast, my reading of Pecola relies on a Mad Studies trauma-informed methodology that depathologizes Pecola’s behavior as childlike coping mechanisms she uses to survive the trauma she endures.

⁸ My Mad Studies trauma-informed methodological approach also draws on affect theorists, such as Ann Cvetkovich, psychoanalytic theorists such as Anne Anlin Cheng, trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, in addition to disability and critical race studies scholars such as Therí Alyce Pickens and Sami Schalk. In this article, I focus on examining Pecola’s positionality as a Black girl to disrupt conventional pathologizing and adultifying readings of her character, which contributes to a broader interdisciplinary project of de-pathologizing marginalized communities and challenging sanism rooted in white supremacy that has been taken up by the aforementioned critics and Mad Studies scholars.

⁹ Mad scholars and activists (such as the Hearing Voices Network) have also advocated for the de-pathologization of voice-hearing more generally (see Blackman, “Psychiatric Culture” and Blackman, “The Challenges”).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and Western University's President's Entrance Scholarship and Doctoral Excellence Research Award.