Confronting Visuality in Multi-Ethnic Women’s Writing

A. Laflen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137413031
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137413048
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

Considering new perspectives on writers such as Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich, Confronting Visuality in Multi-ethnic Women's Writing traces a cross-cultural tradition in which contemporary female writers situate images of women within larger contexts of visuality.

Part I

Coming-of-Age with Mass Media

1

(Re)Visualizing History in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Throughout her body of work, Toni Morrison has been deeply engaged with the ethics and politics of visuality. Morrison’s interest in visuality stems from her desire to “bear witness to the plight of African Americans” (Bouson 2), a plight that Morrison has described as “grotesque” (Jones and Vinson 181) and in graphic description as “my people are being devoured” (Morrison, “Language Must Not Sweat” 121). There is a tension also between Morrison’s sense that the desperate situation of African Americans warrants immediate attention and the strange invisibility of racial issues in much of American culture. Morrison recognizes that a process of erasure and forgetting has rendered America’s racial past and its ongoing legacy largely invisible in American culture—though its effects remain keenly felt and impact the lives of contemporary Americans, both black and white. In Playing in the Dark, she indicts literature for its role in this process of erasure, suggesting that though “the major and championed characteristics of our national literature” are “responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” (5), “in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse” (9). She has also suggested that slave narratives played a role in this process of erasure, explaining that “over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too horrible to relate.’ In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things” (“Site of Memory” 109–10). Not surprisingly, Morrison describes her job as a writer “to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” (“Site of Memory”110), to “find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write it,” and “to implement the stories that I heard” (113).

Though issues of visuality pervade her writing, Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was composed throughout the 1960s and published in 1970, is an important starting point for this study as well as for examinations of visuality in Morrison’s later writing because the novel represents a foundational moment in contemporary critical treatments of visuality in literature and theory.1 Combining feminist and nationalist concerns in unprecedented ways,2 The Bluest Eye manifests a crisis in visualized authority, exposing the generally invisible operation of power. To this end, Morrison makes visible the ideological functions of families, educational institutions, and popular culture, and she seeks a different, though not formal or authorized, place from which to visualize. Significantly, this “different place” is not imagined to be one of racial or cultural authenticity, an issue that perplexed many members of the Black Arts movement and continues to circulate in critical discussions of The Bluest Eye.3 Instead Morrison demonstrates that one does not have to identify a position of authenticity in order to confront visuality.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison “implements” one of her own personal experiences from childhood in order to examine what could happen to “the most vulnerable member” of a community (210), a black female child, in the decades before black became beautiful in the United States. In an afterword she added to the novel in 1993, Morrison describes how the novel grew out of a childhood encounter with a classmate who expressed a desire for blue eyes, her repulsion toward that desire, and her confusion about how the classmate had come to perceive them as more desirable than her own dark eyes (209–10). This childhood experience informed Morrison’s subsequent engagement with the Black Arts movement in the 1960s, whose members asserted the beauty of blackness and encouraged black people to reclaim beauty. Though Morrison found these assertions inspiring, she also questioned why it was necessary for blackness to be reclaimed among black people; how was it they had come to accept the dominant view of beauty? (210). Unpacking the complexity of this issue in The Bluest Eye led Morrison to create a multifaceted examination of the political and social functioning of visuality, one that attempts to disrupt the dominant visual regime by bringing to light both the operation of power that is generally unseen and the subordinated history of African Americans during the World War II era.

Morrison fashioned The Bluest Eye as a female bildungsroman that employs a strategy of paired characters, essentially splitting the primary female perspective in two.4 Pecola Breedlove, the central focus of the novel, is the abject scapegoat for her community’s racial self-hatred, while Claudia MacTeer, the primary narrator, develops a critical gaze as an adult with which she interrogates her own childhood memories and desires. Splitting the narrative focus between Pecola and Claudia allows Morrison to at once depict the full effects of the objectifying gaze in her consideration of Pecola, whose personal devastation is so complete that she cannot narrate her own story, and at the same time, the development of a critical perspective via Claudia. In other words, the novel traces one logical, though admittedly extreme, outcome of the black community internalizing racist ideologies even as it offers a possible strategy to avoid this outcome. Nevertheless, Claudia admits that as an adolescent she also identified with the objectifying gaze and is therefore also implicated in her own critique.

Merging Nationalist and Feminist Concerns in The Bluest Eye

Morrison’s consideration of visuality in The Bluest Eye is uniquely contemporary because of the way she was influenced by thinking about visuality and aesthetics emerging from both the Black Arts movement and feminist media studies at the time. Central to the Black Arts movement was the call for an aesthetics that was distinct and separate from white Western traditions based on, in Larry Neal’s words, “a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology” (29). This move toward a new black aesthetics, the expression of which was an art that reflected a sense of self-determination, meant that the “Black artist,” as the poet Etheridge Knight states, had to “create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones); and along with other black authorities, he must create a new history, new symbols, myths and legends (and purify old ones by fire)” (qtd. in Neal 30). The Black Arts movement, with its call for a black aesthetic to serve the political and social interests of black Americans, offered Morrison a vision of literature that was politically engaged and able to foster social change. It also directed her to consider the ideological and political functions of aesthetics. As she explains in the afterword, “The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging inferiority originating in an outside gaze” (210). And The Bluest Eye was recognized by early reviewers as a “Black Arts novel,” which meant that its “engagement with African American psychology was thus acknowledged through Black Aesthetic concepts” (Douglas 153). For example, Ruby Dee’s 1971 review of the novel explicitly connects it to the Black Arts movement: “The author digs up for viewing deep secret thoughts, terrible yearnings and little-understood frustrations common to many of us. She says these are the gnawings we keep pushed back into the subconscious, unadmitted; but they must be worked on, ferreted up and out so we can breathe deeply, say loud and truly believe ‘Black is beautiful’” (319).

However, while The Bluest Eye was legible for early readers in the context of the Black Arts movement, which may have contributed to its acceptance by reviewers as well,5 Morrison’s concern with nationalist issues is tempered with feminist concerns as well, and it is the way she combines these concerns that makes the novel unique in its historical context. Morrison shares the unease of other second-wave feminists ranging from Betty Friedan to Laura Mulvey to Gaye Tuchman with the impact that media images of women have on female spectators, and in the context of 1960s and 1970s feminist media studies, Morrison’s focus on issues of female representations and spectatorship in The Bluest Eye reflects a larger trend in feminist scholarship.6 However, while this early work tended to overlook the impact of race on the visual construction of women or women’s engagement with images,7 Morrison foregrounded the way that visual relations are inflected by gender, race, and class. Issues of race would not emerge as a focal point in feminist scholarship until the mid-1980s when feminist scholars such as Mary Helen Washington, Hazel Carby, Judith Mayne, Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Bobo, bell hooks, and Jane Gaines began to insist on the importance of race in differentiating women’s experiences, in general as well as in relation to the gaze. These critics emphasized that because black women often “experience oppression first in relation to race rather than gender,” they can at times more easily identify with black men than with white women and that black women often experience race, class, and gender oppression as an “interlocking” system (Gaines 16). Morrison’s depiction of black female spectatorship in The Bluest Eye anticipates this later work and has even been cited by scholars as influencing the development of theories of black female spectatorship. Most famously, bell hooks references The Bluest Eye in Black Looks when she describes Pecola’s mother, Pauline Breedlove’s “education in the movies” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 122), as illustrating the need for critical responses to media (hooks, Black Looks 121).

Morrison also does not limit her critique to specific images of women but rather situates these images in the operation of visuality more generally. While examinations of women’s images tend to focus on changing the way women interact with specific images or types of images without necessarily changing the larger contexts in which images circulate (Thornham 52), Morrison’s focus on the contexts of visuality aligns her project with the more recent interdisciplinary work by those in critical visuality studies who seek to change the way events and history are visualized broadly.8

Thus Morrison’s consideration of visuality in The Bluest Eye surpassed most other 1960s- and 1970s-era critical considerations of women and images by situating images in larger contexts of visuality and also by foregrounding the effects that race and social class, in addition to gender, have on visual relations. Thus though The Bluest Eye emerged out of the critical contexts provided by the Black Arts Movement and feminist media studies, Morrison combined these contexts in unique and groundbreaking ways. And the fact that scholarship has largely come to share Morrison’s concerns with visuality underscores the ongoing significance and relevance of this text to contemporary studies of visual relations. In fact, I would argue that the novel’s expansive critique of visuality is only now becoming clear as critical visuality studies evolves to recognize and discuss how the operation of visuality exceeds the work of images as well.

Visualizing History

Morrison herself drew attention to the significance of visual issues in The Bluest Eye via the title she gave the novel9 and in the afterword she added in 1993 when she writes that she wanted the novel to “peck away at the gaze that condemns” blackness as ugly (210). However, while Morrison invokes the language of the gaze in this description,10 she actually seems to refer less to a specific optical process than, more generally, to “a contest as to who is capable of visualizing events, whether in and as the History proposed by the state, or as alternative subaltern or decolonial readings” (Mirzoeff, “Introduction” xxx). In other words, at stake in The Bluest Eye is not only how black female spectators interact with images but also, in a larger sense, how visuality itself naturalizes power relationships and, along with this, whether or not it is possible to identify a different way of visualizing and a different position from which to look that is not predetermined by the existing power structure.

Indeed The Bluest Eye stages a contest between the official visualization of American history and cultural citizenship—as this is represented in educational and popular culture narratives—and the underrepresented, often unrecognized, history of racial and gender oppression in America. Morrison captures the official, formal vision of America in several ways, including through depictions of passages from the Dick-and-Jane reader that begin each chapter, Hollywood images that attract Pecola and Pauline, and the “sugar-brown” girls who assimilate into middle-class domesticity. Together, these cultural manifestations represent the white norm of 1940s cultural citizenship that the novel engages and critiques. This norm is marked by the negation of blackness as well as nostalgia for an imagined American past. Lauren Berlant has discussed how complete participation in American public life has always required the “abstract citizenship” associated with an “unmarked” white male body, and she refers to the body’s visible qualities, the parts that resist abstraction, such as a black body, “surplus corporeality” (“National Brands” 112–14). Consequently, black individuals are constituted only a position of absence, and abstract citizenship requires the negation of blackness in order to be recognized as a full member of society. The official version of 1940s cultural citizenship is also characterized by nostalgia for an imagined past. Henry Giroux finds evidence of such nostalgia in 1970s Hollywood, explaining that films such as The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti “resurrected white, suburban, middle-class youth in the nostalgic image of Andy Hardy and Frankie Avalon” (35, 42). In this mythically innocent past, as Debra Werrlein explains, “Domestic unrest evaporates while post-war prosperity thrives, despite such tragic realities as the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955” (55). Interestingly, in The Bluest Eye, Morrison considers how narratives of childhood are particularly effective at disseminating both the ideal of abstract citizenship and nostalgia (represented in the Dick-and-Jane primers, the celebrity cult of Shirley Temple, and candy wrappers bearing the image of blond Mary Jane). In the educational and popular culture narratives of childhood to which Morrison alludes, white middle-class children and their families are depicted as the norm and invoke nostalgia for an innocent American childhood, which symbolizes, as Werrlein contends, “an ideology of national innocence” on racial matters (54). In Playing in the Dark, Morrison would ask even more insistently, “What are Americans always so insistently innocent of?,” and she writes that the answer is a subordinated “Africanist population” that serves as a convenient scapegoat onto which the “new white male” can project all his fears (45). In The Bluest Eye, she demonstrates that narratives of childhood and American innocence serve to occlude the history of racial oppression that the nation is unwilling to look at or acknowledge. In contrast, the narratives of black girlhood that Morrison places at the center of the novel depict a strikingly different vision of postwar American culture and represent Morrison’s attempt to bear witness to the plight of the African American community during this period. The novel is, as Morrison has said, “a terrible story about things one would rather not know anything about” (“Unspeakable” 208).

To draw attention to the discrepancy between official American history and the underrepresented history of African Americans in World War II America, Morrison situates Pecola and Claudia at the start of the mythical postwar period. Beginning in 1940, the novel takes place during a time when Americans had supposedly begun to look beyond the domestic worries of the Depression to define America’s role in a growing international conflict (Rogin, Ronald Reagan 237; Werrlein 195). Michael Rogin explains that although domestic concerns about ethnicity and class had dominated American politics from 1870 to the New Deal, World War II “provided the occasion for the emergence of the national-security apparatus” (Ronald Reagan 246). In contrast, though Morrison’s novel is set just prior to the beginning of World War II, the war is largely absent from the novel. Instead Morrison focuses on local concerns and subordinates national and international affairs. In Lorain, Ohio, Morrison’s own midwestern hometown, characters are most concerned with caring for children, and the difficulties of this task in light of poverty and the lingering deprivation of the Depression displace questions about America’s possible involvement in the war. Furthermore, as Werrlein points out, “while 1940 marks the eve of both war and economic recovery in American history books, it also marks the year Richard Wright’s Native Son kicked off an angry protest movement against racism” (55). Morrison captures this underrepresented aspect of American history in The Bluest Eye. As Werrlein explains, “when 1970s America had already begun to assemble nostalgic myths about suburban life during and after World War II, Morrison offers a sharply different version of 1940s family and community, one that suggests that familial ‘pathologies’ do not simply spring from individual shortcomings” (56). Instead, as Gurleen Grewal explains, the Breedloves emerge from a history of “a race-based class structure of American society that generates its own pathologies” (118). Morrison’s challenge in The Bluest Eye is to make visible this race-based class structure and the way that it has come to seem so natural that critique is difficult..

Classification, Separation, and Aesthetics

To do this, Morrison dissects the way that visuality is used as a means of authoritarian control, demonstrating that the black community of Lorain is subject to intense visualization from social and political institutions that define individuals narrowly and foreclose, for many, the possibility of even imagining any other social arrangement. For example, educational and social-scientific narratives that subordinate and demean blackness are institutionalized in Lorain in ways that make it difficult for characters to recognize the ideology underpinning the social arrangement, let alone imagine a different arrangement. Morrison alludes to these narratives particularly through her use of the Dick-and-Jane primers, and Morrison’s critics have commented on how her references to the primers illustrate the ideological power of visualizing white middle-class family life as the norm. Andrea O’Reilly argues that the books instruct pupils in the ideology of the family (87), while Grewal describes how primers prime, or make ready, and Morrison shows how they prime black subjects (125). According to Werrlein, “by associating white suburban families with prosperity, morality, and patriotism, Americans painted black urban working-class families as un-American” (125). Moreover, in 1965 the Moynihan Report formally labeled the black family “pathological” and in doing so “outwardly dissociated black families and especially black women, from the national ideal” (Werrlein 125).11

Certainly, the narrative of white family life presented in the primers contrasts starkly with the stories of racial and s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What’s (Still) Wrong with Images of Women?
• Part I. Coming-of-Age with Mass Media
• Part II. Witnessing Visual Manipulation
• Part III. Spectatorship in an Expanded Field of Vision
• Conclusion: Confronting Visuality in the Digital Age
• Notes
• Works Cited