《最藍的眼睛》觀看自愛的症狀式表現 - eThesys 國立中山大學學位論文

國立中山大學外國語文學系
碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Sun Yat-sen University
Master Thesis
透過《最藍的眼睛》觀看自愛的症狀式表現
Seeing through The Bluest Eye: A Symptomatic Presentation of SelfLove in the Look
研究生：林立婷
Li-ting Lin
指導教授：陳福仁 教授
Prof. Fu-jen Chen
中華民國 104 年 2 月
February 2015
i
Acknowledgement
I would like to take this chance to thank everyone who has helped me through the
entire writing process: my professor Fu-jen Chen who instructed me and kindly gave me
advice; and the committee members, professor Ya-huei Lin and professor Yuan-jung
Chen, who enlightened me with their in-depth points of views. I also thank my
comrades who accompanied me, helped me, and showed me hospitality in and outside
of campus. I am blessed to have grown with these wonderful people throughout my
academic years.
Last but not least, I am grateful for my open-minded parents who sacrifice their joy
and pursuits in life just to raise me and my siblings well. I can never thank them enough
for their unparalleled efforts and the knowledge they instill me according to their
educational backgrounds. My soul mate has always been my emotional support and the
person who I can sparkle ideas with in each facets of life. I am fortunate to go through
every phase with this other half of me. Finally, my feathered companions who have
always been cuddly and amusing whenever I need them. Their dedication to my
achievements is beyond words.
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摘要
本論文以尚-保羅‧沙特的存在主義哲學及斯拉沃熱‧紀傑克的精神分析觀點
來討論唐尼‧莫里森的小說《最藍的眼睛》中，非裔美國人的「自愛」(self-love)
如何幫助他們呈現自身在白人社會中的定位和價值。我認為莫里森以設定主角一
家(The Breedloves)為「純黑」來對照「混血」非裔美國描述了人們如何在一個文
化價值不同於自身種族背景的社會中展現自我。因此，我以書中人物適應社會遇
到的挫折來證明他們內心的「自愛」如何變相地透過「自鄙」(self-debasement)的
行為模式去迎合白人社會的價值進而安頓在群體中。以此觀點，我欲表示在此框
架下的非裔美國人之所以會產生自我懷疑及自卑感終究是歸於他們本身的「自愛」
而非「自恨」(self-hatred)。
論述包含四個部分。緒論介紹作者唐尼‧莫里森與理論家尚─保羅‧沙特、
斯拉沃熱‧紀傑克的背景、回顧以角色「自恨」作結之文獻，以進一步連結到本
論文之理論結構及論點。第一章闡述唐尼‧莫里森的小說《最藍的眼睛》裡的角
色如何透過白人的審美觀及「外界眼光」(outside gaze)來看待自己以致產生自我厭
惡感(self-loathing)。欲證明各種「自鄙」的行為及情緒皆來自於角色本身的「自愛」
而非「自恨」，我將以沙特定義的「厭惡」(repugnance)和「恨」(hatred)來詮釋純
黑和混血黑人如何化悲憤為力量、突破社會框架來證明自我。第二章我以沙特定
義的虐待者(sadist)及被虐者(masochist)、紀傑克的拉岡式精神分析來歸納純黑非裔
家庭(The Breedloves) 展露「自愛」的兩種基本方式，以及主角琵可拉(Pecola
Breedlove)的「自愛」如何有症狀(symptom)地展現使她超脫自我。
結論重申前述兩章概要和本篇論文的分析結果。
關鍵字： 唐尼‧莫里森、《最藍的眼睛》
、沙特哲學、精神分析、施虐與受虐、自
愛、觀看
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Abstract
This thesis attempts to counter a generally acknowledged view in regard to the
essence of hatred, observed as a lack of interracial appreciation within the
Afro-American assemblage in Toni Morrison’s first published novel, The Bluest Eye. In
effort to explain my standpoint, I endeavor to bring lights from existential
phenomenology and psychoanalytical philosophy respectively from Jean-Paul Sartre
and Slavoj Žižek. To support my argument, I will examine diverse visions of cultural
studies and literary reviews, and provide textual evidence of self-love to defy critics’
remarks of self-hatred in the characters.
According to Toni Morrison, the aesthetic principle in the white society is the
prying eye, a “secret” which causes the Afro-American subjects’ social inferiority and
self-loathing. Despite different approaches to analyze this scenario in the black
community, critics conclude that the Afro-American characters’ self-debasement is a
sign of their hatred toward the self and other blacks along with the internalization of
white aesthetics. In this thesis, I argue that the characters’ self-debasement/self-loathing
is only a “mode” of nature to adapt to the norms of white society rather than an inherent
hatred toward their own blackness as critics imply. I analyze all occurrences critics see
as Afro-Americans’ self-hating gestures with theories concerning the look and desire in
one’s building of identity based on “self-love.” Thus I consider all characters’ negative
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emotions (such as shame, anger, and repugnance) toward themselves and others are
merely “temporary presentation of the ego” owing to their frustrated self-love; therefore,
“self-debasement” should not be considered as hatred of any sort. To support my ideas, I
use Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of “ego’s transcendence,” “hatred’s dubitable nature,” and
“two patterns in the being-for-others” to examine characters’ self-love responding the
“outside gaze” in terms of the “mode of being”; to continually justify self-love, I apply
Slavoj Žižek’s notions of “symptom,” “ideological fantasy,” and “unconscious desire as
the Thing” to focus on the protagonist’s self-identification with others based on her
“symptomatic” gestures of self-love in the “mode of being.”
Key Words: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sartrean Philosophy, Psychoanalysis,
Sado-masochism, Self-Love, Look
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Table of Contents
論文審定書…………………………………………………………………………….….i
Acknowledgement………………………………………..……..….……………….........ii
摘要………………………………………………………….…………………………..iii
Abstract..............................................................................................................................iv
Introduction.....................................................................................................................…1
Toni Morrison
Jean-Paul Sartre
Slavoj Žižek
Literature Review
Theoretical Framework
Thesis Structure
Chapter One: Projecting the Outside Gaze: Interpreting Characters’ Racial Self-Loathing
in the Look……………………………………...…………………...53
Pecola’s Relief of Frustration with Self-Love
Pecola’s Obsession of Objects of Love
The Ambivalent Nature of Self-Love
Pauline’s Devotion into Hard Work with Self-Love
Cholly’s Passion of Funkiness with Self-Love
Geraldine’s Self-Built Quality Life with Self-Love
Chapter Two: Patterning the Map of Self-Love: Analyzing Symptomatic Gestures in the
Being-for-Others………………………………………………….....79
Cholly’s Sadist Expression of Self-Love
Pauline and Pecola’s Masochist Expression of Self-Love in Liberation
Pecola’s Symptomatic Gestures of Self-Love before Liberation
Symbolization of Pecola’s Self-Love after Liberation
Pecola’s Imaginary Identification in the Thing
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..105
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….111
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“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another––physical
beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both
originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in illusion. In equating physical
beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the
heap” (Morrison 122).
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Introduction
Toni Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye, published in 1965, marks her
childhood memory in which she recalls a distraught black girl discouraged by the image
of white idols in her self-identification with the way people look at her. This childhood
experience was a start before Morrison notices the Afro-American’s precarious yet
constant “racial self-loathing” (The Bluest Eye 210) orbiting around the white aesthetics.
Much later this scenario develops into her novelist passion that haunts her with the why
and how to the girl’s frustration: “There is really nothing more to say––except why. But
since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how” (8). The novel adopts the
view of innocent black girls to disclose the Breedlove’s misfortune as a reference to
Afro-American victims of the white ideology. Pecola Breedlove’s quest for a pair of the
bluest eyes involves several others who internalize the same code, and still others who
do not. With or without attempts to assimilate to the white beauty, most Afro-American
characters appear to be self-loathing in their interaction with others. However, I find
these characters’ trait of “self-loathing,” or “self-debasement” is rather a learnt
temperament to compromise with others’ desire while adjusting to the values of the
white society. For this reason, I disagree with critics’ (Davis, Samuels, and many others)
lights to interpret the Afro-American characters’ “self-loathing” as self-hatred. For the
idea of “self-hatred” is too assertive that it neglects all characters’ passive gestures of
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self-love prove themselves worthy to others.
On the one hand, this passive gesture of self-love, in view of psychoanalysis, is
rather “symptomatic”; meaning there is more of what their behavior appears to suggest.
On the other, such an inert show of the characters’ self-love is a scope of human nature
regarding the “good” and “bad” self-love1: both types of self-love are naive and “utterly
benign” in one’s self-development and perception of others; however, the “bad”
self-love is usually oriented by one’s interest alone to realize his/her personal value that
sometimes it can harm others due to lack of consideration (qtd. in Cooper 661).
“Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly,
stupid people love stupidly” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 206), the Breedloves so
illustrate both types: Pauline and Pecola Breedlove’s self-love is good and mild, though
it weakly lands on a single wish to be accepted by others; whereas Cholly Breedlove’s
self-love is bad and invasive that it violates the well-being of others out of his
overdriven passion to gratify himself. The rest of the personas (The Macteers and the
“brown” generation) show a mixed tendency of self-love in their configuration of the
self. All of them follow their innate narcissism and act accordingly although they
sometimes appear to be self-debasing when feeling frustrated by people’s view of them.
As phenomenology considers self-debasement a “basic mode” of our being in the world
established in the “look,” let us consider, is the idea of “self-hatred” the only measure to
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justify every persona’s un-confidence and contempt of the self and others? Is there any
alternative to interpret Morrison’s idea of Afro-American “racial self-loathing” instead
of denying every glimpse of their self-love with a simple conclusion on hatred?
To offer a new reading to this novel, I distinguish the sense of “loathe” from
“hate,” “repugnance” from “hatred” to support my idea of characters’ self-love that even
Morrison’s choice of words (hate/hatred) to pigment their comportment is redefined in
my interpretation. Aside from this, I use phenomenology to show how their self-hatred
is really absent and their self-loathe is but a “mode” to adapt to the ideological beauty in
terms of the “good” and “bad” self-love. Also, I practice psychoanalytical viewpoints to
explain why the most discussed protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, is truly self-loving than
self-hating in her self-identification with the imaginary others. I combine these methods
on the ground of one’s building of identity with the outside gaze on the desire of love.
Truthfully, our “self-identification” with others is an “effect of self-love” that “makes us
see our own fears and desires in others” (Force 50). Despite the depth of two methods,
my main idea remains simple––I defy characters’ self-hatred by proving their self-love
in search of social identities. With these measures, I believe The Bluest Eye is a general
portrayal of people who fear of showing their worth in order to be accepted by the
partial value of the society. Although the subjects in this context are mainly black men,
their experience is applicable to people of all races. Specifically, Morrison’s staging is
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sarcastic in a way that it reversely blames the Afro-Americans’ denial of “funkiness”
(87) as a price paid to practice white ideologies. A simple reading on her background
shows the reason to her writing on this discontent.
Toni Morrison (1931-present)
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio. She is a teacher, a writer, and a single
mother. At home Morrison takes care of her children and does all the necessary duties a
mother is in charge of. Preferably, aside from bonding with family, she retreats to her
quiet corner for writing because her domestic passion is in parallel with her compassion
toward the Afro-American others. In academia, she is significant for uplifting the
African awareness in North America. In fact, she takes it upon herself as a mission
rather than an occupation to cater for issues concerning the black inhabitants in North
America. She admits in an interview held by Nellie McKay: “I do feel a strong
connection to ‘ancestors’” (McKay 414). For that reason, she attributes her mission in
writing to the familial tradition of story-telling, a “shared activity” (415) in the house.
With this reference she indicates the eloquence of her ancestral females is a positive
influence on her realization of black self-worth; the knowledge of male members
inculcates her essence of the African heritage, most importantly, instills Morrison “a
strong sense of her own value on her own terms” (414). Therefore the legacy of black
tradition and familial concern interweave a major part of her thematic lines. Susan
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Willis and Debra Werrlein comment on her African consciousness as “a process for
coming to grips with historical transition” (34) and a measure “to expose childhood
innocence as a pervasive ideology that simultaneously perpetuates and mystifies the
harsher realities of white nationalist hegemony” (56). The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s
first ideal presentation of the unconfident Afro-Americans. Among her topics of
domestic conflict and return to black origin, we can always find a submerging idea
about the importance of self-worth. In truth, she notices the prevalence of white
aesthetics inflicting Afro-Americans’ self-worth, a phenomenon which encourages her
to “hit the raw nerve of racial self-contempt” (211) in the presentation of the Breedloves.
Long afterwards, Morrison adds in the afterword she showed “the damaging
internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze”
(210), hoping her readers will seek an answer to the Breedloves’ deeply ingrained
worthlessness.
To depict how the “outside gaze” affects Afro-Americans’ idea of the self,
Morrison emphasizes on the danger of the standardized beauty, and indicates that even
her esteem is much shaped by what the “white code” suggests. One day in confirming
the use of her picture in a magazine, she asked the editor, “‘Are you really going to put
a middle-aged, gray-haired colored lady on the cover of this magazine?’” (qtd. in
Heinze 15). Like the Afro-American characters she portrays in the novel, her unsureness
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involves the acceptance of white aesthetics she wishes to disobey. In her daily life, she
notices signs such as “white only,” “colored only,” and white “lady” versus colored
“women” greatly contribute to the black’s interracial debasement (Denard 18). Although
Morrison cannot withdraw the influence of white ideologies by only writing about it,
she designs an alternative to raise the African consciousness with the context of The
Bluest Eye. For black readers, the characters’ deception of convicted ugliness
contrasting the white idol becomes a passage to look upon themselves with love. The
title indicates points of view from that of the white men its characters adopt to identify
themselves with. What lies in the blue eyes is a critical set of aesthetics that leads to
black interracial prejudice within subjects who consecrate it in the community:
“Idealized beauty . . . it has the power to destroy the potential for love, and it is exactly
that thwarted possibility that consistently haunts the characters in Morrison’s world”
(Heinze 16). In a way Morrison satirizes this tendency with the Breedloves yielding to
the white code, enslaved in a misery that could have been improved with admittance of
self-worth. In contrast to their misfortune are the Macteers and the “brown girls” (The
Bluest Eye 81) who are confident Afro-Americans on their own terms. In the afterword,
Morrison makes a remark on Pecola Breedlove’s self-debasement, “She is not seen by
herself until she hallucinates a self” (215), which is also an opinion about the distraught
girl in her childhood. With a mystic hue, Morrison’s use of hallucination to end Pecola’s
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self-unsureness is tactful to show her unconfident love of the self. This revelation, I
believe, is to address to the Afro-American readers for raising the awareness of love and
respect for the origin in accommodation to the society’s values.
The Breedloves
The condition of the Breedloves is similar to the unsprounted marigolds on the
ground of the community. On the one hand, this scenario of infertility symbolizes
Pecola Breedlove’s failure in giving birth to her baby and gaining affection from others.
On the other hand, the remaining marigolds are like an emblem to the Breedloves’ being
“put outdoors” (17) because they are the “certain seeds” (206) that would not grow. For
Pecola, her father, Cholly, is the only person who insures her worth with perverted love.
It is not until Soaphead Church grants Pecola a pair of blue eyes does she feel secured to
show to the imaginary others about her self-worth. In exchange to her sanity, Church’s
trick satisfies her wish of being looked with interest. In fact, Pecola’s self-unsureness
results from an improper home education. In lack of knowledge, both Cholly and
Pauline Breedlove are unable to enlighten their children with worth: “through Cholly
and Pauline, Morrison suggests that parents who emerge from histories of oppression
might reproduce that degradation within the family unit” (Werrlein 61). Thus Sammy
runs away from home, Pecola imitates Pauline to hide self-pride and from Cholly to
diminish selfhood. However, Morrison uses Claudia Macteer’s idea of the white idol to
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interpret these Afro-Americans’ self-debasement as an adjustment to the white norms: “I
learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing,
even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement” (The Bluest
Eye 23). Either abandoning funkiness like the brown girls or devaluing selfness like the
Breedloves, all is but measures to attain the “ownership” (18) in the look of others.
Simply put, this ownership is a stance in responding to others’ look in terms of
relationships. To return the outside gaze, the Breedloves gentrify the partial definition of
“blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned” (20) beauty with an intricate development of
self-identity on others’ opinions of them. For this reason, I practice Jean-Paul Sartre’s
detailed discussions on the “look” in The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and
Nothingness to explain the Breedloves’ building of identity in a conflict between
self-love and others’ looking at them. Let us take a look at Sartre’s theoretical
background.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80)
Jean-Paul Sartre is a twentieth-century philosopher, biographer, novelist, critic, et
cetera. Amongst these titles, he is most well-known for his existentialist phenomenology.
As a fundamental French theorist of existentialism, he develops his thought under a
substantial touch of German philosophy, specifically, those of Edmund Husserl,
Immanuel Kant and the others’. Sartre’s philosophical thought is evoked at his twenties
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when he attends the É cole Normale Supérieure in Paris, 1924, accompanied by a
long-lasting relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Along with numerous essays on
topics of cinema and philosophy, the earliest theoretical work, The Transcendence of the
Ego, was published in 1936 and later became the keystone of his academic development.
During his concentration in existentialism, Being and Nothingness, another prominent
work was introduced to the public in 1943 with its source greatly fashioned by Husserl’s
notions, such as “being-in-itself” and “being-for-itself” in Ansichsein and Fürsichsein.
He deploys these terms to answer the primary question of philosophy, “Are there other
minds like my own?” In fact, Immanuel Kant raises this question in his Critique of Pure
Reason which illustrates that the ego alone constitutes all the perceptible phenomena.
Impacted by Kant’s concept, Descartes contemplates that perhaps our perceptions are
merely illusions; all is but masked phantoms our conscious ego produces. To defy
Descartes’s solipsist attitude, Husserl argues that there are still something universal and
transcendent which are not confined to our mental acts. Husserl’s withdrawal of
solipsism further guides Sartre to prove the existence of other minds; his treatment is to
show the problem of minds through the otherness in the “negation.” In progress to
answer the question, Sartre develops insightful ideas in The Transcendence of the Ego
and Being and Nothingness, and both works intertwine on a few of Husserl’s concepts.
For instance, the nucleus of Transcendence of the Ego contains the Husserlian
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expressions of “intentionality” and “non-intentional”, which are alternative terms for
“being-for-itself” and “being-in-itself” elaborated in Being and Nothingness.
Akin to Husserl’s belief that “consciousness is consciousness of something,” Sartre
adds, “All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This
means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or
if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content’” (Being and Nothingness 11). That is
to say, consciousness in its constitution has a transcendent trait from which a being that
is not itself emerges and is already existent before this revelation. In addition, he thinks
that the primary self-consciousness is a consciousness before reflecting––a
non––reflective2 consciousness––which is a non-positional (non-thetic) self-consciousness (xi) recognized as the “cogito” (the proof of a subject’s existence by her/his stream
of thoughts derived from René Descartes’s idea, “I think therefore I am”). To specify the
function of non-reflective consciousness, Sartre takes examples such as being absorbed
in a story, running after a streetcar, looking at the time, and so forth (Transcendence of
the Ego 48) to show that when one is entirely engaged in an activity, the “Me”
(self-awareness) is absent in this non-reflective stratum. Nonetheless, dissimilar to
Husserlian thought, he abandons the transcendental ego in the non-reflective
consciousness as reinforced in the essays of Husserl and Descartes. To dispute the
“transcendental ego” standing behind consciousness (“intentionality”) in the process of
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reflection, he insists that the ego is “outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like
the ego of another” (31). Adding to this volume of thought, he considers the ego as an
objective unity which is consisted of elements that allow the subject to be recognized by
others (since most of the acts take place in public). In a step to dispute Husserl’s
transcendental ego, Sartre confirms that the ego is merely a transcendent object which
appears only for reflective consciousness when reflections occur.
Although it seems vague to the distinction of these two entities––transcendental
ego and transcendent ego––Sartre distinguishes them clearly: The difference between
transcendental ego and transcendent ego is that the first precedes any action through
constituting, unifying, and individualizing conscious phenomena into human traits. It
“‘inhabits’ every act of consciousness” (Catalano 11), forbidding consciousness to be an
emptiness. The second is an object of consciousness which appears only in reflections
without inhabiting in consciousness. On the basis of the transcendent ego’s
“transcendence” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness xi), he considers human being as solid
existence because our consciousness (as a being that exists everywhere) is a
transcendence in the world. In this dimension, he defies Husserl’s idea of transcendental
ego for it hampers human freedom with its functions preceding acts to perform human
traits. As Sartre insists on transcendent consciousness granting human freedom, he
strengthens its absoluteness in the explanation of “facticity”: Even though we are
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individuals of free will. We are paradoxically bound to be free because throughout our
lives we make choices even at the point we do not want to. These options are granted on
us and we cannot escape from the fate of choosing. In a way we are trapped in our
freedom, because of it we have to choose and are responsible for the consequences we
make.
Nevertheless, Sartre does not explicate as to why freedom is absolute other than
attributing it to the ego’s transcendence and to the dimension of the illogical “magical.”
Phyllis S. Morris answers insightfully:
While his criticisms of the transcendental ego based on experience do not prove the
nonexistence of the transcendental ego, Sartre may have succeeded in showing that
the phenomenologist cannot support the existence of a transcendental ego by
appeal to intuitive evidence. (185)
Despite Sartre cannot prove the non-existence of transcendental ego, his idea of human
freedom profoundly renders his break from Husserl’s principle as an independent choice.
Still others disapprove of Sartre’s ignorance on some of the psychoanalytic tradition.
Ronald Grimsley remarks, that Sartre avoids talking about the unconscious activity in
order to prevent his philosophy of the “look” from correlating with psychoanalytic view
of normal human behavior (37). He argues that the Sartrean basis (in-itself and for-itself)
transcending psychological boundaries is insufficient, for example, to explain abnormal
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human behavior. For that reason Grimsley thinks Sartre’s theory is psychoanalysis in
disguise that fails at showing why neurotics are less free than others in terms of human
freedom. Whether the phenomenology’s focus on the “look” or psychoanalysis’s on
unconscious activity is more credible than the other, both demonstrate human
relationships are looped in the influence between oneself and another. Each study shares
an idea in common: Either in our look or unconscious messages, “desire” ingrains all
exhibitions of our behavior as the base of self-identifications with others. In a sense, our
desire as such is known to be patterned by “self-love” for it is considered as “the engine
of all human behavior” (Force 49). Thus, besides Sartre’s theory to study Cholly,
Pauline, Pecola’s normal human behavior, I facilitate Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian
psychoanalysis to study Pecola’s abnormal behavior and show her self-love in her
realization of the self.
Slavoj Žižek (1949-present)
A striking figure in the academia, Slavoj Žižek is known as a Slovenian “Elvis of
cultural theory,” (qtd. in Gutierrez 113) a complimentary title if to compare with his
other given names: an “obscene-obsessed Thing,” a “sublimely devil” (Žižek, “Critical
Response” 491). His first publication in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
brings him attention he had ever received before the 1990s. In the next decades, an
amount of substantial works astound the academic (largely in North America): The
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Plague of Fantasies (1997), The Ticklish Subject (1999), Interrogating the Real (2005),
The Parallax View (2006) and so on. The topics cover social politics, film studies,
cultural criticism, postmodern thoughts based in Marxism, German idealism and
psychoanalysis he mastered at the University of Ljubljana. In revisions of the dialectical
tradition, Žižek shows a specific interest in Jacque Lacan’s concepts on a variety of
subjects. Geoffrey G. Harpham comments:
The character of Žižek’s adherence, even adhesion, to Lacan is unique in today’s
intellectual climate, where a withholding of full approval is regarded as an
essential element of self-respect. For Žižek, the doxa of Lacan are not to be
submitted to skeptical testing, but confirmed by any means necessary. (465)
In fact, Harpham is against Žižek in many facets: He considers Žižek’s style of
explanation is in lack of rigor, consistence, and positive principles, “seems to write for
the browser” (455). In addition, he thinks Žižek is not willing to accept indignities to his
thought from readers (506). In response, Žižek ridicules Harpham’s unquestioning of
cannons is to maintain the “society that sustains them” (“Critical Response” 491).
Despite these attacks, Žižek’s adept use of cinematic scenarios, historical events in an
entertaining, outspoken style brings psychoanalysis to a novel stage. His eloquence
helps map out the interwoven ideas of psychoanalytical discourses.
The Sublime Object of Ideology contains most of his theoretical basis continued in
14
his other works. In that Žižek uses Lacan’s graph of desire3 to discuss the triptych4 of
reality: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. His layered concepts in this book
center on the idea of “unconscious desire” (Loose 76) appearing in the form of
“symptom” and penetrating all layers of human reality. In varied conceptual depth,
Žižek puts the unconscious (fundamental) desire into practice of the “sublime object,”
(The Sublime Object of Ideology 77) the “lack of the Other” (137), the “Real, as the
impossible Thing” (The Ticklish Subject 367), the “death-drive” (Interrogating the Real
33), et cetera. In these adaptations, psychoanalysis shows the unconscious desire
patterns all phenomena in human reality. To explain our unconscious desire to identify
with others (the Other), Žižek shows the Other’s function of naming that gives
meanings to our “self,” defining our identity in the Imaginary and Symbolic. He
emphasizes, in our reality what fails to be given meanings to become the “leftover” of
our desire (the “Thing” resisting symbolization), often masked with fantasy (The
Sublime Object of Ideology 136). In particular, Žižek exemplifies the anti-Semitic
unconscious desire that frames the idea of “Jew,” turning the failed point into
“ideological fantasy” (48-9). A quick view on daily life, in fact, we often engage in
ideological fantasies in way of stereotype. It masks our desire and carries with it a truth
behind what we do or think according to it. Thus, the idea of unconscious desire in
Žižek’s demonstration is two-fold. In both domains it is the uneven point, a detachment
15
beyond the normal functioning yet maintains5 the harmony of our symbolic universe: In
social reality, it is masked by people’s fantasy to cover the fear toward an “exception”
(Vogt 61): The “Jew” is an otherness considered as the “social symptom” (The Sublime
Object of Ideology 16). In conscious reality, it is the kernel of people’s fantasy where
“drive” functions: Our unconscious desire is a symptomatic “Thing” (79), driving us to
attain the full meaning of our identity.
On the insight of unconscious desire seeking to complete one’s identity, Žižek
drones on with Lacan’s view of “ideal-ego,”6 an idea originates in Sigmund Freud’s
discussion of childhood “narcissistic perfection” (2948), an innate self-lovingness.
Lacan rephrases this narcissism as our ideal-ego after the mirror stage. Žižek accords,
that our predominant self-identification is “imaginary identification” (ideal-ego) with
images “in which we appear likeable to ourselves” (Sublime Object of Ideology 116-7).
In adulthood, we continue to achieve a unified “sense of self”7 by identifying ourselves
with others. As an extension to this thought, Žižek preoccupies on the “gap” between
how we see ourselves and the view from where we adopt to see ourselves as likeable. To
crystallize the self-detachment “into the image of his double” (116), Žižek uses Georg
Hegel’s “for-the-other” (118) to show we necessitate the Other for realizing our self.
This view echoes to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Hegelian idea of “being-for-others”
demonstrated in the “look” that results in interlocking human relationships.
16
Comparatively, Žižek’s “he is himself this other” (118) in the imaginary identification is
akin to Sartre’s view of the Other’s “presence in person” (Being and Nothineness 340)
in “being-for-others.” Both of them show the Other as the foundation of our
self-awareness, the source of our identity, and thus an unreducible influence within our
being in the world. Here this light also applies to my stance in the examination of The
Bluest Eye. By the same idea, critics’ evaluations are the foundation of my critical view
to re-read the novel. From their perspectives I notice an impossibility of self-hatred in
the details less taken notice of. I provide a new literary identity on the basis of theirs. To
show these reviews, I summarize how they interpret the characters in variations of
self-hatred.
Literature Review
Throughout the essays concerning The Bluest Eye, numerous scholars sparkle ideas
with measures of phenomenology, colorism, racism, sexism to review this very first
book by Toni Morrison. To be true, they all take notice of the Afro-American’s
interracial prejudice in the community and attribute this occurrence to the black’s innate
self-hatred. However, I disagree with all critics’ conclusion on self-hatred to justify
every Afro-American’s self-debasing gesture toward each other. Before I prove
characters’ self-love with further measures, I shall summarize the consensus on
self-hatred in varied aspects. To utilize Jean-Paul Sartre and Slavoj Žižek’s theories, I
17
include some critics’ ideas to my theoretical concepts of this study.
In the study of The Bluest Eye, Cynthia A. Davis and Wilfred D. Samuels adroitly
interweave the intricate subjects of existential phenomenology with this modern literary
work. In “Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction” (1982), Davis facilitates
Sartre’s theory to display how the characters on the quest of self-definition undertake
the consequence of their choices. She examines that the novel is about a self-discovery
through transcendence which “at the same time, the mythic sense of fate and necessity
corresponds to the experience of facticity, both as irrevocable consequence and as
concrete conditions for choice” (23). Samuels shares similar Sartrean view in “The
Damaging Look: The Search for Authentic Existence in The Bluest Eye” (1990). In the
study, he comments that “her approach is often Sartrean in that, like the existential
philosopher, she reveals each character’s awareness of self indirectly through his or her
relationship with others” (10). In the analysis of characters’ self-denial, both critics
show an affinity to Sartrean thoughts and all point out that Morrison is deft at enabling
the existential philosophy to her fictional operation. Speaking of self-denial, Samuels
specifies the Breedloves’ absence of autonomy for they relate their worth entirely to the
Other, which, is in a sharp contrast to the Macteers and the Maginot Line (three
prostitutes)’s life attitude. As a matter of fact, the Breedloves’ lack of confidence is
ascribed to their impaired self-value that shuns them away from the public attention. In
18
this way, the Other’s influence easily aggravates their fragile selfhood: “One might
indeed argue that Pecola, Pauline, and Cholly Breedlove fall victim to their failure to
transcend the imposing definition of ‘the Other’s’ look . . . consequently lives a life of
shame, alienation, self-hatred, and inevitable destruction” (11; emphasis mine). To this
point, Davis notes: “. . . to use the Other’s look to confirm identity . . . What that means
can be seen in the many Morrison characters who try to define themselves through the
eyes of others” (8-9). Although Davis does not indicate the eminence of self-hatred as
Samuels does, in her reading of Cholly’s outrage, the sense of hatred is felt in her
interpretation: “. . . Cholly Breedlove, in his sexual humiliation, looks not at his
tormentors, but at his partner, with hatred . . .” (13). Here, what Davis detects is an
appearance of racial-hatred projected by Cholly’s self-hatred onto his partner. In general,
both critics attribute the eminence of the Other to the root of characters’ self-hatred.
On top of the phenomenological points of view, colorism is another form to
analyze The Bluest Eye. Ruth Rosenberg and Denise Heinze respectively in “Seeds in
Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye” (1987) and “Beauty and Love: The
Morrison Aesthetic” (1993) demonstrate how colorism relates to the constitution of
characters’ self-identity: the former differentiates Claudia Macteer from the rest of
others by her rejection of the imposed beauty code; and entitles her as the “survivor” in
the white society for she stands for “vigorous opposition to the colorist attitudes”
19
(Rosenberg 440). Rosenberg also notices a sense of hatred in the novel: “The process of
bequeathing self-hatred is symbolized in the name Mrs. Breedlove has given her
daughter” (440; emphasis mine). This statement refers Pecola Breedlove’s name to a
white actress’s name in the movie, indicating her mother, Pauline’s attraction to
whiteness beauty. In point of this, Morrison implies: “The concept of physical beauty as
a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the western
world” (qtd. Samuels 10). Denise Heinze signifies the idealized beauty in The Bluest
Eye is rendered by skin color alone. In affirming “Morrison rejects those standards of
beauty” (16), she adds that the beauty code according to skin tone is actually males’
desire:
Most susceptible are black women and girls, who too often anchor their identity on
the slippery surface of physical beauty, not realizing the sacrifice of self and
family . . . to be in their search for physical beauty is the object not necessarily of
black male desire, but of white male desire. (25)
Similarly, Patrick B. Bjork in “The Bluest Eye: Selfhood and Community” (1992) also
shows colorist thought in his evaluation of the story. In explaining blacks’ status in the
social hierarchy, he writes that “consequently, those who are able to mimic white social
codes may hope to move socially and economically in both the black and white worlds,
and thus, color serves to determine class order” (39). Bjork seems to say that not only
20
skin color affects blacks’ self-identity, to a maximum effect it also downgrades their
social rank.
In addition, Harriette McAdoo’s discussion of group-imposed subordination
inclines to interpret the text through colorism: “some light-skinned Blacks still feel
superior and prefer to socialize with those of similar appearance, while others who are
very dark continue to harbor feelings of group-imposed inferiority or insecurity” (qtd. in
Heinze 20). In this case, both light-skinned Geraldine and Maureen fairly represent the
“light-skinned Blacks”; and the Breedloves equally convey the disposition of “who are
very dark.” Monteiro Kenneth also shares the idea of group-imposed inferiority in his
study of the colored groups’ social experience. In spite of races, he indicates a risk to
maintain one’s self-value with the influence of others’ opinions when integrating into a
new community: “one’s self-conception is primarily determined by the way in which it
is reflected or mirrored through the eyes of significant others” (45). In this dimension,
he concludes that blacks’ self-depreciation “is more correctly conceptualized as a
negative ‘reference group’ orientation, not a negative self-orientation” (49). The
reference group orientation is evident in the light-skinned Maureen who enchants the
entire school in her swaddle of “comfort and care” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 62).
Moreover, her pungent comment on the Macteers is “a cruelty unmatched by adults”
(Heinze 23). Her behavior justly gives a vivid portrait of the interracial contempt: “I am
21
cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye
73). Based on Alice Walker’s concept of colorism8 and Paula Giddings’s assertion on
black men’s fondness toward fair-skinned females, Heinze thus concludes: “Morrison’s
bout with colorism seems a necessary purgative in her attack on ideal standards of
beauty, which in her experience, it appears, have been most abused by light-skinned
blacks” (19-21). This nineteenth-century colorism also appears in Lisa Williams’s
article “The Bluest Eye” (2000) which discusses the negative influence of white
aesthetics on the colored females. In elucidating the “cult of white womanhood,” she
reveals that “the social and economic reality of slavery” enforced on the black women
actually hinders them from practicing feminine virtues (57). To be exact, it even leads to
white men’s rape to those colored females who remain powerless.
In addition to Williams’s colorist interpretation, her perspectives largely depend on
racism and sexism in her emphasis of Pecola’s sabotaged growth. In the analysis of
Claudia’s reminiscence in the later days, she comments: “Through the character of
Claudia, Morrison emphasizes that the black female artist will transcend the silencing
effects of racialized self-hatred by speaking and writing of it” (55; emphasis mine). In
Williams’s dual setting of Claudia and Pecola––one who inherits the black tradition and
one who is thrown to the utter desertion of the black-unfriendly North––she manages to
present Morrison’s lucid sketch of “how both racism and sexism lead to Pecola’s
22
destruction” (54). With this idea she regards Cholly’s rape to Pecola as a residue of the
slavery act in the “many hierarchical layers of domination and submission” (56). Phyllis
R. Klotman poises a similar duality in “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple
Sensibility in The Bluest Eye” (1979). In this article, Klotman inserts an antithesis
between the images of school and home, Shirley Temple or Dick-and-Jane and Pecola
Breedlove, “black experience and white culture” (125) akin to Williams’s of Claudia
and Pecola. In explaining Geraldine’s white cultivation, Klotman remarks: “whether one
learns acceptability from the formal educational experience or from cultural symbols,
the effect is the same: self-hatred” (124; emphasis mine). Previously, Patrick Bryce
Bjork’s colorist reading of the novel also identifies the weight of racism and sexism:
“The Breedloves are victims of a racist, class conscious society that has forced them to
live unnatural lives”; the fate of The Bluest Eye characters not only have been inflicted
by racism, but also by the infamous effect of sexism that is “represented through
stereotypes” (36-7).
Jane Kuenz scrutinizes sexism in “The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community,
and Black Female Subjectivity” (1993) as well. She borrows the idea of sextualization
from Frigga Haug to explain the relation between commodities and the black female
body: “femininity and ‘the sexual’ can be produced and reproduced as commodities, as
Pecola’s belief that she can simply acquire blue eyes indicates” (424). What is more to
23
her sexist reading is that the impact of mass culture closely hinges on the making of
female subjectivity. Among all the characters, Claudia as Morrison’s voice, is the only
person who “fosters a brutal hatred for her white baby dolls” (426), that is, the effect of
sextualization in commodities. Correspondingly, Bjork’s reading of racism implies that
the color is the prime cause to all social orders and consumers’ internalization of
commercialized beauty encourages those who lack the promoted traits to “mediate
between the contractions of image and substance, and thus between the diverseness of
desire and self-hatred” (41l; emphasis mine). Significantly, Linden Peach also discerns
racism in Modern Novelist: Toni Morrison (1995) by connecting the look of Claudia
Macteer’s braided hair to the lynch rope. Whilst poising the white ideology as the main
cause to the characters’ misfortune, Peach agrees with Valerie Smith that there is one
problem in Morrison’s fictional operation: It is that the novel in an attempt to unveil the
“secret” of the white code, fails in telling “how” since “why” is impalpable to juxtapose
the tragedy. Though, like the others’ opinions, Peach writes that “the authentic black self
is buried so deep in some of the characters that their perceptions of themselves amount
to self-hatred” (28).
The Bluest Eye Characters’ Inward Self-Love
In large, all reviews fail to explain why and how, if not self-love, these characters
struggle to exceed their worth defined by the white ideology with means they meagerly
24
have: Through education and hard work, the Afro-Americans can “do the white man’s
work with refinement” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 83) and become “what is known as an
ideal servant” (127). Although I deny all interpretations on self-hatred in these analyses,
I adopt some of the ideas related to my interpretation of The Bluest Eye characters
linking phenomenology and psychoanalysis. In brief, I use Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory on
the “look” to discuss Cynthia A. Davis, Ruth Rosenberg, Denise Heinze, and Kenneth P.
Monteiro’s accordance on characters’ self-awareness “through the eyes of others” in the
formation of self-identity. In addition, Wilfred D. Samuels’s insight on the Breedlove’s
relationship with others in “shame” through “the Other’s look” points to Sartre’s view
of “being-for-others.” Similarly, Hariette McAdoo’s idea of the Afro-American’s
imposed “inferiority or insecurity” shows masochism as one of the attitudes Sartre
discusses on the mode of being. Lastly, I use Slavoj Žižek’s adaptation of the
“unconscious desire” in ideological fantasy to explain what Denise Heinze and Phyllis
R. Klotman notice in the “white male desire” and “cultural symbols” of the society. Jane
Kuenz equates “the bluest eye” to commodity “sextualization” presenting white female
beauty shows Pecola’s unconscious desire for the “Thing” in her death-drive.
Here, I briefly explain my reason not adopting Patrick B. Bjork, Lisa Williams, and
Linden Peach’s readings of racism to explain characters’ self-denial. As cited, Bjork
deems the Breedloves as direct victims of racism; Williams connects Cholly’s rape of
25
Pecola to the destructive aftermath of slavery act, and Peach creatively configures the
hair to a lynch rope. In my idea, these views totally eschew Toni Morrison’s concern for
the Afro-American interracial self-contempt induced by the “outside gaze” (The Bluest
Eye 210). The why and how Morrison raise to undermine the Afro-American’s
self-identity lies in the discrepancy of their self-awareness and others’ opinions toward
them. Mentioned in the afterword, the discrepancy holds the society’s value represented
as a “thing” Morrison considers “we (reader and I) are ‘in’” (213). In Pecola’s desire,
the idea of bluest eye links to the white man’s “own standard of beauty” (Bloom 43) due
to financial success (Miner 154), nevertheless, it becomes her “Thing” lodged with
absolute beauty. The “Thing” that patterns her desire also reflects the desire of the
society. To be precise, the truth in the why and how of the Breedloves’ misery is covered
by the “Big Secret” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 213) of white ideology, the “Thing” of
the society best incorporated by Pecola. In Morrison’s effort to “hit the raw nerve” (211)
of racial prejudice, in the ending chapter she locates Pecola in the “Thing,” significantly
shows Pecola’s locus of desire grants her a new identity based on love of self. In this
respect, I install the speculative discourses of Slovaj Žižek and Jean-Paul Sartre on
desire and look to unveil Morrison’s mystified message “we (reader and I) are ‘in.’”
Theoretical Framework
In this section, I present the major concepts I facilitate to answer the why and how
26
deployed in The Bluest Eye. First, I use Slavoj Žižek’s ideas of “symptom,” “ideological
fantasy” and “unconscious desire as the Thing” to explain why Pecola Breedlove is
self-loving instead of self-hating. Next, I apply Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of “ego,”
“hatred’s dubitalibity,” and “attitudes toward the Other” in progress to answer how the
Breedloves’ self-hatred is really absent. Sartre generalizes all sorts of desire as “desire
of the Other’s body” (Being and Nothingness 506) forever out of reach. Žižek’s
radicalizes Jacque Lacan’s idea that desire is a “desire for non-satisfaction” (The
Ticklish Subject 332). I juxtapose these concepts on the same ground of desire’s
impossibility to be fulfilled. Despite Sartre minimizes the importance of unconscious
activity, his view of desire (toward Other’s body) parallels the psychoanalytical view of
otherness in the non-satisfied “unconscious desire” (Loose 76). Though, Sartre thinks
the idea of unconscious is “absurd” (Transcendence of the Ego 57) and avoids to talk
about it. He deems all consciousness is outside in the world. Simply put, he considers
our consciousness is only a viewpoint that inserts an irreducible distance between itself
and objects intended. For this reason Sartre thinks unconscious activity in the psyche
(bearing no distance from its object) is insufficient to explain the phenomena in human
reality. In regard to this, Žižek presents a similar view:
I think that, at least for Lacan, who emphasize this again and again, the proper
dimension of the unconscious is not ‘deep inside.’ The proper dimension is outside,
27
materialized in the state apparatuses . . . What subverts my conscious attitudes are
the implicit ideological beliefs externalized, embodied in my activity.
(“Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political” 5)
Although psychoanalysis embraces unconscious activities, Žižek also thinks the
unconscious patterning our outside behavior has a distance to our inner awareness. In
The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek introduces this distance between one’s
unconscious activity and outside behavior in the “ideological fantasy.”
Symptom
The idea of “symptom” helps progress to Žižek’s “ideological fantasy.” In
psychoanalysis, the term “symptom” is different from the clinical use of “syndrome” to
describe diseases. Though, it is also an indicator. It points at our “lack” (of the original
love-object) as a being. Jacque Lacan defines the “lack” as the place that posits our
desire: “Desire is what manifests itself in the interval demand excavates just shy of
itself, insofar as the subject, articulating the signifying chain, brings to light his lack of
being” (É crits 524). Naturally, when we desire from something to another, we are
experiencing this “lack” in our shift of desire to cover, actually, the lost object of
maternal love. This lost object9, according to Sigmund Freud, is “the persons who are
concerned with a child’s feeding,” (2942) usually the mother, with who we first identify
ourselves with to achieve unity of self-awareness. As we grow out from the infancy, the
28
loss becomes our unconscious desire to mitigate the “repressed libido” (2678) of
maternal love. This lack of love-object results in our “symptom,” shown as a repetition
in our shift of desire to fill up the incompleteness of maternal thing. Lacan reads Freud’s
idea of “symptom” as a “return of the repressed”10 (qtd. in Žižek, The Sublime Object
of Ideology 57) from the future and formulates it in view of language: In forming a
sentence, the “symptom” is like a signifier, indicating the full meaning of a sentence
with one word after another before reaching the period.
Likewise, the “symptom” entails a “life story” (The Invisible Remainder 95) in our
self-identification (with substitutes of love-object) in the form of “transference” (The
Sublime Object of Ideology 59). As an extension to Lacan’s thoughts, Žižek maintains
the late Lacanian “sinthome,” symptom as the Real to answer “Why is there something
instead of nothing?” (77):
This, then, is a symptom: a particular, ‘pathological,’ signifying formation, a
binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a
stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network,
but is at the same time a positive condition of it. (81-2)
In psychoanalysis, the analyst focuses on this “something instead of nothing” to
examine the subject’s symptom. As Žižek rephrases, the Lacanian symptom contains a
“jouissance”11 that “gives consistency to the subject” (81). To be clear, the jouissance is
29
the “binding of enjoyment” that drives us to desire, to continue finding substitutes for
the maternal love throughout our life. That is why symptom is a “positive condition” to
our being, an attempt to care for our incompleteness in its “kernel of enjoyment” (74).
“For Žižek, in parallel, jouissance is the only affect that presupposes the existence,”
(110) writes Matthew Sharpe. Thus the analyst’s duty is to maintain the subject’s
symptom by “putting-into-words” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 74) some of
her/his imaginary traces while leaving all other traces behind. The point is to let the
subject accept her/his “lack” that creates all traumas instead of looking for a “deeper
message”12 (The Invisible Remainder 94) in her/his symptom. For symptom is what
sustains us to desire, the consequence of its full naming will result in our psychic
breakdown, an “access to knowledge is then paid with the loss of enjoyment” (The
Sublime Object of Ideology 73). This procedure reveals our symptom’s “radical
effacement” (Interrogating the Real 33) is a full symbolization of the repressed,
unconscious desire. What begins in us a lack remains a lack. The symptom covers this
uneven point of the lost love-object, but it also stabilizes the functioning of our desire
for self-knowledge.
Ideological Fantasy
Thus, psychoanalysis endeavors to interpret all the symptoms in the human domain.
In fact, it was Jacque Lacan who thought Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism in Capital
30
requires a speculation on symptom. Žižek pans over Lacan’s late discourses, sees a need
to elaborate on the symptomatic social reality in Marx’s scope of lineal social relation
from feudalism to capitalism (The Sublime Object of Ideology 16-30). He thinks Marx is
unaware of the illusion in the social reality and that something is repressed like a
symptom in the bourgeois society: There is a discrepancy between what people think
they are doing and what they are actually doing (28). To fill up what Marxian formula
lacks, Žižek uses Peter Sloterdijk’s cynicism13 to show the “ideological fantasy” in the
society: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (30). For
this reason, Žižek thinks modern societies are ideological because people are willing to
be guided by a “machine”14 (27) of belief (in ritual, practices, thoughts and so on). For
instance, a usual practice of ideology is stereotype and commodity fetish that produce
some cultural symbols, the “sublime objects” of value and belief. This view of ideology
implies, the only way to break ideologies is “to critically analyze the social ideals that
the ideology promotes” (Gutierrez 116).
However, Žižek shows ideology is rather unshakable. He exemplifies it with the
anti-Semitism in which the “Jew” is a “social symptom” of anti-Semites’ “ideological
fantasy.” He emphasizes, the idea of “Jew” involves some “unfathomable x” (The
Plague of Fantasies 31), that is, some excessive qualities contributing to the identity of
“Jew.” This “something in it more than itself” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 104)
31
Žižek answers, is “jouissance” (73). By referring to “jouissance” he means it is
impossible to annihilate ideologies because the subjects’ desire enjoys finding
substitutes (for the love-object) according to others’ view of them: “What does the
Other want?” (128) That is to say, if an anti-Semite sees a Jew and thinks he does not
act like a conventional one, the anti-Semite will fall for the idea that this Jew is hiding
his inner intentions. The fantasy eventually finds itself “as arguments in its favour”15
(50), animating anti-Semitic desire to continue imposing qualities on the Jew. This
implies, the problem of ideology is not how people behave but how subjects see each
other the way they desire, of course, the desire already posited by enjoyment.
That is why Žižek terms ideology as a “fantasy-construction” (The Sublime Object
of Ideology 45) in subjects’ illusion of social relation between things to avoid the horrid
“Thing.” Robert Rushing notes, Žižekian fantasies “stage desire as the force that both
provokes and is provoked by the loss of the object of desire” (54). On the one side,
ideology sustains the order of reality with subjects’ social illusion to escape what
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe see as the “antagonism”16 (45), the otherness in the
society. On the other side, it also points at a place failed to be integrated into the society,
such as the Afro-Americans in The Bluest Eye. Despite their efforts to fit into the society,
they are still conceived as “different.” With a shift from social reality to conscious
reality (144), Žižek concludes, to identify the “social symptom” is to go through a
32
fantasy-traversal17 in the “excess” (144) that gives place to ideological fantasy. In a
sense, the traversal is to reversely identify subjects’ “excess” motivating desire in the
first place. As our desire is a lack, the “excess” suggests a thing is enabling desire, that
is, the “drive”: “desire and drive, in a way, presupposes one another: one cannot deduce
one from the other” (The Ticklish Subject 362). Žižek emphasizes, behind one’s fantasy,
there is only “drive” pushing unconscious desire to sustain her/his symptom. To identify
the symptom is to confront the drive; to confront the “phantasmic core of our being”
(368), the “Thing.”
Unconscious Desire as the Thing
As the Lacanian symptom defines, the maternal thing18 we lose after entering the
symbolic life actually return in us as “an incarnation of the impossible jouissance”
(Cohen 351). Therefore what our symptomatic (repetitive) desire truly aims at is the
lack of love-object, the late Lacanian idea of the “Thing” in “unconscious desire”
(Loose 76). This lack explains why our desire is never fulfilled because it seeks to
achieve an unattainable primordial object of love. Shifting from one object to another,
Robert Rushing writes, “it is clear that what we desire we shall never have” (53). Our
desire shown in replacement of objects not only indicates desire is a void (forever
unsatisfied with everything), but also the fact that we somehow enjoy this void, this
dissatisfaction that renders the act of desiring a failure (so that we desire for other
33
things). This again, is our “symptom” in the form of repetition. Interestingly, it is this
unfulfilled feeling that makes us keep on desiring. As for the source to our (symptom’s)
enjoyment in failed desires, psychoanalysis deepens into the correlation of desire and
drive. Žižek follows Immanuel Kant’s idea of self-consciousness, states, that our
“drive” needs to satisfy itself with an otherness “that forever eludes its grasp” (The
Ticklish Subject 370). He refers the otherness in the drive to the subject seeking the
“Thing”:
. . . the Thing is first constructed as the inaccessible X around which my desire
circulates, as the blind spot I want to see but simultaneously dread and avoid
seeing, too strong for my eyes; then in the shift toward drive, I (the subject) ‘make
myself seen’ as the Thing––in a reflexive turn, I see myself as It, the traumatic
object-Thing I didn’t want to see. (365)
Simply put, our desire (a void) and drive (an excess) coexist19 when we crave for
something to fill up the lack of love-object. Whilst our desire fails each time
approaching to the Thing, the drive is feeding itself with desire’s failures, for jouissance
is what the drive persists for.
With the co-functioning of desire and drive, what Žižek really presents, is the
alternative to symptom as “a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive” (The Sublime
Object of Ideology 81). As in the psychoanalytic treatment to the patient’s symptom, the
34
analyst should maintain the symptom while letting her/him accept her/his lack as source
of all traumas. But what happens exactly if the patient achieves a deeper meaning to
her/his symptom? Žižek’s use of “sinthome” suggests, still, the symptom lasts even with
full interpretation, but the subject in an attempt to avoid “the end of the world” (81), to
shun from her/his horrid core, sees herself/himself as the “Thing” who “supplants and
transposes the symptom” (Cohen 358). That is, s/he becomes the “Thing” s/he has
desired and feared, a “shift toward drive,” precisely, to the “death-drive” (The Ticklish
Subject 365). By “death-drive” it does not mean the subject dies of realizing all the
meanings in her/his core of being, rather, s/he is detached from the symbolic world of
meaning, an escape to the Real. Although s/he experiences the “psychic suicide,” a
positive reading says the “Thing” makes its subject confronting it undergoes a psychic
rebirth, a revival with a new identity of the true self: “What’s involved in the drive,
Lacan tells us, is a making oneself heard or making oneself seen” (Mellard 401). To this
point, I emphasize on Žižek’s idealist reading20 of the late Lacanian “Thing,” which is
actually “the ‘driving force,’ of desiring” (The Invisible Remainder 97). In a sense it
“drives” us to become an ideal version of our self, Claudia Breger writes, “Žižek 's
figure of resistance is to undo symbolic authority by ‘dying for’ it, in ‘completely
identifying’ with it” (86). What seems to be a catastrophe like “a psychic suicide”
confronting our Thing is actually self-identification with our superego (Žižek, The
35
Ticklish Subject 479-81). Žižek exemplifies with The Mask in which an ordinary man
when he wears a green mask, performs his “unconstrained perversion” (479) as the
Thing.
The man’s ideal self is presented in his death-drive (shown as possessed by the
mask), in that he is “undead” (479) and is able to materialize all his fantasies without
symbolic obstacles. His action becomes surreal, yet idealistic according to his desires.
What this presents is the man being the Thing still acts according to his desire in the
“horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of jouissance” (481). By
this Žižek notes the death-drive is a “stupidity of superego enjoyment” (479), it only
wants its host to enjoy endlessly beyond symbolic death. In other words, the death-drive
provides unsatisfied joy one can never get rid of even at the cost of self in becoming
something entirely different (such as a zombie). Žižek deepens the death-drive’s
superego enjoyment on the discussion of “imaginary identification”21 (The Sublime
Object of Ideology 116-9). The concept of imaginary identification is based on Freud’s
notion of super-ego (ego-ideal or ideal-ego): “The subject’s narcissism, makes its
appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego . . . He seeks to recover it in the new form
of an ego ideal” (2948). Lacan differentiates ideal-ego (imaginary identification) and
ego-ideal (symbolic identification), and facilitates these terms to present one’s
self-identification with others. Accordingly, the aim of our ideal-ego is to retrieve “an
36
object which has been lost” (qtd. in Žižek, Jacque Lacan 19), again, the primordial
love-object discarded into the death-drive, the Real, as the “Thing.” In view of Freud,
this attempt is to “form a total idea of the person” (1544) who first gave us love, a
model object around which we stick to “imitate” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of
Ideology 121) in life. This appears in our imaginary identification with others to achieve
the ideal self. The tricky part is that the lost Thing “forever eludes” (The Ticklish
Subject 370) our grasp and thus paves for us a self-seeking journey with objects of
desire replaced one after another, keeping us in sanity.
The Symptomatic Bluest Eye
Therefore the “symptom” has two aspects in reality. Both can be seen in the Bluest
Eye context. On the one side, the Afro-American is a social symptom, the object of the
white society’s ideological fantasy. A paramount of disgraceful names are dedicated to
the characters: The “black e mo” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 65), the “loud nigger” (87),
et cetera. Their nicknames are given by those who see them the way they desire. Even
though these characters internalize customs of the society but nevertheless they are like
a stain in the social network. On the other side, Pecola’s symptom enjoys repetitively
assimilates herself to the bluest eye, the “Thing.” Pecola’s desire of the bluest eye
indicates her “Thing” substituting the love-object with fraudulent idea of absolute
beauty. The idea of the “bluest eye” quilts all qualities according to that of a white
37
beauty. Of the myth a pair of bluest eyes holds, she believes, is attractiveness she needs
the most and more importantly, affection from others. In addition, Soaphead Church’s
“ritual” to carry out Pecola’s wish is a fantasy-traversal like a psychoanalytical
treatment to her symptom. The meaning to her desire (to be looked with interest) is
symbolized in one pair of blue eyes with an exchange of her psychic stability. In
hallucination, she encounters her double, an “otherness” from whose point of view she
sees herself as the “Thing” she desires. In this status, she is made aware of the adorable
others (Maureen, Joanna, Michelena, Alice-and-Jerry figures) with whom she identifies
to show self-love in conversation with her split. Even before this final revelation of
Pecola’s true self, there are many traces of her self-love. Next I will introduce the
Sartrean ego to bring out hatred’s impossibility, and progress to the “mode of being” to
justify characters’ self-love under their guise of self-loathe.
The Sartrean Ego
Sartre explains human reality with two aspects of the “ego”: the “I” and the “Me.”
In our ego, the “I” is the “unity of actions” (Transcendence of the Ego 60) and “Me” the
“unity of states and of qualities” (60). Plainly speaking, our affection and self-awareness
in the “Me” is expressed through the act of “I.” For instance, the subject in “I feel
hungry” is “I.” Through “I,” I express my hunger, but after all “I” is only presenting the
hunger of “Me.” The “Me” is the real one who suffers from hunger. In other words, the
38
unity of the “I” and “Me” presents my “ego,” my “self” through which I express hunger
in language. Psychoanalysis studies the ego along with other psychic apparatuses (id,
super-ego) to engage in, for example, “the interpretation of dreams” (Freud 4629)
toward one’s unconscious activity. However, Sartre’s phenomenological focus is not in
the unconscious. His focus is on the outside of psyche, on the effect of “look” to
interpret human behavior and relationships. First, he thinks human consciousness is
only temporary “point of view” (Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego 33) we adopt to look
at objects; we use the lens of consciousness to capture everything in our eyes. Second,
our ego is not innate in psychic apparatus, it is “outside in the world” (31). Then, where
does our ego come from? Sartre answers:
The ego is a virtual locus of unity, and consciousness constitutes it in a direction
contrary to that actually taken by the production: really, consciousness are first;
through these are constituted states; and then, through the latter, the ego is
constituted . . . (81)
The point here is on our consciousness’s “direction contrary” to constitute an ego. This
means, that our ego is formed in a reflexive turn, simply speak, in “reflection.” That is
to say, our ego (sense of “self”) emerges from consciousness, more precisely, only from
our reflective consciousness: “the ego is an object apprehended, but also an object
constituted, by reflective consciousness” (80). Again, in the example “I feel hungry,”
39
my reflection on the want to consume is involved before “I” speaks for the feeling of
“Me” to present my ego “self” in hunger. On the other hand, there are moments we do
not reflect (46-9), in a sense, moments when “I” halt from expressing the feeling of
“Me.” For example, when we are absorbed in reading a book, we “forget” our self in the
act of reading, by this Sartre means we do not feel our “self” in the “non-reflective
consciousness” (47). Thus Sartre’s nucleus idea in The Transcendence of the Ego
suggests two types of consciousness: Where there is look, there is consciousness; with
reflection (reflective consciousness) to look, there is an ego, without reflection
(non-reflective consciousness) to look, there is only consciousness.
Thus, the Sartrean ego is about human consciousness transcend outside in the
world by the act of “looking.” Because of consciousness’s transcendence, it is a
“being-for-itself,” (Transcendence of the Ego 23) referring to its being only a viewpoint
for the subject to see, a nothingness by itself. András B. Kovács points out,
consciousness, or nothingness is “a product of human intentions” and “the essence of
being” (137), precisely, our being in the world through looking. Human being is, like all
other matters, a “being-in-itself,” (Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego 23) an object in
form which sees and being seen. In addition, consciousness’s transcendence suggests
therefore our reflection’s transcendence from which ego arises. Sartre exemplifies the
ego’s transcendence in the chapter “The I and the Me” (32-60) with a detail on the
40
“twist” in reflection. In that he explains the contents of our reflection is dubitable
because reflection is an act to recall in a memory without a “Me” expressing through
“I.” In other words, memory is a non-reflective consciousness (47) which does not
produce ego, containing only remaining of our past consciousness. Thus Sartre follows
Edmund Husserl’s idea, states reflection involves a twist in its contents: “reflection
modifies the spontaneous consciousness” (48). For instance, if we describe the feature
of a stranger who passes us by a moment ago, our description is constrained by our
limited impression of this person so it is normally inaccurate. This means distortion is
involved when we recall an object (being-in-itself), let alone when we think of
something immaterial, such as consciousness itself: The image we conceive of a
consciousness consists parts we know of an object and parts we contrive to form what
consciousness is like. This message is, as long as we reflect, the contents we make of
cannot escape from being reshaped into a mixture of being-in-itself (object) and
being-for-itself (consciousness). Though, our ego arises even with a modification.
Dubitable Nature of Hatred
Sartre continues to illustrate on the ego’s transcendence in the chapter “The
Constitution of the Ego” (60-91) with an emphasis on the subject’s “Me” of
self-awareness and affection. In a step to elucidate Me’s “states” and “qualities,” Sartre
uses “hatred” and “repugnance” to distinguish these emotions of the self (62-4). What
41
seems to be equal expressions for the subject experiencing repulsion, he discerns a
difference between the two on the ground of ego’s transcendence. In fact, Sartre not
only thinks our ego emerges from reflective consciousness, he also considers it not
attaching to anything, not even to consciousness, though all are already outside in the
world. That is, the ego is absolutely independent. As “consciousness” is after all only a
temporal viewpoint that cannot last, our ego as a consciousness product is also
temporary presentation of our “self,” Roberto P. Machado reads, “every act of
consciousness is carried out as a flight from being” (261). In other words, our ego only
represents us at the moment it arises. The ego’s transcendent objects “actions” (I) and
“states and qualities” (Me) are also temporary unity of our consciousness “founded in
the immanent flux of momentary Erlebnisse” (Laycock 30). Although these objects
show how we feel in a “self,” Sartre is not contented at this step to interpret Me’s
emotions, such as “hatred.” He notices, our sense of hatred fails with a simple reflection
into memory:
I see Peter, I feel a sort of profound convulsion of repugnance and anger at the
sight of him (I am already on the reflective level): the convulsion is
consciousness . . . But is this experience of repugnance hatred? Obviously not.
Moreover, it is not given as such. In reality, I have hated Peter a long time ago and
I think that I shall hate him always. An instantaneous consciousness of repugnance
42
could not, then, be my hatred . . . I would say: “I feel a repugnance for Peter at this
moment,” and thus I would not implicate the future. But precisely by this refusal to
implicate the future, I would cease to hate. (Transcendence of the Ego 62;
emphasis mine)
Because of ego’s transience, our repulsion on the spot limits itself in the performance of
“I” and cannot last afterwards. In fact, Sartre’s view on the ego’s transcendence
considers all our expressions are temporary presentations of the self by refection
(reflective consciousness). In the section “States as Transcendent Unities of
Consciousness” (61-70) he thinks our “hatred” is but a projection of the emotional
“state” from previous repulsive experience. This repulsive experience is only a memory
(non-reflective consciousness), a “profile” (63) to our life-experience (Erlebnis) and
cannot be reduced into the present activity of ego’s transcendence. In other words, our
memory’s contents cannot participate in the Me’s temporary feelings.
Let me take another example, when we see a stain on our white shirt, we hate its
staying on us while we try to present ourselves as clean and organized in the white shirt.
With a closer look, actually, we have always hated to see a stain on our white clean shirt.
Our hatred is not limited to this time only, it was in the past and will still be in the future.
Sartre states: “Hatred is credit for an infinity of angry or repulsed consciousness in the
past and in the future. It is the transcendent unity of this infinity of consciousness” (64).
43
Our hatred to see its presence is forever, as long as we keep looking at the stain on our
white shirt. But this feeling toward things we do not like is after all only temporary
emotion because of ego’s transience in reflection. To really “hate” the stain on our white
shirt, then, we need to continue to look at the stain and never cleanse it or distract from
the look to effectuate eternity. Therefore Sartre thinks our repulsive feeling toward
things we dislike is rather a temporary quality22 shown as “repugnance” instead of
“hatred.” Although Sartre’s intricate idea on hatred rejects its presentation in the self, he
adds repugnance is hatred’s spontaneous emanation 23 and it is from which hatred
emanates as the subject’s “life-experience”: The quality “represents the substratum of
the states, as the states represent the substratum of the Erlebnisse” (70), Steven W.
Laycock reiterates, “The ego appears as transcendent; and experience as immanent”
(39). Still, Sartre raises another doubt in his interpretation of Me’s feelings. He thinks,
that the “me, as such, remains unknown to us . . . It is infinitely near, and I cannot circle
around it” (86). By this Sartre means even though our “Me” represents feelings through
“I,” it nevertheless is our subjective feelings about the self, “it is the me, on the contrary,
which bars our way.” He continues, to really know our self “is inevitably to take toward
oneself the point of view of others” (87). To see “Me” we need a stance from outside,
the only way is to realize others’ points of view. For this reason, he develops in Being
and Nothingness the third basis, “being-for-others” on human relationship.
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Two Attitudes toward the Other in the Mode of Being
For our consciousness is a viewpoint we adopt to see the world, everything we
look at are naturally objects for our consciousness (21). It objectifies everything in our
view toward the world. That is to say, when we look at a person, the person is an object
to our consciousness, but it remains an otherness to us. In this sense, we can never be
the foundation of ourselves because others’ look also turns us into an object to their
consciousness. Sebastian Gardner explains insightfully: “Consciousness is autonomous
and an absolute, but a non-substantial absolute which does not provide its own
foundation” (48). Truthfully, we do not know how others look at us, with what emotion
held to judge us, others as “the Other” forever remains unreachable. Human relationship
is a relation of objects among other objects that give influence to one another while
maintaining its own autonomy. In fact, Sartre uses this measure (of the look’s
objectification) to prove the existence of others (Being and Nothingness 301). He
describes an awkward situation in which a man is found shameful to peep into people’s
privacy: “. . . I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other . . . By the appearance of
the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it
is as an object that I appear to the Other” (302). The person’s absorption is suddenly cut
off at the presence of another person. At this moment, he returns in the “Me” with guilt
in their inter-perception based on the look. Thus to look is not only to exercise our
45
eyeballs, but also to establish influence onto each other. In this example of shame,
Sartre verifies the existence of the Other and its unreducible influence in human reality,
and terms our mode of being as “being-for-others” (341).
Accordingly, “being-for-others” is our relation with others in which others’ look
contributes to our awareness and knowledge of the self. In other words, others as the
Other in its “presence in person” (340) is the source of our awareness about “the self.”
Due to our “being-for-others,” other people’s opinions affect us to the same scale as
ours to them: “A gaze, of course, is often met by another, equally directed and
objectifying” (Brosman 65). Others’ perspectives are inaccessible to us as ours exclude
them. Our worlds are separated at the very basis of our free consciousness; I am in my
own world looking through my screen as you are in yours. Whether others remain still
or are in motion, we only perceive them as objects configuring our vision. Although
others’ look affects us, owing to ego’s transcendence we are all isolated individuals,
however, trapped in the look. Thus, Sartre emphasizes human freedom is a “given
characteristic” (Being and Nothingness 473) to our being in the world. Nevertheless, as
long as we exist we cannot escape others’ look that objectifies us as they can’t from ours.
In a way, “I am being robbed of my freedom” (Grimsley 33) by others’ freedom.
However, it is necessarily in this entanglement that we establish our self-identity. Thus
Sartre’s “being-for-others” shows our building of identity based on the look: “what
46
appears to be self-contained, autonomous entity, a person-in-herself, is innately
dependent upon external elements for her own self-definition” (Taylor 78). In our
“being-for-others,” the way we respond to the Other’s look defines our identity in the
world. There are two basic attitudes in responding to others’ “look” of us: Masochism
and sadism. I use “she” on masochism and “he” on sadism according to the gender of
Bluest Eye characters practicing these attitudes.
Briefly, the masochist feels secured to be the Other’s object, whereas the sadist
wants to be the only foundation to his being by trying to get hold of the Other’s freedom.
In the chapter “Concrete Relations with Others” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness
471-556) Sartre considers masochism as an extension of love: The beloved wants to be
the lover’s center of universe; the lover wants to be the beloved’s only choice. Each of
them relies on the other for self-definition and fears of losing this secured value of self
to be “in danger” (477). Thus, the one who starts to reduce his devotion in love will
make the other a masochist needing affection. The masochist seeking for love tries to
“get rid of” (491) her own, giving up her subjectivity in the hope that he will offer what
she needs. However, the Other (her lover)’s freedom remains out of reach under all
circumstances. Her self-annihilation is futile because her being inferior to him requires
his freedom to recognize his power over her. In her submissiveness she is still subjective
to effectuate his supremacy. Conversely, Sartre considers sadism as a form of sexual
47
desire24: The sadist feels humiliating “being subject to” (533) the Other’s freedom that
escapes his control. He wishes to be on his own without the influence of the Other in his
“appetite directed toward the Other’s body” (501-5). Thus to stop the Other’s look, the
sadist method uses an agent to materialize the Other’s flesh. This indicates the sadist’s
joy is to disgrace others with force because he sees underneath the agents’ clothing a
“facticity of the Other” (522) he desires to grasp. Similarly, his attempt to get hold of
the Other is futile. The sadist is unaware of its agent’s freedom to conceive of the pain
imposed. The Other’s freedom is still unaffected and unattainable even with violence.
Consequently, Sartre concludes human relationship that is naturally based on sadism
and masochism, will never work out. In these basic attitudes, András B. Kovács writes,
we are all “endangered by the freedom of others, and constantly having to face the lack
of metaphysical values or guarantees” (137). Of course, Sartre also recognizes other
attitudes in our “being-for-others,” but he considers all are originated from these
elementary ones that render the phenomenon of human relationships an unresolved
“conflict” (Being and Nothingness 475).
Thesis Structure
To attend to the why and how deployed in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, I
facilitate Jean-Paul Sartre and Slavoj Žižek’s theoretical concepts on the ground of
desire’s impossibility to be fulfilled and love’s symptomatic presentation in the
48
transference. As Morrison notes, “the book can be seen to open with its close” (The
Bluest Eye 214), the Breedloves’ self-debasement is in line with their love for the origin,
a return to the black tradition whilst being trapped in the confinement of the “outside
gaze.” In chapter one, I select Sartre’s idea of the “conscious look” in The
Transcendence of the Ego and the “mode of being” in Being and Nothingness to explain
how characters’ behavior contradicts to their nature only to be accepted by others and to
protect themselves from danger. In chapter two, I continue on Sartre’s patterning of
“two basic mode in the being-for-others” along with Žižek’s lights in The Sublime
Object of Ideology to prove characters’ self-love underlining all their symptomatic
gestures. With these measures, I will fathom the depth of the primary text, The Bluest
Eye, by revising its textual evidence less examined or is rather intended for a misleading
idea of “self-hatred” toward characters’ own blackness.
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Notes of Introduction
1
Jean-Jacques Rousseau discusses about the idea of “good” (amour de soi) and “bad”
(amour-propre) self-love in his Second Discourse. He radicalizes the “bad” self-love is
not necessarily evil, but it usually is in the way it leads its subject to act out his/her
goals without moral disciplines; whereas the “good” self-love is much simpler, the pure
love of the self that doe not interfere with others’ foundations (qtd. in Cooper 660-4).
2
In varied texts, non-reflective consciousness is also called pre-reflective or
unreflected consciousness.
3
First published in É crits (1966), Jacque Lacan designed the diagram to illustrate the
vector of desire penetrating the unconscious structure of mental reality in three orders:
the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary.
4
Tony Myers clearly explains Lacan’s formulation of mental reality in three orders:
The Real signifies everything that cannot be introduced with meanings, the unknown
facet of human reality. The Symbolic covers from language to law, all social structures
human mentality conceives of. The Imaginary designates the formation of one’s ego
starting from the mirror stage in identification with mirroring images of the self.
5
Slavoj Žižek (follows Lacan) thinks if the patient’s symptom is unbound in the
analysis, he meets psychic suicide. Likewise, those who succumb to the idea of Jew,
rationalize their act to eradicate Jews as the threatening Thing (“Leftist Plea” 999).
6
Lacan follows Sigmund Freud’s concept and develops on the idea of ideal-ego in his
essay “Mirror Stage” to specify one’s imaginary identification with others to achieve the
lost love-object for a unified sense of self (in the Imaginary).
7
The “sense of self” is the subject’s coherence between ego’s awareness of itself and
what s/he first identifies her/himself with in the mirror stage.
8
Alice Walker’s colorism originates in the 19th century black writers’ exclusive use of
light-skinned heroines.
9
According to Freud’s idea in “On Narcissism,” we lose the love-object (breast and
mother) since the moment we grow out of infantile identification with mirroring objects.
The same point we start to internalize meanings around us.
10
Lacan conceives of symptom as a floating signifier in an unfinished sentence before
achieving fullness of the language’s content. It quilts all signifiers to give the sentence
50
its full meaning.
11
The experience of pain and pleasure combined.
12
Žižek states in The Invisible Remainder, “‘do not compromise your desire’ can only
mean ‘do not put up with any of the substitutes for the Thing, keep the gap of desire
open’” (95).
13
Cynicism is a concept of false consciousness.
14
Žižek uses the idea of Pascalian machine to illustrate one’s participation in the
ideological doctrine and belief.
15
Ideology functions as a social fantasy upon the lack of unconscious desire finding
objects for its coverage. No matter how one behaves, the idea of “Jew” actively fulfils
what it is referred to (greedy, selfish, et cetera). For “idea” itself is an empty signifier
that acquires its meaning from its holder’s desire. The “Jew” is anti-Semitism’s object
of fantasy, an object-a (frame of desire) constructing anti-Semites’ desire (Žižek, The
Sublime Object of Ideology 104).
16
The antagonism is the late Lacanian Real which resists symbolization, a gap, an
otherness, a social symptom in the Symbolic Žižek keenly majors in his political and
cultural studies.
17
Fantasy-traversal is the psychoanalytical treatment to the subject’s symptom (a sign
of repressed desire) by going through the mask of fantasy to show nothing is behind but
drive enacting desire and producing traumas. Žižek states, “This is similar to Freud’s
view that the keys to the functioning of the human mind were dream, slips of the tongue,
and similar ‘abnormal’ phenomena” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 144).
18
The Lacanian psychoanalysis refers to the Freudian maternal thing as the “Thing,”
the “Real of the subject’s fundamental fantasies” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject 367)
introduced to the subject as the return of symbolic castration (of the lost love-object).
19
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’s quote “you are what your deep, driving desire is” helps
simplify the correlation between desire and drive.
20
According to Žižek, Rudolf Bernet (mis)interprets Lacan’s use of “Antigone clinging
to her desire” as one’s compromise with desire so as not to be “drawn into the deadly
vortex of the Thing.” Lacan’s original meaning is the other way around, “‘not
compromising one’s desire’!” by shifting objects of desire to “keep the gap of desire
open.” However, Žižek positively reads Bernet’s distortion as pointing to the Lacanian
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Thing which is “the very universe of drives,” in other words, by compromising with
desire, one keeps on desiring for drive’s cause (The Invisible Remainder 95-7).
21
Our imaginary identification (ideal-ego) is presupposed by the symbolic
identification (ego-ideal) in which we recognize the meanings and values of the
surrounding others “from where we are being observed” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of
Ideology 116).
22
Jean-Paul Sartre clarifies that the “quality” is a temporary presentation of the ego
seen in the subject’s “faults, virtues, tastes, talents, tendencies, instincts, etc., are of this
type” (Transcendence of the Ego 71). On the other hand, “hatred” adopts an infinite
potency: “My hatred was given in and by each movement of disgust, of repugnance, and
of anger, but at the same time it is not any of them. My hatred escapes from each of
them by affirming its permanence” (63). Hatred contains “dubitability” through “the
very nature of its existence” (64) as a piece of the subject’s life-experience.
23
Sartre signifies the relation of the two is an illogical, magical bond (Transcendence
of the Ego 68).
24
When Sartre discusses desire in chapter three of Being and Nothingness, he defines
all sorts of desire as sexual desire; whereas it does not necessitate amorous acts but
works on the subject’s want “of a transcendent object” (501) in the Other, that is, the
freedom.
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Chapter One
Projecting the Outside Gaze:
Interpreting Characters’ Racial Self-Loathing in the Look
In this chapter, I will argue how Afro-American characters (the Breedloves and the
“brown” generation) show their anger and shame as “repugnance of the self” on the
spot 1 instead of “self-hatred or hatred of others.” To make this clear, I employ
Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that distinguishes the difference between hatred (life experience)
and repugnance (ego’s momentary presentation) to my discussions. Accordingly, as
hatred is “credit for an eternity” Transcendence of the Ego 63) like a profile to certain
experience (that lasts in the past and in the future), it does not participate in our ego’s
transcendence in the “look” that presents our momentary feelings of the self. For this
reason, the Afro-American characters’ “self-hatred” should rather be seen as
“self-repugnance,” “self-loathing,” or “self-debasement” for their love instead of hatred,
occupies all the meanings of life purposes. “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s
indifference”2, in truth, critics’ idea of “self-hatred” fails to explain why characters care
to mitigate their negative feelings about themselves to move on in all life aspects with
their “good” and “bad” love of the self. From being victimized by the white aesthetics
to proving themselves worthy of attention, the Bluest Eye Afro-Americans soothe the
feel of unworthiness in different ways of learnt social adjustment. In general, each
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character represents a unique adaptation to the white society: Pecola dwells in the
comfort of artificial love to cover the lack of maternal object, Pauline and Cholly realize
their importance through work and concern for the family, Geraldine (a “brown” female)
combines both measures to outstand in the community by doing “white man’s work
with refinement” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 83). Despite most of them consecrate the
beauty of whiteness, Ruby Dee defines all their attempts are to “plod through a
desperate, pitiful search for meaning and personal definition” (qtd. in McKay 19).
In my view, characters’ search for “personal definition” is challenged by the
“outside gaze” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 210) that weighs the value of blackness. In
spite of this, to redefine their black worth to others, their determination already discards
any sense of hatred toward themselves by showing an ambivalent nature of self-love
aired with self-debasement as they feel defeated by others’ disinterest of them. For I
believe all human behaviors on the act of looking all signify a need for love that comes
from deep within, and maps out all our intentions throughout life choices. No matter our
gesture is good or bad, moral or immoral, and the emotion that holds it is audacious or
timid, violent or tender, all that is patterned by our good (amour de soi) and/or bad
self-love (amour-propre) to be appreciated as how we adore our own images. The
characters in the novel fairly perform it with a peculiar air: They show how we can
become self-debasing just to preserve our value/belief to be secured of our “ownership”
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over the things we consider most dear in confrontation with others’ “look” that issues
prejudices against us. As long as “to look” is to effectuate influence on others, no one’s
being is founded on her/his own basis to fill up the void of primordial love. In the
following discussions I will elaborate how characters’ self-loathing is a learnt
temperament to protect themselves from any potential harm in order to live up to others’
expectations of them, of “what the Other wants of me?”3 First I examine Pecola’s
cravings for beauty and progress to her parents (Pauline and Cholly)’s obsession of life
importance, and finally with Geraldine to show Afro-Americans exceeding the white
ideology of “ratty nigger” (18) by earning a quality life.
Pecola’s Relief of Frustration with Self-Love
“He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see” (48). Simply and
frankly, this message tells of a man ignoring Pecola Breedlove for she lacks all there is
to be worthy of his attention. Why is there nothing to see about her? Morrison does not
tell the answer, instead, she writes “There is really nothing more to say” (8) and lets
readers picture on Pecola’s unworthiness to be looked at involving people who do not
appreciate her on the path of growth. To be true, there are too much to say about Pecola
to be summed up in one sentence. Thus I will begin by her first response to the
damaging “outside gaze” (210) to know what causes her self-repugnance in
identification with the rest of others. Most importantly, we will see how she diverts from
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that negative emotion about herself to look for commodities (love-objects) to help heal
her sense of defeat: “self-love produces identification; identification produces
commerce” (Force 59), a gesture mirroring her love of self through the objects she
chooses to purchase, to seek comfort from.
Pecola’s frustration of being unable to win others’ interest of her begins in an early
stage of life. The incident happens somewhere in her neighborhood, for the first time
she realizes other people’s beauty scale is entirely different from hers. At the sight of
dandelions, a thought comes to her mind: “Why, she wonders, do people call them
weeds? She thought they were pretty. But grown-ups say, ‘Miss Dunion keeps her yard
so nice. Not a dandelion anywhere’” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 47). At this moment, the
neighbor’s routine to remove dandelions for tidying the yard is in a sharp contrast to
Pecola’s fondness of them, let alone her understanding as to why dandelions are
despicably called weeds and should be removed. Soon afterwards, we are introduced to
a dramatic change of her attitude:
Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at
her and do not send love back. She thinks, ‘They are ugly. They are weeds.’
Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and
wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges
of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and
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presence. An awareness of worth. (50)
This event happens right after her contact with Yacobowski, a white shop owner, a
critical scene that changes her view about dandelions. In the store, she notices an
unspeakable distance between Yacowbowski and her when paying the Mary Jane
candies. Quietly he manages to be peaceful, though, Pecola notices his demeanor is
rather reluctant than welcoming about her visit. In the vacuum of words, Yacobowski
hesitates to handle her coins and that makes her feel she somehow deserves his cold
attitude because after all she is not the “doe-eyed Virgin Mary” he expects to see: “She
has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her
blackness” (48-9).
After purchasing Mary Janes, she is immersed in that feel of unworthiness as what
she can make of from that experience is all based on Yacobowski’s indifference to her,
“Her thoughts fall back to Mr. Yacobowski’s eyes” (50). As if to sort out her
undesirability, she relates dandelions’ “uselessness” in the eyes of neighbors and thinks
of them as her equal. She now understands why dandelions are taken as weeds to be
removed, for even if dandelions can blossom, their flowers are not as precious and
flourishing as those preserved and nourished in the garden. Most of all, like her,
dandelions cannot show to people who are disinterested of knowing what she/they are
capable of other than being a black/weeds and let herself/themselves be called according
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to the society’s desire. Thus on the way back, dandelions so happen to be Pecola’s
reflection on her importance in the world. When she thinks about how she is treated in
the store, the unpleasant memory renders her fondness of dandelions toward despising
them just like how she is ignored by the white shop owner.
Furthermore, the reason why Pecola compares herself with dandelions is because
when she looks at them, her ego emerges and transcends “outside in the world.” As in
this case, her ego (“self”) lands on dandelions for they are what she preoccupies at after
the shop experience. For reflection involves “distortion,” Pecola’s picturing of her “self”
applies the image of dandelions and Yacobowski’s coldness because “how others look at
her” is something outside her knowledge she seeks to find out her worth to others. In
this way, the image of dandelions and Yacobowski’s coldness participate in her
understanding of being-for-others, and becomes for her sole knowledge of
self-importance4 in the world. In an instant, Pecola’s self-awareness is consisted of
what she recognizes in dandelions’ undesirability and Yacobowski’s silent opinion about
her, simply, a unity of ugliness in her idea. Just after a few seconds since the contact,
now she conceives of dandelions as unworthy as her “self” in the eyes of others and
considers, her “uselessness” should be rectified lest she be “removed” like dandelions.
At this step, we might fall for the idea that because she despises dandelions as her equal
so she certainly does not love herself, and even hate herself. However, for hatred acts
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on a constant act of looking to effectuate its eternity, it fails to be in her case of
temporary self-judgment. For I see her following gesture after feeling ashamed of
herself already disables the sense of hatred in her shift of look with love. She sincerely
wants to become one of those flowers that is cherished in everyone’s garden, nourished
and desired to blossom the best of her being. I am going to explain how she generally
responds to the outside gaze with self-love in whatever life brings to her.
Pecola’s Obsession of Objects of Love
Other than Yacobowski’s coldness, she is also insulted by comrades at school: “like
a necklace of semiprecious stones they surrounded her . . . they gaily harassed her” (65)
and despised by a girl of her age “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos.
I am cute!” (73). After all these dehumanizing experience, she never gives up seeking
some warmth by identifying herself with anything that is considered “lovable,”
“beautiful,” yet is “destructive” to her innocence in potential. Therefore she develops a
habit to find her “personal definition” (qtd. in McKay 19) outside in the world, mainly,
with pictures of white idol imprinted on all commodities that poorly teach her lessons
about love. In her resolution to “better” herself in order to be loved, she becomes
obsessed with commodities that offer timely comfort to her shallow existence. Her
earliest inquiry of love begins when she menstruates for the first time at the Macteers’s.
Enlightened by Frieda’s reply, “somebody has to love you” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye
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31) to give birth to a baby, Pecola’s growing need for social approval guides her to
identify herself with images of white, smiling, loving, inanimate faces. That is, she
confuses the “fraudulent love” (23) of artifacts with an idea that the only way to be
loved is to become like the white idols whose looks embellish all commodities. The
most influential message amid all necessities is the picture of a fair-haired, blue-eyed
lady, Mary Jane on the candy wrap.
After being struck by Yacobowski’s distaste of her, she tries to absorb the
inanimate feature of this plastic love into herself:
Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. 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. The eyes are petulant,
mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. 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)
As soon as she captures Mary Jane’s attractiveness on the candy-wrap, she is victimized
by what she sees as a model figure of beauty. For what underlines the charming face of
Mary Jane is a prejudiced scale affecting innocent Afro-American subjects like Pecola,
who eagerly fixates on sources to fill up the void of maternal love. Born and raised by
Pauline and Cholly who are themselves unconfident to act out the pride of blackness to
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people of white origin, Pecola’s obsession learns to have her self-love subtly expressed
through a paramount of fraudulent love. Claudia Macteer, the girl who stands for
Morrison’s “Afro-American esteem” is the “sober” one from whose point of view I
justify Pecola’s inward play of self-love struggling with white symbols of beauty:
If she was cute––and if anything could be believed, she was––then we were not.
And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we
could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the
obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers
when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What
did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we
were still in love with ourselves then. (74; emphasis mine)
According to Claudia’s confession, what makes her and Pecola, and other
Afro-American subjects undesirable is the society’s general disinterested to the beauty
of blackness. By putting herself in Pecola’s position, Claudia does not think of her race
is ugly; rather, she realizes black people just can hardly attend to the society’s desire
unless they are born as appealing as the attractive “brown” girl of the school. Even if
they try to attain white men’s interest with all measures, they are the “otherness,” the
“exception” lacking all there is required to be “beautiful” in the eyes of white men. But
that is not a concern to Claudia as she says, “And so what?” for she knows her worth
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and is comfortable with it; whereas Pecola rather chooses to care more about others’
view of her than feeling confident on her own terms. A refrain to Denise Heinze: “to be
in their search for physical beauty is the object not necessarily of black male desire, but
of white male desire” (25). Though, as Claudia admits, Afro-Americans are actually still
in love with themselves after internalizing the beauty of whiteness even if they do not
show their pride. The fatal lack that makes Pecola this self-debasing is because she does
not dare to show to people who already considers her as unworthy to be looked at in the
first place. Pacola’s fascination of Mary Jane not only suggests she is willing to be an
object to the Other’s desire, but also her narcissistic, fundamental need for others’
approval of her by her assimilation to what others like. Thus she eagerly tries to beautify
herself with Mary Jane candies, hoping to be loved as how people adore Mary Jane.
Despite neither candy-eating nor simply staring at Shirley Temple’s image (Morrison,
The Bluest Eye 19) help adorn her appearanc, with her barren possession inside and out
those are the only maneuverings for her to come closer to the “sublime beauty.” At a
minimum effect, a part of her desperation drains out and transcends with the savor of
condiments permeating in her mouth.
The Ambivalent Nature of Self-Love
In addition to Pecola’s desolate soul craving for attention, Morrison emphasizes all
other self-debasing black and “brown” characters needing the acceptance in a white
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society based on their love of self. That is, these subjects try to escape from being the
object of “social fantasy” by doing “white man’s work with refinement” (83) with an air
of racial self-loathing. In large, Morrison portrays their “loathing” of funkiness as a
“reference-group orientation” (Monteiro 95) manifested only in black communities that
totally embrace white ideologies like that of Pecola’s. Mabry and Rogers radicalizes:
“African Americans are more likely than the white to hold negative opinions of their
fellow blacks’ innate capabilities” (qtd. in Cormier-Hamilton 122). This statement
shares an idea about Afro-Americans’ challenged self-acceptance and love for the black
origin in all social aspects of life. Such is seen in the Breedlove females’ (Pecola and
Pauline) convicted sense of imperfection. Their belief is in line with the outside gaze
that penetrates their soul like that of Yacobowski’s, judging their black legacy, of what
they hold most dear:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and
could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their
conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each
one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.
(Morrison, The Bluest Eye 39)
Unnoticed as it goes, the Breedloves live by a belief that they are ugly because they are
black and unworthy to be looked at. Thus in their total submission to the white
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aesthetics they establish an indispensable connection with others on the feel of shame.
Sartre exemplifies the feel of shame as the proof of others’ existence, these characters
prove their being-for-others as they think of themselves shamefully contrasts to the
“ultimate form of beauty” of the white society. As a consequence, the “all-knowing
master,” (39) in its “presence in person” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 340) freely
replaces the Bluest Eye Afro-Americans’ precious funky tunes with a monotonous
“Mama” word as that of Claudia’s white doll could only utter out.
Pauline’s Devotion into Hard Work with Self-Love
Yet, even so the Breedloves still drift on proving their black worth that is
challenged by the white principle of desirability. Each scene entails a message that
shows the Breedloves as well as the “brown” Geraldine’s tempered gestures of social
adjustment rooted in self-love. For I consider, if these characters do not love themselves
they would not look for other ways, with or without white education, to prove
themselves worthy of love and of attention with means they meagerly have. As I have
noted, the use of hatred to justify every Afro-American characters’ self-unsure gesture is
insufficient to tell why and how these people endeavor to transcend the confinement of
what they are entitled with. For instance, before working for a white family and
investing time into cinemas, Pauline Breedlove outstands in a group of black women
bejeweled of high fashion. Neglecting these people that can help “adorn” her to that of a
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white beauty, she prefers to stay in her own style:
Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused
by her because she did not straighten her hair . . . The sad thing was that Pauline
did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast
favorable glances her way. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 118; emphasis mine)
Morrison uses the “sad thing” to satirize Afro-Americans’ blind acceptance of white
cultivation which slowly but effectively erodes black pride in silence. In this depiction,
Pauline expects others to see her as how she naturally is without redundant supplements.
What she confidently disobeys is the fantasy these women contrive to cover their fear of
being an “otherness” in the environment filled with wealthy and fashionable white
individuals. These women’s desire to be looked with interest attaches an ideology of the
“absolute beauty” (122) Pauline configures as entirely new, appealing, but intensely
de-characterizing her.
Although Pauline’s confidence lessens after the birth of Pecola because Cholly
ignores her for his wild dream of freedom, at the workplace Pauline expresses her pride
of blackness on an occasion to make choices. Whilst conversing with a lady she works
for, she is unaffected to all advice about leaving Cholly only to secure the job:
Anyway, she told Cholly to get out or she would call the police . . . So I taken my
things and left. I tried to get back, but she didn’t want me no more if I was going to
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stay with Cholly. She said she would let me stay if I leave him. I thought about that.
But later on it didn’t seem too bright for a black woman to leave a black man for a
white woman. (120)
Pauline rejects to abandon Cholly because she loves her family just like she loves
herself, and most importantly she has a profound respect for the origin that even the
white woman’s offer to secure her finance cannot tear such a bond. A trace back to
Pauline’s early pride of her “own style” shows, that her “self-loathing” is a learnt
temperament she adopts along with the “movie education” she indulges to get away
from the boredom of marriage. From the time she memorizes theatrical lines of movie
stars to balance her lonesome joy in married life, she is made unbearable to “look at a
face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty” (122). Therefore
she transfers such a fascination of film contents to the second job of her life, the Fishers’
and its units and decides to never leave. Like the cinematic settings, the house is
furnished with models she adores and imitates in life. We are told, even “Pecola” this
name of her daughter is chosen from a movie: “Pecola? Wasn’t that the name of the girl
in Imitation of Life?” (67) To achieve a sense of fulfilment, she is motivated on duty
because under the gaze of the Fishers’ beautiful, celebrity-like eyes, she feels accepted
and worthy by keeping the Fishers’ things in order. In a place that fulfills her interest
and sense of achievement, the concept of whiteness beauty she internalizes little by little
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peaks her “personal definition” (qtd. in McKay 19) about life purpose while Pecola
solitarily reaches eleven years old. This, for Pecola, is a critical phase migrating from
childhood to adulthood on the quest of “how she is looked by others.” However, Pauline
as her mother rather joins her growth with a twisted beauty notion she learns partly at
the Fishers and largely from the movies.
Pauline’s idea of beauty is an impact on Pecola’s self-development. The
“discovery” of biological ugliness starts to form in the house as Cholly’s aimless life
and violence sets the whole family apart. For life in marriage is too insipid that it makes
both Cholly and Pauline relentlessly look for alternatives to locate their self-worth,
Pecola weakly inclines to objects of forged love because she is devoid of her parents’
overall attention. The “exception” remains excepted as long as innocent females like
Pauline and Pecola compromise with icons promoted to entertain the “white male
desire” (Heinze 25). In Pauline’s fondness of movie stars that turns into loathing of her
family’s “lack,” we see internalization of whiteness beauty hatches into self-denial. As
soon as the spring comes, the Breedloves’ seed of “racial self-loathing” sprouts at the
Fishers’ when Pauline shouts at Pecola for splattering blackberry juice. This introduces
how Pauline becomes a partial mother at the Fishers in her devotion into work simply
because “Power, praise, and luxury were hers in this household” (Morrison, The Bluest
Eye 128). Claudia watches the whole incident and is disturbed by Pauline’s priority to
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cajole the girl she babysits and lets her call by the nickname, whereas lets Pecola call
her “Mrs. Breedlove.” Cynthia A. Davis reviews this distant mother-child bond: “Mrs.
Breedlove in The Bluest Eye has a nickname, ‘Polly,’ that only whites use; it reduces her
dignity and identifies her as ‘the ideal servant’” (8). Pauline feels secured and is able to
put things in order where she cannot at home as a retainer to the white family: “Here her
foot flopped around on deep pile carpets, and there was no uneven sound. Here she
found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye127).
Still, I consider Pauline’s debasing attitude toward Pecola is a gesture departs from
love. In the first place, if she does not love Pecola she would not name her according to
her favorite light-skinned Afro-American character in the Imitation of Life5. Although
“Pecola” in that movie is a descendant of black African and white American, it suggests
a return to the black origin aired with American consciousness. As to why Pauline
breaks out at Pecola at the Fishers, I would say because of her love of the self and
family, she sticks to anything that fulfills her life purpose and finance by attending
timely to every “chaos” happened at the Fishers’ to not lose the job for any reason. Thus
she caters to all details that needed to be improved even at the cost of Pecola’s esteem, a
learnt behavior to earn the living and survive in the society as in the microcosm at the
Fishers’. For Pauline spends most her time in the theaters before working for the Fishers,
the destructive idea of “absolute beauty” already takes its shape in everything she sees
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latter on in life. By this we know how important “whiteness beauty” is to her interest
that dominates all her attention that the Fishers justly provide what she searches
throughout life. At the white family’s place, she receives compliments, feels appreciated
and envisages herself to be in their family portrait. As an ideal servant, she realizes “all
the meaningfulness of her life was in her work” (128). Gently, the Fishers gratify every
purpose of her life that even the thought about her cranked foot vanishes along with the
chores she is assigned to:
Mrs. Breedlove’s skin glowed like taffeta in the reflection of white porcelain, white
woodwork, polished cabinets, and brilliant copperware . . . . She disappeared
behind a white swinging door, and we could hear the uneven flap of her footsteps
as she descended into the basement. (107-8)
The white uniform she is given to wear not only makes her more obligated in the work,
but also distracts her from being justified by the unwanted gaze of people who despise
her cranked foot. Though, what attaches to the vestment is a power enough to erase her
real name at the presence of the Fishers’s girl. After all, Pauline’s contentment comes
along with self-sacrifice in which she finds herself “useful” for others’ needs. With
Fishers’ furnishing and nurturing, Pauline’s dream and obligation delicately reach
equilibrium on the scale of all life importance.
Cholly’s Passion of Funkiness with Self-Love
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On the other hand, as Pauline lacks motivation at home because “all the
meaningfulness of her life was in her work” (128), she finds Cholly’s untamed dream of
freedom is a task of delight she is obligated to deal with. For this reason, she fulfills her
sense of achievement at home with Cholly’s valor and violence. On account of Cholly’s
need for passion to carry on, they reach a truce on providing each other the zeal of life:
“Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove fought each other with a darkly brutal formalism that was
paralleled only be their lovemaking. Tacitly they had agreed not to kill each other” (43).
Opposite to Pauline and Pecola, Cholly is less dependent on the out approval of his
being. In other words, he does not need others to judge for him “what he holds most
dear.” Cholly is a portrayal of the Afro-American subject who demonstrates an explicit
love and return to the origin. Yet, with bare knowledge to express love, all his actions
and thoughts based on his bad self-love become rather dangerous: “To be sure,
amour-propre usually is bad. Relative and rivalrous, it usually manifests itself in a
self-seeking which is at least as interested in laying others low as in raising oneself
up-indeed” (Cooper 664). In reminiscence to his wild youth, he configures his favorite
black man, Blue Jack as an almighty entity:
He wondered if God looked like that. No . . . It must be the devil who looks like
that––holding the world in his hands, ready to dash it to the ground and spill the
red guts so niggers could eat the sweet, warm insides. If the devil did look like that,
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Cholly preferred him. He never felt anything thinking about God, but just the idea
of devil excited him. And now the strong, black devil was blotting out the sun and
getting ready to split open the world. (134; emphasis mine)
Not having faith in religion, Cholly admires Blue as an opposite influence to positive
beliefs. He is compelled by this strong-willed and self-reliant man that he wishes to be
as unaffected to all the worldly values. He considers, if he were to have such power he
would be able to distribute his fellow black men some “sweet, warm insides” of
anything precious in this world to elevate the worth of blackness. Considerably, he truly
loves blackness and all that is related to it, only such passion often turns into a
destructive force to violate others when trying to prove himself more than an “old
smoke” (153). However, for there is nothing more important than staying safe no matter
how audacious one’s dream can be, Cholly’s valor at home usually weakens outside of
the house, in front of the white men crowded around him (147-9). Even if he has killed
some men before and will not hesitate to kill some more, at any rate he loves himself
too deeply to let him be exposed in a no-win situation.
Thus despite all measures to prove himself more than a nigger, he is objectified all
the time by the omnipresent “hee-hee-hee’s” (147) echoed in white men’s voice. This,
too, enrages Cholly for he is unable to escape from the hysterical, mocking laughs
piling over his esteem. Driven by a fear to be “leaving only flakes of ash” (151) in the
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hands of men with weaponry, he chooses to withdraw from violence and moves on in
peace. In his being a “threat,” a social symptom, Cholly lets himself be freely exploited
as white men wish and survives the danger in a cloak of incompetence. Therefore
Cholly’s youth is smitten by the remark of “ratty nigger” (18) that his unconstrained
desire to excel others palpitates ever more forcefully in his latter life. As he ages, love
for blackness ripens into love for family, and finally condensed in one solemn shadow,
Pecola. Once upon reeling his drunken body to the kitchen, he issues a strong sense of
compassion at the sight of Pecola handling dishes in a lifeless form. Her frailness
catches his attention as he looks at her miserable shape and decides to save her spiritless
soul from whatever she is inflicted of. In a sarcastic lack of knowledge, his rage to
compensate the wreck-minded daughter with love renders his following behavior an
unatonable sin:
Cholly saw her dimly and could not tell what he saw or what he felt . . . The
sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. His revulsion was a
reaction to her young, helpless, hopeless presence . . . What could he do for
her––ever? What give her? What say to her? . . . The tenderness welled up in him,
and he sank to his knees, his eyes on the foot of his daughter. (161-2; emphasis
mine)
As a result, his bare practice of proper parenting misleads this outflow of love to
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consummating with Pecola. By this I do not mean Cholly’s act is rendered by his lack of
education or simply his upbringing as in the lower-class, rather, what happens to him
can also happen to people of all other classes, races, and educational backgrounds. In
his case, the “eruptions of funk” (Willis 35) cruelly take place on the “most delicate
member” of the Breedloves and of the community (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 210). In
“a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoken at last” (214), Cholly’s
sarcastic show of self-love is only side by side to the “brown,” middle-class Geraldine’s
measure of self-love.
Geraldine’s Self-Built Quality Life with Self-Love
Either being as self-loathing as the Breedloves, or as confident as the brazen-glow
Geraldine or Maureen Peal at Pecola’s school, they are merely two sides on the same
coin of proving themselves worthy of love. Similar to Pauline and her mother’s
conviction of ugliness, Geraldine’s conviction is that she thinks blackness is a
threatening “Thing.” Thus she expels Pecola from her place once upon intrusion and
reassures to herself that her own white education is a blessing. Geraldine’s self-love,
though dissimilar to Cholly’s self-love that is “too much” to be considerate, is also bad
because her separation from ancestral root encourages her to kick Pecola out of her
place and to insult her blackness. Geraldine’s lack of respect and manner is no less than
Cholly’s full eruption of desire. “Amour-propre” as such, “is source of the worst human
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evils,” though, “it has also been the source of the greatest accomplishments” (Cooper
664). Due to her self-oriented love, Geraldine is attached to cultural symbols of white
cultivation to elevate herself: “They wash themselves with orange-colored Lifebuoy
soap, dust themselves with Cashmere Bouquet talc, clean their teeth wish salt on a piece
of rag, soften their skin with Jergens Lotion” (82). To maintain her social status,
Geraldine believes the imitation of funkiness will ruin her son, Junior Louis’s
upbringing and turn him into a “dirty and loud” (87) nigger, thus she bans anything
relates to it from her citadel with constant caution. To “differentiate” herself from other
Afro-Americans who are “unlike” her, she straightens hair like Dixie Peach’s, parts it,
sleeps with hands rest on her stomach and most of all, learns “how to behave” (82) like
a white woman. Though, these gestures do not necessitate morality, but desirability
alone. On top of her assimilation to the “trendy” fashions, all her measures are purely
self-improvement to “live up” to the expectation of the white society; in a way, to love
herself in others’ acceptance of her despite what is right or wrong. With a closer look to
her background, we can notice her nurturing is already given a goal to merge into the
white society and obtains a quality life:
They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white
man’s work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher
education to instruct black children in obedience . . . The careful development of
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thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. (83; emphasis mine)
As Pecola is narcissistically obsessed of pseudo love, Pauline of hard work and Cholly
of the eruption of “funkiness,” the brown woman Geraldine shows herself deserving of
an affluent life because she surpasses white men’s abilities. The “brown” generation,
Morrison says, “feel secure” (83) to develop their styles with what they are enriched of.
Linden Peach writes, “These divisions are the result of the gradual
embourgeoisement of black people . . . of adjustment and accommodation to white
norms” (28). This point suggests, that Geraldine’s racial-denial is rather a learnt attitude
to obtain white male desire and thus to shun from losing her esteem to the society’s
ideological fantasies. Because of her peculiar self-love, she becomes a mean mother
who teaches her son nothing but how to avoid being a “nigger” and expects to see the
best of him. Louis understands such a “gift” means isolation from other kids, a
necessary procedure to become as successful and achieving as his mother capable of
white men’s jobs: “Gradually he came to agree with his mother that neither Bay Boy nor
P. L. was good enough for him. He played only with Ralph Nisensky, who was two
years younger, wore glasses, and didn’t want to do anything” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye
87). Therefore Geraldine disobeys black traditions only to live up to the white men’s
desire and expectation of her. With her education and adaptation she leads a prosperous
life enclosed only to her family, though not the best way or even admirable, all comes
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from self-love needing outside approval of the self.
Thus these all happen in a scope during “a time of great social upheaval in the lives
of black people” (212), both the Breedloves and the “brown” generation gentrify the
loathing/repugnance of themselves and others with love to figure out everything by all
means. What they learn, mistake, and experience are applicable to people of different
races growing to know themselves, to prove their worth with the outside gaze for the
“personal definition” (qtd. in McKay 19). For it is impossible to annihilate any
judgment of free consciousness, whilst trying to maintain our worth, at times we have to
compromise with others’ value and hide, or even sacrifice our true belief just to “stay
safe” in the harsh conditions. These characters show how our performance of self-love
can be ambivalent from time to times: Sometimes they appear to be self-loathing, other
times self-annihilating, but most times self-comforting. Morrison brilliantly portrays all
circumstances with Afro-American personas of middle and lower classes. Central to her
presentation is the Other’s transcendence that complicates human behaviors, in Sartre’s
words, leads to
a state of “body-in-situation” apprehending “the Other’s
transcendence-transcended” (Being and Nothingness 471). A play on the self-search to
substitute the primordial love, at the same time demonstrates why human relationships
will never work out the way it is expected because we are all free beings. In the next
chapter, I will fathom into “the modes of being,” basically love (in masochism) and hate
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(in sadism) to identify the Breedloves’ symptomatic gestures of self-love.
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Notes of Chapter One
1
I emphasize characters’ emotions shown “on the spot” to indicate actions that
contribute to the performance of any feelings are all “temporary” according to their
behaviors on site. For according to Jean-Paul Sartre, “hatred” is an “Erlebnis,”
(Transcendence of the Ego 64) the life experience, which covers all repulsions in the
subject’s lifespan; yet, it does not jump out of its being as an eternal experience to join
the subject’s momentary emotion based on the act of looking from where the ego
emerges.
2
I am indebted to Elie Wiesel’s inspiring saying: “Indifference to me, is the epitome of
evil. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness,
it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite
of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one
actually dies” (27 October 1986).
3
I paraphrase Slavoj Žižek’s “‘Che vuoi?’––‘You’re telling me that, but what do you
want with it, what are you aiming at?’” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 123) as
characters’ voice on the quest of how to be desirable in the eyes of others/the Other.
4
Pecola’s ego (the self) transcends outside in the world as both Yacobowski and
dandelions’ objectifying “looks” are the source of her reflection of self-importance in
the world. As she wonders how she is to others, such a reflection makes up her
self-image with the outlook of dandelions (being-in-itself) and Yacobowski’s “idea of
her” (being-for-itself) and adds on her self-inflicting idea of unworthiness.
5
The Imitation of life is a novel in 1933 by Fannie Hurst adapted into films to portray
the “brown” Afro-Americans’ conflict between black awareness and white cultivation
provoked by their mixed genetic backgrounds.
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Chapter Two
Patterning the Map of Self-Love:
Analyzing Symptomatic Gestures in the Being-for-Others
Having generally exemplified the Afro-American characters’ “good” and “bad”
self-love proving themselves worthy of what they value in life, in this chapter I narrow
down on the Breedloves’ types of temperament in their “being-for-others” (mode of
being). In antithesis, Cholly is a sadist, Pecola and Pauline are masochists: The former
seeks to gain total control over females as if venting anger on the Other’s agents is the
only way to prove his worth; the latter feel assured of love with the sadist’s violence and
immorality to realize their self-importance. To totalize these types of “being in the
world,” I interpret this unusual family as awkwardly has neither courage nor security to
speak out their pride of blackness in order to live on their own terms. The Breedloves’
life experience as such does not generalize all black families, their condition, like their
conviction of “ugliness,” is unique
1
that purely demonstrates the mode of
“being-for-others.” All along, the symptom2 patterns a spectacle of their desires, a
panoramic view for us to see human nature in terms of self-love. I use Jean-Paul
Sartre’s notion regarding sadism and masochism and Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the “Thing”
to analyze, respectively, the Breedloves’ intrinsic show of self-love and how the
“sublime object,” the “cultural symbol” (Klotman 124) at last un-beings Pecola to
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underline her “self-loving split.” By these methods, I will answer why the Breedloves’
belief is so deeply rooted that “no one could have convinced them they were not
relentlessly and aggressively ugly” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 38). Their feel of
unworthiness is central to the consequence of plodding through discouraging situations,
and struggling with what they adjust to in order to verify their personal worth. Morrison
so happens to depict our instinctive interactions with the Other to retrieve the primordial
object of love under all circumstances.
Cholly’s Sadist Expression of Self-Love
Despite Morrison portrays the Breedloves as an unusual family that appears to be
abnormally uncomfortable of what they deem most valuable, she does not overlook the
importance of home education along with depictions of the ambivalent self-love. Of all
the characters, Cholly embodies the figure of Morrison’s male ancestors 3 who
appreciate black tradition and endeavors to pass it down with full heart. Though, his
fatal lack of proper knowledge about love is why he “had joined the animals” (Morrison,
The Bluest Eye 18) to “love” his beloved ones rather violently. Patrick B. Bjork writes,
“under the gaze of the Other, Cholly learns early in life that survival in his unnatural
state of being a ‘we-object,’ is predicated upon his collaboration with the Other, and
thus he makes the black woman the object of his displaced fury” (48; emphasis mine).
Accordingly, Cholly not only is a sadist trying to get rid of the “being-for-others,” but
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also is a person whose respect for the origin is too profound to let it be jeopardized at
any rate. Thus in his animalistic instinct to distract from the white men (the Other)’s
penetrating gaze, he uses female agents to vent all his undischarged emotions, all that is
because he wishes to be the only foundation of his being; a “being” that is unaffected to
all influence from the outside. In this way, the reason why he “disgraces” Pauline and
Pecola to love them immorally in his “eruptions of funk” (Willis 35) results from a lack
of parental nurturing at an early age: “Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected
for a crap game by his father” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 160). Owing to this, Cholly’s
entire course of actions focus on getting hold of the Other’s transcendence respectively
by using Darlene, Pauline, and Pecola to suppress the omnipresent “hee-hee-hee’s” (147)
that reminds him of his incompetence.
Along with the hysterical laugh are titles such as “nigger,” or “coon” (148-9)
flowing around his presence. To un-tag himself from these debasing titles, his respect
and fondness of black culture grows into a sadist inclination to any force opposite to
predominant white authority. That all begins in the youth when Blue Jack bemuses him
with stories of brutality: “How the black people hollered, cried, and sang. And ghost
stories about how a white man cut off his wife’s head and buried her in the swamp”
(134). Thus he models Blue’s unparalleled courage to disobey the Other’s definition of
worthiness and seeks to break its captivity like how Blue “talked his way out of getting
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lynched once” (134). Cholly’s attachment to Blue is, Trudier Harris revises, a respect
for the “communal folk process by being an active tradition bearer” (21). Such a
“tradition bearer” like Cholly, shows one’s self-love expressed in a violent way, and his
impulse to eradicate others’ “looking at him” becomes ever more intense since he comes
of age. Although Cholly does not depend on others’ definition to weigh his worth like
Pauline and Pecola do, Cholly cannot stop white men’s mockeries from violating his
subjectivity as long as others desire to.
By the end of his puberty, when he is found courting in the woods, his anger and
shame break out on a female “object,” Darlene, the one “who had created the situation”
(Morrison, The Bluest Eye 151) in the first place. Cholly so replaces his repulsion
toward the white men on this vulnerable agent to distract from their hysterical laughs on
the spot:
Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider
directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed
him. They were big, white, armed men . . . For now, he hated the one who had
created the situation . . . The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to
cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight. (150-1; emphasis mine)
Cholly transfers his resentment toward the white men on Darlene not because he hates
her, but actually, he loves her as a part of him because of her blackness for it is what he
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holds most dear. Hassan Md. Reza Khan writes: “Cholly’s perverse sexuality is related
to repetition of the past pains and to an unconscious effort to master the humiliation of
his own sexuality” (28). What he is truly irritated is his impotence at that occasion that
makes both of them objects of white men’s desire and leaves her being freely sneered
for her nakedness. Because of his desire to protect, to cover this partner, simply to love
her dearly, all he has in mind at that moment is repulsion even if he thinks of it as hatred.
In my interpretation, if he does hate her, he would not think of doing anything to amend
the situation and even blame himself for his cowardice. Thus this incident fairly
portrays Cholly’s self-love as love for black others having itself expressed pervertedly
as loathing of Darlene. This inert play of love becomes clearer when he withdraws from
the idea to strangle her but “instead he touched her leg with his foot” (Morrison, The
Bluest Eye 149) in front of the white men who want to see more of it.
In addition, according to Sartre’s definition of the sadist aim to “rediscover a
freedom without factual limits” (Being and Nothingness 532) by “hating others”4, such
an aim of the sadist not only fails by hatred’s being only life experience, but also trips
on the principle of being-for-others. Gary Cox clearly explains Sartre’s idea of the
sadist’s attempt “to hate”: “hatred is the abandonment of any attempt to realize union
with the Other” (93). As seen in Cholly’s case, his wish to prevent white men from
debasing blackness will never come true as long as they are free to look at him and
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judge him, effectuating all influence on his being in the world. In so far as Cholly lives,
he cannot be completely free of judgments other than being trapped in the act of
“looking,” and that is what annoys him assuming a sole role of his foundation. In other
words, Cholly’s “hate” is unable to be in his interactions with others as long as it (hate)
plans to “suppress other consciousness” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 534), that is, to
deny others’ influence over him. In addition, all his attempts “to hate” is after all a
pattern of his love for the self and origin, an impulse repetitively reminding him of other
ways to prove his self-value, the worth of blackness in general. By the time he meets
Pauline, his anger and shame has become fonder and yonder to his comprehension, such
an uncertainty about what else life will bring to him thus encourages him to construct a
family with her; a decision made on the desire to know what he is really capable of with
what he barely has. Though, life with Pauline is equally insignificant. As romance and
tender love is no longer enough to hold him still, he finds Pauline’s special need of
“reassurance” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 117) appears to be a proper agent for his
unchanneled passions. As a result, Pauline becomes a faithful audience to hear Cholly’s
oppressed whistling music. After they settle down on each other’s need, Pauline recalls:
“Cholly commenced to getting meaner and meaner and wanted to fight me all of the
time” (118).
Since Cholly sees marriage lacks the fuel of life and the act of challenging white
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men to prove his worth will leave him “only flakes of ash and a question mark of
smoke” (151), his anger, shame, most of all, desire of complete freedom in the youth
thoroughly vent out in his latter days. He comes to Pauline with music (114), and with
violence to stay. As if to amend his freedom ravaged in that confrontation with armed
men, he is habituated to objectify the Other’s “transcendence in person,” namely, those
female objects around him. At home, his affection, frustration, strength, all that is
amounted to his wild dream becomes a bundle of love toward Pauline and Pecola,
meanwhile is twisted by his sadist desire to violate them to be free of the Other’s
mockeries. To stop white men’s “hee-hee-hee’s” (147) echoing in his grey head, a
thought on “what destroyed that desire” (160) of Pauline happens to kindle his flaming
concern about the alienated daughter: “Had he not been alone in the world since he was
thirteen . . . he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As
it was, he reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at the moment
(160-1). Thus Cholly’s spontaneous idea of doing something for Pecola is rendered by
his lack of self-control and bursts into destructive passion. Accordingly, Pecola silently
accepts his perverted care and that proves her as a masochist needing “assurance” in
terms of love: “to love is to wish to be loved, hence to wish that the Other wish that I
love him” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 490-1). In a way, Cholly “Breedlove” is a
shore to Pecola’s harboring need for the maternal love. Both Pecola and Pauline, known
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for their “belief in fantasies derived from outside the black community” (Harris 26) are
impregnated with the “martyrdom” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 39) of having to
compromise with Cholly’s s sadist desire. To some degree, Pecola and Pauline use his
violence to prove themselves worthy of love and attention at home, which appear to be
the masochist’s “necessary first step toward liberation” (Žižek, “The Ambiguity of the
Masochist Social Link” 118). The Breedlove females liberate themselves in a house
crammed with the sadist valor seeking complete freedom in the female bodies. To
present the masochist’s expression of self-love in liberation, I am going to narrow down
to Pauline and Pecola’s need of Cholly’s violence to realize self-importance.
Pauline and Pecola’s Masochist Expression of Self-Love in Liberation
In the first place, if Pauline and Pecola were deprived of Cholly’s unconstrained
love, they would not have alternatives to know they are actually the only “worthy”
beings of the shabby house. That is to say, along with Pauline’s tolerance of Cholly’s
beatings is his drinking problem that propels her sense of mission to accomplish tasks as
a “decent” Christian. In determination, she believes the virtue of hard work is to be
rewarded, thus by letting Cholly “get drunk and beat her up” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye
198) she feels grateful for this cause to live on. By taking on whatever life gives to her,
Pauline is granted of this importance at home besides indulging in the Fishers’ reliance
on her house maintenance. At any rate, Pauline’s masochist attitude weighs her
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self-value with all the hardship of life, which means what fulfills her at home instead of
piously following religious disciplines is actually Cholly’s sin that makes her
down-to-earth useful. Pecola witnesses all her wild dreams and recalls: “She didn’t like
it. Then why’d she let him do it to her? Because he made her” (198). Even though
Cholly never occurs to appreciate whiteness beauty or considers blackness as unworthy,
he is encouraged “to live his fantasies” (159) as he realizes “there was nothing more to
lose” (160) other than the spark of life he has already lost in marriage. The vortex of
desire engulfs him upon seeing Pecola’s solemn figure moving in front of him in the
house. Whilst being forced to watch Cholly’s violent love toward Pauline, Pecola
naturally becomes the next target of his unsatisfied desire5. As a consequence, his
expectation of Pecola “to excel in his own image and for his own sake” (150) is twisted
into a sadist play of the “Obscene” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 519). The event
comes quickly, but leaves an everlasting effect in the community as Pecola is then
notorious for miscarrying her father’s child. Claudia and Frieda watch but are unable to
help. With guilt and compassion they relate it to their having buried the seed of
marigold too deeply in the soil that is itself “unyielding” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 5),
intolerant for the unusual ones that need to be nurtured by love the most.
In my opinion, Pecola’s being sexually assaulted by her father disturbingly leads to
her self-liberation, I am going to explain why. Let me zoom in on what really happens in
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the “Obscene” between her and Cholly. For the feel of humiliation is what a sadist like
Cholly wishes to impose on the Other, in this case, on the white men, he uses Pecola as
the agent to bring out its “transcendent object” that violates his being on his own terms.
This ‘object’ is exactly the white men’s freedom he wishes to control for the sake of his
being entirely free of judgments in the world. Such a performance of the “Obscene” as
Cholly does to Pecola is a unique measure to obtain one’s complete freedom, though
doomed to fail. On Pecola’s part, due to her need for maternal love and fear of losing
importance, she weakly allows anyone like Cholly to “rescue” her from the
love-deprived life. As he scrutinizes her brokenness and wonders: “Why did she have to
look so whipped?” Cholly’s perverted love quietly simmers from the moment he finds
himself caught up in her “haunted, loving eyes” (161). Pecola, conscious or unconscious,
lies immobile only to watch the ugly event unfolds itself. What follows next is Cholly’s
sadist expectation to see the Other being humiliated this way, although he does it to love
Pecola, he rather desires to see this agent of the Other “betrays or humiliates [her]self”
(Sartre, Being and Nothingness 523) after the act of the “Obscene.” For if she
betrays/humiliates herself because of what he does to her, he will feel he can actually
control her and thus to control all other white men.
However, at the pitiful sight of Pecola’s “grayish panties, so sad and limp around
her ankles” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 163) the Other’s “hee-hee-hee’s” (147) still
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freely6 sneers at Pecola’s misery. For it is from Cholly’s point of view we see the Other
looks at Pecola remaining pitiful, he wins neither a sole basis of his being nor absolute
freedom that he seeks to utilize to suppress others’ consciousness. The hysterical laugh
of the white men returns to mock him of his ridiculous parenting of love, giving the
same empathizing, penetrating, dehumanizing look now at both of them. His repulsion
to the haunting Other’s transcendence “would not let him pick her up” (163). Despite he
is determined to turn away from the scene and leave her alone, his heart softens on the
second thought at the lousy sight, realizing this agent is his beloved daughter. Only he
does not know Pecola rather takes this act of the “Obscene” as compensating her lack of
maternal love. Silent as it is, Pecola’s inaction to escape from Cholly’s grasp indicates
her give-in: “the only sound she made–a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat”
(163). Claudia recollects this incident and doubts about her inaction: “How come she
didn’t fight him?” (189) With her understanding of Pecola’s craving need for others’
approval of her, she then concludes:
And Cholly loved her. I’m sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her
enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch
was fatal . . . There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of
love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the love’s inward
eye. (206; emphasis mine)
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In a way, Cholly is manipulated by Pecola’s need to fulfill her own emptiness. The
sexual assault is shocking, mistaking, yet it is after all his profound self-love twisted
into unconditional love for family. We are told in the epilogue, that Cholly’s
dissatisfaction, (desire’s impossibility to be fulfilled) even holds him on another
performance of it. At a minimum effect, Cholly’s misallocated love abnormally amends
Pecola’s brokenness in such an unhealthy binding just like how the Fishers’ endorsing
faith mitigates Pauline’s feel of unworthiness7. Both Pauline and Pecola “liberate”
themselves from insecurity in an unusual way in which certain hardship and immorality
have to be involved to assure their self-worth. With these two poles of total opposite,
one whose only interest is to seek in the other the pleasure as the other passively
demands it, the Breedloves are victims of their adapted mode of being.
Pecola’s Symptomatic Gestures of Self-Love before Liberation
Unlike Cholly’s twisted measure to prove blackness worthy and thus to liberate his
family’s self-love, Pecola anchors her worth entirely on how the outside others think of
her. Her nature corresponds to the masochist’s reliance on the feel of shame to connect
with others: “I rest upon the Other, and as I experience this being-as-object in shame, I
will and I love my shame as the profound sign of my objectivity . . . I wish to be desired,
I make myself in shame an object of desire” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 492). As
mentioned, before Cholly resolves to donate some love to her, she is already glad to be
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objectified by the loving gazes of Mary Jane and Shirley Temple. In her daydreaming on
having their sweetness, Pecola sojourns on the meaning of “self,” through which we see
her self-identification with these figures is in parallel with an attempt to sort out her
“femininity and ‘the sexual’” (Kuenz 422). Along with her self-projection on these faces
of fraudulent love, the more significant is such a gesture is accompanies by a binding of
shame and joy. In other words, for she loves herself and wants to be like them, she feels
ashamed of her appearance not even being close to theirs. Whilst hoping the act of
savoring/staring at them can beautify herself, her shameful joy emerges as the
“jouissance” repeating itself with replacement of love-objects: From wanting to have
the features of Mary Jane, Shirley Temple, Maureen Peal, to finally desiring for a pair of
the bluest eyes.
As replacements of love-object signify Pecola’s symptom showing in shameful joy
(painful pleasure), that also means she has always loved herself and all that feel of
shame, anger, repugnance comes from her frustrated self-love because of others’
disinterest of her. By so saying, all characters’ self-loathing (conviction of black
ugliness) like Pecola’s, is but a temperament adapted according to the self-love
repressed in the transference; in all life experience as seen most evident in Pecola’s
quest for the sublime beauty. Again, after her contact with Yacobowski:
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence . . . The
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anger will not hold . . . Its thirst too quickly quenched, it sleeps. The shame wells
up again, its muddy rivulets seeping into her eyes. What to do before the tears
come. She remembers the Mary Janes. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 50; emphasis
mine)
In that situation, shame foreplays a sweet escape as anger fades. Kosofsky E. Sedgwick
and Adam Frank’s reading on “shame” suggests that when a person is “in shame,” s/he
is more likely to attract others’ attention on her/him. That all comes from the fact that
“shame” can direct people’s gaze “away from other objects to this most visible
residence of self” (136). Plainly speaking, Pecola’s feel of shame is justly a method to
attract others’ attention on her because she loves herself and wants to be seen and
accepted by others, despite dandelions are the only witness to her “shame” and returns
not a glance at her: “they do not look at her and do not send love back” (Morrison, The
Bluest Eye 50). What follows next is equally meaningful. After she tries to attain
dandelions’ interest, as we know, she is immersed in the loving gaze of Mary Jane
candies as if the Other is looking at her adoringly. The candy wraps present nine pairs of
round, moist, luring eyes staring at her with much affection. Inside of them, candies’
sweetness nurtures her barren taste of life like therapeutic doses she uses to calm the
ache of unwanted feelings. As her emptiness is covered by the timely remedy, she
moves on with a thought to obtain the bluest eye of the world, hoping one day people
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will look back at her like how they look up at Mary Jane.
Despite this sweet escape is only a momentary relief, she is encouraged by her
masochist need of love to alter the feel of shame into “continuing interest or enjoyment”
(Sedgwick 134) on any love-object at hand. Thus she is attached to all the value of
others and finds it as much pleasurable to just indulge in a fabricated happy self. Nine
Mary Janes offer nine wonders, one after another, she dreams on having blue eyes like
those of Mary Jane and Shirley Temple’s. Though, this behavior is rather “apt to prompt
denial and escape” (Tangney 46) from what she is inherited of for the act of looking also
issues self-comparison with the ideal features. Under all circumstances, she desires to
fill up the fundamental lack by consummating with all objects of love, an act that
centralizes her self-identification with the outside gaze projected through products: “She
swallows her shame. It is a total confusion––that is to say, identification––of happiness
with shame” (Woodward 223). To her heart’s content, a journey set out by the feel of
shame is by far her only way to define self-worth: “Shame tells a story––that we hold
certain ideals, that these represent things we value enough to strive for” (Fishers 192).
Nevertheless Pecola’s “certain ideals” are condensed into one wish for a pair of the
bluest eyes, the sublime “Thing” that represents absolute beauty she considers no one,
not even Mary Jane’s beautiful eyes can match.
Insomuch as her masochism needs love to establish a solid foundation of her being,
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she relishes every moments that help distract her from others’ harmful gaze. Thus the
feel of shame becomes her access to enjoyment; an exile from the insipid world that
even Yacobowski’s cold stare is dismissed in her delirium. Pecola’s aggrandized dream
to have those of Mary Jane’s features that “provide[s] a certain kind of satisfaction”
(Dean 28), is then conditioned by her drive’s “satisfaction in the very circular movement
of repeatedly missing its object” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject 360). For this reason she
keeps on trying to attain the “Thing” that always escapes her grasp. Although she
constantly fails to have the sublime beauty she desires, at least she learns to identify her
shame with happiness in places uncompromised for her blackness, a gesture of
“psychical survival” (Minsky 185) so to speak. What she desires in the bluest eye, the
“thing” Morrison considers “we (reader and I) are ‘in’” (The Bluest Eye 213; emphasis
mine) is the society’s desire lodged in the image of white idols she consecrates. In other
words, her wish to obtain “the bluest eye” is a wish to embody her “Thing,” the lack
which holds for her narcissistic attachment on worldly values to become her “ideal
self.” As Pecola moves steadily toward knowing “how to be loved,” that is, “how to
retrieve the primordial object of love,” next we will see the excess in her that entails all
meanings of obsession when her fantasy about the “bluest eye” is then “traversed,”
brought to light in her full compromising with desire.
Symbolization of Pecola’s Self-Love after Liberation
94
Although Cholly has assured Pecola of love, desire is after all impossible to be
fulfilled as long as it is a black hole that cannot be covered. For this reason, she turns to
ask Soaphead Church, the priest of town who is also a “Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter
of Dreams” (165) for a pair of the bluest eyes. What he does in turn is equal to a
psychoanalytical treatment to the patient (Pecola)’s symptom, in which case, all
meanings of her desire are purposefully symbolized for the sake of fulfilling her pitiful
obsession of absolute beauty:
I, have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I have her the blue, blue, two blue
eyes. Cobalt blue. A streak of it right out of your own blue heaven. No one else will
see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live happily ever after. I, I have found
it meet and right so to do. (182; emphasis mine)
Church’s “trick” that turns into a miracle is embedded in Pecola’s powerful belief as if it
is the last hope to discard her conviction of biological ugliness. As soon as the “ritual”
finishes, our vision from Claudia’s narrative is blurred out into Pecola’s surreal
perspectives as when her “double split” emerges to speak with her. The Lacanian idea of
“subject-split” in the act of speech offers a view on the distant otherness of the self:
The other is the distanced though familiar object-self expressed in speech. The
paradox of the selfness/otherness of the speaking subject, according to Lacan, is
resolved by the way the I functions as a mark both of subjective unity and
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objective distance. (Owens 59)
When she madly speaks of her eyes becoming blue, we witness literally her dialogue
with her distant self, a “psychic suicide” in the symbolic world that leads to a new
configuration of her “self” in the mental collapse, the Real. Church’s play thus carries
out all her desire to be worthy of attention in one push of her into the death-drive,
assuming the role of her “Thing.” What happens afterwards, in spite of Claudia’s
attempt to crystalize the whole event, is told only in Pecola’s monologue with the
company of a pleasant presence by her side. A real “destruction of the symbolic
universe” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 81) it is, she retreats to a delusional world to
realize her deepest desire.
However, this scene rather presents the rebirth of Pecola after her symbolic death
as Žižek’s view of the “positive” state of death-drive suggests:
. . . psychoanalytic treatment is . . . rather, designates the subject’s (symbolic)
rebirth, his (re-) creation ex nihilo, a jump through the ‘zero-point’ of death drive
to the thoroughly new symbolic configuration of his being. (The Ticklish Subject
253-4)
Linden Peach writes, “In Morrison’s novels the struggle to define and create a notion of
selfhood in ways which are different from the stereotypical expectations of behavior
carried by the larger symbolic order as a whole inevitably involves a process of inner
96
dislocation” (27; emphasis mine). This “inner dislocation” 8 points to Morrison’s
arrangement on Pecola’s split to justify the fact that “She is not seen by herself until she
hallucinates a self” (The Bluest Eye 215). Furthermore, her self-transformation with a
pair of the bluest eyes is in a sharp contrast to her previous life where her
self-debasement makes her “see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people”
(47). Now have all her cravings assorted, she jumps from the Symbolic to the Real and
undergoes the dimension “making oneself heard or making oneself seen” (Mellard 401).
By the orientation of her inner glow, she sees through the imaginary blue eyes and
eventually “dares” to speak of her beauty that is originally neglected by herself.
Familiar yet uncanny, the Other’s “presence in person” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness
340) now takes place in her self-detachment because in her madness “[she] can never
meet with anything but the consciousness which is [hers]” (302). As long as our
consciousness bearing a distance to itself like a “mediator between myself and me”
(302), Pecola’s looking inward to her “self” is thus mediated as an otherness coming
from her “phantasmic core” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject 368) of being. Church’s trick
that turns into a real miracle, in fact, is presupposed by her masochist need of attention
and most significantly, her obsession to obtain the absolute beauty. This scene that
follows Cholly’s sadist love shows how Pecola loves herself without looking outside to
justify her importance. At the exchange of sanity, her madness becomes rather a “safe”
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state where she confidently parades her blue eyes to everyone passes her by, though in
reality only spends days in the house “walking up and down . . . head jerking to the beat
of a drummer so distant only she could hear” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 204).
Pecola’s Imaginary Identification in the Thing
Therefore it is only after Pecola takes laps does she arrive in front of her desire by
totally compromising with it, leaving the past behind to reconstruct her identity by
looking only at herself instead of the outside others. Though, merging with the “Thing”
is “too strong” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject 365) for eyes so she loses sight and is
caught up in unnatural bodily movements. This arrangement also echoes to Claudia’s
realization of their (Afro-Americans’) inward “love with ourselves” (Morrison, The
Bluest Eye 74) that is eventually played out in Pecola’s split. Žižek states, “to achieve
self-identity, the subject must identify himself with the imaginary other, he must
alienate himself––put his identity outside himself, so to speak, into the image of his
double” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 116). To be true, Pecola’s self-loving split who
keeps making remarks on her beautiful eyes is her “true self,” the inner glow of her
beauty she constantly neglects:
You are my very best friend. Why didn’t I know you before?
You didn’t need me before.
Didn’t need you?
98
I mean . . . you were so unhappy before. I guess you didn’t notice me before.
I guess you’re right. And I was so lonely for friends. And you were right here.
Right before my eyes.
No, honey. Right after your eyes. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 196)
This presents exactly how often she, as for most people, tends to rely on sources from
the outside too deeply to posit our position in the world, and overlooks our goodness
deep within that makes us special and keeps us valuable. By looking through her eyes
we see how one is never truly happy until s/he obtains inner peace; in a way, a
tranquility that comes from pure satisfaction of life of what we already have as Pecola
ironically can only realize hers in madness, in her dialogue alone with herself. Like the
man of The Mask shows his “true character” in being the “Thing,” Pecola’s self-love
that is constantly eclipsed by her fear of losing others’ interest, at last comes to her as an
otherness tongued with compliments to shut her down from the uncompromising world.
In spite of this, she keeps on identifying herself with the imaginary others to
achieve a unity of self-awareness because our identity is “always structured in terms of
a certain being-towards-madness” (Žižek, Conversations with Žižek 4). In this sense,
Pecola is left in the “horrible fate” (The Ticklish Subject 481) of the predestined
superego enjoyment, being driven like a walking dead to seek what she can get from
comparing with the imaginary others:
99
Oh yes. My eyes. My blue eyes. Let me look again.
See how pretty they are.
Yes. They get prettier each time I look at them.
They are the prettiest I’ve ever seen.
Really?
Oh, yes.
Prettier than the sky?
Oh, yes. Much prettier than the sky.
Prettier than Alice-and-Jerry Storybook eyes?
Oh, yes. Much prettier than Alice-and-Jerry Storybook eyes.
And prettier than Joanna’s?
Oh, yes. And bluer too. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 201)
In conversation with her double, she still tries to fill up the gap between her ego self (a
dandelion) and what it seeks to become (idols) in the Imaginary. This brings us back to
her initial self-comparisons with Mary Jane, Shirley Temple, Maureen Peal, only this
time she is completely confident and comfortable with herself. Although she becomes
no more than a hollow shell at home, the mental collapse lets her redefine her worth by
blocking out the outside gaze from interfering her ego “questing for wholeness and
unity” (Myers 22). The conversation goes on as she keeps asking the other half whether
100
her eyes are the bluest and feels contented when the voice promises her for a long stay
to clear all her doubts. On the outside, Church’s unusual measure guides her through the
core of desire and carries out her fundamental wish to be looked with interest, by the
imaginary others, by all the angles of her personality. On the inside, its accomplishment
lies in her self-acceptance by facing “the most destructive” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye
122) locus of desire that haunts her innocent adoption of beauty concepts in all the
things she sees. Precisely, she becomes the “Thing” as soon as she has the supreme eyes
since those are in the place of what she craves the most, the dim remainder of maternal
love-object brought to light in her vision. Years after all the happenings to Pecola,
Claudia recounts: “she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort
to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not
reach––could not even see––but which filled the valleys of the mind” (204). Solemnly,
all the things left unsaid about the Breedloves are gradually collected in Claudia’s
reminiscence, for their voice has slowly vanished in town and thus faded from the scene
on their latter days after all strivings. The whole family moves to another place. There
Pecola is still possessed by her new identity in a visionary world excluded others.
Pauline continues to serve on a daily basis as Cholly quietly perishes on a usual day in a
workhouse. Geraldine still dwells in her citadel with her son, fully utilizing what she
has been instilled with to develop her own style by excelling others. The Breedloves and
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the “brown” generation equally go through a path specially designed for people of all
races on a single wish to transcend themselves from the gaze of others. Surely, a path
forward fraught with obstacles putting individuals into self-doubt, self-repugnance,
whereas also offers each subject choices to freely make of what has been done to them.
102
Notes of Chapter Two
1
The Breedloves are the immigrants from the South in the 1940s, the time after the
World War II, a phase of social upheaval that all the people seek to define their worth in
the reorganized society. The Breedloves’ condition is harsher than the rest of others
because they have to adapt to the value of the North that they know very little of.
2
By saying “self-love all alone patterns their gestures in the flow of symptom” I mean
characters’ self-love is an outflow of “symptom” persisting for enjoyment as long as
characters function in the Symbolic because “symptom” is the consistency of being.
Such a gesture of the symptom maps out all subjects’ desires to be fulfilled with objects
of love to replace the lost maternal object.
3
According to the interview with Nellie McKay, Toni Morrison says: “I do feel a
strong connection to ‘ancestors.’” Cholly Breedloves is the one in the novel who truly
represents Morrison’s “strong sense of her own value on her own terms” (McKay 414).
4
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the sadist’s desire to achieve full freedom is asking for
a privilege to project “the realization of a world in which the Other does not exist . . .
hate presents itself as an absolute positing of the freedom of the for-itself before the
Other” (Being and Nothingness 532). Sartre continues that the sadist expression (to hate)
is to suppress all others in general to gain complete freedom. Paradoxically, the sadist
attempt as such implies others’ existence and thus others’ free-will that is forever unable
to be suppressed (534).
5
Cholly Breedlove experiences the shift of desire from Darlene and Pauline to Pecola
because “desire” is a lack, a void that cannot be fulfilled. This “shift” of objects is
Cholly’s “symptom” enjoying the love-objects replacing one after another.
6
As Sartre defines our “feel of shame” is the proof of others’ existence (302), in this
case, Cholly’s “shame” makes him feel annoyed by the sight of Pecola’s pitiful figure
on the floor after he shows her love. That is why he is rather reluctant to clean up the
mess he has done to Pecola because he is aware of the Other is still freely looking at
him and makes him feel ashamed of what he does afterwards.
7
As Pauline Breedlove finds her life purpose and gratifies her sense of fulfillment with
works assigned by the Fishers, Pecola equally finds herself to be important with
Cholly’s “care” of her.
8
Linden Peach’s idea of “inner dislocation” points to Slavoj Žižek’s idea of ideologies
103
being carried out in our behavior. That is to say, we usually internalize the Other’s belief
and act according to it, presenting a “model of split subjectivity” (“Psychoanalysis and
the Post-Political” 5).
104
Conclusion
Claudia Macteer’s observation in the community best explains Toni Morrison’s
depiction of Afro-Americans’ self-loathing temperament: “Guileless and without vanity,
we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the
news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not
comprehend this unworthiness” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 74). As she radicalizes, their
love of self is rather inert because they struggle with themselves of what most people
expect to see. Despite Claudia stands for the confident Afro-Americans and rejects what
the “all-knowing master” (39) says about blackness, she cannot mitigate Pecola’s
deeply-ingrained sense of unworthiness, or to save her from being miserable to herself.
For everything Pecola sees is the eyes of other people, she is unaware of the fact that
“the thing most dear” she seeks to obtain comes from her deep within. In parallel to her
showing “self-love” in delusion, Cholly and Pauline speak out their love for their own
sake: One for attaining total freedom and the other for fulfilling religious cause, the
integrity of familial bond is thus shredded by their unconstrained desire to cover the
lack. “Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love
weakly, stupid people love stupidly” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 206). Morrison
demonstrates all these facets of love with the portrayal of the Breedloves most vividly.
By comparing their condition with the Macteers and the brown generation’s, the
105
Breedlove household appears to be stuck in their situation and solution to improve what
they are entitled with.
Everything that is supposed to be in the right place in the Breedlove household is
all misallocated, or rather messed up like the nonsensical run-on sentence of the primer
story suggests: “. . .hereisthefamilymotherfatherdickandjaneliveinthegreenandwhitehous
etheyareveryhappy . . .” (4). Here is a black family, they are immigrants from the South,
and they are not very happy. Opposite to the life of “standard” family, precisely, the
“white middle-class” Dick-and-Jane family, the parents cannot even make their ends
meet owing to their constrained abilities as new-comers, let alone minding business
other than focusing on finding their worth in the North. Thus the mother neglects her
children’s growth to make a living, so that her family can at least carry on in the
harshness of life. The father, upset of being deprived of funkiness, does nothing
productive other than idling around and fighting with his wife when their son runs away
from home, and the daughter invisibly falls for the prey of fashion propagandas. Even
so, I see in their violence, weakness, even stupidity as Morrison describes, weigh in
each understanding of their “self” and pushes them forward to love madly and
unconditionally in their own definitions. The Breedloves, like Geraldine trying to avoid
being a social symptom in every aspect, learn to hide away their pride of blackness lest
they become conspicuous in contrast to symbols promoted in “shops, magazines,
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newspapers, window signs” (20). Pauline adapts to it most willingly, let alone teaching
Pecola about the danger beyond such an internalization that disarrays their being “on
their own terms” because she herself is a masochist needing to follow the omnipresent
voice that tells her “What does the Other want?” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
128)
On the other side, Cholly’s rejection of being an object to the Other’s desire is
rather misguided by his sadism to commit a horrid thing to the pitiful daughter. An
unsettling hue at the finale, his consummation with Pecola is a shocking twist of
Claudia’s idea of Afro-Americans’ “love with ourselves.” The more disturbing is
Pecola’s gratification in such an unfitting situation. We see, in her silent response to
Cholly’s misguided affection, a disquiet truth of satisfaction dimly glows in his unruly
manner. Like Pauline finds her life importance through hard work and Cholly with his
measures to “love” the family, Pecola fulfills her emptiness by accepting herself in a
“safe” state with the company of imaginary others unparalleled to her beauty. Thus we
are told, that she is “always already in the truth” (Interogating the Real 34), a truth of
being loved by her “self” all along but dares not to speak of it for she fears of being
rejected by others. Pecola’s shift to her new identity with blue eyes is exactly the
actualization of “physical beauty,” a personification of what Morrison thinks “we
(reader and I) are ‘in’” (The Bluest Eye 213). This scene inserts a silence broken at last
107
to reconstruct, really, Pecola’s “identity by representing what resist symbolization”
(Breger 82).
As all desire is to fulfill the maternal lack, what the personas’ self-search
radicalizes is a conflict between the building of selfhood and the outside gaze on the
return to infantile narcissism. Their careful and unyielding self-love that extends to love
of other members captures human nature that happens to be circulating, perverted or not,
in the black households. In spite of races, our love of others is in parallel with love of
self in the first place that we find ourselves to be willing to, or even encouraged to love
universally: “Love of others, it is thought, needs to be preceded by, and perhaps even
grows out of, love of self” (Cooper 661). Step by step, the traces of characters’ behavior
draw us closer to see their “racial self-loathing” perform rather like an intricate
self-protecting measure to avoid the unnecessary confrontations with people who desire
to provoke their shame and anger out of satisfaction. These characters, reinforced in
their sado-masochism, gentrify their pride with an air of self-debasement toward what is
being promoted and avoid confronting directly with it. Much adjustment without
improvement, and much action without solutions, they gradually settle in a prison that is
partly, but certainly built with their own hands and made only for them.
As I have applied the idea of “self-love” as a root to all human behavior to this
well-discussed work of Toni Morrison, I have yet to come up with a more detailed
108
discussion about the “good” and “bad” type of self-love as well as their relations with
masochism and/or sadism. Owing to my limited research methods, I am unsatisfied to
my use of the “mode of being” to pinpoint all the characters’ treatments of themselves
and others. For the possible correlation of “love” and “hate” is a question unsolved in
the Being and Nothingness Sartre sees as forever “conflicting,” it is unclear as to why
the basic models of human behavior allow the emotion of love (in masochism) whereas
hatred’s should be disqualified (in sadism). Other than exemplifying the sense of hatred
in The Transcendence of the Ego on the temporary act of “looking,” and concluding all
emotions as momentary presentations of the ego, I have not found out why “love” can
still last in human relationships for it is specifically what the masochist seeks to identify
herself with others. Although I apply Sartre’s method to explain the Breedloves’
circumstances, owing to my lack of a thorough understanding about Sartre’s works, I
am unable to give a more solid ground to map out all complicated behaviors for the
love-hate position is incomplete and is rather meant to be contradictory in terms of
human freedom. For that reason I try to fill up the lack with psychoanalytic insights,
which is more direct and accordant on the idea of narcissism to help strengthen my
focus on abnormal behavior presenting self-love. Thus all is done in my adoption of the
“conflicting relationships” and “desire’s impossibility to be fulfilled” shared in both
fields, for I have yet to discover a more reliable source to justify my speculations other
109
than magnifying the deal on the lost maternal object. Even so, I am certain about all
intentions behind characters’ actions, instead of self-hatred, really signify a return to the
inner self, which is blindfolded by their intrinsic reactions to the socially “others” in
their opinion for the best reason. My belief becomes stronger as I go deeper into the
Bluest Eye context one step after another, that along with my experience, people of
different races is in common on a craving need for love. The forms to achieve it can
sometimes be welcoming, other times terrifying, but most times unnoticing; all are ways
to secure our “self,” with all measures, by all means. At last, I leave my question and
space for the unexpressed, even silenced gestures to whoever’s interest is like mine, is
not to compromise with most critics’ desire.
110
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