Toni Morrison's "Allegory of the Cave": Movies, Consumption, and Platonic Realism in "The Bluest Eye"

Abstract

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is an unusually effective exploration of racism in twentieth-century America in part because of place it gives to central legacies of Western civilization. Like Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man draws on Emerson and Whitman as well as folklore, Morrison recognizes importance of Western literature and philosophy to Afro-American experience in America; in some ways The Bluest Eye stands opposed to more hermetic work like Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which despite its many strengths does not come to terms with intellectual and economic foundations of racism and whose portrayal of character and personal growth suffers accordingly.1 Morrison's characters are more convincing and ultimately more moving than Walker's because they operate in a world shaped by a complex and sometimes repressive cultural heritage. In The Bluest Eye this heritage is primarily represented by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Plato's Allegory of Cave in Book VII of The Republic.2 These two important moments in Western culture provide specific thematic and structural elements in novel; in a larger sense they suggest Morrison's belief in close relationship between intellectual traditions and particular economic and social conditions. Eliot's contribution in The Bluest Eye is more apparent because it operates on level of imagery as well as theme and structure. In prologue narrator Claudia MacTeer remembers when she and her sister Frieda planted marigold seeds in a childish rite they hoped would guarantee health of their twelve-year-old friend Pecola's baby. If seeds sprout, they think, baby will thrive. But no seeds sprout, baby dies, and Pecola spends her life plucking her way between tire rims and sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all waste and beauty of world.3 Only much later does Claudia understand that it isn't her fault, that the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year (160). The Bluest Eye is framed by narrator's brooding recollection of a wasteland, and seasons which title major sectionsAutumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer - mark off a parody of rebirth and growth. In the thin light of spring (127) Pecola Breedlove is raped by her drunken father (a cruel sort of breeding indeed), and in summer, pregnant, she goes mad after equivalent of Eliot's Mme Sosostris works a phony spell to give her blue eyes. The echoes of Eliot's Waste Land are important for thematic and structural rea