Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Catherine Beecher, coauthored a work entitled The American Woman’s Home for middle-class Victorian women, to help them use the site of home, and specifically the kitchen, as a means of ordering their lives. Home as the domestic sphere, as opposed to the broad geographical landscape of the city, had been deemed, and remains, the woman’s realm. Such readings of place are “fundamentally political,” to borrow Doreen Massey’s language.1 In other words, persistent readings of home as the feminine place serve a political end. Yet as Lori Askeland writes, “The vulnerability of this domain, however, must not be overlooked; the house remains a sheltered ‘feminine’ space, that is, a hus for true spiritual growth, which by virtue of its enclosure in the ‘masculine’ domain of materialism and commercialism, always remains in danger of being invaded and corrupted by it” (782). While the values promoted by Stowe and Beecher’s reading of the Victorian “model home” were deconstructed by later writers like Toni Morrison, many of their notions about the site of home persist due to the influence of larger patriarchal paradigms. “The woman’s place is in the home”—even if that home abuses, confines, perverts. The home as shelter is an enduring myth that both men and women found reason to support. So even when the built environment did not support the mythology through architectural design, women found ways to imagine a new place. As Askeland explains:
Implicitly, then, the “model home” represented both shelter from and dominance over the chaos of the world. As several scholars have noted, the kitchen was one place where Stowe and Beecher in particular believed that order and control could be brought to bear on society’s problems…. [But Victorian homes were not built according to the innovations suggested by these two women.] Thus because their domain was always undermined by their need for shelter in the larger masculine domain, Victorian women were often forced to enact the reverse of Rapoport’s dictum: to “think” their domain, create a mental ideal of it, after it had already been built, and thereby remodel as best they could. (787)
Women began “remodeling” within the space of their own imaginations, and the degree to which they were able to act on their thoughts determined the success of their “renovation.”
This chapter turns to the material constraints out of which women’s experiences are forged. Toni Morrison’s representation of home moves away from the concern with the city in Wright’s and Ellison’s works. Morrison’s focal point shifts to the kitchens in The Bluest Eye. Thus I shift from the city in the previous chapter that surrounds Bigger’s kitchenette apartment and the Daltons’ basement in Native Son and the ever-changing face of Harlem that contrasts with Mary Rambo’s blues kitchen and his well-lit underground hideaway in Invisible Man. Presumably, had the narrator of Invisible Man been able to go back over the puddles of milk to the home he was running toward during the Harlem riot, he would have found Mary where he left her. While the narrator’s identity is so vital that he cannot go home again, Mary’s presence is so fundamental that she cannot leave home. In contrast, in The Bluest Eye, Morrison demystifies Mary’s blues kitchen by offering first Big Mama’s imaginary kitchen, then Mrs. MacTeer’s greens and blues kitchen, Polly’s black and blue kitchen, and finally the Breedloves’ kitchen that seems to have no music, no food, no comfort at all. The dynamic imposed by these kitchen places, so limiting to the vital male protagonists of Wright’s and Ellison’s novels, is ultimately subverted by the perverse behavior of Cholly Breedlove in his own kitchen.
Central to the construct of home because of its function as hearth that both heats and feeds the household, the kitchen is crucial to the survival of the inhabitants. Even the Thomas family of Native Son has an oven, the presence of which justifies the naming of the whole apartment a “kitchenette.” Of course, the oven is woefully inadequate in sustaining the family and consequently, the oven/hearth fractures into the consuming furnace in Bigger’s alternate place within the Dalton home. Thus the centrality of the kitchen/oven is usurped by the basement/furnace, which, in serving as crematorium for Mary Dalton, holds something even more imperative for Bigger (as well as for Mary’s parents) than heat in the middle of a Chicago blizzard.
In Morrison’s Paradise (1998), the oven is quite literally the center of the town of Haven until the residents feel compelled to move. The town established by former slaves has been threatened by an undefinable “outside”:
Ten generations had known what lay Out There: space, once beckoning and free, became unmonitored and seething; became a void where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose—behind any standing tree, behind the door of any house, humble or grand…. But lessons had been learned and relearned in the last three generations about how to protect a town. So, like the ex-slaves who knew what came first, the ex-soldiers broke up the oven and loaded it into two trucks even before they took apart their own beds. (16)
The oven is taken apart brick by brick and moved to the center of the new town, where it is reassembled. The hearth is home for the residents of Haven and later, the newly established Ruby. And, significantly, it is not located inside a kitchen place. Instead it is outside, in the center of the town. Once the oven is removed from the kitchen, just as in Native Son, the illusion of (black) female authority is shattered. In Paradise, Morrison literally removes the kitchen walls that might otherwise reinforce the pretense of (black) female power, concealing the true male authority that maintains identity, passes along traditions, conducts business, and polices the community.
The material site plays a direct role in authorizing behavior. Moreover, place to some degree can dictate behavior. As both a material and psychological construct, home is given to impose structure and purpose on an otherwise meaningless space. However, if it fails to produce order, then its occupants must create order by some other means. The ultimate tragedy of home as place is that when it fails to be precisely that which it is promoted to be (fixed, inherently locatable, stabilizing), it asserts itself despotically upon the lives of its inhabitants by dictating what they can and cannot do. Yet, rather than being abandoned as a failed, even impossible, construct, it becomes the focus of a power struggle instigated by the politics of place to maintain the elusive/illusionary site of home.
On the most fundamental level, of course, homes are built. Carving physical space into definitive places is an aggressive act. For once space is cut into units of meaning such as room, house, city, state, school, and store, which gain their significance as particular locales in relationship to one another, we who are invested in those distinctions must first acknowledge their existence in these specific terms. Yet it is not enough simply to acknowledge the labels; we must stand ready to defend them. The act of place making, like all other constructions of identity, is necessarily communal. It operates in terms of inclusion and exclusion, and consequently precipitates the construction of binary oppositions like inside versus outside or “us” versus “them”—and these are debatable constructs. Kathleen M. Kirby explains that place operates on the presumption of definitive borders that can be used to determine key aspects of individual identities:
Place seems to assume set boundaries that one fills to achieve a solid identity. Place settles space into objects, working to reinscribe the Cartesian monad and the autonomous ego. It perpetuates the fixed perimeters of ontological categories, making them coherent containers of essences, in relation to which one must be “inside” or “out,” native” or “foreign,” in the same way that one can, in the Euclidean universe, at least, be in only one place at one time. (176)
Once these boundaries demarcating the perimeters of place have been established, place begins to dictate which human activities should occur there and elsewhere, and moreover, is endowed with the ability to construct signposts of identities in order to determine who should participate in which activities. The inhabitants necessarily enter into a struggle. Henri Lefebvre explains that space is not simply a void waiting to be filled by a fertile presence; instead, it functions as a mechanism of power: “That space signifies is incontestable. But what it signifies is dos and don’ts—and this brings us back to power. Power’s message is invariably confused—deliberately so; dissemination is necessarily part of any message from power” (142).2 Place is conflicted, and the intensity of the struggle surrounding spatial delineations is dictated by the level of commitment and power occupants have to apply to defending them. Thus, for example, in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove is the most completely victimized because she is the weakest person in the struggle.
The tragedy of place is demonstrated with dramatic clarity by Pecola’s rape at the hands of her father. Preceding this devastating climax, however, are indications that more than simply address how these events come to pass, as the narrator, Claudia, modestly asserts in the early pages of the novel, but why as well. For Pecola, home never succumbs to the order of place because place has no structure in the Breedlove home, which therefore does not function as place. Instead the claim of groundedness, articulated by “home as place,” that circumscribes knowledge of and experiences with home, is contradicted by the lack of order. And the disorder that might otherwise be accepted as space or unencoded expanse is contradicted by the material structure built as house (home). This home, then, is left dysfunctional. Without structure, Pecola finds only the chaos that leads to her dementia within the amorphous abyss of blue eyes. While she experiences the complete loss of meaning and value for her own subject position, some of those around her are able to maintain a semblance of order in their lives. Sites of meaning often appear for other (female) characters in the oasis offered by the blues kitchen, like the one Mary Rambo has in Invisible Man, that serves to translate the pain of experiences and deprivation of present conditions into the cathartic form of blues expressiveness.
Our examination of home for the male characters Bigger and the narrator of Invisible Man goes outside of the structure to grapple with the geographically larger sites of the city and thus alludes to the imagery of state and nation. Bigger encounters the city and kills two women who threaten his survival there, and the invisible man must leave women behind. In contrast, our study of home for the female character, Pecola, leads further inside, to a room within the structure (to grapple with the physically smaller site of the kitchen that evokes the imagery of family and nourishment). It is no mere coincidence that for the narrator in Invisible Man, Mary is figured as a mother in her kitchen—located safely under patriarchal control. Despite the potentiality signified by Mary Rambo’s blues kitchen, the male protagonist there has more options available when he begins engineering the site of home than does a little girl like Pecola. Home for her centers around her family, and her mother in particular.
Kitchen: Mrs. MacTeer’s Greens and Blues Kitchen
The closest Morrison comes to Mary Rambo’s blues kitchen in Invisible Man is Mrs. MacTeer’s kitchen. Mustard greens are cooking there instead of cabbage. Greens, like cabbage, are African American soul food. As in Native Son, when Bigger’s hunger helps him forget he is not at home (sopping his plate clean with bread),3 and in Invisible Man, when the narrator enjoys the hot, buttery yams that remind him of his cultural heritage in the South, the greens play a key role in making Mrs. MacTeer’s home. Morrison uses the word “greens” as a pun, introducing a play that deliberately conflates the taste and the smell of the greens with the sound of the singing and the experience of place.
While Mrs. MacTeer is not singing in her kitchen when we meet her, even as a young child, Claudia MacTeer notices the effect her mother’s kitchen blues have on the mood of the house. Lonesome Saturdays are transformed by song:
If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn’t so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for these hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin di-i-ime to my name.” I looked forward to the delicious time when “my man” would leave me, when I would “hate to see that evening sun go down …” ’cause then I would know “my man has left this town.” Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all the grief out of the words, and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
But without song, those Saturdays sat on my head like a coal scuttle, and if Mama was fussing, as she was now, it was like somebody throwing stones at it. (24)
The blues, of course, thrive within a culture of contestation. Mrs. MacTeer is fluent enough in a blues vernacular to rid many “lonesome Saturdays” of their bitterness, but Claudia states clearly that there are moments when her mother’s blues idiom fails. One such occasion is in autumn, soon after the novel opens, when Pecola Breedlove comes to stay with the MacTeer family.
Mrs. MacTeer makes no secret of the fact that Pecola will not be staying long since she is irritated with the girl at the moment. The curt manner with which Mrs. MacTeer deals with Pecola mirrors her expressions of love to her own daughters, Frieda and Claudia. Her concern for Pecola’s well-being is tempered by her poverty. Once she discovers that the visitor has drunk three quarts of milk over the course of a single day, she begins a harangue implicating Pecola and everyone else by whom she feels she has been wronged. The milk becomes a symbol that incriminates Pecola’s family and her mother, in particular, for their failure to nurture or even properly nourish her. Pecola can drink three quarts of milk, but she remains thirsty for the love that Mrs. Breedlove refuses to give her.
Mrs. MacTeer assumes Pecola’s motivation for drinking the milk is greed, but Claudia understands it to have another source—her desire to engage the picture of Shirley Temple on the cup. Both Frieda and Pecola talk of how they adore her. Pecola imbibes the milk because it gives her the opportunity to worship the image of Shirley Temple; it is a simple conduit legitimating her relationship with the girl on the cup. She drinks the milk like an insatiable infant who believes that by drinking she will somehow become closer to that cute and adored image. What she discovers, unfortunately, is that her efforts only cause her further alienation.
Pecola is thrown away by her family and left to sink or swim at the mercy of God or the world around her. Neither of her parents bothers to check on her well-being. Unlike Shirley Temple, who seems to have nearly the whole world’s love, Pecola has few who care whether she lives or dies, and they are not empowered to do much to alleviate her suffering. Pecola’s presence is like the presence of the cup in the MacTeer home. The cup suggests a value system decreeing who is or who is not lovable in society. The image that gives complex meaning to an otherwise insignificant cup, bolster the mainstream’s claim of ownership over the ideal American home. Even if icons such as Shirley Temple serve to anger or dismiss, as for Claudia and Pecola respectively, they have managed to infiltrate the MacTeer household, creating confusion and keeping it a site of contestation.
While Mrs. MacTeer overlooks the negative significance of both the cup and blue-eyed dolls, Claudia is acutely aware of their devastating potential. Instead of offering a character like Mary Rambo, who consistently expresses herself in a blues idiom, Morrison juxtaposes Mrs. MacTeer’s moments of failed blues expressiveness with Claudia’s naïve insight. Claudia destroys the doll she is given for Christmas in an effort to expose its value. In scenes like the following, Claudia’s latent blues expressiveness incubates, only to erupt in gestures such as the dismantling of the doll:
I fingered the face, wondering at the single-stroke eyebrows; picked at the pearly teeth stuck like piano keys between red bowline lips. Traced the turned-up nose, poked the glassy blue eyeballs, twisted yellow hair. I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable. (20)
Claudia speaks as the uncorrupted voice of a threatened black subjectivity. As Gurleen Grewal asserts, “Morrison’s invocation of black music is significant, for it related to a nonbourgeois consciousness not co-opted by the dominant culture” (16). Rather than literal music, the black “music” here is the sentiment of the blues. Claudia employs this blues logic even as a child. She is as perplexed by the adults’ response to the doll as they are by hers. Her mother assumes that she desires the unyielding plastic white doll for Christmas; no one asks her what she wants. If they had, she would have been ready with an answer:
“I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music…. (21)
Importantly, what Claudia wants for Christmas is to experience a kitchen scene wherein she is central. The scale of an adult area is brought into proportion by her “low stool.” The kitchen is both secure and warm due to her relationship with and proximity to her grandparents. This experience is characteristically vernacular and resists the force imposed by the dominant structure as represented by the Shirley Temple cup and the doll.
It’s no wonder that the adults do not ask Claudia what she wants for Christmas, since they could not have given her what she desires. Barbara Johnson’s observations made in reference to Sula are applicable here:
Morrsion’s novel conveys so strong a sense of what she calls “rootedness” precisely by writing under the sign of uprootedness. Yet it is not simply that there was once a there there and now it is gone, but that there is from the beginning something profoundly uncanny about “that place.” Home is familiar precisely to the extent that, as Renita Weems puts it, it is somehow a place one has never been. (4)
Claudia has never been figured in Big Mama’s kitchen in the ways she imagines. The “experience” there is the sole item on Claudia’s Christmas wish list. Claudia imagines the interior space of Big Mama’s kitchen to be without contradictions. There are no apparatuses like the cup and the doll to disrupt the fantasy in which she is central. However, we know that “real” space is fraught with contradictions. Building upon Steve Pile’s work in The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity, Katherine McKittrick asserts that multiple narratives simultaneously compete for space:
Homes and the nation become hybrid intercultural spaces that encourage different kinds of ambivalence in the mind…. Pile explains that spaces—emotional, bodily and environmental—produce “many spaces in the same space: space projected from the inside onto the surface of the body.…Objects forever preserved within the body-mind; outsides inside; insides outside…. Lines of demarcation, ideals; and so on.…” There is a messiness, then, to occupying space, and in The Bluest Eye the relationship between place and identity is about mental and corporeal movement, is cursive inscriptions, naturalisation, and contestation. The inside is out, and vice versa. (13)
As is evidenced by the environment outside of Claudia’s imagination, identity for a black girl in 1941 Lorain, Ohio is contested.
But for Claudia, contradictions are mediated by eruptions of blues expressiveness. As Grewal explains, “What makes it possible for … [Claudia] to resist the dominant culture is the strong presence of an alternative culture at home passed on to her by her mother, whose blues songs … and kitchen conversation with the neighborhood black women … emit the resilience of a cultural identity of resistance” (37). Pecola, on the other hand, cannot even imagine an experience like that of which Claudia dreams. The intimacy of Big Mama’s kitchen site is the polar extreme of the detachment fostered by the “outdoors.” So while one girl has a fantasy in which she is solidly placed (at home), the other girl is operating out of another fantasy in which she is maximally displaced (homeless).
Pecola comes to be in the MacTeer home as a “case” who needs a place to live for a few days because she and her family are “outdoors.” Claudia explains what that means: “There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. The distinction was subtle but final. Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact; defining and complementing our metaphysical condition” (18). Being outdoors suggests a literal homelessness that means more to the community than the abstractions of race and class because of its tangibility. Nothing elicited more sympathy or fear in Lorain, Ohio than the thought of being put outdoors. The experience is no more “real” than the scene Claudia imagines of Big Mama’s kitchen because, likewise, it is a place imagined without contradictions. The community agrees to overlook discrepancies that might suggest that “outdoors” is anything other than what it needs that space to be.
Claudia informs the readers that Pecola is “outdoors,” then explains what it means in order to dissipate any confusion that might arise from the fact that Pecola actually first appears inside. In fact, Claudia and Frieda have graciously agreed to set aside petty arguments so that they can focus their attention on “trying hard to keep her from feeling outdoors” (19). The reality is, of course, that the Breedloves are not literally outside. Each of them has someplace to stay until they can be reunited. Pecola’s father, Cholly, is in jail for setting their residence on fire; her brother is with another family; and Mrs. Breedlove is staying with the Fishers, where she works as a maid. They are not forced to lounge in the gutters like those mired in the contemporary, urban sense of homelessness. Yet the exercise of these two little girls is futile within a community that needs to have the Breedloves “outdoors.” A more mature Claudia later admits:
All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty; and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. (159)
The community balances its own insecurities against Pecola as if their positive characteristics could only exist when directly confronted by the opposite extreme. She embodies the negative traits those around her never wanted to be—black, ugly, poor, etc.—and they use her as a scapegoat to free themselves of being identified as those things. So even as Pecola has a place to rest her head in the MacTeer home, she is still “outdoors” because she cannot—is not allowed to—stay in the place where she is. Marc C. Conner observes that “the house serves as the antidote to the evil of being outdoors, offering shelter and safety.…But the home as the haven is soon translated into the home as prison…. The house is simultaneously respite and jail; like the community, for which it stands as synecdoche, the house seems to promise rest and comfort, but it provides neither, especially for Pecola” (53). While the house configured simultaneously as respite and prison might be more clearly illustrated by a text like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the dynamic, as Conner suggests, is played out here also. Jacobs’s protagonist, Linda Brent, experiences both rest and imprisonment as a fugitive in the confines of her grandmother’s home; here, Morrison creates a triumvirate.4 The polar, imaginary experiences of Claudia in Big Mama’s kitchen (at home) and Pecola’s experience of being “outdoors” (homeless) diverge from the more “real” and, at least within this context, more central locale marked by Mrs. MacTeer’s kitchen.
Kitchen: Polly’s Black and Blue Kitchen
Mrs. Breedlove escapes the fate of homelessness after Cholly puts their family outdoors because she can stay at the Fishers’ home. Polly’s kitchen is a “black” place in the ways that Dilsey’s kitchen is in The Sound and the Fury—a place where Pauline Breedlove serves her surrogate white daughter and her white family. Mrs. Breedlove is resentful of intrusions into this realm, which might remind her of the ugliness of her life at the storefront. While she is leery of defending that place, she is fierce in defense of Fisher family affairs. In this other place, her employers’ kitchen, Mrs. Breedlove seems to escape the repercussions associated with her own family. Here she can lord over canned goods, shiny floors, and other things that seem to give her life value: “Power, praise, and luxury were hers in this household. They even gave her what she had never had—a nickname—Polly” (101).
Even the little pink-and-yellow girl at the Fishers’ home calls Mrs. Breedlove “Polly.” Hearing the name from the lips of a child younger than she incites Claudia to anger: “Her calling Mrs. Breedlove Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove, seemed reason enough to scratch her” (86). The designation, which seems arrogant and disrespectful to Claudia, contributes to Mrs. Breedlove’s possessiveness over the space of this home. She is able to function within a relatively viable construction of “ideal servant,” which, although constrictive, is nonetheless a seductive contrast to the ugliness of her life at home. Rather than deconstructing such designations, as Claudia does in her dismemberment of the doll or as Bigger Thomas does by decapitating the murdered corpse of Mary Dalton in Native Son, Mrs. Breedlove accepts her role within the Shirley Temple world signified by the cup. So while Pecola hungrily laps at the white milk to no avail, as mammy, her mother is received into this alternative household. Claudia describes the effect the kitchen has on Mrs. Breedlove: “Mrs. Breedlove’s skin glowed like taffeta in the reflection of white porcelain, white woodwork, polished cabinets, and brilliant copperware” (86)—and it is Polly, of course, who keeps the kitchen glowing. Her presence in the pink-and-yellow girl’s kitchen is as vital to maintaining the whiteness of the cabinetry, the counters, and the family who lives there as the black drops are in the optic white paint of Invisible Man’s Liberty Paint Factory.
Conversely, Pecola is the one black drop too many. Pecola’s presence in the Fisher household disrupts the precarious balance and threatens to destroy the whole system. She is only there to handle a chore for her mother, and she is not even invited in until Claudia and Frieda arrive. With a stern admonition to stay still, Mrs. Breedlove leaves the three girls in the kitchen. When she returns with a bag of wet laundry and to answer the small child’s call, Mrs. Breedlove discovers that Pecola has accidentally knocked over a freshly baked pie and is hopping around the floor in its hot insides: “In one gallop she was on Pecola, and with the back of her hand knocked her on the floor. Pecola slid in the pie juice, one leg folding under her. Mrs. Breedlove yanked her up by the arm, slapped her again, and in a voice thin with anger, abused Pecola directly and Frieda and me by implication” (86).
Polly’s maternal feelings seem to be directed at the pink-and-yellow child rather than her own daughter’s obvious humiliation and pain. It is the black child who is hurt and sliding across the floor in the dark juice, yet Mrs. Breedlove is invested in whiteness and defends her place in it without realizing that she has internalized the terms of her own oppression. Just as the narrator of Invisible Man must be expelled from the Liberty Paint Factory, so too must Pecola be expelled from the Fisher household. This kitchen, like the other kitchen site in the storefront, serves as a place of torment for Pecola. So the dimension of physical violence is added to her experience of this material “black” site. Instead of a blues kitchen like the one that mediates on behalf of Claudia, with greens flavoring the sound of her mother’s singing, the “black” place of Polly’s kitchen, a place of domestic servitude, becomes for Pecola a “black and blue” place.
Because of its proximity to the white household, Polly’s kitchen is a “black” site, and unlike the characters seen in their “own” kitchens, Polly does not have a blues vocabulary with which to temper the despotism of that site. Unlike Bigger Thomas, who is frustrated by his “relief” job at the Dalton home, Polly laps up her job as domestic for the Fisher family as readily as Pecola drinks the three quarts of milk. The household that keeps Pauline from being outside when her husband, Cholly, sets their house on fire cannot accommodate her children. This house, then, serves as both Pauline’s refuge and her prison in the way that Conner suggests. To stay there, she must reject her family, and in so doing she sacrifices crucial parts of herself. Barbara Johnson notes in her psychoanalytical reading of Sula that “Freud exclaims over the fact that the German word for ‘homey’ extends itself to turn into its opposite—that the meaning of ‘heimlich’ moves with a kind of inevitability from cozy, comfortable, and familiar to hidden, secret, and strange, so that one meaning of ‘heimlich’ is identitcal to its opposite, ‘unheimlich’” (4). In the German sense of the word, home is at once home and not home. Consequently, Pauline is fragmented into multiple selves who mirror Morrison’s earlier triumvirate: Mrs. Breedlove’s experiences at the storefront (homelessness) and Polly’s at the Fishers’ (at home) are mediated by Pauline’s memories of her teenaged years.
Long before Pauline became Polly or even Mrs. Breedlove, she had stepped on a rusty nail and was left with a mild deformity in one of her feet:
Slight as it was this deformity explained for her many things that would have been otherwise incomprehensible: why she alone of all the children had no nickname; why there were no funny jokes and anecdotes about funny things she had done; why no one ever remarked on her food preferences…. Why she never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace. Her general feeling of separateness and unworthiness she blamed on her foot. Restricted, as a child, to this cocoon of her family’s spinning, she cultivated quiet and private pleasures. She liked, most of all, to arrange things. To line things up in rows—jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step, sticks, stones, leaves—and the members of her family let these arrangements be. (88)
The significance of common occurrences such as teasing and nicknaming is easily overlooked. These communal practices bind individuals around a shared past and give them a sense of cohesiveness that helps unite them into a family unit.5 Being excluded from these practices leaves Pauline feeling isolated. She acknowledges her sense of alienation and identifies her misshapen foot as the source of her world’s failings. Her foot is the foundation upon which she builds a vocabulary for interpreting an “incomprehensible” situation. Without this key element, the young Pauline has no means of systematically confronting the chaos of her life. Her family has excluded her from the cultural practices that structure their existence and left her alone to develop a framework for rendering her experiences intelligible.
For brief periods during her early adulthood, Pauline does experience moments of blues expressiveness. Cholly comes with music—“a kind of city-street music where laughter belies anxiety, and joy is as short and straight as the blade of a pocket knife. She listened carefully to the music and let it pull her lips into a smile” (91). So when she narrates her experience of meeting him for the first time, she expresses herself in a rare blues idiom: “When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil’ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they masked up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me” (91–92). Cat Moses suggests that Pauline articulates a blues narrative of her own, “in lyrically expressing a longing for the rural Southern community that revolved around church (“Sunday dress”) and ritual (“berry picking,” “funeral”), Pauline accomplishes what the blues singer accomplishes: she recreates that which is lost and for which she longs, transforming lack into poetry. Unfortunately, the transformation is temporary and exists only in her memory” (6). Pauline divests herself of the value of such expressive gestures that paint her experiences with color in favor of more calculated, less intuitive systems. The exclusion she feels manifests itself as restriction, so she founds her teleology on “quiet and private pleasures” rather than social practices like those of her family:
She liked, most of all, to arrange things. To line things up in rooms—jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step, sticks, stones, leaves—and the members of her family let these arrangements be…. During all of her four years of going to school, she was enchanted by numbers and depressed by words. She missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons. (88–89)
This teleology operates like blues expressiveness to fulfill the psychological need for order in Pauline’s life. However, the smallness of her spatial terrain dictates the smallness of the system she employs. She is relegated to the porch step and the kitchen, left alone to give order to trivialities that neither impose upon nor impede the welfare of others.
While the omnipresence and deprivation of her foot motivate Pauline to find a way to maintain her mental faculties, they also serve, later in life, to draw her effectively into complicity with her own victimization and, subsequently, that of her daughter. The space of the Fishers’ kitchen (the site where she becomes “ideal servant”) and the porch step are so constricted that the system Pauline has erected to order her life is not able to accommodate anyone other than herself. Because it does not interfere, her childhood family allows her the privilege of that order, but later as a mother she is not able to derive creative expressiveness from the system that might protect her children also. So just as if someone had doomed her to act out a tragic script written at the time her foot was permanently marked by that nail, Mrs. Breedlove refuses to read any signs as warnings and instead accepts them almost fondly, as fate.6 This is how she comes to have ugly children and to live in an abusive home.
The children Sammy and Pecola are ugly because she and Cholly are ugly. Their ugliness is a simple confirmation of what her foot, missing front tooth, and newfound education at the movies7 had already told her—that she and her family are not worthy of either attention or love. As the rotten seed planted by this derision festers, Mrs. Breedlove comes to despise those things and people who are most closely allied with her: “More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man—they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely” (101). In the Fisher home, Mrs. Breedlove finds affirmation that she does not get elsewhere: “Really, she is the ideal servant” (101). She hungrily accepts her position as maid because it offers her a place to escape the ugliness she believes characterizes the rest of her life.
Kitchen: The Breedloves’ Kitchen
The Breedloves’ storefront has very few interior walls. The kitchen is a separate room, but the bedroom and living area are distinguished primarily by furnishings. In this regard, the storefront is similar to the kitchenette apartments of Chicago and the Truebloods’ cabin in Invisible Man. For reasons discussed in the previous chapters, such living conditions affect people’s lives in sometimes rather disturbing ways. As Richard Wright laments in 12 Million Black Voices, “The kitchenette blights the personalities of our growing children, disorganizes them, blinds them to hope, creates problems whose effects can be traced in the characters of its child victims for years afterward…. The kitchenette fills our black boys with longing and restlessness, urging them to run off from home” (110–11). The same effects are evident in the lives of Pecola and Sammy Breedlove. “[Sammy] was known, by the time he was fourteen, to have run away from home no less than twenty-seven times…. Pecola, on the other hand, restricted by youth and sex, experimented with methods of endurance. Though the methods varied, the pain was as consistent as it was deep” (38). The storefront is not a hospitable place to live. As Shelley Wong asserts, “Nowhere in this novel is this legacy of slavery—the disfigurement of human relationships by the market-place—more ironically stated than in Morrison’s decision to locate a family by the name of ‘Breedlove’ in a converted (and poorly converted at that) storefront” (462).
Drinking, having sex, fighting, sleeping, and even waking up are all spectacles available for “public” display, in the Breedlove home. It seems that nothing can happen in this storefront without everyone present at the time knowing about it. The physical barriers that would serve as signposts, issuing prohibitions (“Do not enter”; “Do not exit”; “Watch this, not that”) are simply not present. In their place is space with very few socializing directives. Thus few barriers exist to separate girlhood experiences, like Claudia’s Christmas wish, from adult episodes, like the times when Mrs. Breedlove will not allow herself to have an orgasm until she knows that “my flesh is all that be on … [Cholly’s] mind” (103). Her parents do not shelter Pecola. Instead, she is forced to confront situations that they might have veiled for her. Furthermore, she has never had access to childhood experiences like the one that Claudia imagines in Big Mama’s kitchen, that function as signs of love, so she is left to interpret her parents’ sexual intercourse through her own limited knowledge:
Into her eyes came the picture of Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove in bed. He making sounds as though he were in pain, as though something had him by the throat and wouldn’t let go. Terrible as his noises were, they were not nearly as bad as no noise at all from her mother. It was as though she was not even there. Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence. (48–49)
Because Pecola is forced to confront her parents’ sexuality, she imagines that this is love.8 Certainly, walls create an illusion of safety that can, and indeed must, be challenged. But walls also serve to foster the sense of security a young girl needs until such time as she develops into a mature adult.
The fact that the walls are around the kitchen and not a bedroom, for example, is a measure of Mrs. Breedlove’s inadequacy. In this statement I do not mean to absolve Cholly of his charge within the household; however, we must carefully examine the power at work here. While Mrs. Breedlove cannot be held responsible as an architect, literally designing walls, it is she, in particular, who superintends many of the spatial dynamics. The walls around the kitchen serve as a normalizing gesture that helps to distinguish the storefront as a home. Mrs. Breedlove is able to identify with this particular site and the norms the kitchen seeks to represent (that of the hearth). By acting out the role of wife and mother in her gestures of caretaking, she demonstrates her investment in maintaining the illusion of normality. “Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish” (37). The kitchen, then, becomes a mere tool she uses, along with its accoutrements, to maintain her perceived authority.
On a Saturday morning near the beginning of the novel, these dynamics are played out in a ceremonial conclusion to one of Cholly’s drunken episodes. Mrs. Breedlove’s actions, as the narrator recounts, are well choreographed: “in the kitchen … [Mrs. Breedlove] made noises with doors, faucets, and pans. The noises were hollow, but the threats they implied were not…. There was direction and purpose in Mrs. Breedlove’s movements that had nothing to do with the preparation of breakfast” (35). The eruptions of violence in the Breedlove household can be gauged on Saturday mornings like this one by the clamor in the kitchen. These sounds function similarly to those Mrs. MacTeer makes in her (blues) kitchen to influence her daughter’s perceptions and to shape the order and events of the day. But the regularity with which these menacing sounds emanate from this kitchen is not balanced by the comfort offered by the smell of mustard greens cooking on the stove and songs, “about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times” (24) that make life tolerable for Claudia and her mother in the MacTeer house. Mrs. Breedlove uses frying pans and pokers as weapons rather than for cooking and tending the stove.
This kitchen serves Mrs. Breedlove’s needs as much as the Fisher kitchen does. Her role in relationship to the family, however, is inverted. Where she embraces the Fisher family, she rejects her own. Here again we are reminded of Barbara Johnson’s use of Freud’s notion of heimlich; clearly, Mrs. Breedlove’s storefront home is also, simultaneously, not home. The Breedloves’ kitchen is not a place of soul food and singing, like the kitchen in the MacTeer household and Mary Rambo’s blues kitchen from Invisible Man. Instead, Mrs. Breedlove’s kitchen is the ceremonial backdrop for repercussions of routine episodes of drunkenness.
Womb: Collapsing Inward
If The Bluest Eye is a study of spatial politics, then the struggle comes down to a battle between Cholly and Pecola: he is a sign of boundless passion and operates without restraint; she is passion without an outlet. The former bursts outward and the latter collapses inward. Energy seeks the most expedient route to the ground; thus given their proximity, Cholly finds Pecola the most expedient conduit for his expression. She has no order or meaning apart from the perception of her ugliness to use as a framework for interpretation, so space collapses inward.
The Breedloves’ kitchen is dysfunctional because they have placed no restrictions on the activities authorized to happen there. Each character attempts to flee the stultifying power of the constructs imposed by this storefront home in his or her own way. Mrs. Breedlove rejects all but the most superficial connections to her family for her identity as Polly in the Fisher home. Sammy runs away for however long he can manage. Cholly drinks as an escape. Pecola has the least effective means of escape, with her earnest desire to become beautiful by turning her eyes blue.9
So the perception of ever-extending, empty expanse, which has already been condensed for Pecola by the impermeability of the kitchen walls, is further condensed by the lack of interpersonal directives that might order or restrict any activity. Consequently, all that remains to define the perimeters of the kitchen are the unpredictable impulses of Cholly Breedlove. Cholly invades Pecola’s body as territory and establishes borders, thereby constructing an extended realm for his expression of pleasure and domination. The deprivation created by this unstructured chaos leads to Pecola’s dementia.
Perhaps more than any other character depicted in the novel, Pecola lives the contradictions expressed by the blues. Yet she has no understanding of blues culture or its significance. The “hollow” sounds Mrs. Breedlove makes in the kitchen do not contain the substance of the blues that makes grief seem “sweet.” In fact, at the one moment in the novel when Pecola articulates a blues refrain, she is outside of her home and lying in bed with the other girls at the MacTeer home. Earlier the neighbor child, Rosemary, presumed when she saw Pecola with her panties down that the girls were “playing nasty.” Actually, they had been assisting Pecola because she had just “become a woman.” The shared feelings of confusion, fear, frustration, and finally revelation among female characters after this encounter dealing with Pecola’s first menstrual cycle lead the young girls to try to express themselves through the language of the blues.
The pain of experience itself, not deliberate effort, compels Pecola to inquire about her new procreative abilities using the syntax of the blues. After Frieda explains that before you can make a baby “somebody has to love you,” Pecola asks, “‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?’ But Frieda was asleep. And [Claudia] didn’t know” (29). Unfortunately, Pecola does not sustain the potentially transcendent expressiveness of this moment; she locates the failure of her home and family to nurture her in sight rather than in sound—the blues of her eyes rather than the blues of her mouth.
Characters like Mrs. MacTeer and Claudia use blues expressiveness to temper the harsh experiences of their lives. The blues serves to codify place with signposts that offer Claudia direction as she navigates her surroundings. So Claudia first appears with her sister, Frieda, in a naïve blues moment, trying to utter the “right words” over seeds they plant in the ground. Of the few in the community who care enough to pay Pecola attention, it is only the young girls, Claudia and Frieda, who think her baby is worth saving: “So deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and everything would be all right” (9). However, as Michael Awkward argues, language fails in The Bluest Eye to express the “right words”:
For in the face of Pecola’s intense self-hatred and the disdain of an entire community where Pecola and her pregnancy are concerned, discursive acts such as the MacTeer girls’ incantations of putative (but, curiously unspoken in the novel) “right words” cannot avoid being anything but insufficient. What is required … is the bonding of women, or what Ntozake Shange calls in For Colored Girls’ final scene of an achieved female community which, not coincidentally, is directly preceded by a male’s murder of children—“a laying on of [female] hands.” This communal laying on of hands results in the liberation of the female self and “the holiness of myself released.” (119)
Pecola does not have access to this communal female healing. Her mother does not bring the milk that she desires and the milk she drinks from the Shirley Temple cup cannot satiate her thirst; instead, it results in a backlash from Mrs. MacTeer about why she cannot satisfy Pecola either. Rather than a female laying on of hands that might offer spiritual renewal and healing, home leaves Pecola bereft of maternal sensitivities and alone to deal with perverse fatherhood: Cholly’s destructive masculine laying on of hands. The earth itself refuses to yield for Pecola, and there are no “right words” to say over a child impregnated by her father that will make it otherwise.
Both the words and the ground are crucial here. Even as children, these girls know that they might speak something that can be vital to their ability to negotiate the dynamics of place. Ultimately, the earth proves to be more powerful than their “right words,” which cannot intercede to save Pecola or her child. But in choosing to tell Pecola’s story, an older Claudia gains authority that the younger Claudia has yet to acquire. The Bluest Eye becomes, as Cat Moses describes it in “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” Claudia’s blues narrative.
On the other hand, to survive the kind of assaults directed at her, Pecola needs to reinterpret painful experiences in order to render them intelligible. But the conflict she confronts is too powerful for her meager defense—the hope of becoming pretty. In a dysfunctional household without order, it is even more important that Pecola have a viable means of offense, or at least of coping. Without either, however, Pecola is unable to lessen the tragic impact of the inevitable confrontation. Place is even more constricted for her than the sites of the porch and the Fishers’ kitchen are for her mother. Without codifiers to organize her surroundings around a set of established norms, like the walls of a more traditional house10 or the blues idiom of the MacTeer household,11 the Breedloves’ kitchen randomly signifies contradictory, odd, and even perverse demands that function as expressions of power. If barriers are not established to maintain the order that might protect and defend inhabitants, then the power naturally levels any restrictions. Rather like electricity, power seeks the conductor offering the least resistance as it makes its way to the ground. Pecola is that medium.
Pecola’s story is, of course, framed by the narrative of the Dick and Jane primer and its depiction of the green-and-white house. Yet as Wong suggests, its message conceals a problematic interrelationship between residents and the places they occupy:
The lesson of this passage in fact goes well beyond acknowledging or presenting white bourgeois values—it goes as far as enacting the very conditions of alienated self-containment which underlie those values. We might note, for instance, that the “house” precedes the “family” in order of both appearance and discussion. In this scheme of things, human relations are preempted by property and commodity relations. (472)
Just as Mr. Norton notices the log cabins before he sees the women in Invisible Man, the built structure appears first. The primer hearkens back to the Victorian “model home” that Stowe and Beecher extol in The American Woman’s Home; however, in both Morrison’s obvious manipulation of conventions and this more subtle dynamic highlighted by Wong, the primer reveals the essential need for imaginative “remodeling.” Without such renovations, place remains despotic.
Pecola’s rape attests to the devastating potential of ideological constructs permitted to cohabit freely in the Breedlove storefront. As Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner explain, “We experience issues such as consumerism, colonialism and patriarchy in concrete locales, whether those locales be the high-toned architecture of a department store, the partitions imposed on a countryside by a foreign power, or the domestic sphere as a material—not just ideological construct. It is the rare human issue that is truly placeless” (4). As a site of culture, this storefront—which is neither house nor home in any mythical sense—implicates larger issues of consumerism, colonialism, and patriarchy, among others. Morrison suggests that incest is placed in this storefront at the perverse intersection of racism, poverty, the failure of community, and unfulfilled desire.
That fateful Saturday afternoon when Cholly staggers in drunk, he sees his daughter in the kitchen, washing dishes. Pecola is fulfilling the role she has inherited from her mother. And Cholly barely distinguishes between mother and daughter. She reminds him of Pauline when he met her in Kentucky. “[Pecola’s] hands were going around and around a frying pan, scraping flecks of black into cold, greasy dishwater. The timid, tucked-in look of the scratching toe—that was what Pauline was doing the first time he saw her in Kentucky. Leaning over a fence staring at nothing in particular” (128). Pecola makes a similar gesture to the one her mother made years earlier, her foot scratching a place on the back of her leg. Cholly wants to scratch the itch with his teeth. “The confused mixture of memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length” (128). As always, Cholly acts upon his impulse.
Cholly is contrasted with Mr. MacTeer, who defends his daughter, Frieda, from the illicit, predatory advances of Mr. Henry. Cholly becomes the predator. He does not gauge his actions against a scale of right or wrong, so it never occurs to him that he should not touch his daughter like this: “The creamy toe of her bare foot scratching a velvet leg. It was such a small and simple gesture, but it filled him then with a wondering softness. Not the usual lust to part tight legs with his own, but a tenderness, a protectiveness. A desire to cover her foot with his hand and gently nibble away the itch from the calf with his teeth” (128). He rapes Pecola on the floor in front of the sink. The tragedy of home for Pecola is described best in this scene. The space of home has become so compressed that she is left to maneuver psychologically within the confined space of the kitchen floor.
In 1941 the unyielding black ground signified the terrible cost at which home might be established for the black community of Lorain, Ohio. The barriers that delineate the place of home are erected upon this foundation: the unyielding black ground and the Breedloves’ kitchen floor. The storefront is what remains for cultural outcasts like the Breedlove family. Their internalization of white normative values and their inability to find any productive coping mechanisms ultimately pin Pecola tragically to the ground under the weight of her father’s “embrace.”
Her escape into madness only leaves her more completely bound. The expanse of space that had been segmented into home/kitchen is further condensed into the stultifying and incestuous site of Pecola’s own body, raped and impregnated by her father. Claudia and Frieda attempt to change the dynamics of the dichotomy of Pecola versus the community or outdoors versus a sense of spatial security. They try to impose order through their own blues expressiveness by speaking their magical “right words” over seeds planted in the black earth, in order to ensure that Pecola brings forth the life that would “bear witness” to an otherwise forgotten tragedy. Their magic fails, and remembrance of Pecola is left to Claudia’s narrative recollection as text.
At the end of The Bluest Eye Claudia describes a pathetic picture of Pecola as a peculiar bird attempting to deliver herself from the bondage of walking upon the ground. Now completely insane, she is a hopeless spectacle. Claudia narrates:
The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, 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. (158)
The fragility of the gesture of flying without speed, wind, or anything more than arms for wings bespeaks the severity of her dementia. Yet there is something eerily lucid about her act. Pecola recognizes that she is constrained by the tyranny of place and of home (her family and her community) and unable to draw upon its resources. In contrast to the unforgiving apathy with which the ground confronts her, flight might possibly release her from the tyranny of place into an alternative reality. Despite the fact that Pecola understands that her groundedness is affiliated with her victimization, she does not comprehend any of the physical or metaphorical mechanics involved in achieving flight.
In Corregidora by Gayl Jones, this study of home will continue further inside than Morrison goes in The Bluest Eye. The body becomes the place of contention and the womb the crucial “black place.” My concern, then, will shift from the physical site of kitchen places to the womb, or more precisely, the absence thereof. The novel suggests that the African American home ground must move away from the body to find room within the context of blues culture.
Notes
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