Readers of Rhys and Morrison are forced to see the relevance of the themes both within the historical frame of the novel and in their current moment. In addition, writing about the 1940s and publishing the work in 1970, Morrison makes a connection between these two periods, perhaps similarly to what Jean Rhys does in her 1966 postcolonial novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, causing readers to ask whether racial and gender relations actually improve or change with second wave feminism or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Plath’s The Bell Jar is also concerned with a war-time setting and its relationship to gender roles similarly, Marie Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness, published in Haiti in 1968, draws readers’ attention to the effects of national politics on women’s experiences. Because we see these issues framing Pecola’s story, and the tale of this small community in Ohio in which she lives, the novel easily ties to other works produced by women writers across the Americas responding to the 1960s. Rogin contends that issues of ethnicity and class were central to American politics from 1870 to the New Deal, but with World War II they became more exasperated and ‘provided the occasion for the emergence of the national-security apparatus’ (246). Selecting the year 1940 as the novel’s setting allows Morrison to highlight several important historical moments: first, the obvious Depression era in the United States, which, according to Michael Rogin, caused Americans to look past domestic concerns to what their role might be in a growing international debacle 2 and the efforts to sabotage black literacy (as marked by the Dick and Jane primers that begin each chapter of The Bluest Eye), beginning during Reconstruction and extending through Jim Crow. 1 Set in the Midwest during the Depression era, Morrison explicitly links this historical moment with the one in which she is writing, calling attention to the themes of hunger, wanting, and repression during the Depression as they repeated during the difficult battle that was the Civil Rights Era. Morrison began writing the novel in 1962 because the reclamation of racial beauty at that time forced her to question how the damaging internalization of racialized notions of beauty is able to consume and even break (especially young) women. While male writers like John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Simon and others dominated the American literary imaginary of the decade, exploring loneliness or the search for meaning in contemporary society, Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, published at the turn of the new decade in 1970, explores race, gender, and the aforementioned powerful notion of beauty and its social construction. Morrison’s novel effectively questions how and why a silenced character like that of Pecola Breedlove might hide behind the notion of white beauty and what the consequences of such an action would be not only for Pecola, but for the community in which she lives.
Specifically, this essay considers how Toni Morrison’s portrayal of gender, through a somewhat experimental literary form, is able to present such a genealogy.
This essay will consider women’s writing of what I will term ‘the long 1960s’ to be broadly concerned with presenting decentering genealogies of the period, or narratives that bring the hidden, marginalized voices of the decade, to the centre. The American 1960s, a long and chaotic decade of war, social change, and second wave feminism, is one that certainly extends thematically into the early 1970s.
Issue 4: Female Subjectivity, Sexual Violence and the American Nation in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eyeįemale Subjectivity, Sexual Violence, and the American Nation in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
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