The “Other” Lie: Subjugation and Choice in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved
In a lecture she delivered at University of Michigan’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Toni Morrison said, “We are not, in fact, ‘other,’ We are choices” (p. 133). This assertion is delicately woven throughout Morrison’s novels. She often writes characters that live outside the boundaries of acceptable identification and focuses on how those identities are shaped by the society that ostracizes them. “Othering,” or identification of another person through difference, is something Morrison reflects on in The Origin of Others, as well. She argues we “want to govern, and administrate the Other. Romance her, if we can, back into our own mirrors. In either instance (of alarm or false reverence), we deny her personhood, the specific individuality we insist upon for ourselves” (Morrison, ch. 2). In Playing in the Dark, she argues that the "othering" of African Americans within Early American literature is essential to the white American's identity. This conclusion elucidates the power structure of the “othering” process—i.e. those who hold the most power will be the ones to decide what is culturally acceptable.
Morrison’s examination of “othering” runs parallel to the notion of rejected subjugation. In order to do this within a narrative, she offers her characters the freedom to choose their own path rather than follow the paths society has laid out for them. These characters then undergo various degrees of suffering or success based on those choices that exist outside the boundaries of societal norms or ethical standards. This paper will argue Morrison illuminates the subjugated compulsion to “other” in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved by unveiling and examining the interpellation process associated with appearance and abandoned norms. Through this examination, I hope to explicate not only Morrison’s purpose in using an anchor like “othering” and subjugation to focus her narratives, but also to elucidate the ways in which each character navigates the pressure to conform to expected or oppressive conventions.
The Worth of “Other”
Morrison has an exceptional ability to create worlds and characters that challenge the way the most beautiful and terrible aspects of humanity are perceived and understood. Within the rich and engaging narratives is a commitment to growth—for characters and readers alike. In an interview she gave in The New Yorker after the release of God Help the Child, Morrison was told her books always contained a scene “where the impossible happens.” Morrison’s characters always come to a point where they want to connect to another person “through the trauma of race, or sex, or history [. . .] it’s the humanity, and the pathos of getting past the trauma, to even try” (Als). Morrison responded by saying, “[e]very one of those [moments] is a movement toward knowledge.” It’s the impetus to know humanity that drives Morrison’s stories forward. She demands consideration of questions she doesn’t ever truly ask—it’s the characters and the world Morrison builds around them that serve as the conduit for an exploration of the human condition.
Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, invited readers into the minds of three young black girls living in the 1940’s. She opens the novel with a lyrically jarring presentation of white America by employing familiar, child-like language to re-introduce Dick and Jane, characters from a popular learn-to-read book series that would have been popular during the time the novel takes place. Within this short opening, Morrison repeats a paragraph of short, informative sentences three times. She writes, “[see] Jane. See her red dress,” and then “see jane see her red dress,” and finally, “seejaneseeherreddress” (Morrison, pp.1-2). With simple repetition and form, Morrison presents three different perspectives. The first paragraph, the one that is technically correct and easy to read, is a cardboard cut-out of what life should look like from the perspective of the white characters and the white readers the children’s book is made for. The second paragraph, being stripped of its proficiency, may be read with little difficulty, but it’s considered to be visually displeasing and therefore a poor imitation of the first. The third paragraph is practically illegible. Its essence may be exactly the same, but its presentation is unacceptable in the white-dominated society where the narrative exists.
The narrator of The Bluest Eye, Claudia, tells the story of her childhood with her older sister Frieda and their friend Pecola. At the heart of the story is how these characters navigate black girlhood in the world of white supremacy. Maureen, a white girl who goes to school with Claudia and Pecola, is considered beautiful for her whiteness (“See Jane. See her red dress.”); Claudia, being only nine years old, has yet to internalize the oppressive white standards that distort her community’s understanding of beauty (see jane see her red dress); and Pecola, the girl the town has chosen as their scapegoat for their own self-loathing, is considered extremely ugly and wishes to have blue eyes so that someone will love her (seejaneseeherreddress). The allusions between the introduction’s contrasting form and the character’s different experiences cleverly signal the “othering,” interpellation, and subjugation that’s woven throughout the novel.[1]
One of the first overt references to the “othering” of Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, involves Frieda and Pecola’s fondness for Shirley Temple. They have a “loving conversation about how cu-te [she] was” while Claudia stews in her own personal hatred for the little blonde movie star (p. 19). She says she hates Temple “because she dances with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me.” Claudia sees herself in Bojangles, a black performer, and therefore claims him. Soon after, her bitterness expands to include the white baby doll she’s gifted at Christmas. Morrison writes, “[a]dults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured. ‘Here,’ they said, ‘this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it’” (p. 21). Claudia is appalled by the gift. She finds no use for it and hates the way it feels in her hands. “I could not love it,” she tells us, “[b]ut I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was loveable.”
The grown-ups are outraged at her dissection of the coveted blue-eyed baby doll, which is precisely, I think, one of Morrison’s points. To put a magnifying glass on why whiteness is so desirable—why whiteness holds the keys to the proverbial kingdom—is to question the societal norms this country is built on. Early white Americans weaponized the “othering” they imposed on the Africans they enslaved. As Morrison says, “[n]othing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery” (Playing, p. 38). However, even after slavery was abolished, African-Americans were not free to be as they were. They existed as pariahs—the “other” still—simply because of misinformation campaigns regarding the African’s nature and the colonial mimicry imposed on them.[2]
Claudia’s persona non grata status not only confuses her but enrages her as well. Soon, Claudia’s dissection of white baby dolls turns into a hatred for white girls and is horrified by her readiness to be so violent with the white girls in her company (p. 22). She overcompensates for this shame by loving them instead. From there, her “fraudulent love” leads to a begrudging admiration for Shirley Temple: “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.” Morrison makes it clear that Claudia’s acceptance of Shirley Temple’s “superior” beauty is something that’s been inflicted on her, not something that she readily chooses. Claudia worships Shirley Temple not because she believes Temple is beautiful; she simply recognizes the white girl’s power to dictate Claudia’s acceptance of herself.
In contrast to Claudia’s journey toward subjugation, Pecola is already full of shadowed self-loathing when she’s introduced into the narrative. In an effort to be loved as much as Shirley Temple, Pecola’s greatest desire is to have blue eyes. Though it’s made clear that there is nothing inherently ugly about Pecola’s appearance, the entire town and Pecola herself view her as so. The beauty standards under white supremacy mutilate what it means to be beautiful, and it’s through Pecola’s journey from desiring blue eyes to receiving them through the will of her own fractured mind that Morrison exposes an intricate and infectious web of conditioned perceptions and beliefs that subjugate black girls to arbitrary standards they are incapable of meeting.[3] Pecola’s hatred for herself is born in the “othering” of her own body—a devastating condition that is never rectified—but it’s her subjugation to white beauty standards that truly cement her perception of “self.”
The “Opacity” of Self
Morrison didn’t limit herself to questions of race when she dissected humanity’s need to “other.” She opened the concept holistically, recognizing the many ways in which people discovered themselves by administering identity to others. In The Origin of Others, when Morrison discusses a woman she’d had an encounter with and then couldn’t find again, she writes, “[n]ow she is gone, taking with her my good opinion of myself, which, of course, is unforgivable. And isn't that the kind of thing that we fear strangers will do? Disturb. Betray. Prove they are not like us? That is why it is so hard to know what to do with them” (ch. 2). It’s this question of, what do I do with the stranger? that shifts perspectives to include pieces of humanity we may have never considered: What does it mean to be beautiful? How does betrayal exist? Who is a mother? Somewhere between the question and the answer is a shadow that dictates interpretation and response.
In “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Judith Butler discusses knowing the self through the opacity of existence, and how important this opacity within self-knowledge is to the formation of ethics: “[I]f it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that [the subject] is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethics” (Butler, p. 22). Butler’s argument, woefully condensed, is that it’s what we can’t see within ourselves that actually dictates our morals. Morrison plays with the idea that our subjugation, or our molding by society, is what defines our ethical code in her second published novel, Sula.
Sula begins in a space defined by its physical subjugation: the hill in Medallion is perceived differently depending on which race resides there. When the black community lives on the hill, it’s dubbed the Bottom. When the white community lives on the hill, it’s “the suburbs.” Within the first few sentences of the novel, Morrison establishes a systemic instance of “othering” based on identification practices established upon the invention of the American Slave. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison expounds these identification practices by signifying the white man’s impetus to “other” in the New World by implementing “strategies for maintaining” difference.[4] Morrison’s argument is clearly represented in the re-designation of the hill in Medallion based on its residents. Morrison argues the white man’s identity in America, cast in a kiln of racism, is validated by the “othering” of the black race. Medallion’s hill is a fantastic representation of physical subjugation, especially when compared to Eva Peace’s house.
Upon her introduction into the narrative, Eva Peace’s house is described as being always under construction. Odd additions, like superfluous staircases and doors, introduce the Peace house as belonging to an autonomous owner. In a society that makes far too many choices for her, Eva chooses how she wants her house to exist. Other decisions of interest, like leaving her children for nearly two years and murdering her son, establish Eva as someone who rejects ethical subjugation. Based on her choices, it could be argued that Eva is more aware of the “opaque subject” that convinces most people their choices are right or just and is therefore able to ignore this compulsion.
Sula, Eva’s granddaughter, is thusly raised in a home that incidentally espouses the value of autonomy over conformity, and readers are quickly introduced to Sula’s refusal to conform. When some white boys bully her best friend Nel, Sula cuts the tip of her own finger off in an effort to scare them away. While she bleeds, she tells them, “’If I can do that to myself, what do you suppose I’ll do to you’” (Morrison, pp. 54-5). The boys retreat and Sula establishes herself as a girl who will not submit to a white boy’s authority, even if the entire country was built just for them. Despite the strong protective instinct and loyalty Sula displays in this scene, the emotion that drives it is a rarity. Morrison writes, “[Sula] could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes (p. 53). Sula releases feelings like she does inhibitions, and this aspect of her identity is rooted in a learned desire for authentic autonomy. Emotions and rules are based in connections, and as a child, Sula really only connects to Nel. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that when she dwells or lingers on an emotion, it’s because that emotion is connected to Nel.
Critics and readers alike usually point to Sula’s affair with Nel’s husband as being the most controversial choice she makes, but Morrison tells us early on that Sula’s understanding of sex is based on living in a house where her mother would have sex in a pantry and then “emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier,” and this “taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable” (p. 44). Therefore, Sula’s ethical code doesn’t conform to Nel’s oppressive understanding of sex. The outrage over Sula’s betrayal is certainly just, under the conditions of marriage and friendship as defined in our society at least, but the source of those ethical constraints exist in an opaque subject, and therefore the truth or value of those ethics cannot be definitively determined. For this reason, judgments over Sula’s choice needs to be filtered through a better understanding of how our identities are constituted by the relations we form. If Sula rejects society’s attempts to subjugate her, and she only connects with Nel as a child, then she doesn’t have sexual fidelity stitched into her psyche. After all, they were children when they formed their bond, and Sula’s fidelity to Nel seems to revolve around companionship, co-dependence, and comfort. Morrison tells us, “[Sula] had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down Jude. They had always shared the affection of other people” (p. 119). Her choice to sleep with Jude isn’t a reflection of her love or respect for Nel; it’s simply a reflection of her desire to have sex with Jude.
The composition of Sula’s character may seem unrealistic, but the question her behavior poses is worthy of investigation. Does Sula actually betray Nel? Or has Nel betrayed Sula? In her article, “The Continual Search for Sisterhood,” Cassandra Fetters argues, “Nel, of course, convinces herself that Sula’s betrayal of the friendship breaks apart her marriage, when in fact the marriage, in part, has caused the failure of the friendship, as Nel immediately rejects the part of herself that allowed the friendship to thrive as she takes on the role of ‘making one Jude’” (Fetters, p. 32). Morrison presents a problematic viewing of Sula—both sympathetically and detestably—while also clinging to and questioning Nel’s victimhood in light of conditioned ethical standards. Morrison challenges us not to pick a side. She wants us to flounder in our judgment of who these women are.
The Elusive “Mother”
Women, bearers of life and family, have endured the weight of judgement not only in relation to their sexual expression, but also in the ways they approach, understand, and navigate motherhood. Morrison’s Beloved tasks us with questioning our right to judge black mothers for seemingly unforgiveable acts by exploring the nature of traumatic violence that spreads across generations. In narrativizing black matrilineal violence, Morrison challenges the notion of who gets to be called “mother” by examining the ways in which black motherhood is “othered” by the constrictions of enslavement. She marks the shocking beginning of matrilineal violence for African slaves with a stilted, yet haunting gestalt of the collective and protractive experience of enslavement—or “othering” that leads to violent and oppressive subjugation—through the eyes of a young African girl. This girl both is and is not Beloved, the murdered child Morrison uses to demonstrate the effects of a contagious trauma that spreads across generations.
The “othering” of black motherhood in Beloved can be best visualized through the “chokecherry tree” shaped scar that mars Sethe’s back. Unlike the normative, chimeric representation of ancestral motherhood, Sethe’s “tree of life” is a disfiguring memorial to denied motherhood, whether it be through lynching or the duties of their master’s land. Sethe is subjugated to a motherhood robbed of its life force—both literally and figuratively—and her rejection of this subjugation is reflected in her rebellious decision to emotionally connect to her children. In contrast to her own mother, who remained emotionally distant from Sethe and murdered the children she birthed from the white men who raped her, Sethe took ownership of her children, refusing to renounce her motherhood despite being subjugated to a life that denies her the title of “mother.”
An escaped slave with four children, Sethe chooses to murder her children rather than see them in the hands of Schoolteacher again.
“[S]he was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them” (p ).
Beloved, the oldest daughter, is the only one who dies that day, but she later returns as a haunting entity that strengthens in direct relation to Sethe’s repression of her murder. The lesson here may be that we must confront the ghosts of our past in order to heal, but in Sethe’s choice, Morrison also investigates the concept of ethical relativism when confronted with the subjugation of the “other.” Sethe’s decision to kill her children falls well outside most historic and modern norms, but committing infanticide as a runaway slave is temporally unique. It’s Sethe’s attempts to recognize herself as a mother under impossible social conditions that truly create strife both inside and outside 124 Bluestone Rd.
When discussing how one goes about identifying themselves in a world not built for them, Butler says, “The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not precisely mine. They are not born with me; the temporality of their emergence does not coincide with the temporality of my own life” (p. 26). Sethe’s choice to kill Beloved exists in a temporal bubble, one where the established norms aren’t equipped to manage the firestorm of ethical quandaries slavery presents. A slave mother, being stripped of her right to humanity, is subjugated by norms she’s not even allowed to conform to. Butler claims there is a “negotiation” between the “self” and the norms they seek recognition in, but a slave mother has no power to negotiate. For this reason, many slave mothers depicted in Beloved show varying degrees of detachment, ambivalence, and open hostility to the children they bare.
When Sethe reflects on her love for her children, she tells Paul D: “Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they weren’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if wanted to” (Morrison, p. 191). Once she’s free, Sethe seeks to recognize herself within the norms of white motherhood by loving her children freely—or “too thick,” as Paul D later says (p. 193). He seeks to edify Sethe’s love for her children after learning why she killed Beloved, but any expectations of what a mother’s love can be and do cannot be codified when they exist within a multiplicity of possibilities. To that point, when Paul D compares Sethe’s choice to that of an animal, saying, “[y]ou got two feet, Sethe, not four” (p. 194), he’s ignoring the sharp edge of humanity that softens when wielded with mercy. An animal wouldn’t kill their child to save them from slavery. There are no mercy kills in the animal kingdom. Sethe’s choice, however foreign, is entirely human.
Does that mean she is innocent of wrong doing? I don’t know. I don’t think it can be known. By daring readers to defend the murder of a child, Morrison is throwing them into the deep end of ethical relativism . She presents the infanticide from three different perspectives in order to demonstrate how very differently the same event can be seen and understood. The more we know, the more tempted we are to forgive Sethe—the more tempted we are to question if forgiveness is even necessary. Like Sula, Beloved’s “narrative calls for identification with Sethe, while ultimately making that identification impossible” (Teller, p. 236). In every way she looked, Sethe saw expectations she refused to meet, and in giving her this trait, I think Morrison illuminates the impossibility of escape: we are all interpellated and subjugated from birth, and it is only our choices that define us.
Conclusion
To read Toni Morrison is to see the invisible strings that connect to shape our lives. Bold and provocative, Morrison’s novels challenge social norms in ways that expose the “othering” and subjugation of her characters, perhaps in hopes that readers will place her narratives against the backdrop of their own lives. In this way, Morrison prescribes her character’s mistreatment to the reader. She writes, "there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from. For the stranger is not foreign, she is random; not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter with which our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summons a ripple of alarm” (ch. 2).
Morrison’s commitment to presenting humanity as it is, rather than how we imagine it to be, gives her freedom to push back against false labels and truths. Limiting ourselves to one way to live, to see, to love or forgive, denies humanity its true capacity. She writes, "[t]he concept of what it is to be human has altered, and the word "truth" so needs quotation marks around it that its absence (its elusiveness) is stronger than its presence" (ch.2). Throughout her novels, Morrison exposes the brittle “truth” of what it means to be human by inviting readers to stop searching for truth and start examining why. It’s this invitation that makes Morrison a true visionary.
[1] See also Althusser (1971); Butler (1990); Bhabha (1994)
[2] On the invented savagery of the African people, Morrison writes: “What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American” (Playing, p. 38). Bhabha’s (1994) argues colonial mimicry is the white man’s “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as subject of a difference that is almost that same, by not quite (p. 86).
[3] Zebialowicz and Palasinski (2010)
[4] She writes: “Autonomy is freedom and translates into the much championed and revered "individualism," newness translates into “innocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and the erection of strategies for maintaining it; authority and absolute power become a romantic, conquering "heroism," virility, and the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others" (p. 44-5).
Works Cited
Als, Hilton. “Toni Morrison on Her Last Novel and the Voices of Her Characters.” 2015 New Yorker Festival By The New Yorker, 2015.
Althusser, Louis, and Ben Brewster. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays . New York, Monthly Review Press, 2001.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York, Routledge, 1994.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics, vol. 31, no. 4, Project Muse, 2001, pp. 22–40, doi:10.1353/dia.2004.0002.
Fetters, Cassandra. “The Continual Search for Sisterhood: Narcissism, Projection, and Intersubjective Disruptions in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Feminist Communities.” Meridians (Middletown, Conn.), vol. 13, no. 2, Duke University Press, Mar. 2016, pp. 28–55, doi:10.2979/meridians.13.2.03.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York, Random House, 1987.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye: A Novel. New York, Random House, 1970.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York, Random House, 1992.
Morrison, Toni. Sula: A Novel. New York, Random House, 1973.
Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2017. Kindle Edition.
Morrison, Toni. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: TheAfro-American Presence in American Literature." The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The University of Michigan, October 7, 1988, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Lecture.
Travis, Molly. “Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distancing and Ethics in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ and J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace.’” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 40, no. 2, Eastern Michigan University, July 2010, pp. 231–50, doi:10.1353/jnt.2010.0007.
Yorker, The. "Toni Morrison On Her Last Novel And The Voices Of Her Characters". The New Yorker, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/toni-morrison-on-her-last-novel-and-the-voices-of-her-characters. Accessed 4 Oct 2020.
Zebialowicz, Palasinski. “Probing Racial Dilemmas in ‘the Bluest Eye’ with the Spyglass of Psychology.” Journal of African American Studies (New Brunswick, N.J.), vol. 14, no. 2, Springer, June 2010, pp. 220–33, doi:10.1007/s12111-009-9100-y.
[1] See also Althusser (1971); Butler (1990); Bhabha (1994)
[2] On the invented savagery of the African people, Morrison writes: “What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American” (Playing, p. 38). Bhabha’s (1994) argues colonial mimicry is the white man’s “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as subject of a difference that is almost that same, by not quite (p. 86).
[3] Zebialowicz and Palasinski (2010)
[4] She writes: “Autonomy is freedom and translates into the much championed and revered "individualism," newness translates into “innocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and the erection of strategies for maintaining it; authority and absolute power become a romantic, conquering "heroism," virility, and the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others" (p. 44-5).
