“NOBODY PAID US ANY ATTENTION, SO WE PAID VERY GOOD ATTENTION TO OURSELVES”: GIRLHOOD IN TONI MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE

​This article analyzes Toni Morrison’s ​The Bluest Eye in order to demonstrate how the age, gender and race of the main characters influence the narrative and in fact make the story what it is. The analysis is based on the idea of ​ritualistic violence discussed in Azevedo (2001), the common denominators of American childhood listed by Mintz (2009), the significance dolls have in American girlhood, as explored by Jacobs (2008), and the characteristics commonly found in transitional chapter books specifically about African American young girls discussed by McNair and Brooks (2012). The article demonstrates the ways in which these factors work together in shaping the lives of the three young girls that are in the center of the narrative.


One of the main aspects of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
is that it not only tells a story which is primarily focused on female characters, but these characters are also children. Though The Bluest Eye has many characters from all ages and of both genders, the center of the narrative is Pecola Breedlove, a young girl, and the main narrator is another, Claudia MacTeer; in 1941, when the main events of the novel are set, they were both children: Claudia was nine and Pecola was eleven.
The Bluest Eye narrates the stories of two black families living in Lorain, Ohio, a town where the majority of the population is white. Claudia and Frieda MacTeer are part of a family that, although poor and susceptible to racism, is perfectly integrated in their own community. Pecola Breedlove, on the other hand, is the daughter of Pauline and Cholly, outsiders who suffer from their own severe troubles: Pauline's sense of self-worth and self-esteem are destroyed by many factors -her continued exposure to limiting and exclusionary beauty standards is the main one; Cholly is an alcoholic and was a victim of abuse and abandonment. Set in 1941 -a year in which Pecola is abused, raped and gets pregnant but loses her baby and her sanity along the way -, the novel takes a non-linear approach to its story; the narrative often goes back in time in order to show us how a cycle of violence, self-hatred and detachment ultimately destroyed young Pecola. Pecola believes she is ugly -a belief reinforced by those around her -, and that it is her ugliness that prevents her from being loved, so she desperately wishes she could have blue eyes and thus become beautiful.
In a paper that discusses the notion of ritualistic violence , in which an entire community sacrifices a single victim as a scapegoat in order to achieve a purpose, Azevedo (2001) states that "the violence -physical or psychologicalwaged against the woman [is] a common denominator to all Morrison's novels" (p. 469). According to the author, in this procedure a victim must be sacrificed in order to correct a perceived social crisis; in the case of The Bluest Eye , it is the loss of traditional black values in a community that suffers from the influence of the white majority and has internalized a learned self-hatred. A victim is then chosen as the single reason for the crisis -and his or her sacrifice in theory would bring the world back to order. A specific person is chosen as scapegoat because they have characteristics that are perceived as likely to cause problems, and Pecola Breedlove bears many signs, making her the perfect scapegoat: She is dark, in a society that equates whiteness with beauty and virtue, and blackness with worthlessness; she is a female child in a strongly patriarchal society which discriminates women and children.
As a Black child very few people, if any, would stand below her in the social scale (p. 475).
Pecola's family is comprised exclusively of outsiders, she is passive and does not react to anything that is done to her and, of course, she is both female and a child -which is no small detail. As explained by Azevedo, in a patriarchal society the "female members occupy the very lowest position on the social scale" (p. 470).
Thus, blackness, infancy, and womanhood/girlhood are all signs of exclusion.
The notion of girls and women on the receiving end of continued violence is further explored by Roye (2012 Jimmy and her circle of old female friends, he says that "Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders" (p. 138) -and this "everybody" covers white children, women and men, as well as black men. However, the narrator continues on the same paragraph: "The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other". From this passage we can infer that, among the adults, black women were in the lowest possible position. And if black women were only over black children in the social scale, it is safe to conclude that being Black little girls were as low as one could get. Pecola, Claudia and Frieda are, then, occupying the lowest positions in the hierarchy; Pecola the lowest of them all, probably because she is poorer, and because she is not well integrated into the community, as Azevedo (2001) proposes in her article. In interviews, Morrison herself has discussed this notion of young black girls always occupying a peripheral space in literature: girls "who were props, background" (STROUSE apud ROSENBERG, 1987, p. 436), girls who were "never taken seriously by anybody" (DUVALL apud ROYE, 2012, p. 212).
Both of these issues appear in the novel.
The fact that the main characters of The Bluest Eye are both female and children has a direct influence on their actions and understanding of the world, and this is evident from the beginning of the narrative. There are two major parts in this novel, which are composed of smaller parts -we could call these smaller parts chapters. One of the major parts is comprised of several chapters which are prefaced by a passage from the Dick and Jane primers for young readers and told by an The time narrated, though, is different from the moment of the narration. This is clear, for example, when Claudia talks about the white dolls she got as (very special) Christmas gifts and wanted to destroy in order to understand what was it that made them -and white girls -so special. She says: "It was a small step to 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" (p. 23). There are many moments in which the narrator discusses the way she was then -then she did not love Shirley Temple yet, then she was still in love with herself (p. 74 ), then she was still confident, not knowing her limitations (p. 191). When narrator-Claudia states that all of that was true back then , when she was a child, it is implied that at some point of her process of growing up all of that changed. Children learn from their surroundings, like Pecola learned from her parents -and from a very racist society -that she was ugly. Even though it is clear that Claudia never experienced the amount of trauma that her friend did, she certainly went through an "educational process" (KLOTMAN, 1979, p. 125) of her own.
The educational process that children go through because they are still building their own identity and only beginning to understand a world in which they are not considered full citizens yet is one of the aspects of childhood that appear in The Bluest Eye . There are, however, many more -the following section is dedicated to discussing them.

Steven Mintz (2009) discusses the ways in which the cultural
understanding of childhood has changed over time in America, always emphasizing that it has never been the same for all children, because every aspect of it is shaped by class, ethnicity, and gender, for example. The author reminds us that childhood is a social construct. The discussion about American children in general terms is possible, and Mintz does that, but it is important to keep in mind that affirmations are always generalizations and could not represent the exact truth for each and every child. In The Bluest Eye itself we can see that: even though Claudia and Pecola are both young girls living in the same community at the same time, and they are both black and part of the poor working class, their lives are undoubtedly different.
According to Mintz (2009), it was in the eighteenth century that adults started to see childhood as a part of life that needed to be sheltered, protected, kept at a distance from adult reality. He states, however, that "universalizing the modern ideal of a sheltered childhood was a highly uneven process and one that has never encompassed all American children" (p. 8). Mintz also states that childhood has never been "an age of innocence, at least not for the overwhelming majority of children. Childhood has never been insulated from the pressures and demands of the surrounding society" (p. 4).
Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, being very young children, are kept at a distance from adults. Claudia states: "Adults do not talk to us -they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information" (p. 10). And later: "We do not, cannot, know the meaning of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old" (p. 15). Adults do not talk to them, they do not help them understand the world -like Claudia says, they do not provide information. At the same time, the girls are not necessarily sheltered , because adults talk in front of them. When Claudia says that she and Frieda cannot always understand the meaning of their words, for example, their mother and other women from the neighborhood are discussing their new roomer, Mr. Henry, and his relationships with women -an adult matter. When the MacTeer girls find out that Pecola is pregnant, it is through the bits of conversations they hear in the houses of neighbors. They are invited to come into the houses, and the adults just talk in front of them. They are never invited to join any conversations, however. So they come up with their own interpretations of the situations around them.
It is the case of them witnessing girls first getting their periods and of the meanings they attribute to pregnancy and babies, for example. When Pecola menstruates for the first time, which happens during the brief period in which she is staying with the MacTeers, Frieda is the only one who understands what is happening. She explains it in very simple terms to the other girls: it meant that Pecola could "have a baby" (p. 28). The topic of menstruation comes up again when the three girls are with their widely beloved classmate Maureen Peal. Maureen actually calls it "menstrate" and seems slightly confused by how periods work.
After Pecola menstruates for the first time and finds out that she was from that moment on able to have a baby, she is curious regarding how to do it. Frieda explains to her that she needs someone to love her. Thus, they associate being pregnant with love, necessarily. When Pecola gets pregnant, they cannot fully grasp what it meant for an eleven-year-old to be pregnant and, more than that, that she had been raped by her own father and was carrying his baby, conceived through violence. Claudia says: "the process of having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to us -at least she knew her father" (p. 190-191 It is also interesting to notice that, as mentioned by Mintz (2009), "during the eighteenth century, a shift in parental attitudes took place. Fewer parents expected children to bow or doff their hats in their presence or stand during meals.
Instead of addressing parents as 'sir' and 'madam,' children called them 'papa' and 'mama.'" (p. 15). This cultural change happened more or less at the same time when society started seeing children as people living a separate stage of life, no longer "adults in training" they were considered to be before. Claudia and Frieda call their parents "mama" and "daddy" among themselves (sometimes addressing their mother as "ma'am"), but Pecola calls her mother "Mrs. Breedlove", which shows the complete distance there is between daughter and mother.
Another aspect of these girls' childhoods that is visible throughout the novel is that their first reaction to every problem that comes their way is to always try to solve it on their own. Adults do not talk to them, Claudia tells us very early in her narration, and she also states that she and Frieda, being children, never initiated talk with them as well. They only answered to the grown-ups. So they probably felt like they were in no position to ask questions.
The fact that young children did not initiate conversations with adults is combined with two other aspects within the novel. One, that all of them are afraid of their mothers. When Pecola menstruates and Frieda is trying to help her, for example, the latter tells Claudia: "be quiet, or Mama will hear you" (p. 28). When Frieda is molested by the roomer and is crying in her room, Claudia assumes the whole time that their mother had whipped her at some point. And they try to deal with everything on their own on both occasions. They try to help Pecola and clean the spots of blood on their own until their neighbor Rosemary sees everything and tells Mrs. Macteer that the girls were "playing nasty" (p. 30). When Frieda is molested and says she is afraid of "being ruined", despite both sisters not knowing for sure what exactly that meant, they decide to do something in order to stop it from becoming true. In Claudia's mind, it means getting big and fat like the prostitute Maginot Lineshe suggests that Frieda could "exercise and not eat" (p. 101). They realize that the solution to the problem is drinking whiskey, like the prostitutes do, and they decide to look for it in Pecola's house, since her father was always drunk.
The second aspect is that usually the first reaction adults have when something happens to the children is to scold them. When the girls are accused of "playing nasty" by their neighbor, they all get a whipping, in spite of their protests. Of course, once Mrs. MacTeer realizes what was actually happening, she immediately starts to help Pecola. She does not apologize, but Claudia (who said in the beginning that they did not hear the words adults spoke, but rather looked at and listened to them) states that "her eyes were sorry" (p. 31). When Claudia destroys the white dolls she gets as gifts, there is actually a very profound reason behind it, even if she does not fully compreenhend it yet. Understandably, though, the grown-ups reprehend her for not taking care of the special gifts that were given to her. But Claudia, also understandably, complains: "nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want anything to own, or to possess any object" (p. 21). The third-person narrator also mentions, later on when talking about Cholly's personal history, that adults "treated him like the child he was, never engaging into serious conversation" (p. 140). That silence was part of being a child.
Another aspect that appears in Claudia's narration and is very typical of happened; what she knows is that she is often not included in things that she wants to participate in -probably simply because she cannot participate.
These are some of the ways in which being children shapes the experiences of Claudia, Frieda and Pecola -in different ways because they live in households with different family arrangements, which has an impact in their lives and sense of well-being. There are, furthermore, aspects of their lives which are shaped by the fact that they are not only children but also girls . This is what will be discussed in the next section.

HOW GIRLHOOD SHAPES THEIR EXPERIENCES
In their paper, McNair and Brooks (2012)  When Pecola, who was always the only child to always sit alone in school and was always made fun of, is being bullied by a group of boys after class, Frieda rapidly intervenes, even if she and Claudia were afraid themselves that the boys would then proceed to bully them . The girls are there to defend a friend in a time of need, putting her well-being over their own. Because they are children, it is also very moving that by the end of the novel they decide to give up their hopes of getting a new bicycle in order to make a "deal" with God so Pecola's baby could be saved. McNair and Brooks, quoting Collins (2010), bring to their analysis the idea that black female writers see the importance of the relationships that black women establish with each other. This is present in The Bluest Eye . There is a passage in which a young boy with violent tendencies, Junior, who enjoys picking at girls, thinks: "The nigger girls he did not pick on very much. They usually traveled in packs, and once when he threw a stone at some of them, they chased, caught and beat him witless." (p. 87-88) As a young girl, Claudia also tries to resist the dominating beauty standards imposed on her, which were so destructive for both Pauline and Pecola, who are part of different generations. But she is still young (the youngest of the girls), so, as she states herself, back then she had yet to develop a sense of vanity. By then she was still comfortable in her own skin. When she meets Maureen Peal, a much-beloved classmate who has lighter skin, and the latter affirms that she, Maureen, is cute and the other girls are ugly, Claudia starts to think about beauty.
And she questions the widespread ideas about it: "What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?" (p. 74).
The same sense of resistance appears when she tears the white dolls apart. Jacobs (2008)  Her only interest in the dolls was in dismembering and destroying them in order to understand what was it that made them so beautiful, so cute, so widely adored by everyone. This is an aspect of childhood that was specific to girls. Boys were not presented with dolls that never looked like them nor were they supposed to be their pretend-fathers; they were not presented with toys that were "cute" or representative of society's beauty standards.
Beauty standards are very important for these girls because for girls the idea of love and being loved is connected with beauty from a very early age. Roye (2012) states that "[Pecola's brother] Sammy dreams of escaping his horrible home-life and finally does. This is not a viable option for a female child like Pecola, whose dream is to vanish or to somehow magically acquire blue eyes, which, she thinks, will make her more lovable" (p. 219). Pecola learns from the culture that surrounds her that white skin, blond curls, and blue eyes mean beauty -because Shirley Temple and little girls who looked like her were considered the cutest things in the world. In a way, it is like her mother, who learned from the movies that she was not beautiful. When Pauline loses a tooth, she loses all hopes of ever being beautiful -beautiful meaning, of course, looking as much as possible like the women she saw on the movie screens. But Pecola also learns that she is not beautiful from her own peers. In school, mockingly telling a boy that he loved Pecola Breedlove was a way to be "particularly insulting to a boy" (p. 46). So Pecola thoroughly believes that if she could have a pair of blue eyes her life would be better -maybe even her parents would be different.
And Pecola wants to be loved, of course. When Frieda tells her that for her to have baby someone has to love her first, Pecola asks the MacTeer sisters: "How do you do that? I mean, how do you get someone to love you?" (p. 32) -a question which had never crossed Claudia's mind before, but that she does not know how to answer. When Pecola is visiting the prostitutes, she asks Miss Marie twice how she managed to get so many boyfriends. The second time, she adds: "How come they all love you?" (p. 53). And as Marie tells her a story about a man named Dewey, Pecola wonders about love: what did it feel like? She has no love at home, and the idea of ever being loved is something that she simply cannot grasp.
Another aspect of these girls' lives that is very present is the constant unwanted sexual advances that come from all around them. They are never safe, anywhere, including in their own houses. Mintz (2009) states that "[Alfred Kinsey's] interviews indicated that exhibitionists had exposed themselves in front of 12 percent of pre-adolescent girls and that 9 percent of the girls had had their genitals fondled" (p. 19). The first of these situations is implied in the narrative (though not necessarily as happening to any of the three girls, but to some girl in the past) and the second one is actually depicted. This is the dialogue that happens when Frieda tells Claudia what Mr. Henry did to her: "He… picked at me." "Picked at you? You mean like Soaphead Church?" "Sort of." "He showed his privates at you?" how Pecola's tragic story of emotional and sexual abuse, which ultimately led to the loss of her sanity, interested people only vaguely. Pecola was merely another topic of kitchen gossip, and her story is made even crueler by that.
These little girls occupy the lowest position in the social hierarchy, and they are supposed to be deferential to absolutely everyone. They are not in a position to initiate conversation, and they are not taken seriously if they ever try, so they attempt to solve their problems on their own. As Claudia puts it: "Nobody paid attention to us, so we paid very good attention to ourselves" (p. 191). Their solutions, however, often prove to be very inefficient -since adults do not talk to them, they lack the knowledge or experience necessary to act in an effective way.
These little girls often find themselves tiptoeing around other people.
Claudia and Frieda constantly try to do things behind their mother's back because they are afraid of being scolded or beaten up (and not completely without reason, since their mother's first reaction always seems to be to scold them, even if it is clear that she cared about her children). They fear running into a well-known pedophile that lives in the neighborhood. They fear that they themselves would become the victims of the bullying of the schoolboys if they tried to help a friend. And yet their sense of solidarity to each other is strong -so they defend Pecola from those boys, they help Pecola with her menstruation, Claudia goes with her sister on a pursuit of whiskey so Frieda is not "ruined".
As children, they absorb much from their surroundings. They learn that they are not beautiful -some of them believe it, some of them question it and try to resist it. Pecola believes it so much that she links that belief to the lack of love she experiences, something which causes much anxiety in her. If Claudia realizes that she, like Pecola, does not know the answer to the question about how to make someone love them, she says that she had never thought about that before. Her parents may not know how to express that love in words, but deep down she understands how real it is. Therefore, that is not something that she worries about.
The girls' backgrounds, their family structures, inform who they are -and who they later become.
Choosing to tell the stories of young girls was not a random choice made by Toni Morrison. These stories are what they are because their protagonists are who they are: young, female, Black, poor. The lowest members of the social scale, who -in different ways, it is true -have to look after themselves and each other in a world that too often resists them. Sadly, for every Claudia who thrives despite everything that is against her, there is a Pecola, for whom it is "much, much, much too late" (MORRISON, 1994, p. 206).