Bluest Eye vs Beloved: Exploration of Toni Morrison's work

 

Toni Morrison 

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Born :

Chloe Ardelia Wofford

February 18, 1931[1]

Lorain, Ohio, U.S.

Died :

August 5, 2019 (aged 88)

New York City, U.S.

Notable works :

The Bluest Eye (1970)

Sula (1973)

Song of Solomon (1977)

Tar Baby (1981)

Beloved (1987)

Notable awards :

Presidential Medal of Freedom

National Humanities Medal

Nobel Prize in Literature

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Occupation :

Novelist essayist children's writer professor.

Beloved

1. Summary of the story :

         This story begins in Cincinnati whereby Sethe, formerly a slave and currently a cook resides at 124 Bluestone Road. She lives with Denver, her daughter, and Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law. Fifteen years before the onset of the story, Sethe murdered her two-year-old daughter in an attempt to save her from being taken back to the bondage of slavery. Her community is aware of the murder and ostracizes Sethe. Her two sons, Howard and Buglar, escaped many years before the onset of the novel.

After the death of Baby Suggs, Sethe and Denver remain in the house alone. The baby’s ghost constantly haunts them. Strange people and even furniture are often seen mysteriously moving around the house. However, Sethe seems to have accepted her fate. However, Paul D. Garner, a former slave who knew Sethe back in their days of slavery, arrives at their home and moves in. Garner gets welcomed and becomes part of the family. Garner brings back some of the painful memories from both his and Sethe’s experiences. However, Denver grows jealous of the love and attention Sethe offers him. Nevertheless, the baby’s ghost has disappeared, and both Sethe & Denver find relief.

However, no sooner had Denver become complacent with the new family situation than a strange woman suddenly appeared at their home. She goes by the name Beloved and claims she is neither aware of her identity nor where she comes from. The deceased baby was also named Beloved.

Beloved lengthily interrogates Sethe about her past and appears to be aware of events only known to Sethe. This makes Seth rather uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she welcomes Beloved to stay with them because Denver was lonely and needed a friend. After that, Sethe is left wondering if Beloved could see an incarnate of her daughter. Garner does not want Beloved to stay but can do nothing about it. He is not the owner of the house; neither is he a legitimate family member.

2. Characters of the story :

1. Sethe :

        The main character of the novel, Sethe is an enslaved woman who first smuggles her two older boys to freedom and then escapes with her own baby girl children to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1855. A determined and strong character, she flees Sweet Home while pregnant with Denver and, once in Cincinnati, works to run the household of 124. Prior to the beginning of the novel, Sethe killed her own child when her former master, Schoolteacher, came to take her and her children back to work as slaves. In 1873, Sethe tries to make a new life with Paul D and then with Beloved, but is eventually overcome by Beloved and her painful past. By the end of the novel, she seems to have lost her mind, but also seems to have escaped Beloved’s haunting of her.

2. Denver :

         Denver is Sethe’s youngest child. She is quiet and independent, but also craves attention and love from Sethe and Beloved. She loves to hear Sethe tell her about her miraculous birth. Toward the end of the novel, she gathers enough courage to venture outside of 124 by herself and get help for Sethe. As the novel ends, she seems to have a potentially promising future and to have been saved from the past that controlled Sethe’s life. 

3. Baby Suggs :

           Baby Suggs is Halle’s mother, Sethe’s mother-in-law, and Denver’s grandmother. Halle buys her freedom before the events of the novel and, after establishing a life at 124 in Cincinnati, she becomes something of a preacher or holy person in the surrounding community, holding gatherings in the Clearing in the forest. But after Sethe kills her child, Baby Suggs becomes exhausted and withdrawn, caring only about seeing bits of color, and slowly dies.

4. Paul D : 

             Paul D was a slave at Sweet Home along with Halle, Sixo, and two other Pauls (Paul A and Paul F). He suffered greatly under Schoolteacher and also as a prisoner on a chain gang in Georgia. After the Civil War, Paul D spent years wandering around, unable to feel at home anywhere. This changes when he arrives at 124 and tries to settle down with Sethe, but he is forced out of the household by Beloved. He tries to repress his painful memories by keeping them in what he calls the tobacco tin where his heart once was, but Sethe and Beloved force him to confront his troubled past. Ultimately, he returns to care for Sethe, even after she seems to have lost her mind. 

5. Beloved : 

         It is never clear exactly who or what Beloved is. One day, she climbs out of the Ohio River with no memory of where she is from or who she is. She says she comes from “the other side” and has been looking for Sethe. She is, in some sense, the spirit of Sethe’s murdered child. But, as Denver recognizes at the end of the novel, she is also more. She can perhaps be understood as an embodiment of the seduction and danger of the past, as she causes Paul D and Sethe to remember and narrate their own personal stories and eventually become overwhelmed by them. She also seems to give voice to the pain and suffering of all slaves, as she is able to recall, somehow, the middle passage from Africa to the United States. Ella and the other women who come to rescue Sethe perceive her as a “devil child” and drive her away from 124 with song. 

6. Stamp paid  :

         Stamp Paid is a former slave who works on the Underground Railroad and helps bring Sethe to 124 by ferrying her across the Ohio River. Late in the novel, he tells Paul D about Sethe’s murdering her child, which causes Paul D to leave 124. Stamp Paid feels guilty for his part in Paul D’s abandonment of Sethe, and works to make amends.

7.Amy Denver :

                 Amy Denver is a white woman, who flees from her indentured servitude in an attempt to get to Boston and purchase some velvet. She encounters Sethe when Sethe is almost dying of exhaustion, pregnant, and running from Sweet Home. Amy cares for Sethe and helps get her to the Ohio River and freedom. She also helps Sethe give birth to Denver, who Sethe names after her.

8. Sixo

9.Howard and Buglar

10.Halle

11.Mr. and Mrs. Garner

12.Schoolteacher

13.Ella

3. Symbol of the story :

       

*The Ohio river : 

       As the border that demarcates the free teritory of Ohio from the nearby southern slave states, the Ohio River is of great significance.

*Sethe 's scar :

           Sethe’s scar on her back is an emblem and reminder of the physical cruelty of slavery. But the scar eerily resembles a beautiful tree.

* Paul D's tobaco tin :

        Paul D says that instead of a heart, he has a tobacco tin in his chest, where he keeps all of his painful memories and emotions.

4. Themes of the story:

1. Slavery :

   Through the memories and experiences of a wide variety of characters, Beloved presents unflinchingly the unthinkable cruelty of slavery. In particular, the novel explores how slavery dehumanizes slaves, treating them alternately as property and as animals. To a slave-owner like Schoolteacher, African-American slaves are less than human: he thinks of them only in terms of how much money they are worth, and talks of “mating” them as if they are animals. Paul D’s experience of having an iron bit in his mouth quite literally reduces him to the status of an animal. And Schoolteacher’s nephews at one point hold Sethe down and steal her breast milk, treating her like a cow.

Even seemingly “kind” slave-owners like Mr. and Mrs. Garner abuse their slaves and treat them as lesser beings. Slavery also breaks up family units: Sethe can hardly remember her own mother and, for slaves, this is the norm rather than an exception, as children are routinely sold off to work far away from their families. Another important aspect of slavery in the novel is the fact that its effects are felt even after individuals find freedom. After Sethe and her family flee Sweet Home, slavery haunts them in numerous ways, whether through painful memories, literal scars, or their former owner himself, who finds Sethe and attempts to bring her and her children back to Sweet Home. Slavery is an institution so awful that Sethe kills her own baby, and attempts to kill all her children, to save them from being dragged back into it. Through the haunting figure of Beloved, and the memories that so many of the characters try and fail to hide from, Beloved shows how the institutionalized practice of slavery has lasting consequences—physical, psychological, and societal—even after it ends. 

2.   Motherhood :

            At its core, Beloved is a novel about a mother and her children, centered around the relationship between Sethe and the unnamed daughter she kills, as well as the strange re-birth of that daughter in the form of Beloved. When Sethe miraculously escapes Sweet Home, it is only because of the determination she has to reach her children, nurse her baby, and deliver Denver safely. Similarly, Halle works extra time in order to buy the freedom of his own mother, Baby Suggs, before seeking his own freedom. The strength of mother-child bonds are further illustrated by the close relationship between Denver and Sethe, upon which Paul D intrudes.

But, within the novel, the strength of motherhood is constantly pitted against the horrors of slavery. In a number of ways, slavery simply does not allow for motherhood. On a basic level, the practice of slavery separates children from their mothers, as exemplified by Sethe’s faint recollections of her own mother. Since it is so likely for a slave-woman to be separated from her children, the institution of slavery discourages and prevents mothers from forming strong emotional attachments to their children. As Paul D observes of Sethe and Denver, “to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.” The scene in which Sethe is held down and robbed of her own breast milk shows, on a cruelly literal level, Sethe being robbed of her very bodily capability to be a nurturing mother. The conflict between motherhood and slavery is perhaps clearest in the central act of the novel: Sethe’s killing her own daughter. The act can be read two ways: on the one hand, it represents an act of the deepest motherly love: Sethe saving her children from having to endure slavery, believing that death is better. But on the other hand, it can also be interpreted as Sethe refusing to be a mother under slavery. Slavery would not allow her to be a real mother to her children, so she would rather not be a mother at all.   

3. Storytelling, Memory and the past :

         

         The past does not simply go away in Beloved, but continues to exert influence in the present in a number of ways. The most obvious example of this is the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter. Though literally buried, the baby continues to be present in 124 as a kind of ghost or poltergeist. But beyond this instance of the supernatural, Sethe teaches Denver that “Some things just stay,” and that nothing ever really dies. Sweet Home, for example, although firmly in Sethe’s past, continues to haunt her through painful memories and the reappearance of Schoolteacher and even Paul D. As the novel continually moves between present narration and past memory, its very form also denies any simple separation between past and present. Sethe’s term for this kind of powerful memory is “rememory”, a word that she uses to describe memories that affect not only the person who remembers the past, but others as well.

One of the ways in which memories live on is through storytelling. The novel explores the value but also the danger of storytelling. Storytelling keeps memories alive and Sethe’s telling Denver about her family and her miraculous birth gives Denver some sense of personal history and heritage. As stories spread between Sethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and Denver, personal memories give rise to a kind of collective oral tradition about the past, and offer former slaves the ability to tell their own story and define themselves, as opposed to constantly being defined by slave-owners, such as Schoolteacher (who takes notes for his own writings about his slaves). But storytelling also awakens painful memories, especially for Sethe and Paul D. Bringing up past pain can prevent characters from moving on. The end of the novel suggests that, after Beloved’s disappearance, people had to forget about her in order to go on living, as it repeats, “It was not a story to pass on.” But nonetheless, Toni Morrison’s novel does pass on the story of Beloved, suggesting that there still is some value in our learning about this painful story of the past, that as a nation we should not (and cannot) forget about the history of slavery.

One of the ways that communities find expression in Beloved is through song. Baby Suggs’ sermons are centered around song and dance, while the group of women that forces Beloved from the house does so by singing. Paul D and his fellow chain gang prisoners get through their labor by singing. A chorus of singing people provides the perfect example of the strength of operating as a community. The combined effect of a singing group is greater than that of all its individuals singing alone. Similarly, in order to endure slavery and its lasting effects, characters in Beloved rely on each other for strength.

4.community :

        As the practice of slavery breaks up family units, Beloved provides numerous examples of slaves and ex-slaves creating and relying upon strong communities beyond the immediate family. Baby Suggs’ congregation that gathers in the woods illustrates this, as neighboring African-Americans come together as a community. They come together again toward the end of the novel, as different families provide food for Sethe and Denver when they are in need and a large group of women come to 124 to exorcize, in a manner of speaking, Beloved from the house.

Even in the depths of slavery, when Paul D is on the chain gang, he and the other prisoners escape by cooperating as a team. And it is only through the communal network of the Underground Railroad that Sethe and many other slaves are able to find their way to freedom and establish new lives in the north. At the same time, the novel’s most tragic act—Sethe’s killing of her baby—is partially caused by a failure of community. The community’s resentment about the joyousness and opulence of the feast that Baby Suggs puts together—which the community interprets as being prideful—leads to the community’s failure to warn Baby Suggs or Sethe of Schoolteacher’s approach, and thus Sethe is unable to hide and instead is forced to act quickly and radically.

5.Home :

             Belovedd is split into three major sections, and each of these sections begins not with any description of a character, but with a short sentence describing Sethe’s house: “124 was spiteful.” Then, “124 was loud.” And finally, “124 was quiet.” As 124 is haunted, it seems to have a mind of its own and is almost a character of the novel in its own right. The house is extremely important to Baby Suggs and Sethe as a matter of pride. After escaping slavery, they are proud to finally have a home of their own (the ironically named Sweet Home was neither sweet nor a home for its slave inhabitants).

But the idea of a home is important in Beloved beyond the walls of 124. As a child, Denver finds a kind of home in a growth of boxwood shrubs, a place that feels her own. Paul D spends practically the whole novel searching for a home. He is unable to settle down anywhere and, after much wandering, finally arrives at 124 but gradually moves out of the home into the outdoor cold house before leaving to sleep in the church basement. Slavery has robbed Paul D, like many others, of a home so that, even after he finds freedom, he can never find a place where he feels he truly belongs. These characters’ attempts to find a home can be seen as a consequence of the original dislocation of African-American slaves from their African home, the horrible voyage known as the middle passage that is vividly recalled by Beloved.

   

 The Bluest Eye

 1. Summary of the story:

            

             Nine-year-old Claudia and ten-year-old Frieda MacTeer live in Lorain, Ohio, with their parents. It is the end of the Great Depression, and the girls’ parents are more concerned with making ends meet than with lavishing attention upon their daughters, but there is an undercurrent of love and stability in their home. The MacTeers take in a boarder, Henry Washington, and also a young girl named Pecola. Pecola’s father has tried to burn down his family’s house, and Claudia and Frieda feel sorry for her. Pecola loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is beautiful and that she is ugly.

Pecola moves back in with her family, and her life is difficult. Her father drinks, her mother is distant, and the two of them often beat one another. Her brother, Sammy, frequently runs away. Pecola believes that if she had blue eyes, she would be loved and her life would be transformed. Meanwhile, she continually receives confirmation of her own sense of ugliness—the grocer looks right through her when she buys candy, boys make fun of her, and a light-skinned girl, Maureen, who temporarily befriends her makes fun of her too. She is wrongly blamed for killing a boy’s cat and is called a “nasty little black bitch” by his mother.

         We learn that Pecola’s parents have both had difficult lives. Pauline, her mother, has a lame foot and has always felt isolated. She loses herself in movies, which reaffirm her belief that she is ugly and that romantic love is reserved for the beautiful. She encourages her husband’s violent behavior in order to reinforce her own role as a martyr. She feels most alive when she is at work, cleaning a white woman’s home. She loves this home and despises her own. Cholly, Pecola’s father, was abandoned by his parents and raised by his great aunt, who died when he was a young teenager. He was humiliated by two white men who found him having sex for the first time and made him continue while they watched. He ran away to find his father but was rebuffed by him. By the time he met Pauline, he was a wild and rootless man. He feels trapped in his marriage and has lost interest in life.

              Cholly returns home one day and finds Pecola washing dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and hatred that are fueled by guilt, he rapes her. When Pecola’s mother finds her unconscious on the floor, she disbelieves Pecola’s story and beats her. Pecola goes to Soaphead Church, a sham mystic, and asks him for blue eyes. Instead of helping her, he uses her to kill a dog he dislikes.

Claudia and Frieda find out that Pecola has been impregnated by her father, and unlike the rest of the neighborhood, they want the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they have been saving for a bicycle and plant marigold seeds. They believe that if the flowers live, so will Pecola’s baby. The flowers refuse to bloom, and Pecola’s baby dies when it is born prematurely. Cholly, who rapes Pecola a second time and then runs away, dies in a workhouse. Pecola goes mad, believing that her cherished wish has been fulfilled and that she has the bluest eyes.

2. Characters of the story:

    

*Pecola Breedlove :

               The protagonist of the novel, an eleven-year-old black girl who believes that she is ugly and that having blue eyes would make her beautiful. Sensitive and delicate, she passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates. She is lonely and imaginative.

*Claudia MacTeer  : 

                The narrator of parts of the novel. An independent and strong-minded nine-year-old, Claudia is a fighter and rebels against adults’ tyranny over children and against the black community’s idealization of white beauty standards. She has not yet learned the self-hatred that plagues her peers.

 

*Cholly Breedlove :

              Pecola’s father, who is impulsive and violent—free, but in a dangerous way. Having suffered early humiliations, he takes out his frustration on the women in his life. He is capable of both tenderness and rage, but as the story unfolds, rage increasingly dominates.

*Pauline Breedlove:

Pecola’s mother, who believes that she is ugly; this belief has made her lonely and cold. She has a deformed foot and sees herself as the martyr of a terrible marriage. She finds meaning not in her own family but in romantic movies and in her work caring for a well-to-do white family.

*Frieda MacTeer :

Claudia’s ten-year-old sister, who shares Claudia’s independence and stubbornness. Because she is closer to adolescence, Frieda is more vulnerable to her community’s equation of whiteness with beauty. Frieda is more knowledgeable about the adult world and sometimes braver than Claudia.

* Mrs. MacTeer:

Claudia’s mother, an authoritarian and sometimes callous woman who nonetheless steadfastly loves and protects her children. She is given to fussing aloud and to singing the blue.

*Mr. MacTeer

Claudia’s father, who works hard to keep the family fed and clothed. He is fiercely protective of his daughters.

  *Henry Washington

The MacTeers’ boarder, who has a reputation for being a steady worker and a quiet man. Middle-aged, he has never married and has a lecherous side.

*Sammy Breedlove

Pecola’s fourteen-year-old brother, who copes with his family’s problems by running away from home. His active response contrasts with Pecola’s passivity.

*China, Poland, Miss Marie

The local whores, Miss Marie (also known as the Maginot Line) is fat and affectionate, China is skinny and sarcastic, and Poland is quiet. They live above the Breedlove apartment and befriend Pecola.

*Mr. Yacobowski

The local grocer, a middle-aged white immigrant. He has a gruff manner toward little black girls.

*Rosemary Villanucci

A white, comparatively wealthy girl who lives next door to the MacTeers. She makes fun of Claudia and Frieda and tries to get them into trouble, and they sometimes beat her up.

*Maureen Peal

A light-skinned, wealthy black girl who is new at the local school. She accepts everyone else’s assumption that she is superior and is capable of both generosity and cruelty.

*Geraldine

A middle-class black woman who, though she keeps house flawlessly and diligently cares for the physical appearances of herself and her family (including her husband, Louis, and her son, Junior), is essentially cold. She feels real affection only for her cat.

*Junior

Geraldine’s son, who, in the absence of genuine affection from his mother, becomes cruel and sadistic. He tortures the family cat and harasses children who come to the nearby playground.

*Soaphead Church

Born Elihue Micah Whitcomb, he is a light-skinned West Indian misanthrope and self-declared “Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams.” He hates all kinds of human touch, with the exception of the bodies of young girls. He is a religious hypocrite.

*Aunt Jimmy

The elderly woman who raises Cholly. She is affectionate but physically in decay.

*Samson Fuller

Cholly’s father, who abandoned Cholly’s mother when she got pregnant. He lives in Macon, Georgia, and is short, balding, and mean.

*Blue Jack

A co-worker and friend of Cholly’s during his boyhood. He is a kind man and excellent storyteller.

*M’Dear

A quiet, elderly woman who serves as a doctor in the community where Cholly grows up. She is tall and impressive, and she carries a hickory stick.

*Darlene

The first girl that Cholly likes. She is pretty, playful and affectionate.

3.  Symbol of the story:

The House

The novel begins with a sentence from a Dick-and-Jane narrative: “Here is the house.” Homes not only indicate socioeconomic status in this novel, but they also symbolize the emotional situations and values of the characters who inhabit them. The Breedlove apartment is miserable and decrepit, suffering from Mrs. Breedlove’s preference for her employer’s home over her own and symbolizing the misery of the Breedlove family. The MacTeer house is drafty and dark, but it is carefully tended by Mrs. MacTeer and, according to Claudia, filled with love, symbolizing that family’s comparative cohesion.

Bluest Eye(s)

To Pecola, blue eyes symbolize the beauty and happiness that she associates with the white, middle-class world. They also come to symbolize her own blindness, for she gains blue eyes only at the cost of her sanity. The “bluest” eye could also mean the saddest eye. Furthermore, eye puns on I, in the sense that the novel’s title uses the singular form of the noun (instead of The Bluest Eyes) to express many of the characters’ sad isolation.

The Marigolds

Claudia and Frieda associate marigolds with the safety and well-being of Pecola’s baby. Their ceremonial offering of money and the remaining unsold marigold seeds represents an honest sacrifice on their part. They believe that if the marigolds they have planted grow, then Pecola’s baby will be all right. More generally, marigolds represent the constant renewal of nature. In Pecola’s case, this cycle of renewal is perverted by her father’s rape of her.

4. Themes of the story:

*Whiteness as the Standard of Beauty:

The Bluest Eye provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, the idealization of white beauty in the movies, and Pauline Breedlove’s preference for the little white girl she works for over her daughter. Adult women, having learned to hate the blackness of their own bodies, take this hatred out on their children—Mrs. Breedlove shares the conviction that Pecola is ugly, and lighter-skinned Geraldine curses Pecola’s blackness. Claudia remains free from this worship of whiteness, imagining Pecola’s unborn baby as beautiful in its blackness. But it is hinted that once Claudia reaches adolescence, she too will learn to hate herself, as if racial self-loathing were a necessary part of maturation.

        The person who suffers most from white beauty standards is, of course, Pecola. She connects beauty with being loved and believes that if she possesses blue eyes, the cruelty in her life will be replaced by affection and respect. This hopeless desire leads ultimately to madness, suggesting that the fulfillment of the wish for white beauty may be even more tragic than the wish impulse itself.

*Seeing versus Being Seen:

Pecola’s desire for blue eyes, while highly unrealistic, is based on one correct insight into her world: she believes that the cruelty she witnesses and experiences is connected to how she is seen. If she had beautiful blue eyes, Pecola imagines, people would not want to do ugly things in front of her or to her. The accuracy of this insight is affirmed by her experience of being teased by the boys—when Maureen comes to her rescue, it seems that they no longer want to behave badly under Maureen’s attractive gaze. In a more basic sense, Pecola and her family are mistreated in part because they happen to have black skin. By wishing for blue eyes rather than lighter skin, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently. She can only receive this wish, in effect, by blinding herself. Pecola is then able to see herself as beautiful, but only at the cost of her ability to see accurately both herself and the world around her. The connection between how one is seen and what one sees has a uniquely tragic outcome for her.

*The Power of Stories:

The Bluest Eye is not one story, but multiple, sometimes contradictory, interlocking stories. Characters tell stories to make sense of their lives, and these stories have tremendous power for both good and evil. Claudia’s stories, in particular, stand out for their affirmative power. First and foremost, she tells Pecola’s story, and though she questions the accuracy and meaning of her version, to some degree her attention and care redeem the ugliness of Pecola’s life. Furthermore, when the adults describe Pecola’s pregnancy and hope that the baby dies, Claudia and Frieda attempt to rewrite this story as a hopeful one, casting themselves as saviors. Finally, Claudia resists the premise of white superiority, writing her own story about the beauty of blackness. Stories by other characters are often destructive to themselves and others. The story Pauline Breedlove tells herself about her own ugliness reinforces her self-hatred, and the story she tells herself about her own martyrdom reinforces her cruelty toward her family. Soaphead Church’s personal narratives about his good intentions and his special relationship with God are pure hypocrisy. Stories are as likely to distort the truth as they are to reveal it. While Morrison apparently believes that stories can be redeeming, she is no blind optimist and refuses to let us rest comfortably in any one version of what happens. 

*Sexual Initiation and Abuse: 

To a large degree, The Bluest Eye is about both the pleasures and the perils of sexual initiation. Early in the novel, Pecola has her first menstrual period, and toward the novel’s end she has her first sexual experience, which is violent. Frieda knows about and anticipates menstruating, and she is initiated into sexual experience when she is fondled by Henry Washington. We are told the story ofCholly’s first sexual experience, which ends when two white men force him to finish having sex while they watch. The fact that all of these experiences are humiliating and hurtful indicates that sexual coming-of-age is fraught with peril, especially in an abusive environment.

In the novel, parents carry much of the blame for their children’s often traumatic sexual coming-of-age. The most blatant case is Cholly’s rape of his own daughterPecola, which is, in a sense, a repetition of the sexual humiliation Cholly experienced under the gaze of two racist whites. Frieda’s experience is less painful than Pecola’s because her parents immediately come to her rescue, playing the appropriate protector and underlining, by way of contrast, the extent of Cholly’s crime against his daughter. But Frieda is not given information that lets her understand what has happened to her. Instead, she lives with a vague fear of being “ruined” like the local prostitutes. The prevalence of sexual violence in thenovel suggests that racism is not the only thing that distorts black girlhoods. There is also a pervasive assumption that women’s bodies are available for abuse. The refusal on the part of parents to teach their girls about sexuality makes the girls’ transition into sexual maturity difficult.

*Satisfying Appetites versus Suppressing Them :

A number of characters in The Bluest Eye define their lives through a denial of their bodily needs. Geraldine prefers cleanliness and order to the messiness of sex, and she is emotionally frigid as a result. Similarly, Pauline prefers cleaning and organizing the home of her white employers to expressing physical affection toward her family. Soaphead Church finds physicality distasteful, and this peculiarity leads to his preference for objects over humans and to his perverse attraction to little girls. In contrast, when characters experience happiness, it is generally in viscerally physical terms. Claudia prefers to have her senses indulged by wonderful scents, sounds, and tastes than to be given a hard white doll. Cholly’s greatest moments of happinesses are eating the best part of a watermelon and touching a girl for the first time. Pauline’s happiest memory is of sexual fulfillment with her husband. The novel suggests that, no matter how messy and sometimes violent human desire is, it is also the source of happiness: denial of the body begets hatred and violence, not redemption.

Similarities between both story:

As a newly-founded discipline, cultural materialism refers to two separate scholarly endeavors: One is in the field of anthropology and the other in cultural studies. Cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies, especially in Britain. Its emphasis is on the importance of the attention to the issues of race, sexuality, gender, social classes, and slavery. In contrast to the traditional humanist readings that often neglected such issues and did not pay attention to the oppressed and the marginalized, cultural materialists consider these groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus opening a new approach to reading literary texts and literary criticism. Therefore, the focus of cultural materialists is on issues that have been disregarded for years. Toni Morrison is a great twentieth-century writer to whose writings we can apply matters of race, gender, sexuality, social class and rape. As a celebrated American writer, she is greatly concerned with the life and problems of African Americans. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize in 1993. Morrison gave inspiration to black women writers and generated a new kind of readership that was more alert about issues of 

                 The central motif of most of Morrison's works is the role that race plays in American life. Among the issues she addresses are the victimization of blacks, racial discrimination, motherhood, and the emotional and psychological problems posed to African Americans in a dominantly white society. Although there has been a great deal of research on matters of racism, slavery, African-American culture and Toni Morrison's works in recent years, there are still important issues that require further investigation. As for the available literature review, one may refer to Jennifer L. Pierce, in "Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Corporate Culture, and the Backlash against Affirmative Action" (2003), who argues that racing for innocence is a discursive practice which shows that racism still exists despite some practices that are supposed to deny racism and prove that it has disappeared. In Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness (1991), Doreatha Drummond Mbalia works on some of Morrison's novels and emphasizes on the struggle against race and racial problems. In addition, in "Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved" (1997), Pamela E. Barnett states that Beloved is haunted by the history and memory of rape specifically. Her emphasis falls on the depictions and allusions to rape that, according to her, are of greater importance than other signs of slavery like beating the slaves, which Morrison illustrates. Besides sociological points of view applied to the study of The Bluest Eye, recently some critics have attempted to employ psychoanalytical theories. For example, in "Probing Racial Dilemmas in the Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology" (2009), Anna Zebialowicz and Marek Palasinski use psychology as a tool to show and interpret the racial dilemmas of female characters in this novel. 2. DISCUSSION The two works that this study aims to investigate are Beloved and The Bluest Eye. Beloved contains many cultural materialist concerns such as race, gender, slavery, and rape. Encapsulating the problems and pressures of African Americans, Beloved is a kind of reminiscence of slavery in the twentieth-century American literature. Written in 1970 when the new movement of 'Black is Beautiful' was at its peak, The Bluest Eye stimulated new critical discussions about racism and sexism, as well as social, ethical and psychological issues about race, the female body, and black femininity (Zebialowicz and Palasinski 221). Although all of Morrison's novels can be good representatives of marginalized people, this study will investigate only Beloved and The Bluest Eye. As mentioned above, race and the issues concerning racism are significant in both Beloved and The Bluest eye. According to Winant, the significance of race does not decline. On the contrary, race continues to operate as an important and fundamental factor in culture and politics all around the world. He mentions that race is a way to know and interpret the social world (1). Therefore, matters of race and racism are always crucial topics of discussion not only in literature, but also in politics, economics, etc. In " Probing Racial Dilemmas in the Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology", Zebialowicz and Palasinsk state that according to McKittrick, since blacks have been denied equality and inclusion by imposing unfair and subjective views of race and place, they feel a great sense of discomfort and otherness in a society that is dominated by white people. She makes a comparison between Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece. She mentions that both writers are preoccupied with the ways to overcome the 

                 In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature", Toni Morrison argues that For three hundred years black Americans insisted that 'race' was no usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships. During those same three centuries every academic discipline, including theology, history and natural science, insisted 'race' was the determining factor in human development. When blacks discovered they had shaped or become a culturally formed race … suddenly they were told there is no such thing as 'race', biological or cultural, that matters and that genuinely intellectual exchange cannot accommodate it. It always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of 'race' when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist. But there is culture and both gender and race inform and are informed by it (3). In Morrison's novels, it is realized that the character's self-esteem and self-worth have been denigrated or even eliminated by racism, marginalization and oppression. Their skin color ,or more clearly, their degree of blackness shows their value. For instance, the light skinned blacks had a better position in society than darker ones. It was not an idea just among the white majority, but even blacks treated one another differently based on the degree of their blackness. These opinions were transferred from one generation to the next. Therefore, considering Morrison's characters, it becomes clear that racism and oppression are not limited to an individual's life, but also influence other generations. For cultural materialists, slavery is an important issue to be considered carefully in literary texts. According to Nieboer, "A slave is the property of another, politically and socially [a slave is] at a lower level than the mass of people, and [performs] compulsory labour" (4). The situation of African American people in the USA has always been problematic and disputable. Although abolition of slavery somehow improved hard conditions of slaves, they were not accepted in the society. Since in most situations African Americans did not possess an equal status like other members of society, they always had a feeling of being excluded and separated while fighting for equality. Although there are different kinds of slavery, when we think of it, the figure of black people comes to our mind unconsciously. But here the focus of our attention is on female slaves, whose suffering is twofold in Morrison's fiction. Not only does their skin color push them toward the margin, but also their gender causes their being doubly marginalized. Therefore, it seems that female slaves, throughout history, have become somehow invisible and mute. The life experiences of marginalized groups such as African Americans were highlighted in the works of both black and white writers. Beloved is an example of slave post-narrative works (contemporary literary works based on slaves' experiences). According to Chabot Davis, Morrison‟s text suggests that „a fictional account of the interior life of a slave might be more historically “real” than actual documents, which were often written from the perspective of the dominant culture‟ (248). One point about female slaves frequently appearing in many slave narratives is the vulnerability of their bodies. They cannot protect themselves. In addition to the severe and hard work that exceeded the physical ability of female slaves, black women were also slaves to the whims of their owners. Their bodies did not belong to themselves; they were forced to grant it to their owner whenever he wanted it. They were regarded as the property of their 

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 19 (2014) 17-23 -20- masters, which indicates female slaves' powerlessness. We can say that they were viewed and treated like sexual objects by their white masters and, even sometimes, by their family members. Therefore, many instances of rape and sexual abuse appear in literary works about slavery. In her works, especially Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison intends to remind readers of the history of slavery and its horrible issues and effects, something that she thinks has been avoided and forgotten in traditional slave narratives. According to Holden-Kirwan‟s article, in an interview with Bonnie Angelo of Time magazine, Toni Morrison stated that the American nation tries to forget the memory and history of slavery. She mentions that even the characters in Beloved do not want to remember the history of enslavement in America. Furthermore, Morrison notes that, “I [Morrison] don‟t want to remember, black people don‟t want to remember, white people don‟t want to remember” (415). On the contrary, Morrison's novels remind readers of the crime of slavery preferred to be forgotten by some. In these works, Morrison emphasizes the dehumanizing effects of slavery on slaves. Her focus is on the miserable condition of slaves, especially female ones, of whom Sethe is a perfect representative, since she is raped, mistreated, and violated. In Beloved, Sethe mentions that: "After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That's what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn't speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still." (Morrison, 1987: 16) In Beloved, Morrison reinvents the past and wants the reader not to forget what happened in African American history: "Morrison‟s critically acclaimed novel Beloved probes the most painful part of the African American heritage, slavery, by way of what she has called “rememory” -- deliberately reconstructing what has been forgotten (Kubitschek 115). The violators of slave women's bodies were not only their masters. In Beloved, even when Sethe was a free woman out of bondage, she experienced sexual abuse. Because she could not afford to pay for the engraving of her daughter's grave, she was forced to use her body as an object of commerce. The commercialization of the female body is quite obvious in the bargain the engraver proposes to Sethe, “you got ten minutes I‟ll do it for free” (5). Throughout Beloved it becomes clear that Sethe has killed her daughter to keep her away from slavery and its consequences. Fuston-White stated that it was not Sethe that killed her child, but it was the effect of slavery that caused Sethe to commit the crime: “It was not madness, but the reality of slavery, that drove Sethe to kill her child, fully aware of the act and its brutality, as well as its compassion” (464). Another example of infanticide is Charlotte Brooks‟ slave narrative in American Slaves Tell Their Stories. In this book, Rogers Albert makes six interviews with slaves. One of them is Charlotte Brooks. Like Sethe in Beloved, Aunt Charlotte kills her children. She thinks that it is better for them to die before becoming slaves. She mentions that: “They died for want of attention. I used to leave them alone half of the time. Sometimes old mistress would have someone to mind them till they got so they could walk, but after that they would have to paddle for themselves. I was glad the Lord took them, for I knowed they were better off with my blessed Jesus than with me” (8). One of the experiences that most of the female slaves shared was being raped. In Beloved too, the main figure of the story, Sethe, was raped and her milk was stolen. Some 

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 19 (2014) 17-23 -21- poets, such as Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, and June Jordan consider rape as a battle and women's bodies as a battleground. Black women as the second class citizens of America were forced to tolerate so many sufferings. Greatly vulnerable, their bodies were a site for white men‟s representation of power and oppression. Unlike other people, black women could not think of freedom, let alone enjoying it. In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Linda Brent writes, “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him” (33). Brent‟s book renders a vivid account of the miserable and intolerable life of female slaves. Female slaves fully recognized rape as a hazard in their life, but they could not avert it. The theme of rape and child abuse that has been used by Morrison in her novels is a point that some writers have investigated. In Toni Morrison (1990), Wilfred D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems mention that although now child abuse, incest, and rape are highly publicized topics and people can speak about them, in the past they were not as today. These topics once were socially unmentionable and unaddressed though secretly known. It was Morrison who readily explored them in her pioneering first novel, The Bluest Eye (14). Narrating the hazards of slave life, Morrison‟s novels illustrate the history of enslavement and the condition of slaves. Morrison uses marginalized characters as the protagonists of her novels. This attention to marginalized people, their problems in a white dominant society, racial discrimination, and issues of gender and sexuality has made Morrison's novels great sources for cultural materialist studies. Morrison in The Bluest Eye states that: "I focused, therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female" (170). Another focus of attention for cultural materialists is the social hierarchical system. Issues concerning social class and class distinction have always been important for cultural materialists and critics interested in cultural studies. Among many other definitions, social classes have been identified as "large groups among which unequal distribution of economic goods and/or preferential division of political prerogatives and/or discriminatory differentiation of cultural values result from economic exploitation or political oppression" (Outhwaite et al 81). Many writers have considered these matters in their works. Having a glimpse at the large bulk of African American novels, we realize that their themes mainly revolve around class distinction and other issues related to cultural materialism. In A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry considers racial and gender issues and focuses on the class distinction between blacks and whites. It clearly shows the black Americans living condition under racial segregation. In this regard, Toni Morrison is one of the well-known writers accentuating class distinction and its effects on its members in many of her works, such as The Bluest Eye (1970), Tar Baby (1981) and Song of Solomon (1977). In the two novels under investigation in this study, Beloved and The Bluest Eye, social class plays a very significant role. Besides other factors, like skin color, gender, ancestry, and wealth that create a kind of borderline between people, social class also generates some prejudices. In other words, for Morrison, the ancestry and history of characters are greatly significant, since they cause different social classes and unequal conditions. Morrison argues that a distinctive characteristic of African American writing is its focus on the ancestors. According to her, „these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom‟ (Morrison, 1984:343). 

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences 19 (2014) 17-23 -22- Pecola, the little girl in The Bluest Eye, is a good example of class distinction. She yearns to have blue eyes to achieve an acceptable position in the community. She is a marginalized and oppressed character. Her skin color, social class, and ancestry do not allow her an equal status with other white girls. It seems that she has always been in periphery. This is clear in the voice of the narrator in The Bluest Eye: "We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt" (3). In both novels the ideology of the upper class is dominant and superior, and it is the lower class that must submit to their whims and wills. In Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Bell Hooks works on feminist history and various forms of oppression. He states that: As far back as slavery, white people established a social hierarchy based on race and sex that ranked white men first, white women second, though sometimes equal to black men, who are ranked third, and black women last. What this means in terms of the sexual politics of rape is that if one white woman is raped by a black man, it is seen as more important, more significant than if thousands of black women are raped by one white man. (52) According to this classification, black women are in the lowest status and inferior to other groups. They must try so hard to be accepted by society. In Beloved too, Sethe appears as an inferior black woman who greatly suffers mistreatment. Because of her social status, her white master exploits her as he wishes. Sethe seems to have no right to defend herself. 3. CONCLUSIONS As the elements of race, social class, slavery, and sex are so significant in Toni Morrison‟s novels, cultural materialists and critics interested in cultural issues investigate her novels from several perspectives. Taking advantage of the above mentioned issues in her fiction, Morrison has made readers aware of the calamities that African Americans face in their life. Morrison has pierced into the minds of her characters, revealing their thoughts perfectly. Her works can be a great help to move the position of blacks and especially black females from margin to center. Furthermore, the significance of Morrison's fiction falls on its capacity to combine issues of race, gender, sexuality, and social class simultaneously. The point about her novels is that although matters of racism and slavery are central, she has not disregarded other issues. That is, Morrison's novels demonstrate universal truths about the human condition and that is why her fiction is appealing to both white and black audiences. This study was an attempt to examine Morrison‟s Beloved and The Bluest Eye from cultural perspectives, and to indicate the great attention she paid to minorities. 

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