Harsh Realities and Glimpses of Hope: A Tale of Black Joy
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye tells the grim yet hopeful story of the Breedlove family. Cholly and Pauline Breedlove are depicted to live a content, passionate life as young adults in Kentucky, loving one another with tenderness and joy. Upon their movement to the North for more job opportunities, Pauline and Cholly’s marriage is strained. It might seem that this migration would present new opportunities for growth, but in fact, this new environment is the beginning of their downfall. Despite this, their Black joy is an erasable facet of life and is an illustration of humanity and soulfulness through pain, pleasure, and happiness. Threaded throughout this devastating tale are moments of hope centered on the humanity and essence of Pauline Breedlove. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts a Black woman struggling with the realities of living a life of hardship and oppression in the 1940s yet highlights the triumphs and beauty that is Black joy.
The Breedloves began as a content, healthy couple in the South, but their migration to the North spurred on their downfall. Being ninth of eleven children, Pauline Williams often felt anonymous within her own family, so she would quietly busy herself with organizing items around the house, first jars of peaches and then stones out in the garden. Then, when she turned fifteen, Pauline began to dream of a stranger who would comfort and care for her, someone who would offer a sense of belonging instead of anonymity. This stranger is someone tender, loving, and understanding. Unexpectedly, Pauline meets Cholly, the man she dreamed of. In wonderful descriptions of color and fantasy, Pauline recalls that “[w]hen I first seed Cholly, I want you to know that it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil’ren went berry picking…I could feel that purple deep inside me” (115). From there, Cholly Breedlove sweeps Pauline off her feet, their love embodied in his physical touch, a walk in the town or the fields, and through a sharing of his city and her country knowledge. The two quickly marry, and their joy in one another appears to be endless. Pauline and Cholly share a love strengthened and fostered by an alike community of hospitable, Southern Black folk. Later on, however, in hopes of new work, Cholly and Pauline move to the North in Lorain, Ohio. The North was a different environment for them, one with few Black neighbors and mostly white neighbors who both were less receiving to Pauline and Cholly’s Blackness. It was then when Pauline and Cholly’s relationship began to falter, losing the colorful passion and soul of the South and becoming overrun with isolation in the North.
Throughout the novel, Pauline Breedlove especially suffers from a lack of community within a hostile environment, catalyzing the internalization of popularized societal norms. The North proves to be a challenging atmosphere for Pauline to feel solidified in soul and psyche. In Kentucky, Cholly and Pauline were surrounded by people who dressed, spoke, acted, and thought like them, and Pauline had a community to fall back onto and protect her from hostility and a lack of acceptance. Yet now, while Cholly works all day, Pauline is left alone in a town with women who look nothing like her. These women straighten their hair, wear high heels, and adorn themselves with flawless makeup, and Pauline simply cannot relate to them. Being constantly surrounded by these people, she cannot help but be reminded of the absolute segregation of race. Without the buffers of the South, the familiar scenery and alike community, Pauline becomes vulnerable and loses her sense of self.
Pauline’s newfound vulnerability marks the beginning of her marriage’s downfall. With nothing to do and no one to call a friend, Pauline found interest in watching movies and working for a “pretentious.” white family (119). By unintentionally surrounding herself with imagery of nuclear families and idealized, perfect romances on the silver screen, Pauline slowly internalized these characters into a role she aspired to play. She is enraptured by the “[w]hite men [in the movies] taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses…[t]hem pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard” (123). No longer did she see those bright colors that once decorated her and Cholly’s relationship; she only sees the beautiful, happy, white women in the media. Pauline, now susceptible to adopting cultural and social norms, is slowly drained of any self-love and respect that she had carried in the South.
Morrison depicts Black joy as an inherent and powerful thing through Pauline Breedlove’s life story. From her connection to the South with her community and to her first moments of falling in love, Pauline began her life with hope and fervor. The country, although divided, could not devastate her as she was stable through love and representation. Despite it all, Pauline remained herself alongside other Black men and women who experienced the same struggles.
Pauline Breedlove proves to be a woman who knew Black joy intimately in the South and still so but less in the North. Black joy is something that is experienced daily through tribulations and moments of success, yet it cannot be encapsulated into a singular definition. Kleaver Cruz, creator of the Black Joy Project, describes Black joy as not erasure of the hardships of Black experience but a recognition of life, power, community, peace, among other things (The Root, 2021).
Pauline Breedlove experienced this joy while cleaning her house as a girl and later making love with her newly wedded husband. Although not as prominent as the aforementioned experiences, Pauline could never lose touch of the inherent, powerful thing that is Black joy. Hardship can illustrate Black joy just as well as triumphs, and thus Black joy is shown to be a part of everyday life, in the simplest endeavors or the grandest. Pauline Breedlove of the The Bluest Eye is made vulnerable by the idealization of white values, but forever holds the natural beauty and power of Blackness and Black joy.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts a Black wife and mother at unease, conflicted about her identity and sources of validation. Pauline Breedlove is particularly susceptible to the mainstream imagery of white women with wealthy and attractive husbands and her surrounding Ohio community who look nothing like her. Cultural and societal norms have such a grip on Pauline’s sense of self that she actively wishes to perform a role that could never fulfill her soul. However, the ideals of the movies, unaccepting Black women, and pretentious white women of the North could never take Black joy away from Pauline. Morrison graphically portrays the cruelty and devastation Black women might have experienced in the 1940s and depicts the importance of community and love in this world that seeks to remove individualities and disregard intersectionality.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage International, 2007.
The Root. (2021). Black and Jubilant: Unpacking Black Joy From the Revolutionary to the Ordinary. The Root. Retrieved July 2021, from https://www.theroot.com/black-and-jubilant-unpacking-black-joy-from-the-revolu-1846288040