The Sublime In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

The myth of rebirth is prevalent in agricultural societies from Africa to Asia based on the observation of the cycle of growth. But Pecola’s story is a deviation of this myth since she does not encounter a renewal but deterioration. While remaining unfocused, Morrison’s music moves from the mourner’s bench to a ‘jook’ joint and then to an uptown club in the city. But her central focus is the Black community.
The Bluest Eye presents the fundamental pattern of Morrison’s early novels: an isolated figure, cut off from the community, undergoes a harrowing experience, an ontologically threatening encounter with what is variously described as the unspeakable, the otherworldly, the demonic — that is, the sublime. In this encounter with the sublime, these characters are excluded from a general gathering of the community in beauty and harmony and are …show more content…
She is mentally fragmented and disintegrated both by the rejection of hers by her community as well as the unspeakable (i.e. her rape by her father). This is what Lyotard called the essence of the sublime ontological dislocation. Morrison’s central metaphor is the image of the splintered mirror which constitutes both form as well as content.
At the conclusion of The Bluest Eye, Morrison depicts Claudia’s meditation on Pecola’s fate. Claudia sees Pecola’s shattering as sterility and, finally, death which affects her community also. So the community not only fails to aid Pecola in her distress, but they are also complicit in her destruction. That destruction, as destruction everywhere, has its repercussions on them also. In the last pages of The Bluest Eye, Claudia realized that the seeds of marigolds she and her sister Frieda had planted had not grown. Pecola’s baby and her alcoholic father also are dead.