The Blues in the Bluest Eye

Despite its name, blues music is a rainbow of variety; country blues, urban blues, jazz blues, modern blues, Chicago blues, Detroit blues, with the list going on and on.  Blues music is what it sounds like when the heart is ripped open and all of the pain and love and emotions flow out.  Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Etta James, Catfish Keith, and dozens of others who have popularized the blues genre also have characterized the stereotypical sadness of a blues song.  Bessie Smith’s famous Downhearted Blues is a prime example of the display of emotion in a blues song.

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye could easily be sang to the sultry, slow rhythm of a blues song.  The heartache, despair, and the melancholy tone of the plot and the characters would fit like a glove to blues music.  The Bluest Eye if converted into a blues song would be slow.  The first verse would be reminiscent to childhood and nostalgic for innocence and ignorance of the world and how harsh it can be.  The chorus would be a repetition of the sadness of the characters and so on.

A common theme to both blues music and The Bluest Eye is repetition.  Blues artists always repeat common phrases and words throughout a song and the music itself has the same 10 or so bars over and over again.  The main characters in The Bluest Eye all have repeated tales of misery and a loss of hope.  For Pecola, it's the lack of lovely blue eyes, her desolate home life, and want of love and affection.  Her parents constantly fight, and her mother is frequently abused by her drunken husband, Cholly.  Pauline, Pecola’s mother, who had a relatively good life growing up, slowly sunk into misery after marrying a man she used to love.  Her inability to love her children and the abuse from her husband was certainly key factors of her unhappiness.  Such tales of woe can only be told through the emotion and feeling given in a blues song, which furthers my thought that The Bluest Eye can be read like a blues song.

Blues music originated from African-American communities in the Deep South in the nineteenth century.  The actual term (blues) came from Western African cultures, which used blue indigo clothing and materials for death and mourning ceremonies, and was the base for such phrases as, “feeling blue.”

In my opinion, the connection between the dejection of the black characters (Pecola, Pauline, and Cholly to name a few) and their sadness with the origin of blues music and the book’s title is not accidental.  The story of Pecola, Claudia, and the other characters moves at a slow pace, with Morrison expertly weaving a tale that leisurely moves towards its conclusion.  The tempo of the progressing plot makes a good beat for the words to flow not only from the author, but from the characters.  One can almost imagine Pecola walking dejectedly through town, singing mournfully for her blue eyes and how glorious she’d be if she had them. 

The only element that doesn’t make The Bluest Eye a blues song is the lack of music.  If there was a mournful beat, one could easily and soulfully sing the entire book.