Constructing Cognitive Scaffolding Through Embodied Receptiveness: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Style: Volume 41, No. 4, Winter 2007 385

Naomi RokotnitzBar Ilan University

Constructing Cognitive Scaffolding ThroughEmbodied Receptiveness:

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

I. Truth in TimbreIn a passage close to the beginning of The Bluest Eye, Claudia, the narrator, and her

sister Frieda, are dutifully washing jam jars while their mother chats with herfriends in the kitchen. Claudia compares the experience to a

wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound entersbut is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their wordsmove into lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it punctuated withwarm-pulsed laughter — like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, thethrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know themeaning of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, theirhands, their feet, and listen to truth in timbre. (10)

The wealth of understanding that Claudia is able to glean from this seeminglypassive act of observation is remarkable. First, Morrison endows her child-

protagonist with a highly developed receptiveness, a keen sensibility, acute

musicality and vivid imaginative powers that translate female prattle into images ofdance, abstract geometrical shapes, and sensuous representations such as a heart

made of jelly. Claudia is unable to understand the meaning of the adults’ words, but

she is able to ascertain the ambience of the conversation, and its significance, byconverting its emotional “thrust” into mediums she can understand. Then, she

projects herself into the action, so that she is effectively participating in it.

I wish to suggest in this article that the kind of empathetic projection describedabove, and the concomitant sensation of participation in observed action,

constitute a powerful epistemological tool that is facilitated by the biological

architecture of all human beings who are not disabled by neurological impairment.Through exercising her potential for receptiveness, Claudia is able to surmount the

linguistic barrier between herself and the others and to gain valuable knowledge.

As she explains in her testimonial narrative passages, recounted with suchvividness they are rendered in present tense: “Adults do not talk to us — they give

us directions. They issue orders without providing information” (5). Her

386 Naomi Rokotnitz

knowledge base, therefore, is accumulated gradually, in fragments, and relies

overwhelmingly on embodied knowledge. She learns to “read” gesture,expression, eye movement,1 body odor: to feel the ambience and cadence of a

conversation through attunement to its physical and emotional thrust. Thus she

listens for “truth in timbre” (10). Through repeated practice and increasingrefinement, Claudia reaches a level of understanding that enables her in later life to

articulate, with subtlety, sensitivity and captivating poetry, the constellation of

events that lead to the tragedy recounted in The Bluest Eye.Claudia may be modeled on Morrison herself, and there are certainly many

autobiographical elements in the book, so that it is difficult to make a decided

distinction between Claudia’s first-person accounts, and the third-personomniscient narrator passages. Naturally, narrator and author are not identical, and

Claudia does not define herself as the writer, but I read the novel as the product of

the adult Claudia, a stylized expression of her personal history, and that of hercommunity.2 The Bluest Eye traces the process of Claudia MacTeer’s self-

construction, and of Pecola Breedlove’s (self)destruction. The novel recounts a

year in the lives of the two girls, and reflects upon the dramatic differences incharacter and circumstances that enable one to become a defiantly independent

individual, while the other is abused, marginalized and finally driven to insanity.

In the first half of this article I aim to demonstrate that Claudia’s breadth ofvision, grounded in her natural intelligence and creative abilities, is absorbed from

her direct environment by a process of cognitive interaction. This kind of

interaction has been the focus of many recent neuropsychological studies.Research shows that human perception of actions is influenced by the implicit

knowledge of the central nervous system concerning the movements that it itself is

capable of producing. To a great extent, we are able to interpret the actions of othersbecause we share their motor schemata — we share a bodily knowledge of them.

The neurologist Vittorio Gallese terms this “motor equivalence” (47). Gallese

argues that humans are endowed with a mirror-matching capacity, an inborninclination to imitate, indeed simulate, actions they observe others perform.

Mirror-matching, appears to be “a basic organizational feature of the brain” (46).

This assertion was sparked by the discovery in the early 1990s of mirrorneurons.3 Mirror neurons are activated by goal-related behaviors. They do not

respond to random movements, such as a tree swaying in the wind, but only to the

apprehension of meaningful interaction, such as a hand reaching to pick an apple.When we observe an action we perceive as intentional, our mirror neurons activate

Constructing Cognitive Scaffolding through Embodied Receptiveness 387

both the visual areas that observe the action and, concurrently, recruit the motor

circuits used to perform that action — the circuits that we would use were we toperform that action ourselves. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib explain

further that this mirror system is involuntary. Even though we are able to resist

imitating actions we observe others perform, we are not able to prevent our bodiesfrom responding at a preconscious imitative level. As Gallese notes, “action

observation implies action simulation” (37). This implies that Claudia’s sensation

of participating in the action in the kitchen is justified. Not only is she able to takepart, through simulation, in the conversational dance she witnesses, but she is able

to learn from it, physically, as she would were she really to take part.

Mirror neurons participate in human action-understanding and action-imitation processes (Rizzolatti and Craighero 169). They also influence motor

memory (Stefan).4 However, accumulating research suggests that our mirror-

response mechanisms are distributed about the brain and are not confined to aparticular region (Keysers 343; Agnew 291). Quite to the contrary, it seems

increasingly likely that our mirror neurons work in conjunction with other neural

networks, such as those responsible for memory and inference, and also with anintricate network of peripheral nervous system pathways stretching all over the

body, activating empathetic “motor equivalence.”

The philosopher Andy Clark identified this conjunction in 1998. He observedthat humans are evolved to exploit “any mixture of neural, bodily, and

environmental resources, along with their complex, looping, often nonlinear

interactions” in order to inform and supplement their understanding, as well ascompensate for their limitations (“Where Brain” 259) . The biological brain is just

a part, albeit a crucial part, of “a spatially and temporally extended process” of

cooperation between brain, body and environmental aids (“Where Brain” 271).5 Ina sentence that is particularly apt to the passage I have cited from The Bluest Eye,

Clark claims that humans “exist, as the thinking things we are, only thanks to a

baffling dance of brain bodies and cultural and technological scaffolding” (Natural

Born 11). The human mirror-system both enables and encourages us to maximize

our cognitive potential by drawing upon multiple information gathering and

processing mechanisms that extend our “cognitive scaffolding” (“Where Brain”274). Cognitive Scaffolding, as will shortly becomes clear, also plays an

instrumental part in Morrison’s construction of the protagonists in her novel, and

in her analysis of the community she describes.

388 Naomi Rokotnitz

II. PecolaThe Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first fictional attempt to explore how one “learns”

“racial self-loathing” (Morrison, TBE 167). She recognizes that “the damaginginternalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority [originate] in an outside

gaze” (168). Yet, at the same time, she examines how the community described in

the novel has internalized the white-man’s degrading gaze, so that it grows like acancer from within.6 Morrison aims to impress upon the African-American

community the extent of their (largely unconscious) complicity in the warped

hierarchy of values that perpetuates their subjugation. If dominant white ethicsdefine beauty in terms of light skin, light hair and blue eyes, this does not

sufficiently explain why most of the African-Americans in Morrison’s novel not

only accept but reinforce this view, exposing “the raw nerve of racial self-contempt” (168).

Although they are free, relative to their slave ancestors, Morrison’s

representation of African Americans implies a continued enslavement by culturalprejudices. Their internal enslavement is far more difficult to identify, and so more

difficult to eradicate. It implies, of course, a long history of violence, slavery and

discrimination, but the process of learning self-depreciation described in the novelis, for the most part, conducted through commercialized market forces: Hollywood

movies and their byproducts — Shirley Temple mugs (16), Mary Jane chocolates

(37), Jean Harlow hairstyles (96), etc. Ironically, the target-audience for theseproducts is the White middle-class consumer and not minority ethnicities.

However, when consumers such as Pauline Breedlove find themselves entirely

excluded from marketed notions of desirability, they begin to see themselvesthrough the (blue) eyes of others, thus perceiving a distorted self-image. The more

a character becomes convinced of the White beauty-ethic, the more he or she feels

innately inadequate. Increasing frustration and rejection develop into a convictionof ugliness — external and internal — that results in pathological behaviors

ranging from indifference to abuse, both of self and others.

Morrison is careful to portray a range of different responses to thispredicament, but she repeatedly shows how focusing on material gains and a

fantasy of beauty they cannot possibly fulfill, robs the majority of the African-

Americans both of respect for their own merits and of pride in their past heritage.In other words, by simulating the dominant cultural practices which they observe

about them, through individual and collective mirror-matching potentialities, the

members of the community described in the novel have learned to efface, evendeny, their own beauty, social significance and personal worth.7


Morrison explains in the Afterword to her novel that Pecola’s family is not

representative but, rather, a study case of the most extreme, even “monstrous”potential of the internalization of racial hatred (168). And yet, as Jane Kuenz points

out, the case of Aunt Julie delineates a precursor for Pecola’s own escape into

madness, suggesting that “the town has an undiagnosed and unexamined history ofproducing women like Pecola, that her experience — and the extremity of it — is

not an isolated instance” (429).

In the first scene in which the ironically named Breedlove family is presentedto the reader, Pecola’s parents, Pauline and Cholly, are engaged in violent combat

brought on by “inarticulate fury and aborted desires” (TBE 31). While their son

screams at his mother “Kill him! Kill Him!” eleven-year-old Pecola tries to makeherself disappear. She tries to imagine away every limb in her body, literally

erasing her physical presence. She finds, however, that she cannot erase her eyes.

This may imply to the reader that she cannot extract herself from the harsh realitiesof her home. Unable to grasp the metaphoric significance of her eyes as windows

to her soul, Pecola becomes obsessed with their physicality. She prays continually

for blue eyes, hoping that were she to have blue eyes, maybe her parents would bedifferent: “Maybe they’d say ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad

things in front of those pretty eyes’”(34).

Pecola’s invisibility may be a feat of imagination, a studied defensemechanism, but it has tangible effects in the real world. As Malin LaVon Walther

asserts, “the effect of popular American culture’s specular construction of beauty

is that it bestows presence or absence. One’s visibility depends upon one’s beauty”(777). Pecola’s experience of invisibility and her belief in her own ugliness and,

thus, her worthlessness, renders her so weak, that even the lowliest characters in her

society can take advantage of her. Time after time she is ruthlessly abused, by theschool boys, by Junior and his mother Geraldine, by Church Soaphead, and by her

own parents. And each time her only response is to try to diminish her own

presence. She does not attempt to defend herself, to justify herself, or to attain anymeasure of understanding. She simply accepts — almost expects — violation after

violation.

III: Cognitive Scaffolding In contrast, Claudia, the narrator, though two years younger than Pecola, possessesa powerful drive to self-determination. I have begun to suggest that this drive is fed

by her receptiveness to external stimuli, a receptiveness that enables her to learn

from her environment. As the evidence regarding mirror neurons and the theory of

390 Naomi Rokotnitz

cognitive scaffolding jointly suggest, humans learn through interaction. Pecola is

disabled, mentally, physically, and socially, by being entirely cut off from all formsof human interaction, while Claudia is exposed to a wide variety of inputs that

enable her to extend and develop her personal capabilities: to construct complex

cognitive scaffolding.In a telling scene early in the novel, Claudia and her sister Frieda come across

Pecola, encircled by a group of rowdy boys who are taunting her. She has dropped

her books and stands in their midst covering her eyes. This devastatingly infantilegesture emphasizes her lack of sophistication. She behaves as a toddler might. The

gesture also ties into her obsessive preoccupation with her eyes. She wishes not to

see her abusers, and at the same time, hide her ugliness from them. Frieda andClaudia instinctively leap to the rescue. This act of defiance and solidarity

exemplifies the extent to which their life-experience has been enabling, where

Pecola’s has been crippling. First, Claudia and Frieda have each other as constantcompanions who expand each other’s fields of knowledge. It is Frieda, for

instance, who tells Claudia about menstruation. Pecola has a brother, but the

dynamics of her family unit are such that they do not communicate on any level.Instead, like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit, each of them is locked “in his own

cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality” (TBE 25).

However, the MacTeer girls’ chief advantage over Pecola is that they are part of acommunity. Their mother has friends who gossip in the kitchen and, when they try

to sell their marigold seeds, the girls are taken in, given lemonade and become

privy to the women’s chatter. In this bullying episode, Claudia and Frieda displayan understanding of the strategies of threat and negotiation, an understanding they

have presumably acquired while overhearing the such chatter — and so

participating in conversational-dances of the kind cited above. Frieda has enoughconfidence in her sexuality to target Woodrow, the ringleader, whom she knows

has a crush on her. She implies that she knows a secret that he would not like

revealed, and thereby diffuses the situation.Claudia attributes her sister’s success to the fact that she is physically taller

than the boys, but also to the facial expression she assumes: “set lip and Mama’s

eyes” (50).Vanquishing the bullies is achieved through embodied simulation —through adopting the very gestures and expressions their mother uses when taking

a stand. Indeed, Mrs. MacTeer is the most influential contributor to the

construction and reinforcement of her daughters’ cognitive scaffolding. She hastaught her girls, through example, rather than by ever speaking of it, that they have

a right to be angry sometimes, that they can and should defend themselves, and that


they can take an active stand against abuse. Later on, when Mr. Henry tries to

fondle Frieda, she does not hesitate to tell her parents. Outraged, they end upshooting at him, so that he leaves town in disgrace. This stands in stark contrast to

poor Pecola who, confiding in her mother after being brutally raped by her own

father, is beaten viciously in response. Mrs. MacTeer has also shown her girls, onceagain through example, that they should help their friends. When Pecola’s father

first burns down their house, it is the MacTeer who takes her in, while her own

family fail to inquire whether their child is “live or dead” (TBE 17). By observingtheir mother, the girls have also learned to imitate successfully her very manner and

demeanor. This unconscious body-based knowledge, performed through “motor

equivalence,” is the most important tool they wield. Blue eyes are not attainable —Mama’s are. Successful simulation has tangible effects. This fact is of profound

and determining importance in the novel.

Another aspect of Mrs. MacTeer’s unconscious scaffolding-construction canbe found in her singing. Morrison’s mother was a singer and it is not by chance that

music provides an underlying structure in the novel. The improvisational Jazz,

which requires each player to exhibit both individual skill and acute attunement tohis fellow musicians, together with the sensual Blues, constitute a form of self

affirmation in the novel. As Cat Moses points out, the melody and lyrics of the

songs Mrs. MacTeer sings, suggest to Claudia a sense of hope, of freedom and ofpersonal agency. She learns that it is possible to steer the course of one’s own life.

The songs also disclose a world of sensuous romance and sexual delight. When

Mrs. MacTeer gives way to her singing mood, her voice becomes sweet and her“singing-eyes so melty” that her songs seem “delicious” (18) . Her singing is not

directed at, nor particularly conscious of, the listening child. Yet it nonetheless

imparts invaluable knowledge. Claudia is infused with affection for African-American culture and for her own kind. In contrast, Pecola can see no way out of

her predicament. She is not fully conscious of the possibility of escape. She has

never been sung to, she is hardly ever spoken to. Pauline’s rejection of her owndaughter, in favor of the girl for whose family she works, with her corn-colored hair

and blue eyes, constitutes one of the most heart-wrenching episodes in the novel

(84). Pecola sees herself through increasingly hostile filters, represented by otherpeople’s viewpoints and, significantly, their eyes: Shirley Temple’s idealized

innocent blue eyes, and her mother’s oppressive black eyes, filled with scorn. How

could Pecola ever work up the confidence or initiative to escape?8

Clark argues that the processes by which individual and environment interact

are reciprocal: we both create and, in turn, are created by the very same interactions

392 Naomi Rokotnitz

(“Natural Born”11). In a reasonably supportive environment, we can adjust, adapt,

transform and advance: through accumulating experiences, through graduallyrefining our understanding. Claudia is able to do just this. And this is what one

would normally expect. As Clark asserts, the only constancy our extended

cognitive system may be said to enjoy, is its “continual openness to change” (8).Pecola, on the other hand, is denied the benefits of the interactive “loop” and

remains unassisted by any form of scaffolding. She stands alone, rejected, on the

periphery of the loop.Her plight is made more tangible if we consider her not merely as neglected,

but as disabled. Zuckow-Goldring and Arbib have shown that caregivers

normatively direct and focus, verbally and nonverbally, the child’s attention to, andunderstanding of, the potential uses of specific objects. By both demonstrating the

use of a fork, or cup, or ball, and by guiding the child’s initial experimentation with

the object, caregivers expand the infant’s understanding of both the opportunitiesfor action available to them, which they term “affordances,” and the repertoire of

actions their own bodies may perform, which they term “effectivities” (Zuckow-

Goldring 2181). Learning through assisted trial and error, infants not only increasetheir range of skills, but also their confidence in experimentation itself. This is

crucial. By being denied any form of caregiving — in infancy or at any other stage

of her life — Pecola is left to fend for herself in a sea of information. Indeed, if theassisting caregiver’s direction reduces “search space and thus speed[s] learning,”

it becomes clear why Pecola’s learning process is so much slower than that of other

children (Zuckow Goldring 2181). She is neither assisted in the learning processnor told which elements in her environment are invariants — persistent or stable —

and so do not require continual vigilance. Moreover, though Pecola learns through

imitation — through translating observed action into self-executed action, thusdrawing upon her mirror-matching neural networks — she is usually denied insight

into the impetus for, and the significance of, these actions. This hampers not only

her understanding of the actions themselves, or the appropriate moment to imitatethem, but also restricts her ability to predict when such behavior may be used

against her. How can she learn to read the signs that would lead another to suspect

Junior or Church Soaphead?Although humans have a natural-born curiosity, a great deal of our interest in

exploring the world around us depends upon the encouragement of our caregivers;

on what Zuckow-Goldring and Arbib call “educated attention”(2183). Childrenwho are stimulated, encouraged, and then rewarded, by praise or by success, for

their (mental) activity, may be expected to continue this behavioral trait in later life.


On the other hand, children who are largely ignored will also, eventually, learn to

eat, walk, and even talk, but their level of enthusiastic engagement with, andindependent exploration of, their environment will be radically reduced —

“looking is not enough, since the gaze of the untutored infant cannot pick out the

relevant affordance”(2182). Pecola, as I continually suggest, represents the“untutored infant”; she is disabled by those who ought to provide care and

guidance.

My analysis of the discrepancies between Claudia and Pecola’s cognitivepotentialities is, thus, corroborated by neuropsychological research. It seems that

the older one gets, and the more one is exposed to demonstrations of complex

actions (that can be imitated via the neural system described above), and the morepractice one gets in performing these actions oneself, the more one increases one’s

range of cognitive complexities. These complexities are registered in the very

biological structures of the brain (Molnar-Szakacs). 9 Moreover, there exists anoverlap in activations of action-recognition and language-production areas of the

brain (Arbib; Molnar-Szakacs). Increasing cognitive complexity occurs in both

action-perception and language production areas concurrently, since these twoshare the very same cognitive resources and neural substrata (Molnar-Szakacs

925). Understanding observed action, initiating independent action and developing

linguistic dexterity are all interlinked and are all facilitated by our mirror-matchingsystem.

The mirror through which Pecola has observed herself since birth is the one

reflected in her mother’s disapproving eyes. At the very end of the novel, she standsbefore a real mirror, gazing into her own eyes, which she thinks are blue, a tragic

representation of her desperation to fulfill her mother’s expectations. Ironically,

finally obtaining, in her mind, blue eyes does not earn her the minimal recognitionfor which she hoped. While she was overlooked when she had black eyes, she is

actively ostracized once she obtains blue eyes. That she does not understand it is

her pregnancy that people are avoiding, emphasizes the solipsistic loop of herradically limited cognitive spectrum.

Meanwhile Claudia’s family context enables her to access a primal power,

something close to nature, in tune with the body, that is her natural right. WhilePecola consumes milk from a Shirley Temple mug (TBE 16), and devours Mary

Jane chocolates (37), literally trying to ingest the beauty these girls represent to her,

Claudia buys “Powerhouse bars” (59). Her resilience is a concerted effort, one sheactively reinforces everyday — “against everything and everybody” (150). Her

power enables her to shun cultural restrictions. She recounts how she once received

394 Naomi Rokotnitz

a “big blue-eyed Baby Doll” for Christmas. The gift was physically repellant to her.

She had only one desire: “to dismember it” (14). Instead, her image of an idealChristmas is a harmonious and intimate experience, quite opposed to the dominant

consumer culture:

Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me whatI wanted, they would have known that I did not want anything to own, or to possess anyobject. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would havebeen, “Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?” I could have spokenup, “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs andlisten to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of the stool made for mybody, the security and warmth of Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of themusic, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach,perhaps, afterward. (15)

This unapologetic attention to the body is key, I believe, to the greatestdiscrepancies between Claudia and Pecola, and the very fountain of Claudia’s

strength. At the end of the novel, Pecola becomes imprisoned in solitary

confinement, forever a child, forever longing for the bluest eye. Claudia, supportedby intricate and sturdy scaffolding networks, is able to become one of the most

influential fictional characters who helped young girls in the 1970s internalize that

black is beautiful.

IV. Just as no countIn parts IV and V of this article I focus upon Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother,

and a number of other adult female figures in the novel, in order to try to locate the

cognitive slippage that disables Pecola. The Bluest Eye suggests that the healthiestenvironment for a growing child is one which rewards body-based, sense-rich, and

intuitive perceptions and, thus, provides a necessary balance between embodied

knowledge and linguistic, analytical skills. Analytical skills are, of course, equallybody-based, in that they take place in the brain, but they function differently,

involving the application of reasoning and narrative-constructing skills. It appears,

moreover, that there is a biologically predetermined chronology to theirapplication. The neurologist Antonio Damasio asserts that it is the body that first

responds to emotional signals, while reflection upon the embodied response is a

secondary process (283). This does not imply a hierarchy of importance but simplythe stages by which humans regularly comprehend.

The Bluest Eye explores the potential effects of a radical imbalance between

automatic body-based responses, and secondary, discursive modes ofapprehension and comprehension. Since the novel was written in the 1960s, and


published in 1970, Morrison could not have known of either the theoretical

arguments or the scientific investigations that now support her claims. My aim isnot simply to prove her intuitions were correct by supplying scientific evidence for

them, but to show how her astoundingly complex analysis matches what we now

know regarding brain functions and human understanding. As Catherine Emmotthas asserted: “Cognitive science can provide new technical tools for narratologists,

but, conversely, narratology has a wealth of understanding of complex narrative

texts to offer cognitive science” (319).A poignant example of Morrison’s intuitive accuracy can be seen in the

passage that describes Pauline Breedlove’s childhood. The reader is impressed by

Pauline’s unusual attraction to colors. Her recollection of home is characterized by“a streak of green” created by effervescent June-bugs (TBE 87). She also recalls a

time when, as a child, she had picked berries and the juice had seeped through her

pockets, staining her very skin. “My whole dress was messed with purple, and it

never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me”

(90). It is not merely that Pauline is naturally comfortable with her sensuality but

that her perceptions, and her memories, are formed though embodiedreceptiveness. Her sensuousness and her imagination combine to imply both a

potent desire for “an all-embracing tenderness” (88) in the form of a partner, and

also a distinctive artistic inclination. Pauline, we are led to suspect, was born withthe kind of sensibility that, were it encouraged, may have been expressed in beauty.

Unfortunately, however, Pauline missed, “without knowing what she missed —

paints and crayons” (87).Nonetheless, when Pauline falls in love, it is likened to an explosion of color,

mingled with varied textures and tastes: berries, lemonade, June-bugs and yellow

eyes fuse together into an intense and tactile experience that merges abstract andphysical apprehensions. Kuenz notes that, for Pauline, sexual pleasure is tied into

a sense of “a power” (TBE 101; Kuenz 427). Pauline’s sexual appetite is generated

by Cholly’s desire for her, but “not until I know that my flesh is all that be on his

mind” (TBE 101). Then, she continues, “I be strong enough, pretty enough, and

young enough to let him make me come.” I must add that Pauline’s orgasms,

beyond the sexual pleasure they afford, the sense of communion with her partner,and the gratification of being desired, carry significant weight in terms of

empowerment because they remind her of her embodied self. Sex makes her feel

“… those little bits of color floating up in me — deep in me […] then I feel like I am

laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors […]

and it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts” (101-2). But it does not

396 Naomi Rokotnitz

last. The fact that she needs to feel Cholly’s desire in order to release her own, is

tragically replicated in her need to feel that others respect her in order to be able torespect herself. When this does not occur, she loses respect and sexual drive. In the

industrial north, Pauline’s increased isolation and loneliness, coupled with the

Hollywood films she regularly watches, subdue her nature. Cholly fails to embodya canvas for her colors, and as their intimacy declines, the colors fade. Sensuality

is stifled and replaced by his drunkenness and her adoption of dogmatic Church

doctrines. The rainbow colors that accompanied her country-life are replaced bycolor blindness. Her life becomes black and white: black and white movies, black

and white skins.

Pauline’s blackness, her pregnancy, and every other manifestation of herphysicality are entirely absent from her visual and cultural intake. Gradually

understanding the extent of her own invisibility, Pauline tries to match the

representations she does see. She changes hair styles, buys new clothes,experiments with makeup. But these efforts only engender a “collecting [of] self

contempt by the heap” (95). She feels ridiculous, and she is not accepted by the

community of women, who make her feel “just as no count” (91).The thinning of her physical apprehensions, the threat to the sensuous and

artistic rainbow embodiment of experience in which she delighted until then, is

represented by her losing her front teeth. “Everything went then. . . I just didn’t careno more after that” (96). This is particularly telling when viewed in light of Jerome

Kagen’s assertion that “chronic identification with a category of self marked by

disadvantage and compromised status contributes to the vulnerability toillness”(181). Poverty is less a hindrance to personal advancement than is the belief

in one’s “relative disadvantage” (180). This becomes all the more pronounced

among children who are both poor and members of a minority ethnicity. Suspicionthat one’s social and biological inheritance is inferior stunts confidence and can

often create a level of psychological stress that may contribute “greater morbidity”

(181).Thus, Pecola is born to a mother who has already perfected the devaluation of

herself through commercialized fantasies (Rosenberg 440), she has already

performed an “abdication of self” (Kuenz 422). Her choice of the name Pecola isa symptom of this condition. As Maureen Peal (rather than her own mother) tells

Pecola, her namesake is a character in a film called, significantly, Imitation of Life:

“this mulatto girl hates her mother ‘cause she’s black and ugly” (TBE 52). Morrisonadds extra irony to this anecdote through Maureen’s evaluation of the film: “It was

real sad. Everybody cries in it” (52).10


I wish to suggest that Pauline’s story in The Bluest Eye describes how a process

is put in motion, by which the constructive potentialities of human mirror-matching capabilities are reversed. Pauline blocks out any external sources with

which her own networks may interact productively and tries instead to emulate

networks that are alien to her. She rejects all that she is, but cannot attain that whichshe is not. If, as suggested above, empathetic projection and the sensation of

participation in actions observed provide a powerful epistemological tool, then, by

the same token, Pauline’s self-effacement can be understood to be a powerfulepistemological obstacle. Pauline, in effect, dismantles the cognitive scaffolding

that she had constructed for herself in childhood and that, ironically, served her

very well until after she was married.One of Pauline’s greatest cognitive obstacles is an underdeveloped capacity

for narrative. In childhood, while her embodied receptiveness was exceptionally

vivid, she had a natural aversion to words, even felt “depressed by words” (87).Pauline’s natural inclinations, her innate kind of understanding and her sense of

(aesthetic) pleasure, are all abstract, experienced very actively in the body, and

lacking, even eschewing, any logical or narrative analysis. This, I submit, makesher vulnerable to the narrative frameworks suggested by others, particularly those

most prevalent in her society. As Jerome Bump phrases it, she “accepts the master

narrative without questions” (164-65).11 Her immersion in the dominant, white,popular culture leads her to assimilate a racist view of herself.

While Claudia has a heightened capacity for embodied receptiveness, she also

possesses the ability to frame her sensations, to interpret cause and effect in a socialcontext. Kay Young and Jeffery Saver maintain that “what predominates or

fundamentally constitutes our consciousness is the understanding of self and world

in story” (73). Claudia is adept at expressing herself in narrative form while Paulinefinds it harder to conceive of a narrative progression in her life. Her modes of

understanding are antithetical to this secondary process, and this may be one of the

causes of her demise.12 This view is enhanced by considering Clark’s assertion in“Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche” that language is “a mode of

cognition-enhancing self-stimulation”(370); a “key cognitive tool enabling us to

objectify, reflect upon, and hence knowingly engage with, our own thoughts, trainsof reasoning, and personal cognitive characters”(372). This may also explain, in

part at least, how Pauline’s own pain performs a short-circuiting of her empathetic

reactions. Sympathetic as the reader may be to her plight, few can remain tranquilin response to her complete indifference to her daughter’s pain. Pauline’s inability

to identify with her daughter derives from her perception of Pecola as embodying

398 Naomi Rokotnitz

all that she rejects in herself. Her resistance to Pecola is fed by her (culturally

prompted) resistance of her self. She perceives both herself and Pecola througheyes that deem them repugnant.

Pauline is left stripped of any kind of cognitive scaffolding.13 What, then, is left

of her essential self? And with what tools may she interact with the world? Theanswer comes in the form of servitude. Pauline adopts willed schizophrenia. She

makes a conscious choice to live a double life, ignoring her own home and family

and living exclusively for the benefit of the Fisher family for whom shesuccessfully embodies “the ideal servant” (TBE 99). At the Fisher’s she enjoys

“power, praise and luxury.” They even give her “what she had never had – a

nickname – Polly” (99). Jennifer Gillan argues that Pauline gladly trades in “herown troubled body and history” for the freedom of movement afforded by her new

identity as Polly. Pauline “believes that she is squalid and dark like her apartment

and that the Fishers are stately and clean like their house. Pauline can only maintaina positive self-perception by affiliating herself with the Fishers” (Gillan 291). I

wish to extend this observation by arguing that the Fishers provide Pauline with the

narrative framework she lacks and with a well-defined role. Pauline is blind to theironies of her exploitation. She is entirely convinced — even comforted by — her

own rejection of her essential self in favor of this Polly-persona. And yet she cannot

inhabit Polly all the time. At the end of each day, the fantasy must be set aside andthe old identity of Pauline re-assumed. Pauline’s persisting dissatisfaction and

bitterness remain untouched.

V. Natural FunkinessMorrison demonstrates that denying one’s natural inclination and denying thephysicality of one’s body, result in self-nullification. Consider, for instance, Miss

Della Jones. When her husband is asked “why he left a nice good church woman

like Della for that heifer,” he replies that “the honest-to-God real reason was hecouldn’t take no more of that violet water Della Jones used. Said he wanted a

woman to smell like a woman. Said Della was just too clean for him.” The gossips’

response is telling:

“Old dog. Ain’t that nasty!” one exclaims.“You telling me,” another replies, “What kind of reasoning is that?” (TBE 8)

This question resounds throughout the novel, for the point is precisely that reasonis irrelevant here. It is a matter of physical, sexual attraction, of passion and of

authenticity. Just as Claudia cannot relate to the plastic dolls, so Della’s husband

cannot relate to his lavender-besmothered wife. Della, like Pauline and Geraldine,


unable to construct her own narratives, instead adopted those of others, particularly

the narrative represented by the Dick and Jane primer passage, which serves as anepigraph to the novel.14 Della and Geraldine cultivate “thrift, patience, high morals,

and good manners” at the expense of “the dreadful funkiness of passion, the

funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions” (64).15 Inthe process, they nullify their own being, and lose their attractiveness.

Indeed, in accordance with the Dick and Jane primer, the “hunger for property,

for ownership” is the primary preoccupation of the community (12). “Propertiedblack people,” recalls Claudia, “spent all their energies, all their love, on their

nests.” The use of the word nest implies a nurturing and natural environment, but

the fact that all their love is expended on the external structure, implies a lack on theinside. This obsession for housing and cleanliness is partly bred by a fear of being

put “outdoors” and partly by a (sub)conscious desire to emulate the white

American dream (11). The struggle to fit into a dream from which they are entirelyexcluded takes up all their energies. This leaves little time or emotional energy for

the people who live in the house: themselves and their children.

Interestingly, the more the women in The Bluest Eye care about their houses,the less they care for their own bodies. They are kept clean of course, but to such

an extent that they are sterilized. As I have been arguing, the white beauty ethic

divorces the women from their sexuality. The more Geraldine and Pauline, in theirown ways, try to erase their blackness, the less sexually desirable they become.

Morrison complicates this further by tying into Pecola’s rape. The action that

Pecola performs that stirs desire in Cholly is the scratching of her ankle — arepetition of the very action her mother was performing when he first met her.

Although this rape is rooted in a twisted knot of complicated personal and

collective histories, it appears that one of its roots is Cholly’s longing for a simple,unaffected, natural easiness, which Pauline once had.16 While the women hanker

after an impossible white ideal, the men still desire their real imperfect bodies.

This is explored further through the characters of Miss Marie, China, andPoland, the three prostitutes. They are, or at least believe themselves to be,

prostitutes by choice. They are not owned by any man, nor are they enslaved by

drug addiction. They are as much in control of their own lives as any of the otherAfrican-American characters in the novel.17 Moreover, though they are no longer

young, though China has bandy legs and Marie is overweight, they remain

desirable — the men want them. Ironically, these three are the only ones whoexpress any interest in, or exhibit any affection towards, Pecola. While the church-

going women follow the fire-and-brimstone ethics of judgment, the prostitutes

400 Naomi Rokotnitz

represent an alternative ethic — that of (equally Christian) compassion. Though

universally feared and abhorred by all the other female characters in the novel, theircompany provides a small oasis of ease for Pecola. It is not by chance then, I

suggest, that it is in their company that Pecola experiences a momentary awakening

of her sensual potentialities. In their midst, she allows her imagination, for one briefinstant, to be stimulated. When Marie recalls frying fish with her lover, Pecola not

only visualizes the details of this sensuous experience, but experiences an all-

inclusive sense-rich apprehension:

Pecola saw Marie’s teeth settling down into the back of crisp sea bass; saw the fat fingersputting back into her mouth tiny flakes of white, hot meat that had escaped from her lips;she heard the “pop” of the beer-bottle cap; smelled the acridness of the first stream ofvapor; felt the cold beerness hit the tongue. (41)

However short-lived this “daydream” may be, it allows the reader a glimpse into a

window of possibility, biologically available, yet perpetually emotionally closedbefore Pecola.

This observation feeds back into our assessment of Claudia’s confidence, for

it too cannot be detached from her own imagination and sensuality. When Friedais molested by Mr. Henry, instead of being shocked or outraged, Claudia asks “how

did it feel?” This is acknowledged to be “the wrong question” — but is it? (76) I

wish to suggest that by fostering her sensuality — her keen senses and her delightin engaging them all — Claudia opens up a world of multiplicity and possibility, of

sensual interaction with the world. Claudia is not repelled by the body functions or

body products that culture teaches us to clean up.18 She studies her own vomit (6),wants to see the blood of menstruation (20), spends her time picking “toe jam,” and

enjoys her nakedness (15). She and Frieda not only feel comfortable in their own

skins, but “admire” its dirt and “cultivate” its scars (57). This ease is partlyexplained by their young age, still oblivious to the gender and sexuality politics that

condition and delimit the feminine, the desirable. And yet, although Claudia admits

that, soon after, both sisters succumbed to the dominant cultural prescriptions, thisacquiescence is temporary. Adult Claudia, the narrating Claudia of the novel, has

seen through her teenage weakness, and has re-acquired the defiance her childhood

self championed. Similarly, the rampant jealousy, hatred and violence towardswhite dolls and their human counterparts, which Claudia and Frieda deem

“natural” in 1941, is soon curbed by socialization (59). And yet, physicality and

passion are reclaimed — in socially acceptable and far more productivemanifestations — by the adult Claudia. As I have indicated above, Claudia’s

embodied receptiveness is assisted by increasingly sophisticated discursive modes


of analysis — psychological, social, political - that inform the artistic creativity

expressed in her narration of her story.

VI. MarigoldsWhen Pecola’s pregnancy becomes apparent, she is made to leave school and is

shunned by all. Claudia recalls the common response: “Ought to be a law: two ugly

people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground” (149).People are “disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story.”

Claudia and Frieda listen for someone to say “Poor little girl,” or “Poor baby,” but

they encounter “only head wagging where those words should have been” (149).Against the current of their community’s antipathy, Claudia and Frieda try, once

again, to rescue Pecola. They decide to plant marigold seeds, hoping that “if we

planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, andeverything would be alright” (4).

But the marigolds do not grow, the baby dies, and Pecola goes mad. For years

Claudia holds herself responsible, believing she was to blame for these prematuredeaths. However, as she grows older, as she amasses cultural and sociological

knowledge, and as her analytic faculties are developed, she recognizes the web of

circumstances that were pitted against flowers and babies alike in 1941. Thelinguistic skills and idiosyncratic modes of expression she has developed enable

her to finally voice those words that were left unsaid — to cry out “Poor Baby”!

This cry is comprehensive in scope. As Claudia herself explains: “Morestrongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black

baby to live — just to counter the universal love for white baby dolls, Shirley

Temples, and Maureen Peals” (149). The girls do not consider the social outrage,or the biological dangers, of Pecola having a baby by her father. But they do sense

the “overwhelming hatred for the unborn baby.” Claudia and Frieda want this baby

to survive, almost as an existential equivalent of their own struggle for survival andrecognition. Claudia’s attunement to the physicality of human bodies also

intensifies her sense of the baby’s reality. To her, the child is not an abstract

abomination but a living, breathing baby. Conjuring the physicality of the body, itsfragility, its blackness, its lovability, counteracts the distorting and distancing

discourse of the adults. And this is exactly what she does later on in life by writing

this novel.19

Indeed, the written record of Claudia’s testimony, and the intricate narrative

devices deployed by Morrison, express not only the maturity of understanding that

the protagonist has reached, but the fundamental appreciation of words themselves

402 Naomi Rokotnitz

as intrinsic to our cognitive scaffolding. Clark argues that language is not merely

a form of communicating pre-formed ideas but an integral part of the thinkingprocess itself. Words have a “physical existence as encountered and perceptible

items, as sounds in the air, as words on the printed page”(“Language” 370). As

concrete perceptible items, words allow us to engage in forms of reasoning thatwould otherwise elude us (371). “Thinking about thinking,” asserts Clark, is

“dependant on language for its very existence”(372). By understanding words as

“bodily forms,” Clark reconfigures their relation to humans as embodied agents(370). In turn, Claudia’s natural talent for building upon her embodied perceptions

through a secondary process of analysis and narrative construction, assisted by

intricate external aids — or cognitive scaffolding — enable her to blossom, againstthe odds, instead of the marigolds. Pecola is lost, but Claudia can try to tell Pecola’s

story, and her own. As an adult, Claudia can finally unpack the linguistic

component of the conversational-dance she overheard in childhood, enabling herto accept responsibility for her part in the collective ills of the 40s, to lament a tragic

loss, and to ask for a measure of forgiveness, while also extending a warm embrace

to her own kind. In recounting her story, Claudia manages to overturn the earth,sprinkle it with nutrients, and prepare it for a new batch of marigold seeds.

Generations to come will be able to enjoy these flowers, smell their delicate scent,

and rejoice in their beauty.

Notes1 For instance, when Mrs. MacTeer realizes she should not have whipped the

girls for “playing bad” when they had in fact been helping the menstruating Pecola,she does not apologize outright. “She pulled both of them towards her, their headsagainst her stomach” (22). Claudia understands this gesture, and observes that her“eyes were sorry.”

2 For an interesting discussion of narrative technique and narrator personas inthe novel see Tirrell.

3 Evidence obtained primarily through electroencephalography (EEG) andmagnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which provides information about regionalcerebral blood flow, enabling the analysis of neural activity, suggests that thehuman mirror system stems from activity in the inferior parietal lobe, inferiorfrontal gyres (including Broca’s area), and superior temporal sulcus (STS) (Fadiga;Hari; Muthukamaraswamy and Johnson; Rizzolatti and Craighero). For a detailedsummary of the most important stages of the extensive research on mirror neuronssee Agnew.


4 Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to show that observationof another individual performing simple repetitive thumb movements gives rise toa kinematically specific memory trace of the observed motions in M1andinfluences the direction of subsequent actions, supporting evidence of the role ofmirror neurons in memory formation and also — possibly — human motorlearning.

5 Clark describes the brain as “wetwear,” the body as “hardwear,” andenvironmental aids as “widewear” (“Where Brain” 271).

6 In Playing in the Dark, Morrison claims that the Whites defined their“Americannes” and their sense of freedom in opposition to what they perceived asraw and savage Africanism (65). Projecting their own anxieties — the “dread offailure, powerless, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil,sin, greed” (37-38) — onto the African “other,” they created an illusion of theirown empowerment.

7 By showing the African-American consciousness from within, Morrisonresists its marginalization as ethnic other, or at least, counteracts its categorizationas inferior. But the community she represents has not reached the level of politicalawareness or empowerment that the author has achieved.

8 She could, perhaps, have learned from her brother, who often runs away, buthe never invites her to join him, and he always returns. Except at the very end of thenovel, when she has already lost her mind, he leaves without her and never returns.

9 This relates interestingly to Damasio’s experience with “as if body loops”(281). These simulation mechanisms, bypassing the body proper through theinternal activation of sensory body maps, create a representation of emotion-drivenbody-related changes and result in “significant alteration of brain function” (282).

10 Maureen Peal is a mulatto herself. Gillan argues convincingly that Morrisonuses Maureen’s braids, arranged into “two lynch ropes that hung down her back,”to introduce a submerged discussion of racial violence. Gillan draws a parallelbetween the women’s willful blindness, that adores Maureen’s light skin and greeneyes, and “forgets” the historical implications of racial and sexual abuse encodedin her body, and the willful blindness of the political establishment, that preferredto fight racism abroad in World War II, rather than to confront its domesticmanifestations.

11 Bump draws parallels between the “emotional literacy” required for, anddeveloped by, family systems therapy, and that exhibited by “family romance”novelists, arguing that “this may well be one of literature’s most important

404 Naomi Rokotnitz

contribution to our culture” (159-60). Indeed, he suggests that Claudia is “one of along tradition of narrators who escape family disintegration that can be traced backat least to Helen in Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Helen is the only personwho breaks out of the cycle of abuse and addiction in that novel because she tooadopts a form of the talking cure” by writing a journal (163).

12 Roger Schank claims that “intelligence is bound up with our ability to tell theright story at the right time” (21). For an exploration of current notions of “theoryof mind (ToM), a discussion of the role of quality literary works play in bothdescribing and extending our capacity for reading other people’s minds, and thenotion of ‘imagining serially embedded representations of mental states (that is,“representations of representations of representations” of mental states)’” (271) —see Lisa Zunshine’s excellent 2003 essay and her recent 2006 book.

13 This is replicated in her daughter, as I have argued above; Pecola is deniedthe constructive benefits of cognitive scaffolding.

14 This innovative and complex narrative technique, by which Morrisonprefaces her novel with a mass-produced paradigm of white consumer culture, andthen deconstructs its message through removing spacing and punctuation in threedistinctive stages, has been widely discussed. See, for instance, Tirrell or Kuenz.

15 This kind of behavior is primarily encouraged by the church doctrines thesewomen live by and is not a specifically African-American behavioral pattern.However, because Protestant ethics are combined with their self-loathing , born ofracial discrimination, these women take their refusal to acknowledge their ownbodies to the extreme.

16 Morrison’s attitude to and representation of both Cholly’s life history and hisact of rape are complex and very important to a comprehensive understanding ofthe novel. They can also shed interesting light upon the embodied receptiveness forwhich I argue in this essay. However, in order to focus this particular paper, I havedecided to leave out Cholly and the broader discussion of male sexuality in thenovel that he invites. In addition to Morrison’s own discussion of Cholly in herAfterword to the novel, see also, once again, Gillan’s excellent article, as well asKuenz and Wong.

17 The novel is set in 1941, the year America joined the war. The prostitutes arenamed after Poland and China, representing the two fronts, European and Asian, ofthe war. Marie is referred to by the community as “The Maginot Line” (thefortifications built by the French as defense against Nazi invasion, which provedwholly inadequate). Kuenz argues that, in these three, Morrison “literalizes thenovel’s overall conflation of black female bodies as sites of fascist invasions”


(421). Moreover, the comparison between these three and the other female figuresin their community, who by and large repress their own domestic problems throughuniting in abhorrence against prostitutes, is telling. As Jennifer Gillan rightlypoints out: “There is much focusing on the wrong front in the novel: Thetownswomen concentrate on vilifying the prostitutes for denigrating blackwomanhood, but do not acknowledge the economic inequalities that fosterprostitution in the first place; the prostitutes focus on hating the townswomen, butexempt from their scorn the churchwomen who seem most to embody the ideologyof true womanhood that, in actuality, excludes black women; and the Breedlovesfocus on attaining the material goods that will enable them to maintain an aura ofcitizenship, instead of recognizing that the system of commodity compensation notonly excludes black people, but also distracts attention from the growing economicinequalities between the rich and the poor of all races” (285).

18 See also Kuenz (423).

19 Let me reiterate the disclaimer I make at the opening of this paper: Claudiaand Morrison are not identical, but I believe that the narrative structure of the novelimplies that it has been written by the fictional character Claudia.

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Constructing Cognitive Scaffolding Through Embodied Receptiveness: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

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