The Bluest Eye’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

The history of Toni Morrison’s literary critical reception had best begin with a story. As the 1988–89 Distinguished Professor in Syracuse University’s Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Professor Lecture Series, Morrison gave three public lectures at SU about the African American influence on American literature, and three informal talks about selected novels. During the question-and-answer hour of her seminar on The Bluest Eye, Morrison was asked if, in retrospect, she might have been aware of the Persephone archetype on some level, either consciously or unconsciously, while writing her first novel in the late 1960s. After all, The Bluest Eye does—like the myth—feature a girl/“maiden” overpowered and raped by a father/father figure who “loved” her but whose seed brought not life but death: the death of Pecola’s unborn baby; Pecola’s own “living death” in the underworld of insanity; and the unheard-of absence of all the marigolds in narrator Claudia’s world, including the marigolds whose seeds she and her sister Frieda had planted in an imitative-magic fertility ritual meant to assure the safe birth of Pecola’s baby.

Having been attending politely to all the usual Q&A demands, the author’s demeanor abruptly darkened as she noted that others had pointed out to her parallels between the Persephone archetype and The Bluest Eye. She replied sternly that she had never intentionally rewritten an existing narrative; that was simply not the way she worked. Lightening up to laugh that she had earned a classics minor in college and thus was “not unfamiliar” with the Persephone myth, she ultimately conceded that while she had not been consciously using said archetype in The Bluest Eye, the story may be there, on some level (SU, Oct. 5, 1988).

In 1994, Penguin Random House published a Plume paperback edition of The Bluest Eye, the original in a series of what became Vintage Random House editions of Morrison’s earliest eight novels, each with a foreword—or, in the case of The Bluest Eye, an afterword—written by the author, analyzing the historical, social, and/or personal events that inspired the novel. Though Morrison never explained why The Bluest Eye is the only one of her first eight novels with an afterword instead of a foreword, we can say something about why.