The Bluest Eye Winter (II) - Spring (I)
Winter (continued)
This section of Winter begins with an excerpt from Dick and Jane that describes a cat who doesn’t wish to play with Jane.
The narrator describes the respectable African-American woman of that time. He believes that these women come from the south, and have a reputation for being excellent homemakers. They comport themselves with dignity and maintain the highest standards of hygiene both for their person as well as their property. However, such women are often unable to express tender emotion and are feared by their children just as much as by their husbands. They do find a soft corner in their hearts for their pets. The narrator then introduces the reader to Geraldine, her cat, and her son, Louis Junior. Geraldine is one such respectable African American woman. She only allows her son to play with white children and teaches him to differentiate between “colored” people like themselves, and black people. She forbids him from associating himself with black people.
Louis Junior is deathly afraid of his mother and quite jealous of the cat that often ends up receiving his share of his mother’s affection. Louis Junior lives quite close to the school, and he often plays in the schoolyard at the end of the day. One day, Louis finds Pecola walking in the yard all by herself, he attempts to bully her, and when she rebuffs his attempts, he invites her into the house under the guise of playing with kittens. Pecola is overcome by the cleanliness and beauty of the house, but Louis throws the cat on her and holds the door closed when Pecola attempts to escape. The cat calms down, and Pecola notices its blue eyes. Louis enters the room to investigate and finds her stroking the cat. He grabs the cat and whirls it around. He throws the cat against the radiator and it appears to be dead. Geraldine returns home and Louis immediately blames Pecola for killing the cat. Geraldine is disgusted by Pecola and abuses her out of her house.
Spring
Claudia returns home after playing outside to find her mother singing the blues, while Frieda is crying in her room. She learns that their parents had chased off Mr. Henry because he had fondled Frieda while her parents had been working in the garden. Frieda’s father had shot off in the air with a shotgun, and Mr. Henry had fled without shoes. Comically, Claudia becomes upset because all things happen to her sister first, and she wished that for once she would experience something before her sister. Frieda is worried that she is going to be ‘ruined,’ but they think this will mean that she will become obese like Miss Marie, who was also ruined. They decide to go to Pecola for some alcohol because ruined women like China and Poland lived on whisky to be thin. On reaching Penola’s home, they learn that she has gone to her mother’s workplace from Miss Marie. They upset Miss Marie by calling her ruined and she chases them out of her rooms. They make their way to the house where Pauline works as a maid and find Pecola with her mother. Pauline is washing the house laundry and needs Pecola to carry it home.
Pauline goes to retrieve the washed clothes while Pecola waits with the MacTeer girls in the kitchen. A young white girl comes into the kitchen asking for “Polly,” and this makes Claudia angry because she doesn’t think children should call adults by their names. Pecola tries to show her friends the blueberry cobbler her mother made for the white family, but she causes it to fall. The hot blueberries splash her naked legs and splash all across the clean floor. The white child begins to cry, and Pauline returns. She berates Pecola for making a mess on her floor and comforts the upset child while she throws Pecola and her friends out of the kitchen.
Another excerpt from the Dick and Jane books is included and it talks about the children’s mother who is pleasant to her children and plays with them. The narrator then takes on Pauline’s perspective who is trying to understand when her life began to go downhill. She concludes that it must have begun with her lame foot, even before she lost her tooth. Pauline was born in Alabama, and she believes that her lame foot led to her parents not caring for her as much as her siblings. Her family relocated to Kentucky like many other families in the South, and Pauline began to care for her siblings while her mother worked since she was the eldest child. She enjoyed it at first, but soon Pauline began to search for romance in her life. She wished that a stranger would come to her and take her out of her meaningless life. She recounts the day she met Cholly when he had been trying to tickle her lame foot. She remembers seeing colors just as soon as she had seen him. He had been very kind to her and treated her lame foot as something that required care rather than an inconvenience.
They moved to Ohio, and Cholly got himself a job, but Pauline struggled to find a place for herself. She was uncomfortable living around so many whites, while the black people from the north made fun of her speech. She felt alone, while Cholly made friends, and began to resent her complete dependence on him. Pauline thought she could make better friends if she had nicer clothes and better make-up, which led to several fights between her and Cholly. She found a job for herself, but Cholly had begun to drink, and he led her to be fired from the job by showing up drunk at her house. Pauline bitterly thinks of the $11 that her employer had withheld after firing her when she refused to leave Cholly. She then became pregnant with her first child, Sammy, and things between her and Cholly became better for a few months. She had become obsessed with going to the theatre during her pregnancy, she would immerse herself in their world of fantasy and forget about her own life. Pauline lost her front tooth while eating candy at the theatres, and she gave up on looking beautiful then. The fights between Cholly and her grew more violent as he would make fun of her missing tooth. Pauline stopped seeing beauty in her children and instead found her satisfaction at work. The family she worked for often remarked that she was the ideal servant, while her children at home were forcibly bent towards respectability and never received any tenderness from her.
Analysis
In the concluding section of Winter, the narrator examines the notions of a respectable black family. Geraldine builds a world for herself and her family that mirrors the ideal setting of the reading primers. Through the example of Geraldine and Louis Junior, readers can infer that although they don’t struggle with their material condition, their moral condition is severely lacking. Louis Junior is a sadistic child who attempts to torture Pecola, while Geraldine abuses Pecola and throws her out into the snow without a care. Characters like Geraldine and Maureen Peal demonstrate that beauty or wealth cannot indicate the nature of an individual’s character.
Spring is the longest section of the novel, and it focuses on the transformations that occur within the lives of the characters in the novel, much like the changes that Spring brings for plants and animals. Interestingly, the spring section begins with a reference to violence as Claudia talks about the new blooming branches that make for painful switching. The author links all of the rebirths and births in this section with violence. The first division in the Spring section is Pauline’s account of her life. Pauline struggled with much the same difficulties as Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda encountered as young children. Pauline is unable to accept her beauty, continually compares herself to others, and finds her appearance to be unacceptable. She goes through a series of rebirths, the first of which occurs with her meeting Cholly, and is followed by her migration to Ohio. Pauline and Cholly lead difficult lives in the city, and it eventually begins to change their relationship. Things between them are changed for a brief time when they begin to expect a child, but Pauline losing her teeth causes a large drift in their relationship that remains unaltered even after their second child.
