Morrison later recognized the problematics of omitting Pecola’s consciousness, writing in the Afterword of the 1993 edition that the novel does not “handle effectively the silence at its center: the voice that is Pecola’s ‘unbeing.’ It should have had a shape-like the emptiness left by a boom or a cry”. Yet Morrison, like other authors in the mid-twentieth century, still uses the perspective of the rapist, Cholly, during the scene of the assault. Such reactions, coming so quickly on the heels of the rape scene that leaves a young girl unconscious on the kitchen floor, underscore how the trauma of rape can be compounded by the callousness of others.Īs a rape novel, The Bluest Eye replaces the pornographic titillation seen in novels such as Invisible Man with the pain of the violated victim-survivor. This attitude is epitomized by the reaction of Pecola’s community, as the adults say, “ carry some of the blame” and “How come she didn’t fight him?”. Morrison demonstrates the predominant understandings of rape in the 1970s that blaming the victim for her trauma is easier than trying to understand it. Pecola, the eleven-year-old raped by her father Cholly, is driven mad by her father’s assaults and her mother’s refusal to believe what happened. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes back against “the male ‘glamour of shame’ rape is (or once was) routinely given”. One notorious example of this pornographic voyeurism appears in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), where the Black father Jim Trueblood salaciously describes raping his daughter to a transfixed white man. By focusing upon the person harmed, rather than the perpetrator of the violence, the rape novel challenges long-standing misconceptions about rape and disallows a voyeuristic gaze that turns sexual violence into pornographic titillation. The rape novel instead portrays rape as a violent crime enacting physical and psychological damage upon the victim-survivor. Before 1970, most depictions of rape in American fiction offered the perspective of the perpetrator enjoying the violence and pain he forced upon a woman. Morrison’s first novel also inaugurates a new genre of American fiction called the rape novel, which I describe in Writing the Survivor. The novel appeared on the American Library Association’s “Top 10 Most Challenged Books” list as recently as 2014 for content deemed too graphic for impressionable young people-for Morrison’s novel depicts the rape of a Black girl by her father, the birth and death of her baby, and her fall into madness. The novel is now often taught in high schools and universities but with its popularity comes criticism. As Morrison’s literary star rose, The Bluest Eye was recognized for its nuanced depiction of racism and the fetishization of white beauty standards. Toni Morrison’s masterful first novel received accolades in Kirkus Review, which called the book a “quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence.” Morrison’s novel about three little Black girls was “perhaps the least likely, least commercially viable story one could tell at the time,” according to Hilton Als in The New Yorker. The Bluest Eye was released on October 29, 1970. In this blog post, Field reflects on the power of Toni Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye, to mark its 50th anniversary. New from Clemson University Press, Writing the Survivor by Robin Field explores how rape novels place survivors at the heart of narratives of sexual violence rather than the perpetrators.