Blog post 2: Seasons in The Bluest Eye

‘The Masque of the Four Seasons’, Walter Crane

                 In this post, I'll talk about the novel The Bluest Eye from an archetypal perspective. By definition, an archetype is "an original pattern or model" (Guerin et al) and in literary analysis, an archetypal approach looks for patterns in a text that are similar in many other texts. In the novel, a very prominent archetype is that of the four seasons.

           
            First of all, the book is divided into four parts and each part is named after each season, starting from autumn and ending with summer. The archetype of autumn has a symbolism of tragedy and the first section of the book is definitely tragic. Morrison highlights the development of self-hatred in the young  Black girls in the book, Freida (10 years old), Claudia (her sister and main character, 9 years old) and Pecola, a 12-year-old girl who was even poorer than Freida and Claudia and came to live with them after losing her family home. 

             In part two, winter, this tragedy culminates with a complete death of the girls' self-esteem and self-love. As the archetype winter is strongly associated with death, this all makes sense. A new student came to their school, Maureen Peal, who came from a rich "coloured" family. She was an embodiment of all the seasons: 

"There was a hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk." (Morrison, 62)

Her winter coldness came when she, after pretending to befriend all three girls, declared that they were "black and ugly" and she was "cute". This coldness shocked the poor girls and basically led them to settle into the idea that truly, they were worthless. 

         

            The archetype of spring, which is the next part of the book, is said to represent rebirth and new life. I'm hoping that in this section, the girls will begin to heal from all of this death and sorrow and re-emerge as powerful women. 

Let's see what happens.