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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Nuns and Lust:
Morrison begins Chapter 1 on an interesting note, combining both chastity and sexuality in a simile used to set the scene:
Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel.
The nuns' movement, "quiet as lust," is a noteworthy image with which to begin The Bluest Eye. In the novel, Morrison explores the ways in which the development of a positive self-image and rich emotional life can be arrested. Characters like Cholly experience stunted desire, hopes of a bright future fading into obscurity as banal reality sets in. This delay or even cessation of growth is not entirely the fault of Morrison's characters. Morrison implicates societal forces of oppression and alienation more than any individual, interrogating the racists standards many Black Americans are held to.
The fact that nuns, in particular, "go by quiet as lust," is important. When a person becomes a nun, she commits her life to God, swearing never to marry, have sex, or bear children. For nuns, lust is a feeling that must be repressed, must be made "quiet." The nuns' repressed lust, introduced in the first sentence of Chapter 1, emblematizes the emotions that other characters repress in The Bluest Eye.
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Explanation and Analysis—Adult Conversation:
In Chapter 1, Morrison utilizes a combination of similes to convey the gulf that exists between parents and children when it comes to conversation.
Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me.
Claudia envisions adults' conversations as "the throb of a heart made of jelly," a "gently wicked dance"—beautiful and complex, but inscrutable to her and her sister. Children do not yet fully understand the world's complexities; they speak more directly, filter their language less. Adult conversation may appear unnecessarily complicated to children, regulated by a series of rules mysterious to them. The "edge" and "curl" of adults' words rise far above the heads of children, often by design. Parents will commonly speak in metaphors and subtleties to obscure meaning from children, whom they wish to remain ignorant about certain aspects of life.
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Explanation and Analysis—Death and Homelessness:
In Chapter 1, Claudia meditates on housing issues in her community, introducing readers to the topic of homelessness through her limited child's perspective. On account of her youth, Claudia somewhat overemphasizes the permanency of being unhoused. She utilizes both simile and hyperbole in her discussion:
The concreteness of being outdoors was another matter—like the difference between the concept of death and being, in fact, dead. Dead doesn’t change, and outdoors is here to stay.
In this passage, Claudia compares the act of being "outdoors" (or homelessness) to death. Morrison uses figurative language here to emphasize the totality and seeming inescapability of homelessness in Claudia's mind. She views the lack of a home, like death, as a permanent state, something one cannot come back from. While this implication verges on hyperbole, it does reflect the totality of "being outdoors" in the mind of a young child.
Claudia may be young, but she is nothing if not observant. She picks up on the attitudes and feelings of the adults who surround her. When said adults express their disdain for the homeless, Claudia hears this too and internalizes it, forming her own opinion around those she hears. In her young, uninformed mind, homelessness thus appears to be a state of disgrace into which one can fall, just as permanent as death.
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Explanation and Analysis—Frenzied Birds:
In Chapter 1, the unnamed narrator characterizes the difference between "renting" Black people and "propertied" Black people, who own their own homes. The former group are more common than the latter, a factor highly influenced by systemic socioeconomic racism. When a Black person is fortunate enough and wealthy enough to own their own home, Morrison's narrator asserts, that person will regard their property as akin to their child. Using simile, the narrator describes propertied Black people's fussiness:
Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes.
According to Morrison's narrator, propertied Black people behave towards their homes as a "frenzied, desperate" bird might behave while attempting to create its nest. For these people, the opportunity to own property is hard-fought and hard-won. Only a century earlier, Black people were imprisoned, bought, and sold inhumanely as property themselves. To go from enslavement to home ownership over the course of only a few generations would have been a difficult feat to achieve, and yet more noteworthy given the added issue of racist housing discrimination.
For these reasons, propertied Black people in The Bluest Eye approach homeownership and decoration more aggressively and actively than those people (often White) who take property ownership for granted.
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Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Sore Tooth:
Towards the end of Chapter 2, the narrator uses simile to characterize the Breedlove family's sofa. This otherwise nondescript piece of furniture becomes a physical manifestation of the family's financial and societal hardships:
Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.
In this passage, the narrator likens the family's much-hated sofa to a "sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation." This particular sofa was bought new but arrived broken, an incident for which the store refused to assume responsibility. Now in possession of a less-than-desirable sofa, the Breedloves must mend, fix, use, and make payments on a piece of furniture that brings them no joy. If anything, the sofa reminds them of their financial hardships: the Breedloves want to fix their sofa, or replace it, but cannot. And therefore it sits, a problem that only money can fix—which, sadly, for the Breedloves, makes it unsolvable.
Through this use of simile, Morrison illustrates the way in which financial problems compound for impoverished Black people.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Pecola and Maureen:
In Chapter 4, Pecola endures great humiliation at the hands of Maureen Peal, a young White girl whose rejection crushes Pecola's spirit. After Maureen yells at Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia, calling them "black and ugly black e mos," Pecola retreats into herself. Claudia narrates this dejection using simile:
Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me.
Notably, this simile conjures up the image of Pecola as a crushed, helpless little bird—a tragic figure, victimized by the White supremacist social forces that teach her to doubt her own self-worth. Maureen's rejection is simply another blow to that self-worth, delivered by a person who represents those White-centric female beauty standards Pecola so desperately wishes she herself could achieve.
It is important to the context of the above passage that Maureen, in her angry statement, unequivocally associates Pecola's ugliness with her Blackness. She is not only ugly and Black, but ugly because she is Black. White and Black, beautiful and ugly—these categories are lines drawn in the sand of society, an aesthetic caste system that Morrison attempts to deconstruct through Pecola's relationship with Maureen.
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Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Flies:
In the following passage from Chapter 5, Morrison traces the contours of Geraldine's internal monologue, revealing the woman's opinion of Pecola. Geraldine detests the dirtiness and chaos that accompany poverty. She wants none of these things anywhere near her home or family, consequently disdaining Pecola and assuming the worst of her. Morrison uses simile to convey Geraldine's hatred:
They sat in little rows on street curbs, crowded into pews at church, taking space from the nice, neat, colored children; they clowned on the playgrounds, broke things in dime stores, ran in front of you on the street, made ice slides on the sloped sidewalks in winter. Like flies they hovered; like flies they settled. And this one had settled in her house.
Geraldine, a middle-class Black person, views Pecola and other impoverished Black people as pests: "like flies they hovered; like flies they settled." Geraldine considers these people less than her, less worthy than her—despite the fact that they suffer from the same racism she does. In this passage, Morrison illustrates the process by which a person comes to dehumanize members of their own community. Geraldine finds herself unable to empathize with Pecola because she has adopted the aesthetics and goals of the White middle class, modeling herself after what a White-centric society deems "normal" and "good." In doing so, she has lost the ability to relate to Black people in less fortunate circumstances, or recognize her own intolerance.
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