(Excerpted from "Not so fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye" by Debra T. Werrlein; © 2005 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States)

DICK AND JANE

The Dick and Jane books . . . exist almost entirely outside of history - as if no thing and no time exists beyond the suburban present. They therefore treat American childhood as an abstraction that excludes all but white middle-class children.

Since Jane never complains about her forced domesticity or her subordination to Dick, she lets the privileges of Dick's innocent world stand for the experience of all American childhoods. Reinforcing the abstraction, primers before 1965 deport color, gender, and poverty to "other lands," implicitly defining such variations as culturally un-American or politically irrelevant.

In Lorain, Ohio, schoolteachers favor Maureen Peal, "a high-yellow dream child" who "enchanted the entire school." Stewing over how teachers "smiled encouragingly" when they called on Maureen, Claudia complains that such favoritism makes her and Frieda feel "lesser." Similarly, Pecola notes that her teachers "tried to never glance at her, and called on her only when everyone was required to respond."

While Claudia wonders what made Maureen different, what was the "thing that made her beautiful and not us," she and Frieda try to resist their feelings of inadequacy by dubbing Maureen "six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie." Significantly, Morrison attributes Maureen's power not just to lightness, but to its beauty, leaving Claudia to desperately wonder, "What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important?"

Through Claudia's anxiety, Morrison points to the particular predicament of black girls in a white nation. For power they need beauty, and for beauty they need whiteness.

Without the familial support that strengthens Claudia and Frieda, and unlike her brother who transforms "ugliness" into "a weapon to cause others pain," Pecola succumbs to the "Thing." She accepts that it "made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike."

SHIRLEY TEMPLE

Pecola . . . idolizes Shirley Temple, a depression-era icon whose childhood frivolity conveyed hope to the struggling nation. Despite the common theme of orphanhood in Temple's films, titles such as Curly Top (1935) and Little Miss Broadway (1938) preserve childhood innocence by reducing adversity to a plot device. Presaging the moralizing and harmonizing role that children supposedly played for their families during the Cold War, Temple's characters, Elizabeth and Betsy respectively, pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They both charm wayward (and wealthy) bachelors into marrying financially bereft women so that the happy couple can adopt their orphaned matchmaker.

These child-characters understand that their power resides in the childish sex appeal of blonde hair and blue eyes. In Curly Top especially, Elizabeth flirts with her eventual benefactor, Mr. Morgan, while on their "first date."

Through the childish naivete of Temple's characters, however, the films easily attribute powers of seduction to willful determination, not white beauty. In the song "Be Optimistic" from Little Miss Broadway, Temple advises her fellow orphans that if they "just smile," someone will love them.

Like Dick and Jane, Temple's characters exist in a state of innocence, only brushing with larger socio-economic and historical contexts. They operate, therefore, like Pecola's racist schoolteachers, implicitly blaming darker victims who must endure rather than transcend their own suffering.

Morrison highlights the power of such blame when Pecola begins to menstruate shortly after drinking three quarts of milk from a Shirley Temple cup. While nursing herself to maturity on Temple's standard of female beauty, Pecola cultivates a self-loathing that prompts her to ask Claudia and Frieda, "How do you get somebody to love you?"

Since edicts like Temple's "just smile" occlude the oppressive histories that might otherwise explain Pecola's loveless family, Temple offers Pecola no one to blame but herself.

IMITATION OF LIFE

Pecola outwardly emulates Temple in the novel, but Morrison directly connects Pecola to [Imitation of Life]'s Peola when she signifies on the name. She highlights the distinction when Maureen mistakenly asks, "Pecola? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?"

Faced with political and economic dispossession, Peola rejects her black mother, Delilah, so she can adopt the invisible, but juridically defined, politically and economically empowered white subject position that she associates with the abstracted qualities of white beauty.

Pecola shares Peola's desires, but she occupies a different body, a variation Morrison captures through their similar, but different names. When Claudia compares Maureen's long beautiful braids to lynch ropes, Morrison offers a chilling metaphor that portends the stakes raised by the corporeal differences between Peola and Pecola.

Unlike the light Peola, Pecola inhabits a dark, unabstracted body. Morrison articulates Pecola's struggle between visible body and visible subject when the immigrant grocer, Mr. Yacobowski, registers a "total absence of human recognition" while looking at her.

When she lies in the darkness of her parents' store-front home and whispers, "Please God . . . please make me disappear," . . . she ultimately fails because her eyes remain. Pecola says, "They were everything. Everything was there, in them."

Pecola's eyes represent her consciousness, her ability to see the "ugliness" she associates with blackness. Without the ability to "see" - or without the "c" - Pecola believes she can be Peola; she hopes to enact her own blue-eyed, white-faced version of blackness. Paradoxically, for successful abstraction, Pecola must endure self-erasure and blindness.