This essay compares Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, examining how both novels use poverty, oppression, and sexual abuse to shape their young female protagonists. Through parallel readings of Pecola Breedlove and Bone Boatwright, the paper explores how each character is marked by circumstances beyond her control from birth, how their father figures' psychological failures drive cycles of abuse, and how their mothers' avoidance enables ongoing harm. The essay also highlights key differences in narrative perspective and ultimate outcome, noting that Bone retains hope while Pecola descends into madness.
Authors orchestrate their plots such that characters are forced to make crucial decisions regarding their most centrally held values and beliefs; whichever action a specific character chooses serves to inform the audience as to what kind of individual he or she is. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the motif of abuse occurs in tales throughout history. Considering each story's social context also allows for insight into individual characterizations and a better grasp of the underlying values permeating their settings. Through the characters in The Bluest Eye and Bastard Out of Carolina, each novel's particular moral setting becomes clear, and the similarities seem to span many of the divides of race. Centrally, the key issues in both novels are poverty, oppression, and their emotional consequences. In other words, the themes within The Bluest Eye and Bastard Out of Carolina are similar largely because the characters within the two tales face the same kinds of pressures and handle them in the same ways.
The two characters who draw the most parallels are Pecola and Bone — the protagonists of both stories. Both are very young girls when the novels begin, and both initially find some level of comfort in the female characters that surround them. However, as young and impressionable girls, their lives are forever altered by those around them; they believe, from the very beginning, that they have been permanently attached to a social stigma. Bone declares, "There I was — certified a bastard of South Carolina" (Allison, 3). She is "certified" in that her birth certificate clearly states she is an illegitimate child of her mother, Anney Boatwright. Not only does this have the practical consequence of Bone never knowing who her father is, but it carries the emotional consequence that she must feel like a second-rate individual as a result of her parent's actions.
Similarly, one of the first features of Pecola's personality that Toni Morrison reveals to the reader is that she loves Shirley Temple — mainly because she thinks Temple is beautiful, and she believes Temple is beautiful because she is white. This generates an immediate contrast between what Pecola perceives beauty to be and what she is herself. Pecola Breedlove is a Black girl in a society that values whiteness. Additionally, her relatively dark complexion, even among other Black children, fills her with personal shame, as it occasionally makes her the object of ridicule from lighter-skinned peers. Out of this personal context, Pecola's objective within the first portion of the novel is to somehow make people love her despite what she believes to be her innate ugliness.
Morrison writes, "It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights — if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different" (Morrison, 45). This is the idea behind the title of the story. Pecola's desire for her eyes to be beautiful — or, more specifically, blue — extends beyond merely the notion that blue is good and brown is somehow bad. Her belief that her life would somehow be better if her eyes were blue is more philosophical: she thinks that if her eyes were beautiful, then the things she saw through them would be more beautiful as well. In this way, her dream is to somehow transform the world around her, and the people who occupy her life, into something more attractive and easily loved.
Essentially, both Bone and Pecola believe that something is wrong with them — something bestowed upon them at birth: Pecola is Black and Bone is a bastard. The key aspect of each character's situation is that the difficulties defining their lives are almost entirely out of their hands. After all, they are children, and as a result they are almost entirely at the mercy of the people around them. Accordingly, the most glaring similarity between Pecola and Bone is a direct consequence of their similar circumstances — they are both victims of sexual abuse. This abuse comes at the hands of their father figures, and both Daddy Glen and Cholly Breedlove find themselves in similar social positions, struggling to reconcile the men they are with the men they want to be.
Daddy Glen, for example, lives under the shadow of his brothers. This might not have been so detrimental had his father not habitually reminded him of his utter failure as a man. Daddy Glen cannot leave his father's company "before his father [has] delivered his lecture on all the things Glen had done wrong in his long life of failure and disappointment" (Allison, 99). The depression and disappointment Daddy Glen feels as a result of his inability to measure up to his father or brothers manifests itself in a number of ways. First, it can be seen as a contributing factor to his alcoholism. Second, his peculiar relationship with Anney seems to be another way in which he copes with his sense of failure as a man. He is wholly dependent upon her for the small amount of self-worth he maintains; as a result, he is violently possessive of her under the guise of love. Third, and most destructively, Daddy Glen's dissatisfaction with himself and his life is the central motivation for his sexual abuse of Bone. Essentially, Bone, Anney, and alcohol become the main modes of escape for Daddy Glen from the context of his detestable life.
Cholly Breedlove experiences analogous feelings of depression and worthlessness — largely a result of his race, but also a result of poverty and presumed failure. He is rootless both emotionally and in terms of family ties. Not only was Cholly abandoned as an infant in a junk heap, but when he sought out his father later in life he was rebuffed. The only person who showed him care as a child was his great-aunt, who raised him; she died when Cholly was a young teenager. Cholly also experienced sexual humiliation at the hands of white men who discovered him having sex for the first time and forced him to continue while they watched, forever associating sex with shame. Although Cholly perceived himself as free to have sex, drink, and be violent, he could never freely love or be loved as he truly wished. Consequently, when Cholly comes home one day to find Pecola washing dishes, he rapes her out of conflicting emotions — wanting to release his anger while simultaneously wanting closeness with her. His act of rape accomplishes neither of these goals and magnifies his daughter's already substantial shame.
Dorothy Allison's portrayal of Daddy Glen and Morrison's portrayal of Cholly together suggest that cycles of abuse are rooted in unresolved trauma and social emasculation rather than in simple malice. Both men are products of environments that stripped them of dignity, and both displace that devastation onto the most vulnerable people in their households.
"Enabling mothers who avoid confronting abuse"
"Bone finds identity; Pecola descends into madness"
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