Inside a head

I’m trying to think of how exactly to say this, because the plotline of the novel is so monumentally awful, but the thing that has stuck with me in my rereading of The Bluest Eye is how gentle Toni Morrison is with her villainous characters. Not just Cholly Breedlove, though Morrison’s handling of his character is virtuosic. She holds him to account for raping his young daughter almost at the same moment that she makes legible the violent sexual assault he experiences as a young man that is the key cause of his own sexual violence. The compressed way Morrison manages time in her novels is perhaps most striking around episodes of sexual violence, because it so closely mimics the insidious sense of simultaneity that undergirds the ongoing experience of sexual assault. Cholly and his friend, Darlene, are found by two white men out searching for their hounds. The men are poachers, taking things that are not theirs, and they force Cholly — at gunpoint — to continue to have sex with Darlene. In their aggressive prurience, the poachers steal Cholly and Darlene’s pleasure, evaporating it where they stands: “There was no where for Cholly’s eyes to go,” Morrison writes, “They slid about furtively searching for shelter, while his body remained paralyzed” (TBE 148). Cholly at first tries to cover up Darlene, to keep the white men from seeing their naked bodies, but as the awful scene plays out, he finds himself hating her, “The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile,” (148). Later, when Cholly rapes Pecola, Morrison brings back the nauseating sensation of this passage: “[Pecola’s] small back hunched over the sink. Cholly saw her dimply and could not tell what he saw or what he felt. Then he became aware that he was uncomfortable; next he felt the discomfort dissolve into pleasure. The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. […] He wanted to break her neck — but tenderly. Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet” (161). Morrison is careful to show Cholly’s mistake — he misunderstands, in a fundamental way, the love of a father for a child and the love of two adults — but she is also generous with him, making it clear that his past suffering and exploitation is also to blame for his confusion, his “biliousness.” After I finished The Bluest Eye I turned to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs Bridge, written eleven years before Morrison’s first novel.

I have been told I should read Mrs. Bridge for a long time. I understand it is one of those books that has a special space, especially in the creative writing curriculum in the United States. And while I appreciated the sensitivity of Connell’s presentation, and at time admired the balance of pity with derision, I felt unsatisfied by the end of the novel, in part I felt like Connell, for all of his detailed thinking about India Bridge’s specific social and relational situation, doesn’t seem to think she deserves any better than what she gets. Pity and derision are not generous stances.

There are moments when we get the sense that Mrs. Bridge experiences a sense of her own life’s boundedness. In her half-lit friendship with Grace Barron, with her trip to Europe with her husband. “The Clock” presents the closest reach toward sublimity that Mrs. Bridge is allowed, and even that is deflated, minimized: “For some time, perhaps an hour or more, [Mrs. and Mr. Bridge] had been reading, separately; he had the financial page of the newspaper and she had been idly reading of the weddings that day. The rain blew softly against the windowpanes, shutters rattled, and above the front door the tin weather stripping began to moan. Mrs. Bridge, with the newspaper in her lap, listened to the rumbling and booming of thunder over the house. Suddenly, in total quiet, the room was illuminated by lightning. Mr. Bridge lifted his head, only that and nothing more, but within Mrs. Bridge something stirred” (MB 93-4). The intensity of this internal shift is profound, and Connell tells us it registers across Mrs. Bridge’s life, but it is also miniscule, scanty. “She never forgot this moment when she had almost apprehended the very meaning of life,” (94). I felt dissatisfied with India Bridge’s characterization; not just that this is a portrait of a woman who never fully peers out of her social condition, and who never fully comprehends the kinds of things — friendship, intellectual excitement, surprise — that might have shaken her from middle class complacency. This seems to be the topic of the novel, after all. But, she is given short shrift even by her creator. Mrs. Bridge is narrated across thirty years of her life — from her early marriage to her recent widowhood. And while the pathos of the characterization is clear, the precision of it is not. Because Mrs. Bridge does not have language to articulate the sublime Connell clearly shows her experiencing here, are we expected to think she experiences it less? Do we really live inside a world that grants full appreciation of experience to people with language to describe it? Surely not. More than that, though, the sensitivity Connell shows to the antinomian, at times antisocial, Bridge children — people with roving intellectual ambitions, people who feel irritated with the social striving of their mother — is a clear ballast against any carefulness he has in narrating Mrs. Bridge. Mrs. Bridge is, after all, Connell’s mother’s generation, Connell’s mother’s age. And what do we do, in writing, if we don’t actively deride, and perhaps even pity, our mothers?