Impossible Motherhood, Female Freedom, and the Politics of Writing

• In Event: The Mother

Abstract

In her 2007 Foreword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison recalls a moment from childhood when she realized that “beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (emphasis in the original). When Morrison wrote her first novel, over the latter half of the 1960s, “the reclamation of racial beauty” animated liberationist projects of many kinds. At a time when Angela Davis celebrated “the black woman as the custodian of a house of resistance,” Morrison pursued a different path, exploring the possibility of freedom through the figure of an impossible mother. Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old mother-to-be who carries her father’s baby and yearns for blue eyes to make her beautiful, provides the mute center of Morrison’s narrative. This paper approaches The Bluest Eye as a meditation on the freedom of black women and girls and the responsibilities of the writer who holds their stories in her hands. I ask how Morrison imagines avenues for action in the aftermath of catastrophe and whether her “(failed) attempt to shape a silence while breaking in it” poses a challenge to political theorists’ weddedness to the idea of non-sovereign freedom.

Author

• Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia