"The Bluest Eye" vs "Parable of the Sower": Pain, Suffering, and the Black Experience
How Toni Morrison and Octavia E. Butler use these themes to portray Black life
I discovered Toni Morrison and Octavia E. Butler at around the same time. Because of that, I read their books The Bluest Eye and Parable of the Sower one after the other and the differences in the Black experiences they depict were startling to me. Obviously, I didn’t expect them to portray a monolithic Black experience, the storylines are completely different from one another: The Bluest Eye is set in 1930s Midwest America, whereas Parable of the Sower takes place in a post-apocalyptic West Coast during the 2020s. However, beyond the very clear differences between setting and era, the theme of these two stories remains the same: they both deal with pain and trauma. In The Bluest Eye, pain and suffering make the Black experience whereas, in Parable of the Sower, the Black experience is inscribed within a larger human one wherein pain and suffering leads to growth. And the vehicles for each of these storylines are the main characters Pecola (The Bluest Eye) and Lauren (Parable of the Sower) two Black protagonists, who both absorb the pain around them, yet one is destroyed by it and the other grows from it.
Speedy Quick Synopses
The Bluest Eye
Published in 1970, this is Toni Morrison’s first book. It tells the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl from Lorain, Ohio. She is convinced of her ugliness and dreams of being “blessed” with the blondest hair, the palest skin, and the bluest eyes — hence the title. Pecola is rejected and abused by everyone around her and believes that if she were to look like her idol Shirley Temple, her life would be blissful.
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler published this book in 1993, and it is the first of The Parable two-part series (the second being Parable of the Talents (1998)). It follows the story of teenager Lauren Olamina, who lives in a post-apocalyptic L.A., in 2024. Due to climate and economic crises, the world has collapsed and social chaos reigns; it is complete anarchy. Lauren suffers from hyperempathy, the ability to feel others’ emotions. She lives protected with her family in a gated community, outside of which poverty, violence and a drug called “pyro” ( which makes its users want to set fires to anything and anyone) are rampant. When her community gets destroyed by pyro addicts, Lauren is forced to escape with two of her surviving neighbours Harry and Zahra. In the fight for survival, the group grows along the way and Lauren comes to create a new faith and community called Earthseed which aims to instill a new destiny for humanity.
Black is beautiful painful
What struck me the most after completing The Bluest Eye, was how utterly heart-wrenching the story of Pecola was. Her story is that of suffering and trauma. She is an abandoned child, constantly insulted, mistreated, excluded, taunted, and abused. The only times she gets a break is when Pecola retreats to her fantasy world and turns herself into a Shirley Temple look-alike, and/or when she escapes to the prostitutes’ apartment upstairs from where she lives; there, the women give her the attention and affection she so much yearns for. Pecola relates to them because just like her, people shame these women and banish them to the margins of society. But outside in the real world, away from these exceptional glimmers of bliss, she is everybody’s punching bag.
Pecola’s tale is that of the ugly duckling. Unloved everywhere she goes, her lack of beauty seems to trigger everybody’s hatred for her. Just like the ugly duckling, Pecola dreams of the swans’ beauty, or in her case, the blue eyes’ beauty. Yet, everywhere she goes she is met with rejection and abuse. Unlike the ugly duckling, she doesn’t turn into a swan. She is doomed to her state as an ugly duckling and continues to suffer everyone’s wrath. This is what rubbed me the wrong way after completing the book: the pain Pecola suffers seemed gratuitous. That is all her story is about. The heaviness of trauma she accumulates never ceases to increase, and ultimately, it completely destroys her. Not to mention, in the story, she and her family are known as the most dysfunctional members of the community. Making her the figurehead of pain and suffering. What stood out to me, even more, is that Pecola seems to symbolize the most dreary Black experience you can think of. She suffers the product of terrible transgenerational trauma, and being on the receiving end of that, she has no choice but to continue down that route.
I was terribly upset by the end because the message behind the pain was a terrible one. It promoted a sort of pessimistic realism, reducing a certain Black experience to a tale of tremendous suffering with no offered solution. I understand that given the Jim Crow landscape the story operates in, it is only natural to expose the readers to the very real and valid hardships of that time. I also understand that making Pecola the protagonist of such a difficult story can make the readers ponder on the destructive powers of beauty standards, race, class, and gender. But to be quite honest, you either finish the book stunned by the heaviness of it all or take pity on the Pecola’s of the world.
Humanity Black is beautiful
After completing Parable of the Sower, I felt completely different. The story’s ending was like a breath of fresh air. After all the incredible suffering the characters go through, you sense this empowering feeling of hope. It isn’t cliché by any means, but rather quite realistic. It is a story of unimaginable pain and hardships, but contrary to The Bluest Eye, I didn’t feel defeated by the end of it; I felt energized. I think that is because this book does not dwell on the pain the characters suffer.
The landscape of this book is extremely different from the other. We are dealing with a post-apocalyptic world, where all the structures we know today have crumbled. Because of that, it left space for desolation, poverty, extreme violence; anarchy. For example, human trafficking and slavery are the most lucrative businesses (ironic, isn’t it?), and the people trafficked and enslaved wear these remote-controlled collars which torture them if they step out of line (or sometimes are switched on for the perverse pleasure of the master). Also, the poorest of the poor are often all addicted to the “pyro” drug which makes them want to set places — and people — on fire and revel in ecstasy at the sight of it all. Pain and suffering are what make this catastrophic world, and no one can escape it.
In the midst of all of that, we have our main protagonist Lauren, who is a “sharer”: someone who has a condition called hyperempathy, and who feels what everybody does. The beauty and power of having Lauren as the protagonist are that through her, we experience not only what she goes through, but what everybody around her goes through as well. In this way, the pain she is experiencing is not a product of her being a Black girl but instead is the consequence of sharing abilities. Because of her hyperempathy, Lauren is vulnerable to others’ pain way beyond the emotional level of “regular” empathy; it transmutes to a physical level. So Lauren is a sort of embodiment of sufferance (similarly to Pecola) yet that embodiment is the consequence of sharing what she is witnessing, not a consequence of her Blackness.
It’s important to note the socio-historical context in which Parable of the Sower takes place. It deeply contrasts with the Jim Crow era of The Bluest Eye. Contrarily to Pecola’s segregated Midwestern America, Lauren is operating in a seemingly post-racial modern or should I say futuristic terrain. When a character’s race is mentioned, it is a simple descriptor. It has nothing to do with their social standing. Understandably so, given the circumstances of the apocalypse, the colour of your skin certainly doesn’t matter when the entire world is in shambles. The story of pain and trauma is no longer reserved for the Black characters. Therefore, the story of pain and trauma becomes inscribed within humanity at large and is no longer the pillar of Black life like it is in The Bluest Eye. Conversely, it can easily be argued that The Bluest Eye conveys the same message. After all, being Black doesn't absolve Pecola of her humanity and within all the pain she suffers, as a reader, you are compelled to protect her and defend her dignity.
Yet Lauren’s story not only helped universalize the thematic of pain but also helped promote a sort of optimistic realism. Trauma is constructive, always propelling her towards hopeful days. Whereas for Pecola, trauma is destructive, and she is dragged in a downward spiral.
Final Thoughts…
The point here wasn’t to bash one book and favour the other, or even decide which one painted the “correct” Black experience. Rather, the point was to reflect on the power of artistic expression, in representing different visions of the world.
I read Toni Morrison’s later works before her first book, and so I got to know her “more refined pen” before experiencing her first published book. That tainted my reading of The Bluest Eye, because, in my opinion, her later work is way more nuanced and portrays a variety of Black experiences that don’t all ground Blackness in trauma (of course, her other classic Beloved (1987) also relays the atrocities of slavery, but it’s a vehicle for the theme of motherhood and the sacrifices that come along with it). So, The Bluest Eye clashed with what I knew and appreciated from her work that I previously read. I know that with time, I will be able to read The Bluest Eye in a different light and appreciate it differently. Not that I didn’t appreciate it before — because I did; I can acknowledge it is a beautiful piece of literature. But I think that with some distance, I will be able to absorb it better. The same thing happened when I read Beloved: reading it the first time upset me for similar reasons, and the second time around, I enjoyed it. When it came to Octavia E. Butler’s book, it reflected my view of the world (racially-speaking) much more. The matter-of-factness that race was approached with fit the way I see things and made the difficult subject matter more palatable to me in a way. Now, when I read, I do try my best to suspend my beliefs; otherwise, you just end up reading only to confirm you think and judge/discard what doesn’t match up with your beliefs. But there was something about Parable of the Sower that reached me in a way that The Bluest Eye couldn’t.
In the end, these are two books that I can’t recommend enough. I think everyone should read Toni Morrison and Octavia E. Butler’s books, as they are iconic writers with incredible talent. Even though The Bluest Eye and Parable of the Sower are completely different, style and genre-wise, they offer a variety of (Black) stories. And, even though I might not agree with one, I still value the importance of the existence of the two, because it is through artistic expression that boundaries are pushed and that diversity of thought is preserved.
FYI
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage International, 2007 (first published in 1970).
Butler, E. Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2019 (first published in 1993).
“Parable of the Sower”: Cheat Sheet