Dirty Words: Lack and/of Innocence in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) depicts a complex interplay of lack and fetishism. While many scholars read narrator Claudia and protagonist Pecola in opposition—emblematic of childhood survival and failure, respectively—this article argues that the novel links the girls insofar as both are excluded from an innocence primarily associated with white childhood. Both girls respond to the shameful sense of lack that emerges from their unfulfilled desire for innocence by fetishizing symbols of the ideal object. While innocence depends on negation, fetishization operates by substituting one love-object for another. As such, fetishization necessarily fails to “produce” innocence for either girl. Claudia, who fetishizes cleanliness and “good grammar,” recognizes the inadequacy of her substitution even as she maintains an attachment to it. She consequently exhibits what David Eng and Shinhee Han call “racial melancholia,” an orientation toward lack that permeates the formal elements of her narrative. Conversely Pecola, who fetishizes the titular blue eyes, uncritically adores her substitution. Enacting the process of incorporation theorized by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok allows Pecola to keep innocence “alive” within her unconscious but also requires she compulsively stage the fantasy of the object’s continued existence. Attending to the girls’ shared melancholia alongside the parallels between them ultimately enables a reparative reading that honors their position in Morrison’s lineage of complex girlhood friendships.