Insanity is at once a social stigma and a tool used toward exclusion, marginalization, and domination of characters rebellious in nature otherwise ‘difficult to control’; in many cases, it is a reaction toward the external world, and in a limited number of cases it is what is called- ‘mental imbalance’ or insanity which may or may not have been triggered by the external world/circumstances. If we go with Michel Foucault’s observations in Madness and Civilization before the social and physical exclusion of the ‘mad’ in society, it was the lepers who were treated so. Once leprosy as a malady was abated, the place was taken over by madness. The practice of sending away mad people in ships, ‘The Ship of fools’ is an instance of this kind of discrimination. During the Renaissance such an attitude did not exist, madness was not seen as an illness but a condition of grace rather where the mad were seen as those who had come close to God’s reason, this was the reason why rather than being marginalized they were accepted. Around the seventeenth century, the view toward this section of society changed and those who could not conform to the accepted ways of society were put away in mental institutions or were segregated and confined; only in the eighteenth century, madness came to be seen as obverse to reason.1
In the essay, I intend to deal with three fictional characters who either through their actions, their stand on issues, or through their very position in society bear the brunt of societal prejudice and for the want of a better term are considered ‘mad’. The point that I am trying to make here is: one- those who are considered mad are not necessarily so; two- many a time they are those people whom society finds as ‘inconvenient’; three- often they are reduced to this pathetic position as a result of the atrocities wreaked on them for either following their reason which may not coincide with the given or the accepted societal rules, or sometimes because they are the weakest links in the chain in terms of rights and value as attributed to them again by society. The three characters under scrutiny are Veronika, Sharda, and Pecola. Veronika belongs to Ljubljana, which is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city; Sharda belongs to the small Indian town of Jullundar, (Punjab, India) and Pecola belongs to the North American society of Lorain. (Ohio). The geographical location becomes important considering that biological and resource circumstances determine the behavior of the dependants, a person’s behavior is influenced by the perception of the environment; types of behavior prevailing in a sub-environment also become an important factor influencing individual and group behavior.
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It is important to analyze Pecola’s (of The Bluest Eye) situation in life and her eventual schizophrenic predicament through her parents' individual lives as the impact of their experiences leaves an indelible mark on hers, reducing it to what it eventually becomes. Pecola has to bear the brunt of not only her mother’s lack of adjustment in the new industrial society they have relocated to but that of her father also. She has to bear the burden of their humiliation, exploitation, rejection, and refusal of hope. As a little girl still wide-eyed and simple in her acceptance of the world Pecola comes to trust even Soaphead Church, the charlatan in the novel. It is only natural to feel sympathetic towards her and her situation, had she not been so isolated, so unloved, so rejected by her own family she would have been spared the fate she met with.
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove is the daughter of Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. The black family finds itself at odds with the society it is placed in. It is a situation made worse by the physical deformity of Pauline. But this problem remains dormant till she is with her parents, comfortable in a society that does not give undue relevance to physical beauty. The life that she led among people of her kind did not make her feel unaccepted, she was content doing the daily household chores, but slowly she reached an age where her heart desired companionship and love, it was at this time that Cholly appeared in her life. They got married and decided to move to Ohio where there would be more job opportunities for Cholly. The change that came about was in terms of lifestyle and values. Pauline who was content looking after her little brother and sisters at home became lonely in the new place and Cholly became too busy to fill her loneliness. A feeling of rejection appeared as Pauline felt out of place amongst the people around her. An unpretentious, simple black woman with ordinary features Pauline had no complex regarding her looks. This was the reason why she did not feel any need to straighten her hair or go to the beauty parlor for any other reason. But in the new set up great stress was laid on outer appearance, it was a society where being beautiful meant being less black, having straight hair, uniform teeth, slender body, etc. Even the pronunciation differed, suddenly Pauline felt very out of place and Cholly was not there to help. The situation worsened when Pauline’s first tooth fell for she had already started making attempts to look outwardly pleasing and sometime later when the second tooth fell, she gave up on her attempts at outward beauty, felt defeated and her life was filled with bitterness. The notable point here is that for Pauline situation was made worse by societal attitudes and its artificial norms of beauty this was the reason why it was able to strike such a terrible blow to her personality. At one point in the novel Morrison writes:
Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying children) and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes. When Cholly began to quarrel about the money she wanted, she decided to go to work. Taking a job as a day worker helped with the clothes and even a few things for the apartment, but it did not help with Cholly. He was not pleased with her purchases and began to tell her so. Their marriage was shredded by quarrels….Money became the focus of all their discussions, hers for clothes, his for drink. The sad thing was that Pauline did not care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way. (The Bluest Eye, 92)
Ultimately, a prey of the new mindset dictated by the capitalistic society, Pauline found her peace as a maid in a white family, a family she adored.
Cholly abandoned as a baby by his young, unwedded mother, rescued and brought up by his aunt had on the whole what can be called a “fairly happy childhood”. However, in his life somewhere the absence of his parents lurked. A notable feature of his teenage life was an incident that can be said to have a sufficient impact on his life and character; which in turn can be read to a large extent as irresponsible.
After the death of his aunt, on the day of the funeral, Cholly was lured into going to the forest with a girl he liked where he was humiliated by two white men. However, he did not lay the blame for his humiliation on the two men but the girl who was with him. He started hating her. Later alone in the world, he went looking for his father and on meeting him did not find any solace or warmth that he was looking for. He was as isolated as any human could be. When he came to terms with his life he came across Pauline, liked her, and married her. But when things did not turn out as convenient as he expected them to be Cholly along with Pauline shifted to the Northern part of Texas. Cholly himself had not seen a normal childhood so it was a little difficult for him to behave as a responsible, caring father. The total of his frustrations in a new society on all fronts skewed his psyche and he ended up molesting his daughter.
Even her molestation by her father would not have pushed the little girl to be schizophrenic but her ill-placed faith in Soaphead Church and the idea of beauty, that if she had a pair of blue eyes all would love her and there would be order in her world. What made Cholly Breedlove rape his daughter? What made Pauline Breedlove so antagonistic towards her own family and so kind to the white family where she worked? What made the son of the family, Sammy, attempt to flee from the family more than twenty-four times? What made Pauline so “lonesome” in the city as compared to the life in Kentucky town that she had spent? Why did the falling of the second tooth have such an impact on her, when her disfigured leg had not affected her so much? Why at all did Cholly make the black girl he had been found and humiliated with and not the two white men, his tormentors, his object of hatred? And why did Pecola want a pair of blue eyes to ameliorate her condition in life- because she thought if it could earn love for the black cat with the blue eyes it would do for her? Or was it because of the Mary Jane candies with the picture of Mary Jane with a smiling white face, blonde hair and blue eyes that made her feel were the requirements for being loved? These are some of the questions that arise out of a beautifully told tale of a little black girl who desired blue eyes. And how in the quest for the same she was cheated by Soaphead Church and made to believe that the colors of her life had changed when they had not?
Pecola’s madness cannot be separated from the dynamics of power, aggression, exploitation, hatred, and marginalization. She bears the frustration of her mother’s ugliness, rejection loneliness, and poverty that she encounters in the town of Ohio. Both societal forces and intellectual trends give rise to wide acceptance of behavior-environment-ecology links within the domain of sociology and psychology. Marx says, ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’. The globalization of the capitalist free market economy demonstrates how social and personal choices are governed by autonomous processes driven by debt, profit, and control of consumer desire, rather than ordered by humane values and substantive rationality. The production of thought is not driven by the representation of ideals and goals, or libertarian choice, but by the pre-personal process of desire. There is, however exterior limit to capital: the conjunction of decoded and deterritorialized flows may produce their desiring machines, external to capitalist production. The process of desire termed by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘schizophrenia’ is a potent method to map the social unconscious according to its movements and intensities of desire tracing the dominant strata of the capitalist system for the construction of ‘experimentation or becoming’ through a reassembling of the abstract machines that lie between the strata and produce them.
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