Review Essay

Review : Malmgren, Carl D., (2007). Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations.

            The author of “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” is, Carl D. Malmgren in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations which is edited by Harold Bloom, a sterling professor of the humanities in Yale University, whose background is academic writing. This essay was first published in 2007 and is included into an e-book with some interpreters’ perspective about The Bluest Eye also. The aim of this essay may explain and give the evidence to the reader that The Bluest Eye tends to have more than one narrator. The most suggested audiences are interpreters and both of fiction and non-fiction writers, because it may influence interpreters to be more critical analyzing a belles lettres and drive either fiction or non-fiction writers to be more creative in writing.

            Malmgren argues that The Bluest Eye Novel has more than one narrator in which four seasonal sections is narrated by Claudia MacTeer and seven primer sections is taken by an epigraph, the master primer. Four seasonal sections, however, have double voices from the experiencing “I” and the narrating “I”.

(-)        The evidences which Malmgren gives, sometimes, are not convincing and without considering why he must use or choose that evidence. “Elsewhere, she switches to an adult perspective on the incident being narrated,” with the evidence: “We trooped in, Frieda sobbing quietly, Pecola carrying a white tail, me carrying the little-girl gone-to-woman pants”. His evidence is not clear and does not have any point in which it is just the delineation of the moment. He also said: “The critical consensus seems to be that there are two main speakers, Claudia in the seasonal sections, and an authorial persona elsewhere”. “An authorial persona elsewhere” is too general to be put in the context. It needs to be analyzed more specific by showing evidences in the novel who actually the persona elsewhere is.

            There are several parts which underline repeatable points. In the very beginning, he actually explains this: “The seasonal sections are in the first person, but even they are double-voiced, aware of the difference between the experiencing “I” and the narrating “I. In places Claudia speaks as the nine-year-old girl going through the experience, ignorant, for example, as to what “ministratin” is (28). Elsewhere, she switches to an adult perspective on the incident being narrated: [...] pants” (31).” However, he repeats his explanation which has the same main point and does not give any influence to the context:”As noted above, Claudia’s first person seasonal sections are double-voiced, shifting back and forth between the perspective of the nine year-old and that of an older and wiser adult.”

            Approach which Malmgren and I use is textual criticism. Malmgren focuses on analyzing the novel throughout the text and so do I, to analyze every single statement that Malmgren constructs. Textual criticism is the most appropriate way to analyze Malmgren’s essay because it deals with the subjects Malmgren chooses: they are texts, primers, and voices in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

            I personally argue that Claudia MacTeer experience is Toni Morrison’s in the past. From the evidences above, we absolutely deal with the involvement of Toni Morrison, as the writer, in the novel. There are several similarities between Claudia and Morrison, for instance, Claudia and Morrison were born in Lorain, Ohio; Morrison was nine years old in 1940 until 1941, the year when the events take place in the novel. It influences Claudia as the omniscient in the novel because Morrison shapes the Claudia character as she was in the past. It also influences Claudia’s doubled-voice like what Malmgren states. Claudia tends to have two sides character, one side as the nine-years-old girl and another as about thirty-nine-years-old woman. “An authorial persona elsewhere” which Malmgren aims is Morrison herself.