Ontological hygiene and The Bluest Eye

In my class the other night, we discussed Elaine Graham’s concept of “ontological hygiene”. Graham’s book: Representations of the Post/Human, borrows from Foucault’s critique of western definitions of “normal” to discuss how representations of monsters, cyborgs, and so on operate in our culture.

It struck me again how Morrison’s brilliant novel The Bluest Eye displays ontological hygiene in action; in this case, in an African American community that internalizes white standards for beauty, and in the process, destroys much of its unique beauty by devaluing it. The story is about a little black girl, Pecola, who wants blue eyes, thinking that it will solve the problems that have come from her family’s failure (and everyone else’s failure) to love her. The sometime narrator of the novel, Claudia (a bit of a rendering of the young Toni Morrison) concludes her story by noticing how Pecola, now moved to the edge of town (itself symbolic), has pretty much lost her mind and is just wandering like a ghost. “The birdlike gesture are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew here—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (205).