Loving Hatred

            It’s safe to say Toni Morrison is a great writer. Beautiful, even. Just her words and their imagery as well as the deeper meaning and thought carve out a beautiful statue of the human conscience, even if a very specific one. She ends one chapter by saying, “There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” And while it refers to a specific account, I can’t help but ponder the veracity and wisdom behind those words. Because it’s true that when we’re hurt, that when things happen to us that prickle our skin until the light graze turns into bloody torture, we want to know why. We want to know why our significant other left us, why we were rejected from our dream school, why our parents don’t love us. We want to know why. But why is painful. We can’t handle the fact that he left us because we’re not pretty enough or because our impulsiveness drove him away, we don’t want to know we didn’t get in because sometimes ‘good’ just isn’t good enough. We don’t want to know our parents don’t love us because we’re us and that’s explanation enough. Why hurts. How is less painful. How would be our lover’s leaving as a slow waltz out of our lives on a plane to Paris, How would be getting a college admissions letter saying, ‘thank you but no thank you.’ How would be gentle. And Claudia is saying that the why is too painful, the reason her hopes can’t come true. But I’m pretty sure she knows why, I’m pretty sure we all do.

           

            And it was this pain from the unfair why’s and the unalterable aspect of it all that I’m guessing led to her relationship with white, blue-eyed dolls. “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs--all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. "Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it.’” Here we see the internal conflict that plagues Claudia’s mind in a society where she’s set up to be inferior. Because who’s to say what is beautiful? Who has that right? Blue eyes are just that. Blue. But in that time, it was the idea of perfection and freedom. Beauty. It was the bright sign saying Claudia was anything but.

            She clearly harbors a strong antagonism towards the blue-eyed pale porcelain dolls, and by definition the humans that represented them. She says, “I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable.” And this makes me question the rest of the novel, seeing as the premise is supposed to be Claudia’s obsession with said object of hatred, her aspirations to be the former. Because she even destroyed them: “If I pinched them, their eyes--unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll's eyes--would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.” And so here, so simply written, we see the shift of hatred to the love that will encompass the novel. One would think that would help her cope, her not drowning in embitterment. But it turns out that the change was “adjustment without improvement,” and, if possible, it only became worse.