The Theory of Double Consciousness

Du Bois

Toni Morrison plays around the idea of a double consciousness is brought up multiple times in “The Bluest Eye”. The ideas of racial self-loathing that the character deal with are put into the heads of the characters in the novel because of their double consciousness.  As humans we are programmed to care about how other perceive us , but in the cases presented in the novel they are taken to another extreme. A man by the man of W.E.B  Du Bois was a famous author he became famous for his protest against racial prejudice and discrimination  also for this idea in a paragraph in  a book called "The Souls of Black Folk" in chapter one “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”. The paragraph reads:

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Du bois calls direct attention to the fact that we are only as powerful or have as much worth as society grants us.

            In the bluest eye there is an ongoing theme of self-loathing. Claudia wants to be as “pretty” as the white girls, Pecola is desperate for blue eyes and blonde hair, and Geraldine tries her hardest t separate her family from the “niggers” by keeping her home immaculate. They all are unable to accept their race without hating themselves. In the most extreme case there is Pecola. On page 47 the narrator says” she would see only what there was to see: the eyes o other people. Pecola has become invisible to herself and others”. She has been brain washed by the common culture that she is not worthy to be looked at. She only cares about what other see, the way other sees her.

            Pecola ultimately becomes obsessed with the idea of society; in the end she convinces herself that she has blue eyes. The last chapter of the book is a conversation with Pecola and an imaginary friend. Pecola is so obsessed with the idea of how others perceives, she has to create an imaginary friend to comfort her, She cannot learn to accept herself for who she is so her mind creates an outsider that will. This directly proves Du Bois’s theory about the need to be accepted my others. Pecola cooping mechanism is to create an imaginary friend that will support her insanity,. This is extremely tragic event because the only way that Pecola is able to be happy is to create a fake double-consciousness and become mentally insane, to the point were society is even less accepting of her this way than the in her normal state.