Focusing on the Wrong Front: Historical Displacement, the Maginot Line, and "The Bluest Eye"

Abstract

Recent theoretical work has examined ways that abstract idea of bodiless citizen has marked women and non-white Americans as outside boundaries of full citizenship, because attention paid to various markings of gender or race on their bodies precludes them from being categorized as unmarked, representative norm. Peggy Phelan most clearly explains rhetorical and imagistic gender marking, in process making a distinction between invisible marking of abstract value and visible bodily marking of difference: male is marked with value; female is unmarked, lacking measured value and me.... He is norm and therefore unremarkable; as Other, it is she whom he marks (5). As Deborah Tannen says, corporeally there is no unmarked woman because women's bodies and choices they make in of appearance and self-identification in public sphere always mark them in specific, gendered ways. Examining marking in light of political theory, Carole Pateman analyzes how language of Constitution, premised as it is on idea of social contract, accords white male citizen privilege of abstracting himself into concept of disembodied citizen, whereas women, in contrast, can never achieve this state of disembodiment because sexual contract precedes social contract. Drawing on such political theories, Lauren Berlant considers corporeal implications of theory of disembodied citizenship for racial and gendered subjects. When abstract, disembodied citizen is figured as white and male, all others cannot embody such citizenship because they are hyperembodied by racial and/or gendered markings visible on their bodies. Thus, women and African Americans, in particular, Berlant contends, have never had sign of real authority; that is, the power to suppress that body [i.e., facts of one's historical situation], to cover its tracks and its traces (113). Considered in light of this division between unmarked and marked, disembodied and hyperembodied, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye can be read as a commentary on artificial boundaries of citizenship, gender, race, and history. While theories of Berlant, Pateman, and Phelan enable us to understand marking of boundaries of citizenship, race, and gender, difference between marked and unmarked history needs some explanation. Unmarked history refers to historical narrative that features as its prime actor deeds of abstract, disembodied citizen. Once this history is marked as having cultural value, its centrality is soon seen as unremarkable; that is, as representative. In order to centralize this one story, however, others need to be shifted to periphery and soon become remarkable only in their relation to center. According to Priscilla Wald, what unmarked history leaves out resurfaces when experiences of individuals conspicuously fall to conform to defini tion of personhood offered in narrative, and Morrison's Breedloves are certainly conspicuous for their ill-fitting selfhood. By carefully outlining history of their exclusion from terms of full and equal personhood, Morrison demonstrates that this family's unequal position is a product not of their intrinsic inadequacy, but rather of systematic reinforcement of a racial and gendered criteria for full citizenship (10). This critique, in turn, disrupts official stories that feature United States as a brave defender of democracy and staunch critic of racialized nationalism abroad. In setting her story of quest for and repercussions of Pecola Breedlove's desire for blue eyes and unmarked whiteness they represent against backdrop of World War II, Morrison recounts history of this significant year from vantage point of those who have been marked as peripheral in accounts of this era of American history. …

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