The Reflection in the Mirror: When the "Inferiority Complex" of Modern Day America Meets The Bluest Eye

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Obviously, no one is able to see what they really look like, because only flat mirrors will produce a true reflection, and due to even the slightest manufacturing errors, household mirrors are never perfectly flat. However, the reflection that is reciprocated when you look in the mirror is extremely close to how everyone else sees you. Even so, some people perceive their reflections in a mirror from minute to far fetched exaggerations of how their reflections appear. People who deal with anorexia or bulimia fall on the extreme and "far fetched" side of this spectrum, but on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are people who are consumed with the thoughts of an imperfect appearance. Where does this insecurity come from? There is no evidence that people are somehow born with insecurities of their appearance or behavior, so what continues to perpetuate this "condition" in today's society? For one, the media plays a monumental role in declaring what is perceived as "beautiful" and what is not through photoshopped photos of supermodels gracing magazine covers, and the idolization of  handsome or beautiful actors and actresses who appear to have it all. As a result, many people end up altering their identities and personalities to fit society's standards.

Barbie Dolls: Is this how we define beauty?

From an early age, young American girls are exposed to these "socially constructed ideas of 'beauty'" through Barbie Dolls. Barbie's perfect body shape, accentuated curves, beautiful complexion and blonde hair impress a certain idea of "beauty" upon the minds of children. An awareness of this dangerous impression on the minds of young girls has led to the manufacturing of different races of Barbie Dolls, and even a variety of Barbies characterized by respectable occupations, but ultimately, Barbie's constant state of "perfection" has left America with two questions: how do we define beauty, and what are the consequences of this definition? To this day, it seems as if America is bought into the "Barbie Doll" definition of beauty; however, the answer to the second question has become a controversial one. Many campaigns have originated as a result of the population's cry for change. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty beginning in 2004 and continuing to the present day arose through an awareness that society's definition of beauty "had become limiting and unattainable". The destructive effects of this definition has left only 2% of women in the world claiming to feel beautiful and another 98% with a lack of confidence characterized by Alfred Adler's "Inferiority Complex". In short, this complex instigates a low self-esteem, which consists of feelings of "intense insecurity", or a fear of not measuring up. This sense of inferiority can be intensified to a degree in which a person believes that they can never compensate for the aspects that make them "imperfect" in comparison to society's standards of beauty, or it can be acted upon through exaggerated aggression in trying to overcome the complex.

Michael Jackson in 2005

Michael Jackson circa 1970s

Contrary to the popular belief that teenage boys are unaffected in the same way that girls are by the media with regards to the definition of beauty, 54% of girls and 41% of boys ages 13-19 are dissatisfied with their appearance. One of the most popular male icons of modern day America, Michael Jackson, severely augmented his physical appearance through plastic surgery and skin bleaching, leaving him almost unrecognizable. Although Michael claimed his reasons for surgery to be medically based, many people believe that there was an underlying "Racial Self-Loathing" of his "inferiority complex" that influenced his transformation. Although his dermatologist and others close to him supported his claim that he suffered from "vitiligo", which Michael claimed as his reason for turning his skin white, race cannot be completely separated from the equation. He went as far as getting rid of his wider nose, characteristic of many blacks, to choosing a skinnier, more defined nose, characteristic of many caucasians. Furthermore, a certain "Afro-denial" as the comic, The Boondocks illustrates, is demonstrated in Michael's longer, straighter, black hair circa 2005.

Similarly, Toni Morrison demonstrates the detrimental effects of socially constructed ideas of beauty and what is acceptable in The Bluest Eye. Many characters suffer from an "inferiority complex" that leaves them struggling with their own identities apparent through their questioning of and conformity to socially constructed ideas of beauty. 

In receiving the stereotypical gift of a "big, blue-eyed, Baby Doll" for Christmas, Claudia MacTeer begins to question the legitimacy of society's social construct of perfection and beauty. 

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 (20).

Like the adolescents of today's society, Claudia's family is affected by the perpetuation of society's standards of   beauty. They bought Claudia the baby doll because they were enchanted by the idea that this baby doll represented a way for Claudia to fit in to society's definitive standards. However, Claudia's "inferiority complex" forced her to investigate the origins of the standard of perfection manifested through the doll. She claims the "desirability had escaped her" illustrating a consciousness of her worthlessness according to society's standards, and acknowledges the influence of the "shops, magazines, newspapers, and window signs" in formulating society's definition of beauty. However, as soon as she dismembers the doll, she discovers the fake, manufactured facade of this baby doll demonstrated through "a mere metal roundness", or the battery, that keeps the doll functioning (21). When Claudia looks in the "mirror" she sees a girl that refuses to believe the socially constructed ideas of beauty, but she also sees that any attempt to counter this stereotype would be futile because of her race. She is left with conflicted feelings and a state of mind that refuses to let her believe she is worth anything.

Contrarily, Geraldine deals with her "inferiority complex" in the opposite way. Geraldine conforms to the standards set by society because she is attempting to overcome her "inferiority complex" through compensating for it in the only way she knows how: bourgeois respectability. Geraldine's attempts are illustrated in Morrison's words characterizing Geraldine's lifestyle.

Here they learn the rest of the lesson...how to behave. the careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness (83).

Geraldine longing to get rid of the so-called "funkiness" that represents her rich African American heritage, parallels the skepticism that surrounds the reasons for Michael Jackson's nose job and drastic skin color transformation. Geraldine's "racial self-loathing" consumes her, and she longs to conform to American society's definitions of beauty and what is acceptable in order to eradicate the "inferiority complex" from her life. However, despite her various attempts, she is unable to measure up to the unattainable standards of perfection and is left broken when she ends up "in the second row, her white blouse starched, and blue skirt almost purple from ironing" (82).

The Door: Americanization of Immigrants and African Americans

Americanization is a fascinating process that generations of sociologists have attempted to explain. In 1782, a French-American writer proudly praised the country as a melting pot, with Utopian visions of the emergence of an American “new man”. However, American history is fraught with clamorous and silent confrontations, persistent clashes of different cultures, and heated debates about values. After the ninety-seventies, the desirability of assimilation was challenged. Advocates of pluralism coined the alternative metaphor of a salad bowl, in which cultures mix but maintain their distinct shapes. 

In Prospective Immigrants Please Note, Adrienne Rich, a half-Jewish, half-gentile poet, offers a multifaceted interpretation of the Americanization. On one hand, she warns the immigrants of losing their ethnic traditions. On the other, she hints at the danger of rejecting assimilation. Ultimately, she expresses a desire for personal choice and self-determination: an immigrant should be free to select elements from his home culture and American (in this case, mainly white) culture. She writes about the same belief using personal experience in Split at the Root: An Essayon Jewish Identity. 

   

Prospective Immigrants Please Note  

       Adrienne Rich 

Listen to Adrienne Rich reading the poem.

Either you will 
go through this door 
or you will not go through.  

If you go through 

there is always the risk 
of remembering your name.  

Things look at you doubly  
and you must look back
 and let them happen.  

If you do not go through 
it is possible 
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position 
to die bravely  

but much will blind you, 
much will evade you, 
at what cost who knows?  

The door itself makes no promises. 
It is only a door.

 Inside, or Outside

Either you will/go through this door/or you will not go through. 

Door is a widely used literary symbol, very likely due to the complexity and duality its simple structure unifies: an open door signifies opportunity and acceptance, whereas a closed door symbolizes rejection and disappointment; an opening door is often associated with new adventures, and a closing door usually stands for farewell. In the poem, to “go through this door” means to assimilate, to Americanize, and to blend in. The outside is immigrants’ native culture, and the inside is American (in the context of this poem, white) culture. “Either…or” has the connotation of arbitrariness, suggesting that whether a person successfully Americanizes is judged by others.
                    



The first stanza as a whole implies that the society demands a devotion to American standards from immigrant. The society does not recognize immigrants as complex, autonomous individuals. Immigrants are either embraced as new Americans, or regarded as outsiders. Therefore, should anyone strive to reconcile two sides of the door, incorporating some aspects of Americanness into his cultural background, the society demands him to forfeit one for the other.

This door metaphor, though written for immigrants, applies to colored people well. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores African Americans’ quest for identity. Morrison presents most people as eager conformers, shedding their racial identity in order to go through the door. The character Geraldine represents mulatto girls religiously pursue “white” appearance and manners.

“The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; where it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies… when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair” (83).

Funk refers to various natural imperfections of humans: body odor, breath odor, skin crusts, “lips too thick”, “edges of their hair”… For African Americans, “funk” includes their blackness. Geraldine is therefore fighting against her nature, against her African American descent. The words “erupts”, “crusts”, “drips, flowers, or clings” animate the funkiness, as if the girls view it as some kind of stubbornly, indefatigably growing weeds. Their light complexion, white manners, and property have sent them through the door: the society gives them a place above the black people. But they have to cautiously watch what they have attained, and continue the battle against “funk”, totally denying their African American identity.

 The Insiders’s Loss

If you go through/ there is always the risk/ of remembering your name. 
In the second stanza, “name” represents vernacular. Since language is the agent of culture and traditions, “remembering your name” means the awareness of racial and ethnical identity. “The risk” is the anxiety and fears of any exposure of the nature self.

Jewish Immigrant Family

In Split at the Root, Adrienne Rich recounts her father’s influence on her. The man is a second-generation immigrant. When young Adrienne was casting Portia in The Merchant of Venice, he instructed her to read the word “Jew” with scorn and contempt. She could see there was “a kind of terrible, bitter bravado” about her father’s instruction, yet she hesitated at questioning him. It was when she became a college student that she began to understand her father. One day she bought a dress in a small shop and a Jewish seamstress came to do alterations for her. She recalls,

“Something about her presence was very powerful and disturbing to me. After making and pinning up the skirt, she sat back on her knees, looked up at me, and asked in a hurried whisper: ‘You Jewish?’ Eighteen years of training in assimilation sprang into the reflex by which I shook my head, rejecting her, and muttered, ‘No’.”

Adrienne Rich realized that the image of a frightened immigrant, a wandering Jew terrified her, an American college girl having her skirt hemmed. “And I was frightened myself,” she wrote, “because she had recognized me.”

Geraldine attests to Adrienne Rich’s realization. When Geraldine returned home and her son Junior accuses Pecola of killing the cat, she looks at Pecola and abhors the lowness of black girls. “You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house.” she says (92). The fact that she herself is black generates no magnanimity, because Pecola is an undesirable reflection of her race. Pecola’s blackness instigates Geraldine’s insidious contempt and self-denial, as Geraldine is reminded that she can be ostracized from the “white” middle-class for her blackness.

Double Consciousness 

Things look at you doubly /and you must look back/ and let them happen.  

The third stanza, interestingly, describes a kind of double vision: an immigrant’s action is judged by both cultures he is associated with, and he examines himself in two perspectives: an immigrant; an American. This idea is strikingly similar with W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness”, which he states as “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”. 




The experience of immigrants parallels that of African Americans with Americanization being the common direction. Both groups are painfully aware of their difference from the Anglo-Saxon race and voiceless in the white-dominant society. In the Bluest Eye, the discrimination and indifference of others throws Pecola into the conviction that she is hopelessly ugly, so “she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people” (46-47). That all she would see were others’ eyes implies that Pecola is preoccupied with people’s views about her. She consents unconditionally to whatever labels the world puts on her- “you must look back/and let them happen”.

The Outsiders' Loss

If you do not go through /it is possible /to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes /to hold your position/ to die bravely  
but much will blind you, much will evade you, at what cost who knows? 

What complicate the poet’s argument are stanzas four through six. Fourth and fifth stanzas offer a romantic depiction of ethnic nationalism: by adhering to traditions and upholding cultural values, immigrants can live respectably and worthily. However, the sixth stanza points out that those who refuse to Americanize face costs.

Adrienne Rich identifies the Jewish defense against non-Jews as a quality required for survival over generations of persecution. Jews must arm themselves in a world full of potential slanderers, betrayers, people who “could not understand”. However, she questions, “What happens when the white gentile world is softly saying ‘Be more like us and you can almost be one of us?’ What happens when survival seems to mean dosing off one emotional artery after another”? She portrays people of Jewish descent who exclusively interact with their family members, shutting the door at the rich possibilities America offers. They live in a bland world, laughter restrained, angers curbed, and tears withheld. They conform to their original culture, and thus surrender the precious freedom of determining what they want to become. They lack the courage to break free from chains of ethnicity and choose their paths.  

Inside, and Outside

The door itself makes no promises. It is only a door.

The end of the poem returns to the central picture of an emotionless door. It is neither hopeful nor hopeless, neither welcoming nor rejecting.

Since The Bluest Eye precedes Prospective Immigrants Please Note by several decades, it reflects an era with harsher racial climates. Most people were forced to conform to the white-dominant society and adjust to its standards. Furthermore, many immigrants do not share the history of slavery with African Americans, and they do not wear their ethnicity with skin color. Therefore, Morrison mainly aims to celebrate the nature, the root, and “funk”. Adrienne's poem, however, taken as a whole, suggests that people should be free to determine their own ethnicity instead of being categorized into insiders or outsiders by environment. The journey toward self-identification is not painless. As Adrienne Rich writes in Split at the Root, at different times in her life, she wanted to push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to state merely “I am a woman”. Fortunately, in a writing career that spanned over seven decades, she found her own identity: not gentile, not Jewish, but both; a feminist, political activist, and passionate writer.