The Role of Names in Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”: Part I

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Pecola goes to see Soaphead Church, a self-proclaimed “Spiritualist and Psychic Reader” who could help individuals overcome things that impacted them. Pecola comes to Soaphead Church asking him to give her blue eyes so she can feel pretty and be like the white movie stars that she idealizes. After Pecola leaves, he sits down at the table and write a letter to God, telling God that he granted Pecola her wish, and he knows this because she believes it, and that is all that matters. Within his letter, Soaphead addresses numerous themes that appear in the novel, but one that stands out is when he questions the purpose of names.

Soaphead tells God about his own given name, Elihue Micah Whitcomb, but says he can’t remember how he got the name Soaphead Church. The women in Loraine, Ohio, gave him the name Soaphead Church because he would not pursue them or wish to engage in sex with them, and he ultimately accepted the name “and the role they had given him,” the role that placed him in a back-room apartment and led him to become a spiritualist. We do not get why they chose the name Soaphead Church, at least a specific reason for that name, and this is why he says in his letter that he doesn’t recall how that name came to be associated with him. However, now that is what he goes by. It is what he puts on his…