Pecola Breedlove is a really special character, though she herself, nor anyone around her would think so. But the truth is, Pecola is a special little girl, because she represents something. She represents a lot of somethings, actually. She represents all of the children that have been beat down, abused, and forgotten by society. The children that are chewed up and spit out, then mocked and hated by the guilty for the wrongness that was heaped upon them through no choice of their own. She has been subjected to almost every type of abuse and hatred, from everyone around her. No where is there a sympathetic ear, a shoulder to cry on, no one to go to for company except the arms of whores. Pecola is an ugly little girl who wants to be beautiful. …show more content…
She's every child of color that has been subjected to harsh prejudices beyond their years. All of the children who wished to be loved by anyone, for any scrap of attention. She's every child that has ever been raped and sexually assaulted, especially those given scorn instead of pity. She's all of the children who are smashed and broken by this world, who are thrown away like a candy bar wrapper. The system has failed her, like countless other children in society. She comes from a home where abuse obviously takes place. Throughout the novel what goes on in the Breedlove home seems to be a staple of gossip around town. Her dad is a drunkard who rapes her and doesn't even see anything wrong with it. Her mother seems not to give a hoot about either of her children, and even blames Pecola for her own rape and hates her for it. Her own mother blames her for the brutal violence shoved on her, not once, but twice. “Mrs. Breedlove looked dropp-eyed at you? ...ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me all the time” (189). She thinks her mamma is jeleous of her blue eyes, but really it's because her mother is disgusted by her own daughter. The only clothes she is given are raggedy, with holes in her dresses and runs in her stockings. She needs help, it's apparent from both her behavior and her appearance. So the biggest question is, where are the people to help her? The only people that …show more content…
The only way she could ever find peace was to pretend to disappear, to turn invisible so that no one would be able to see the ugly little colored girl she was, that she dreaded being. All that Pecola wanted was to be considered beautiful. “If she looked different, beautiful, she herself would be different....Maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too” (46). She thought that if she was beautiful then she would finally get the love and attention she so desired; the love that was always saved for little white girls with pretty blonde hair, the kind of little girls her mamma takes care of. If she had those pretty blue eyes, it would solve everything. But it wasn't only her face that was ugly, but the girl herself. Not the actual Pecola, but the version that floated out of the lips of the gossipers around town. To them she was nothing but a dirty little girl, from a poor, dirty family. It was the ugliness of her family that made her ugly, that consumed and ruined her. And they all just accepted it, no question, because they thought they deserved it. “It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak to wear, and they had each accepted it without question” (39). It wasn't some all-knowing sources that gave them the cloak, it was the people around them. She had no chance to be beautiful in the opinions of others, she was doomed the moment she was born. But she thought that having blue eye, the bluest eyes,
In this passage of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses juxtaposition and anaphora to show of how the situation looks like and how it actually is. Juxtaposition is used in contrasting the differences between “And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us-all who knew her-felt so wholesome after we cleanses ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness” (Morrison 205). This shows how lonely Pecola was from the rest of the word. Morrison tells of how life striped from Pecola what was originally hers and gave it to other people, instead giving her ugliness. Pecola did not develop to be normal and instead had to suffer about what she was born with. Morrison also employs anaphora in “Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor” (Morrison 205). Morrison uses her to emphasize what Pecola gave to the world and to say that she got nothing good back in return. The revelation makes the readers feel bad for Pecola because she could do nothing more to help herself since she couldn’t control her
Back in the 1940s, lighter skin was a better look. If you were a dark black girl, you were seen as dirty and lesser. Since Pecola was a dark skin with wooly hair, she was accepted openly. To be beautiful, you need “blue eyes.” Pecola’s hardship of being an “ugly” black girl growing up around whites was hard for her. She believed she was ugly, because she is bullied and tormented. Pecola is a fragile and delicate child when the novel begins, and by the middle of the book, she has been almost completely worn-out by hurt and shame. Pecola is a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in its own ugliness. Others in the community, like her mother, father, and Geraldine, act out their own self-hatred by expressing hatred toward
Pecola Breedlove is an innocent little girl who, like very other young child, did not ask to be born in this cruel world. It is bad enough that practically the whole world rejects her, but her own parents are guilty of rejection as well. Her own father, who is constantly drunk, sexually molests his daughter more than once. The first time he has sexual intercourse with his daughter, he leaves her slightly unconscious, and lying on the kitchen floor with a guilt covering her frail, limp, preteen body. The next time he performs the same act, but this time he impregnates her. Of course, the baby is miscarried. This is obviously not a love a father should be sharing with a daughter. This act displays hatred in the worst way.
Throughout the novel, Pecola is easily manipulated into believing what society tells her, and soon becomes fixated in achieving “beauty”. Due to certain events, Pecola comes to believe that beauty is the panacea to her life’s problems and the key to happiness, demonstrating how manipulating the Master Narrative can be. One of the more subtle events that affect Pecola’s mindset is when she goes to purchase a Mary Jane candy bar. When Pecola goes up to Mr. Yacobowski with her money, he barely acknowledges her: “At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see” (48). To Mr. Yacobowski, Pecola is so far from the socially acceptable standards: she is a black, poor, and ugly child. Mr. Yacobowski’s blunt ignorance is similar to many other people’s reactions when Pecola is around. Pecola doesn’t know how to think for herself yet, and from this encounter she is forced to see herself, in the eyes of Mr....
The more “ugly” incidents she is subjected to, the more extreme and abundant do her desires evolve to be. The climax is when Pecola is raped by the antagonist of the novel, her own father, Cholly Breedlove. Eventually, she loses her sanity and reaches out to Soaphead to ask for blue eyes. Disgusted with the molestation, people find another reason to despise Pecola and to ignore her. Becoming delusional, Pecola surmises that people ignore her because they are jealous; “Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off” (p. 193). Pecola consequently creates an imaginary friend (p. 191) to talk to as a defence mechanism to deal with the pain of being raped, and neglected by her own
Very crucial to Dinah’s eventual freedom and liberation from her displeasing life is her enduring patience. Dinah does not revolt against the unjust society or demand an immediate change towards liberation, but instead lives through the misery and hopes for a future of freedom. Without patience, determination in achieving her goals, and perseverance through the challenging events of her life, Dinah would not have achieved such satisfying liberation in her later years. It is the patience and the decision to wait for the good that is to come that provide Dinah and Pecola with such remarkable liberation.
She faces constant criticism, has an aggressive home life, and lives in a society that considers beauty as being white, which negatively affects Pecola and leads her to fantasize about becoming more beautiful. She feels the only way to Morrison uses Shirley Temple to show Pecola’s fondness for beauty. Shirley Temple was a popular young actress during the 1930’s, and was known for her curly blonde hair and blue eyes. Pecola developed a fascination for Shirley Temple cups, “she was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face”(pg.23). This image shows that Pecola believes that having blue eyes will maker her life like Shirley making her more like a white child. Another instance showing this is when Pecola goes to the store she buys the candy Mary Jane, which has a girl with blue eyes on the wrapper. We see her fascination with Mary Jane’s blue eyes, and she felt if she ate the candy she would become Mary Jane. This is shown when Morrison writes, “To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane”(pg.50) When it comes to Pecola mother, there is similar racial self-loathing manifested in her as
The Infant Child plays a huge role in Blanche’s early life. As a result of her mother’s death, Blanche has a fearful temperament, and
Brought up as a poor unwanted girl, Pecola Breedlove desires the acceptance and love of society. The image of "Shirley Temple beauty" surrounds her. In her mind, if she was to be beautiful, people would finally love and accept her. The idea that blue eyes are a necessity for beauty has been imprinted on Pecola her whole life. "If [I] looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they would say, `Why look at pretty eyed Pecola. We mustn't do bad things in front of those pretty [blue] eyes'" (Morrison 46). Many people have helped imprint this ideal of beauty on her. Mr. Yacowbski as a symbol for the rest of society's norm, treats her as if she were invisible. "He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper... see a little black girl?" (Morrison 48). Her classmates also have an effect on her. They seem to think that because she is not beautiful, she is not worth anything except as the focal point of their mockery. "Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked.
The first stage of Pecola coming to believe she is ugly starts with her family's attitude toward her. Right from the very start of Pecola's life her parents have thought of her as ugly on the outside as well as on the inside. When Pecola was born, Pecola's mother, Pauline, said: "Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly" (Morrison 126). Pecola became labeled ugly as soon as she was born. The reason people think of her as ugly relates to the way she gets treated by her family. Her parents never even gave her a chance to prove that she is worth something and not just a piece of trash. In the first stage of Pecola's realization of being ugly, she starts to feel the way she does because her family does not give her any support and tell her she actually means something to them. Pecola does not really have anyone that she can go to talk about things. All of the weight of her problems rests on her shoulders with no one to help her out, not even her parents, the two people that brought her into this very world.
Marie, who is a product of an abusive family, is influenced by her past, as she perceives the relationship between Callie and her son, Bo. Saunders writes, describing Marie’s childhood experiences, “At least she’d [Marie] never locked on of them [her children] in a closet while entertaining a literal gravedigger in the parlor” (174). Marie’s mother did not embody the traditional traits of a maternal fig...
Brought up as a poor unwanted girl, Pecola Breedlove desires the acceptance and love of society. The image of "Shirley Temple beauty" surrounds her. In her mind, if she was to be beautiful, people would finally love and accept her. The idea that blue eyes are a necessity for beauty has been imprinted on Pecola her whole life. "If [I] looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they would say, `Why look at pretty eyed Pecola. We mustn't do bad things in front of those pretty [blue] eyes'" (Morrison 46). Many people have helped imprint this ideal of beauty on her. Mr. Yacowbski as a symbol for the rest of society's norm, treats her as if she were invisible. "He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper... see a little black girl?" (Morrison 48). Her classmates also have an effect on her. They seem to think that because she is not beautiful, she is not worth anything except as the focal point of their mockery.
I cannot say that I can relate to what it must have felt like for Pecola to be called a "a nasty little black bitch" and accused of killing a cat when she did nothing. But, I can say that I know what it is like to feel ugly and scared. Pecola is an extreme example of a person who is treated horribly by everyone she encounters, whether it is because she is black or ugly or both. Her mother ignores her, her father rapes her, her friends betray her, little boys and girls and adults call her names, and even a cat and a dog are killed in her presence. All of these things are experienced by people all of the time, however, it might not be as extreme or it might just be one or two of the things. Something that seems as trivial as name calling is something that happens to all Americans.
A reader might easily conclude that the most prominent social issue presented in The Bluest Eye is that of racism, but more important issues lie beneath the surface. Pecola experiences damage from her abusive and negligent parents. The reader is told that even Pecola's mother thought she was ugly from the time of birth. Pecola's negativity may have initially been caused by her family's failure to provide her with identity, love, security, and socialization, ail which are essential for any child's development (Samuels 13). Pecola's parents are able only to give her a childhood of limited possibilities. She struggles to find herself in infertile soil, leading to the analysis of a life of sterility (13). Like the marigolds planted that year, Pecola never grew.
In the novel, there is one character who truly suffers more than the others, her name is Pecola. The perfect child is white with blue eyes and blonde hair. Pecola is an African-American girl who clearly does not fit the description of the “perfect” American gi...