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The Bluest Eye
Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo...”(Morrison 65). Here we see her schoolmates name her darker shade of skin as too ugly to accept. With both her teachers and classmates being so cold to her, it is inevitable that Pecola would feel alone and isolated. She was often left with her thoughts which mostly consisted of her desire for blue eyes. With blue eyes she would be beautiful and popular, people would like her and treat her better. In essence, beauty equaled happiness.
This lack of beauty even intruded upon her family life. Pecola’s first encounter with her lack of beauty comes from her mother. Living in a grubby storefront, taunted and alienated by her classmates and either beaten or ignored by her parents, Pecola is a tragic figure who begins life at the bottom the moment her mother, brainwashed by the white movie industry, decides her daughter is irretrievably ugly: Pauline Breedlove was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.
Her parents, Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, fought frequently. These outbursts greatly upset Pecola and she often wished she could disappear when they occurred. “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes’”(Morrison 46). Mrs. Breedlove spends all her energy on her employer’s home and children and leaving her own home a cruel, bleak, and ugly place. Pecola’s mother finds her too ugly to love. Although her parents had their own problems and issues to deal with, perhaps if Pecola was beautiful, they may have treated her better. They may have paid her more attention or taken greater investment in her happiness. They may have been less critical and abusive of her. However, she was not, and although they tended to her needs, they did not express their love for her.
Pecola is led to further isolation by the harsh reality that no one encourages or loves her. All of the supports that a young child needs are not there. Her family does not support her, her teachers abhor her, classmates ridicule her, and people in the town ignore her. She has more or less has no one to turn to. Her adult rolemodels are three uncouth, prostitutes that were looked down upon by all the women in the town. Although these women, Miss Marie, Miss Poland, and Miss China, provided her with some entertainment, and enjoyment in her rather depressing, mundane life, they did not advise her or listen to her troubles or problems. The only kindness Pecola finds is the offhand acceptance from the three prostitutes, themselves outcasts who do not bother to intervene between Pecola and the destruction visited on her. She was only reprimanded for her negative actions, no positive encouragement or [next page]