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The Bluest Eye
was raped, some people even tried to put the blame on her, saying that she didn’t fight her father. They also say that it’s, ”Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.....Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground” (Morrison 190). The only way in which some sympathy is expressed is the shaking of their heads. Pecola ends up delivering a stillborn, probably as a result of her young age and the beatings she received after her impregnation. She ends up going crazy, “walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent hands on shoulders, she flailed her arm like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly”(Morrison 204).
At the end of the book she is isolated from the town both physically and emotionally. Mrs. Breedlove and Pecola moved to the edge of town in a little brown house. Adults looked away when they saw her and, children who were not frightened, laughed at her outright. A young girl’s life ruined as a result of society’s placing of beauty on such a high standard. And making that standard and the importance of it known to all.
Morrison has written of desolation and decay, because this is where, as victims of our environments, we are left. Again redressing the causal argument, society has a standard of beauty, Pecola does not meet this standard. Her life is plagued by event after event which impress her ugliness upon her. She becomes the object of hatred by all of the members of her town. Her unstable family life leads to her rape which further enhances the problem. Pecola then becomes pregnant and begins her descent towards madness. Her life is then changed forever, she will never be the same. At the end of the book, one of the main characters, Claudia, reflects as an adult that people need someone like Pecola in their lives. Claudia's last words are dark and unhopeful. She insists that the people of her town, including her, failed and used Pecola. She also speaks skeptically about love, wary of its abuse, warning that there is a kind of love that is selfish and without real care for the beloved. She finishes with the image of the barren soil and the impossibility of growth. It is too late to bring back the marigolds, just as it is too late to help Pecola. By finishing with the image of the barren soil, she implies that the social forces which shaped Pecola's tragedy are still here, as real and omnipresent as the ground we walk on.
One of the most critically acclaimed living writers, Morrison has been a major architect in creating a literary language for Afro-Americans. Her use of shifting perspective, fragmentary narrative, and a narrative voice extremely close to the consciousness of her characters reveals the influence of writers like Virginia Woolf and William [next page]