There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly. Geraldine arrives and puts an end to the mayhem, but her disgust bubbles up like vomit when she looks at Pecola, who, she feels, is surely more to blame than her son:.
She had seen this little girl all of her life. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between. We belong as much to the things we throw away as to the things we keep. What he knows about love is informed by abandonment and contempt. Like Pecola, he grew up in a world where love was not only largely absent; it was an emotion to be despised.
By extending his stunted understanding—violently, selfishly—to his powerless daughter, he acts out in one of the few ways available to him. We listen, at the end of the book, as she talks with the only person she has left: her blue-eyed self.
I remember finishing that section of the novel, at age ten or eleven, and feeling the sharp chill and awfulness of being split in two. You can find her everywhere. What you want to know is who will love you, and what surprises that love will bring you that day. Morrison, in the photograph on the back cover, looked like the kind of person my family might have known, and if she was one of us that meant that one of my four beautiful older sisters could, perhaps, write a book, too.
Now I can see that my hope for my sisters was a way of having hope for myself, hope that I might become the artist I wanted to be. I held on to every bit of hope I could find. I felt as trapped in Brooklyn as Pecola did in Lorain. Instead, he would fall in love, and maybe prosper, and not live his life as an outsider. Meanwhile, Morrison the editor was also gaining in strength.
This desire—this need—seems to have been with Morrison since she was a student at Howard. As an editor, she chose to bring those black stories to the fore. After she met Middleton Spike Harris, a collector of black ephemera, who introduced her to other collectors—among them Roger Furman and Morris Levitt—Morrison got to work with a designer, Jack Ribik, putting together a kind of scrapbook of black American history and life.
She jettisoned the idea of having text dominate the collection, for fear that it would give it too much of an ideological spin. Morrison, like many black Americans of her generation, had come of age with the idea that black achievement—as well as the hard times—formed a kind of lore, an oral history that was passed down with pride.
In the same essay, Morrison wrote:. The point is not to soak in some warm bath of nostalgia about the good old days— there were none! To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.
It would have to assume that we were still tough, and that our egos were not threads of jelly in constant need of glue. She included documents—a patent showing that William B. Purvis had invented the fountain pen, for instance—and photographs, among them one of Lena Horne bathing in her drive and significance, and one of the black cowboy Nat Love.
I say you must always tell the truth. And I tell you that we are not weak people and we can stand it. Morrison showed me what was possible. Her relatives on both sides were migrants from the South, she explained, who had suffered and persevered. She went on:. Even before I knew what they had done to stay alive, to raise their children, and to be better than their detractors—even before that, their eyes impressed me.
They were like wells of stacked mirrors—each with a depth and refraction of its own. The closest I can come to describing it is the look of people who have lived places where there are great distances to view. Desert people, or people who live on savannahs or mountain tops—they have the look I remember in my parents and their relatives. Their eyes were terrible, made bearable only by the frequency of their laughter.
Hello, Miss China. She acquires an imaginary friend whom she talks to almost exclusively about her eyes. While we might be quick to toss this off as simple insanity, that seems a bit too easy. Instead, we might think of Pecola's imaginary friend as the only way she can make sense of her experience.
Since no one in her life ever showed her love or affection, Pecola's young mind at the end of the novel does the only thing it can do: it creates an imaginary friend to love and affirm her.
Claudia's last words about Pecola provide another lens through which to view her character. In Claudia's view, the townspeople of Lorain used Pecola's ugliness in order to make themselves feel beautiful. This suggests that Pecola has functioned as a scapegoat for this black community's own low self-esteem and self-loathing. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Toni Morrison. Previous Next. Pecola Breedlove Pecola Breedlove is a young girl growing up black and poor in the early s.
What's Up With the Ending? Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Characters Pecola Breedlove. Popular pages: The Bluest Eye. Take a Study Break.
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