FREE ESSAY ON PECOLA

PECOLA

The Breedlove family has moved from the rural south to urban Lorain, Ohio, and the
displacement, in addition to grinding work conditions and poverty, contributes to the
family's dysfunction. Told from the perspectives of the adolescent sisters, Claudia and
Frieda MacTeer, Morrison's narrative weaves its way through the four seasons and traces
the daughter's (Pecola Breedlove) descent into madness. Through flashback and temporal
shifts, Morrison provides readers with the context and history behind the Breedloves'
misery and Pecola's obsessive desire to have the bluest eyes.
This short novel counterbalances two points of view: one, the tragic consequences of
racism (in the Breedlove family), and two, agency and resistance to that racism (in the
MacTeer family). The story's focus, however, is on the Breedloves, and readers are
immediately faced with the dissonance between the realities of the Breedloves'--and
especially Pecola's--lives and the chapter headings that begin with excerpts from the
white, middle-class Dick & Jane reader. Much as Pecola's world falls apart in the novel,
the Dick & Jane passages, repeated three times, degenerate into formless, meaningless
print: seemothermotherisverynice. 
The object of scorn for her ugliness from her family and acquaintances, Pecola yearns to
become beautiful and, (she thinks) as a result of her beauty, loveable. That beauty is
strictly defined by white and unattainable standards; however, a Shirley Temple mug and
Mary Jane candies become the emblems of that for which Pecola yearns. 
The same racism that underpins the standards of beauty under which Pecola and her mother,
Pauline, suffer, is also at the root of Pecola's father's alcoholism and violence. After
he impregnates Pecola and she is beaten by her mother for it, Pecola (with the treachery
of Soaphead Church, a faith healer) goes mad, believing she has obtained her blue eyes.
By novel's end she obsessively, repeatedly asks an imaginary other if, indeed, her eyes
are the bluest. 
There is an interesting (and excerptable) scene in the novel when Pauline is in the
hospital giving birth to Pecola. The doctors come by her bed as the attending physician
says, these here women you don't have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with
no pain. Just like horses. Pauline counters by moaning something awful to teach the
doctors that [j]ust 'cause I wasn't hooping and hollering before didn't mean I wasn't
feeling pain. 
While the doctors have their story about Pauline, she resists their version, retelling
it, talking back to medicine and to readers. This section raises important questions
about assumptions and the ways social factors such as race, class, and gender can get in
the way of hearing stories and understanding patients' lives.