Pauline saw the beauty of life through the
colors of her childhood down South. Her
fondest memories were of purple berries, yellow lemonade, and "that streak
of green them june bugs made on the trees the night we left down home. All them colors was in me"1. Pauline and Cholly left the colors of the
South when they moved North to Ohio to begin their life together. Through Cholly, Pauline hoped to find those
colors of beauty that she left "down home".
For a while she did find her colors, her beauty,
in the eyes of Cholly. He released in
her all the colors of life which were sealed down in her soul. Everything about their early married life was
described in vivid colors. This was true
even of her sexual experiences with him.
Everything was fine, ordered and beautiful in both Pauline and Cholly's
life until they moved "up
North".
Once they moved North everything changed. The colors went out of Pauline's life. "I missed my people. I weren't used to so much white
folks...Northern colored folk was different too"2. Cholly only became "meaner and meaner
and wanted to fight all of the time"2.
He did not help the situation and contributed to his wife's
dissatisfaction and disillusionment by not coming home. He found his satisfaction through other
people, thus he neglected Pauline.
To make up for this neglect and her own
insecurities, Pauline sought comfort through movies. Here she would sit and watch the perfect
"white" world of Hollywood.
Here she would find her colors on the "silver screen". She had a longing for these colors which was
going to affect her life and the lives of her family until it destroys them,
especially Pecola.
When Pecola was born, a major change occured in
Pauline's life. According to Susan
Willis, "Adjectives become substantives, giving taste and color and making
it possible for colors to trickle and flow and finally be
internalized..."3. She now wished to live her life like this, through the
colors in herself.
Right after Pecola was born Cholly again began
to pay attention to Pauline again the way he used to when they lived down
South. The only problem was that the
colors had dimed in Pauline. By working for a white family, she found her
order and her colors again but not with the intensity that she once did. There she could order her life in a way she
felt she could never achieve at home. As
Willis points out, "Polly [Pauline] Breedlove lives in a form of
schizophrenia, where her marginality is constantly confronted with a world of
Hollywood movies, white sheets, and blonde children"4.
It is here in the "white" home, that
Pauline takes the new identity, Polly.
She seperates from her physical self, and enters into a world of the
neat ordered white person, where she forgets her family, characterized by
disorder, and blackness [ugliness]. She
sees the "white" world with her vivid colors, while she sees the
"black" world, where she comes from, in plain ugly black and white. In her "black" world, she sees no
possibility of order, neatness, or color.
This is because she stopped looking for them. She found a substitute for her family; a
substitute that will bring the colors back into her life.
Through this "scitzophrenia", the
real damage to her family lies within the
"white" world. It is
from this world, in which she finds her "colors", that Pecola obtains
her desire for "the bluest eyes".
Pauline and Pecola are not the only ones who
are preoccupied by the idea of whiteness.
The character of Claudia is also aware of order and beauty as seen through
the eyes of the "white" world.
The children are bombarded with visions of blonde children with bright
blue eyes. Shirley Temple and Jean
Harlow in movies; the figure of a little blonde Mary Jane, on the candy they
eat, and the blond baby dolls they recieve as gifts, are all ways of
reinforcing the stereotype of beauty and goodness that a black child could ever
hope to achieve. This dilemma is offset,
in Claudia's life, by the attention she recieves from her loving parents, that
have showed her to love herself. This
is a love of support that is not present
in Pecola's life.
This is not to say that the love and support
that Claudia received from her family does not offset the feeling of hate and
confusion that she feels towards the white role models that she encounters
everyday. She learns, as does Pecola, at
a very young age, that the world looks differently on those with lighter
skin. It is for this reason that Claudia
destroys the white baby doll she receives.
Through the destruction of the doll "...she is striking out against
the horrifying dehumanization that acceptance of the model implies - both for
the black who wears it as a mask and for the white who creates commodified
images of the self"5.
The lie of beauty and perfection, in the
"white" world, is reinforced each day, for the children, in the
schoolroom. Claudia, with the help of
supportive family, was able to understand that the fantasy world of "Dick
and Jane", from the elementary reader, is a perfect world that does not
exist and can never exist within their black community.
It is also quite clear that Pauline was not
capable of understanding that perfection does not lie within the white world
she so desperately wants to enter. She
is also unaware that she is not a part of this world. In her mind the little white girl, whose
family she works for, is her own perfect child.
To make up for the dissatisfaction and disillusionment in her own life
she "...gives their [her employer's] child a love she with holds from her
own...6". This is felt deeply by
both of her children but played out to a greater degree in the life of Pecola.
Unlike Claudia, Pecola does not have the family
support to draw strength from and realize her own black identity. She gets no positive input from her parents
because they are trying to realize their own true identities.
This lack of parental support causes Pecola to,
"search painfully for self-esteem as a means of imposing order on the
chaos of her world"7. Having no
family base to lean on, she must retreat to her own fantasy. It is in this fantasy that she seeks her blue
eyes. It is with these eyes that she
believes she will become beautiful
and will be
accepted by society. It is with these
same blue eyes that she hopes to gain the attention and love of her mother
which is not present in her life now.
"...for Pecola to feel acceptable, she must insure herself by
possessing not only blue eyes but the bluest eyes created"8.
It is not fair to say that Pecola was not loved
by her father, for he did love her in his own strange and twisted way. He was not able to show love for anyone
because of his pent up anger towards white society. The times did not allow a black man to vent
anger in the direction of the white community so he took his anger and frustration
out on his family.
One of the major acts of his frustration
manifests itself in the burning of the family home. It is through the colors of the fire that
Cholly is able to release some, but not all, of his anger towards the white mans
world. Another way that Cholly expresses
his anger but, also his love, for Pecola is by his rape of her in the
kitchen. It is here that the colors of
his early marriage to Polly, and the happiness he felt, again enter his
life. The same colors of happiness that
Polly felt during their early marriage, Cholly, in his drunken state, again
felt. Only it was not with his young
wife that he "saw" the colors of happiness, but with his young
daugther.
It is also through the rape that the world of
Pecola and the whole Breedlove family turns black. Through his actions, his way of showing his
daughter love, Pecola becomes, "the town's scapegoat and places her in
company with the books other outcasts; the prostitute Miss Marie and the quack
mystic Elihue Whitcomb, dubbed "Soaphead Church"9. It is through the whispers about Pecola and
the shunning of her that the town justifies the image of good and
beautiful. It is because Pecola becomes
pregnant with her father's child that she no longer has the ability, if it ever
exsisted, to be beautiful in the eyes of society. The pregancy has also destroyed her chances
of recieving her mothers love and approval forever because she is dirty in
everyones eyes.
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