139 140

Literary Analysis of Toni Morrison's The

Bluest Eye
 141 142

Table of Contents In a Nutshell/Overview

Cover Page The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, published in 1970. It tells the
tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl growing up in
In a Nutshell/OverviewWhy Morrison's hometown of Lorain, Ohio, after the Great Depression. Due to
Should I Care? its unflinching portrayal of incest, prostitution, domestic violence, child
molestation, and racism, there have been numerous attempts to ban the book
What's Up With the Title? What's from libraries and schools across the United States, some of them
Up With the Ending?Literary successful.

Devices In the Afterword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes that the novel
came out of a childhood conversation she could never forget. She remembers
Book Summary/Plot Overview
a young black girl she knew who wanted blue eyes, and how, like Claudia
Chapter Summaries MacTeer in the novel, this confession made her really angry. Surrounded by
the Black Is Beautiful movement of late 1960s African- American culture,
Plot Analysis Morrison decided to write a novel about how internalizedracism affects
Character Analysis young black girls in a range of ways - some petty and minute,some tragic
and overwhelming.
Character Roles
Character Clues
Themes and Quote AnalysisBest
of The Web
About this eBook
 143 144

Why Should I Care? What's Up With the Title?

As we write this guide to one of the most famous depictions of incest and
beauty myths in American literature, these themes are taking center stage
once again in popular culture. Lee Daniels's 2009 film Precious (based on
Sapphire's 1996 novel Push), has gotten people thinking about poverty,
race, beauty, and incest in new and still-relevant ways.
How cool would it be to read both books - or to read The Bluest Eye and
watch Precious - and be able to say something brilliant like, "Following in
the footsteps of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Sapphire's work explores
the devastating effects of sexual violence on modern African-American
women."
Well, maybe you wouldn't put it quite like that, but hopefully, after reading
The Bluest Eye, you can see how Toni Morrison helped create a space where
black women writers could talk about the horrible effects that racism,
poverty, and substance abuse can have not only on the adults who
experience them but on their children as well.
The Bluest Eye forces us as readers to confront our own ideas of what
counts as beautiful. When we read the novel, do we identify with Pecola's
desire to conform to the standards that contemporary celebrity culture tells
us are beautiful?
The title has at least two meanings, referring both to Pecola's desire to
change the way she is seen and the way sees.
Let's deal with the easy one first. As a black child growing up in1940s
America, Pecola associates beauty with being white and having blue eyes,
like child icon Shirley Temple. Pecola seems to be OK with her nose and
mouth, even her hair - but her eyes, oh, her eyes! She thinks that if she could
just have those bright blue eyes, she'd become truly beautiful and no one
would ever tease her at school, her parents wouldn't fight anymore, andshe'd
never be sad again.
Now, onto the second aspect of the title - Pecola's desire to see the world
differently. Pecola believes that if her eyes were blue, she would begin to
see the world the way that white children do - she would get to be innocent,
she would experience a loving family.
A third idea plays with the meaning of "blue" as "sad." Pecola's eyes
already are the bluest in the book, in that they are the saddest eyes,
possessed by the most tragic character in the novel.

Do we secretly or not-so-secretly want to change our bodies and our facial

features to look more attractive? Or do we, like Claudia, recoil from this
idea and identify with the underdogs, oddballs, and people who look
unique?

Do we try to change ourselves in order to fit what other people find

beautiful, like Pauline? Or, do we scoff at beauty rules and laugh it up, like
Miss Marie? The novel offers several different ways of interacting with
beauty norms, and it's endlessly interesting to see where we find ourselves
within these schemes.
 145 146

comes to play with Jane. The epigraph says,

What's Up With the Ending? "THEYWILLPLAYAGOODGAME." It's painfully ironic that this excerpt
foregrounds the theme of friendship. Pecola doesn't have any real friends,
only this voice inside her head.
It's easy to read the final chapter quickly, since it consists mostly of rapid
dialogue between Pecola and what appears to be an imaginary friend. But
Now, calling this second voice an "imaginary friend" is maybe a bit too
when we slow down and read more closely, we see how this conversation
easy. It might be more interesting to see the second voice as the part of
speaks to two of the major themes in the book - Appearance and Society
Pecola that still wants to live. After all, this is an affirming voice, an
and Class.
encouraging voice, one that wants her to go outside and to help her address
the aftermath of the rape.
First, this chapter highlights the fact that Pecola's obsession with beauty has
evolved throughout the novel. By the end, "blue eyes" are no longer simply
Perhaps the true tragedy of the novel is that in ignoring her completely,
code for Shirley Temple or white beauty; rather, they are how Pecola makes
Pecola's community forces her into such devastating loneliness that she has
sense of the rape she has endured.
to imagine someone talking to her. The community commits a crime on a
par with Cholly's abuse: if Cholly failed her by raping her, Pecola's
Pecola convinces herself that the reason no one talks to her and the reason
community failed her by never acknowledging that a rape took place.
her own mother can't make eye contact with her is because everyone is
jealous of her eyes. It's just too hard, and Pecola is too darn young, to admit
that the real reason she is being ignored is because she was raped by her
father and delivered his child.

When you think about it, this is actually a realistic portrayal of the way
children (and hey, some adults too) deal with cruelty and teasing. In this
chapter, it's as if Pecola is shouting, "You're just jealous!"

We also see the consequences of relying on physical beauty to make up for

psychological and social problems. If beauty is being used to cover up
ugliness, and the world keeps doing ugly things to you, then beauty can
never be enough to fight that. Even though Pecola has, in her delusional
mind, received blue eyes, she now wonders obsessively, "what if there's
someone with bluer eyes?" There will always be someone out there more
beautiful than you, and Pecola seems to be an example of how crazy you
can get if you don't face this fact.

Finally, the ending reminds us that Pecola's "madness," if we want to call it

that (do we?) is not her fault but is embedded in her community. The
chapter begins with a quote from the initial Dick and Jane grammar school
primer that is the book's epigraph, at the point in the story where a "friend"
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Literary Devices - Table of Contents Writing Style

Writing StyleTone Lyrical and Featuring Multiple Perspectives

Narrator Point of View
Morrison is famous for her use of fragmented narrative with multiple
Symbols, Imagery, Allegory perspectives. Her use of different narrative styles - alternating between first-
and third-person omniscient - gives her the freedom to do two interesting
Setting things. On the one hand, she uses Claudia to convey the thoughts and
Tough-o-Meter perceptions of a 9-year-old girl, giving the novel an aspect of innocence. On
the other hand, the use of third-person omniscient narration allows the novel
Genre to cover broad sweeps of time and space - like when we get the history of the
Breedloves' storefront or stories about Soaphead Church's white ancestors.
This opens the novel up, giving it historical depth, and allowing us to see
how the racial issues of the past are still impacting these characters in the
20th century.

Sometimes the contrast between speakers is particularly vivid. For example,

during Pauline's story, the narration begins in third-person omniscient.
Suddenly, about three pages in, we get a series of paragraphs from Pauline's
perspective. One minute we're reading a lyrical line about how Pauline "saw
the Kentucky sun drenching the yellow, heavy-lidded eyes of Cholly
Breedlove" (3.7.10). The next minute we're immersed in Pauline's own
Southern dialect as she says, "When I first seed Cholly...it was like all the
bits of color from that time down home when all us chil'ren went berry
picking after a funeral" (3.7.10). This makes the narrative more inclusive,
giving rural, less-educated characters the opportunity to describe their own
experience in their own language.
 149
Tone
Sympathetic, Poetic, Philosophical
Both Claudia and the third-person narrator are deeply sympathetic. Claudia
insists that Cholly loved Pecola even though he raped her, and the third-
person narrator provides Cholly's back-story not to let him off the hook, but
to complicate his personality and try to show us how the rape fit into the
context of his life.
The book is also deeply poetic, featuring long, elegant descriptive passages
about immaterial things like love:
Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I
could smell it - taste it - sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its
base - everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the
frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when
the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined
its presence in my throat. (1.1.10)
The novel is also philosophical. It features multiple aphorisms - short
maxims about life - such as: "Love is never any better than the lover"
(4.11.8).
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Narrator Point of View
First Person (Central Narrator) and Third Person (Omniscient)
First Person (Central Narrator)
Claudia provides the bulk of the narration in the book. This is convenient
because she actually witnessed what happened to Pecola as well as the way
the town spoke about her, and she makes sure to include snatches of these
conversations in her narration.
Claudia narrates her story from two different perspectives. In the Prologue
and final chapter, the adult Claudia uses the past tense to describe events
that happened back in 1941 in Lorain. But for the bulk of her narration,
Claudia uses the present tense to describe these events, which has the effect
of showing us things through her 9-year-old eyes.
Occasionally Claudia will move between the two modes, allowing us to see
how she is reflecting on her own experience and highlighting the act of
narration. Claudia is a highly empathetic narrator, and while she doesn't
have access to the minds of the people she describes, she does her best to try
to understand them, especially Pecola.
Third Person (Omniscient)
In the chapters that deal with the Breedloves and the one featuring Soaphead
Church, the narrator isn't Claudia, but rather a third-person omniscient
narrator. This speaker is capable of moving through extreme distances of
space and time. This is the voice that tells us the long history ofthe
Breedloves' storefront, details Cholly's early sexual humiliation, and
recounts Soaphead's journey from the West Indies to America.
The third-person style is useful in a book with so many complex characters.
It allows us to watch their lives unfold over time, in ways we could never do
if Claudia were the sole narrator.
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strong political and personal statement.

Symbols, Imagery, Allegory
Blue Eyes/Vision
Blue eyes seem to symbolize the cultural beauty and cachet attributed to
whiteness in America. Different characters respond to blue eyes in different
ways. Claudia, for example, resents the blue eyes of her white dolls, viewing
their association with beauty ironically and with disdain. For Pecola,
however, blue eyes are something to strive for. She believes that having blue
eyes would change the way other people see her, giving her something white
America values as beautiful. Even more interestingly, she believes she
would see things differently through blue eyes, that they wouldsomehow
give her the relatively carefree life of a white, middle-class child.
In part because of her low self-esteem as a poor black child, Pecola does not
believe in her own beauty or her own free will. She spends her life praying
for a miracle because she cannot conceive of being able to change her life on
her own.
We also like the idea that "blue" can refer to sadness. When Pecola believes
she has acquired blue eyes at the end of the novel, we might understand her
as actually having the saddest eyes of anyone in the novel.
Houses can often symbolize an ideal of domestic harmony, which we see in
the first part of the Prologue. The Dick-and-Jane house seems safe and
comfortable and the family that lives inside perfect, normal, happy...and
presumably white. But the houses of the working-class African-American
characters in this novel are not comfortable.
Often, the way that houses are described matches the emotions of the people
inside. The Breedloves' abandoned storefront is described as assaulting
passersby with its melancholy appearance. And although the MacTeer house
is "old, cold and green," Claudia goes to great lengths to tellthe reader that
the love of her family provided warmth. If only the Breedloves were so
lucky!
Houses also have a particularly loaded association for women in the novel,
since women who didn't work were responsible for tending to the home.
Geraldine and Pauline both have strong domestic ties: Geraldine views her
home as an extension of herself, and Pauline uses the Fisher's home to
fantasize about being of a higher social class.

Houses

Did you notice all of the discussion of houses in the novel? From the very
first page, when we read the line, "Here is the house," the novel seems to
want to get us thinking about where and how people live.

One way to think about houses is as a symbol of economic advancement.

Owning a house says something about one's income and social class status.
Claudia notes that property ownership is important for African Americans,
especially coming out of the age of slavery. In the 19th century, black slaves
were considered property, so the opportunity to own property - an
opportunity some middle-class blacks were able to afford - made a very
 153
Setting
Lorain, Ohio in 1941; the Rural South in the Early 20th Century
The novel begins in Ohio after the Great Depression. Economic security is
of particular concern for African Americans, who have far fewer
opportunities for mobility than do their white counterparts. From the
beginning, we see how important every last penny is to the MacTeers, as
their entire family spends time picking coal for Zick's Coal Company even
though it harms their health.
When we get to Pauline's and Cholly's stories, we can view their moves
north to Ohio from the South as part of the Great Migration of African
Americans that occurred from 1910 to 1940. Waves of African Americans
seeking better jobs and more racial tolerance moved from rural southern
towns to more industrial northern ones.
Of course, when Pauline and Cholly arrive in the North, their lives don't
necessarily change for the better, and this geographical complexity is one of
the most important aspects of the novel. Once up North, the couple has to
face a different set of problems: disdainful whites, people judging them on
the basis of their southern accents, differing beauty norms, etc.
Through Soaphead Church, Morrison also tackles Caribbean immigration to
the United States, albeit briefly.
154
Tough-o-Meter
(6) Tree Line
The hardest part of the novel to understand is probably the Prologue. How
does a Dick and Jane reader relate to the events in the novel? Morrison
seems to want to juxtapose popular depictions of so-called normal family
life with other kinds of families that aren't so peachy (or monosyllabic).
Morrison switches up the narrative style sometimes, too. So while some
chapters feature mostly Claudia narrating, others have funky things like
Pauline telling her story in first person, or Pecola and her imaginary friend
speaking in dialogue.
In the Afterword, Morrison says she wanted to avoid demonizing either
Pecola or her community, and this is why she chose to use multiple
perspectives in the novel. So rather than frustrating us, we might think about
how these shifts in perspective shake things up, make the reading more
interesting, and help us get into the psyches of some of these complex
characters.
 155
Genre
African-American Modernist Fiction
The influence of Modernism on Morrison's work cannot be stressed enough.
Morrison wrote her Master's thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner
- two of the most important figures of British and American Modernism,
respectively. Their influence can be seen in the form of the novel, which
features the multiple perspectives and stream-of-consciousness so typical of
modernist works. We might even think of Pecola's split psyche at the end of
the novel as something that marks her as a subject in the modern world. The
novel also takes up some of Modernism's thematic concerns, including the
breakdown of the modern family, the dissolving of community, and an
increasing skepticism about religion.
What distinguishes Morrison's work from those of her idols, though, is the
way she combines Modernist form and content with distinctly African-
American elements, such as old blues lyrics, black southern dialect, and
narration from the point of view of African-American characters. This puts
Morrison in another literary tradition as well - that of black Modernists such
as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Nella Larsen.
156
Book Summary/Plot Overview
The novel opens in the fall of 1941, just after the Great Depression, in
Lorain, Ohio. Nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister,
Frieda, live with their parents in an "old, cold and green" house. What they
lack in money they make up for in love. The MacTeers decide to take in a
boarder named Mr. Henry. At the same time, they also take in young Pecola
Breedlove, whose father recently hit her mother and tried to burn down the
family home. Pecola is a quiet, awkward girl who loves Shirley Temple,
believing that whiteness is beautiful and that her own blackness is inherently
ugly.
Pecola's home life is difficult. Her father, Cholly, abuses alcohol and her
parents fight constantly. Pecola begins to think that if she were prettier, her
parents would be nicer to each other and to her. Since Pecola equates beauty
with whiteness, she begins to pray for blue eyes in order to change the way
she sees the world as well as the way she is seen by others. Above Pecola's
house live three prostitutes - Miss Marie, Poland, and China. These women
use men for money, curse, spit, and laugh. They are also genuinely kind to
Pecola and tell her stories about love, sex, and money.
Pecola gets teased at school by boys, and by the new, light-skinned girl,
Maureen Peal. One winter day, Claudia tries to punch Maureen for making
fun of Pecola, but she misses and punches Pecola dead in the face instead.
Junior, a young black boy from the neighborhood, lures Pecola into his
house and attacks her with a cat. Later, when he kills the cat, he blames it
on Pecola, causing his mother to yell at her and kick her out of the house.
In the spring of 1942, Mr. Henry gropes Frieda and gets kicked out of the
MacTeers' house. Through flashback, the narrator reveals the histories of
Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. Pauline has a deformed foot that has always
made her feel like an outcast in her huge family. We see her as a young girl,
losing herself in church songs and romantic fantasy, always imagining
someone who would love her and save her. From Hollywood movies, she
learns about beauty and begins to emulate white celebrities like Jean
Harlow.
 157 158

We also learn about Cholly, who is abandoned by his mother near train Chapter Summaries - Table of Contents
tracks when he is four days old. He gets taken in by his great aunt, Jimmy,
who raises him until her death. The day of Jimmy's funeral, Cholly has his
Prologue, Part 1
first sexual experience with Darlene, a local girl. While they are having sex
in a field, two white men approach them and shine a flashlight on them. Prologue, Part 2 Autumn,
They laugh at the pair and force them to continue having sex while they
watch and laugh. Cholly and Darlene are humiliated, and Cholly, unable to Chapter 1 Autumn,
direct his anger at the white men, turns it onto Darlene instead. He spends Chapter 2 Autumn,
the next few years moving from city to city and from woman to woman. He
meets and weds Pauline in Kentucky and the couple moves to Lorain, Ohio. Chapter 3 Winter,
Chapter 4 Winter,
Back in the present, Cholly comes home drunk one day to find Pecola
washing dishes. Cholly rapes her in the kitchen. When it's over, he covers Chapter 5 Spring, Chapter
her with a quilt. Pauline finds Pecola unconscious on the floor. When
6 Spring, Chapter 7
Pecola tells her that Cholly raped her, she doesn't believe it and hits her.
Cholly rapes Pecola again at some point after this, although it's unclear Spring, Chapter 8 Spring,
exactly when.
Chapter 9 Summer,
Pecola becomes pregnant with her father's child. She visits Soaphead Chapter 10Summer,
Church, a quack psychic and healer, and asks him to give her blue eyes.
Soaphead tells Pecola to give his dog some meat, and if the dog acts Chapter 11
strangely, she will get her wish. Pecola doesn't realize that Soaphead hates
the dog and has given her poison to feed to it. When the dog begins to gag
and limp around, Pecola believes she will receive her blue eyes.

Claudia and Frieda learn of Pecola's pregnancy through neighborhood

gossip. Although everyone else in Lorain wants the baby to die, Claudia
and Frieda pray that it survives. They spend the summer of 1942 planting
marigold seeds in the hopes that if the flowers blossom, Pecola's baby will
survive. Pecola's baby dies. Pauline and Pecola move to the edge of town
and Pecola begins to lose her mind. Pecola can be seen looking into a
mirror, talking to herself about her blue eyes, and picking through trash.
 159 160

Prologue, Part 1 Prologue, Part 2

Summary Characters Involved

The novel opens with sentences from what looks like a children's Dickand
Jane grammar reader.
The sentences feature a family of four: Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane.They
focus on Jane, who wants to play.
Jane sees a cat, but the cat will not play with her. Jane's
mother laughs, but does not play with her. Jane's father
smiles, but he does not play with her.A dog runs, but
does not play with her.
Finally, a friend comes along to play with Jane.
This paragraph is then repeated word-for-word a second time, without
punctuation.
The paragraph is repeated a third time, without punctuation and withno
spaces between the words.
Unidentified narrator, Pecola, Cholly Breedlove
Summary
The narrator (so far unidentified) explains that no marigolds grew inthe
fall of 1941.
The narrator and her sister thought the marigolds didn't grow because
Pecola, a young girl in the town, was having her father's baby.
The narrator and her sister thought that if they planted marigold seedsand
said the right words over them, Pecola's baby would be born OK. The
narrator spent many years thinking it was her fault that the marigolds didn't
grow, because she had planted the seeds too far downinto the earth. She
now understands that it was the earth's fault.
The narrator says that Pecola's baby is dead, along with her father. Though it
will be difficult to explain why this is so, the narrator will tryto tell how.
 161 162

In one such creepy gaze-fest, Pecola drinks three quarts of the

Autumn, Chapter 1 MacTeers' milk. Mrs. MacTeer gets mad, scolding the girls and
sending them outside.
Once outside, blood begins to spill down Pecola's legs. Pecola and
Characters Involved
Claudia get scared, but Frieda knows that Pecola is getting her first period
or, as she calls it, "ministratin.'" Frieda tries to attach a pad toPecola's
Claudia MacTeer, Frieda MacTeer, Rosemary Villanucci, Mr. Henry, dress. Rosemary, spying from the bushes, yells to Mrs.
Pecola, Mrs. MacTeer MacTeer that the girls are up to something perverted. Mrs. MacTeer rushes
out, sees Pecola's bloody legs, and takes her into the bathroomto clean her
Summary up.
That night, the three girls sleep next to one another. They talk about how
In front of a Greek hotel, Rosemary Villanucci teases her neighbors,two Pecola can have a baby now. Frieda tells Pecola she can only havea baby if
sisters named Claudia and Frieda MacTeer. She tells them they can't get someone loves her. Pecola asks how to go about getting love.No one
into her father's car, since she's white and they are black. answers her.
Claudia (the narrator) and Frieda go to the railroad tracks with their
family to pick coal for Zick's Coal Company.
Claudia remembers getting sick once after picking coal; she recalls her
mother taking care of her and Frieda singing to her. Although her mother
yelled at her for vomiting on the floor, Claudia remembers feeling
surrounded by love.
The MacTeers take on a boarder named Mr. Henry. Through gossip, we
learn that he has never been married. Mr. Henry is immediately playful with
Frieda and Claudia. He teases them and does a magic trickfor them -
presenting a penny then hiding it in his clothes for the girls to find.
In addition to Mr. Henry, the MacTeers also get another houseguest - young
Pecola Breedlove. Pecola's father, Cholly, is in jail after recentlytrying to
burn down the Breedloves' house and hitting Pecola's mother.Pecola's
mother is staying with the woman she keeps house for. Her brother, Sammy,
is staying with another family. Pecola is now homeless, which the narrator
refers to as being "outdoors."
Frieda and Pecola bond over a mutual love of Shirley Temple. Claudiahates
Shirley Temple. She recalls getting a white doll for Christmas one year and
resenting it. Instead of loving her doll and mothering it, Claudia
dismembered the doll in outrage. Pecola, on the other hand, loves Shirley
Temple so much that she drinks milk out of the sisters' Shirley Temple
saucer just to be able to gaze into Temple's face.
 163
Autumn, Chapter 2
Characters Involved
Pecola, Sammy, Mr. Breedlove, Mrs. Breedlove
Summary
The narrator presents a history of Pecola's house. Over the years the house
has been a pizza joint, a Hungarian bakery, a real estate office,and a place
where gypsies lived. But before all that, the Breedloves lived there.
The Breedlove house has three rooms: a kitchen, a bedroom and aliving
area, which the Breedloves call the "front room."
Everyone in the family sleeps in the same room.
The sofa is described. It was bought new but the fabric split down theback
before it arrived. The store refused to take responsibility for this,so the
family is forced to keep a horribly ripped couch while continuing to make
monthly payments on it.
Everyone in the house hates the sofa.
164
Autumn, Chapter 3
Characters Involved
Pecola, Sammy, Mr. Breedlove, Mrs. Breedlove, Mr. Yacobowski, Miss
Marie, China, Poland
Summary
It's a Saturday morning in August.
The night before, Cholly Breedlove came home drunk. Young Pecola
anticipates an argument between her parents.
Mrs. Breedlove begins to pester Cholly about getting coal for the stove.
Cholly refuses. Mrs. Breedlove tells Cholly that if she so muchas sneezes,
the kitty litter's going to hit the proverbial fan.
The narrator states that Mrs. Breedlove and Cholly need each other. Mrs.
Breedlove needs to argue with Cholly to break up the boredom ofher
domestic life. Cholly needs Mrs. Breedlove because he needs someone to
hate.
We learn that when he was young, Cholly was startled by two white men
while losing his virginity. The two men shone a flashlight on himand
mocked him, forcing him to continue having sex while they watched.
Instead of hating the white men for taunting him, Cholly directed hishate
at the girl he was having sex with. Because of this incident, Cholly has
major issues with women.
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Mrs. Breedlove sneezes.
She dumps cold water on Cholly's head. Cholly leaps on her and they begin
fighting on the ground. Sammy enters the fight too. Finally, Mrs.Breedlove
hits Cholly over the head with the lid of the stove; she wins.She orders
Sammy to get some coal. The fight is over.
Pecola, scared and alone in her bed, asks God to make her disappear. She
also prays to God to maker her eyes disappear so she doesn't haveto see
anything. Pecola thinks about how ugly she is. She begins to
 165
think that if her eyes were different, she would be different too. She
begins to pray every night for blue eyes.
Pecola goes to buy candy from a white immigrant named Mr.
Yacobowski. She is scared of buying candy from a white adult. Shefeels
like he doesn't even see her.
Pecola goes to visit the three prostitutes who live above her. Their
names are China, Poland, and Miss Marie.
The women joke about the men they see and tell Pecola stories. Marie says
she's a prostitute because she wants to be; Poland agrees. The narrator
describes the three prostitutes as hating men and abusingthem. Once, the
three women seduced a Jewish man, robbed him, andthrew him out a
window.
Pecola asks them questions about love and wonders what love is andwhat
it feels like. She wonders whether her parents love each other.
166
Winter, Chapter 4
Characters Involved
Maureen Peal, Pecola, Claudia, Frieda, Woodrow Cain, Bay Boy, Mr.
Henry, China, Miss Marie
Summary
There is a new girl at school and her name is Maureen Peal. She is light-
skinned and rich. The teachers and boys all love her. Frieda andClaudia are
fascinated and annoyed by her. They make fun of her in secret.
Claudia and Maureen are assigned lockers next to each other. One day,
Maureen offers to walk home with the sisters.
On the way home, the girls see Pecola getting teased by a group of boys.
The boys are calling her "Black e mo" and saying that her fathersleeps
naked.
Frieda hits one of the boys, Woodrow Cain, with her stack of schoolbooks.
Claudia yells at Bay Boy. The boys back off and the girlskeep walking home
together.
After the fight, Maureen is really nice to Pecola. She offers to buy herice
cream but does not offer any to Frieda or Claudia.
Maureen says she loves the white actress Betty Grable. Claudia saysshe
prefers Hedy Lamarr, a Jewish actress. Claudia prefers the underdog.
Maureen says her uncle sued the ice cream shop they are going to,
Isaley's, because they wouldn't serve him. Maureen says her familyreally
likes suing people. The book is ambiguous about this, but Maureen's
family may have gotten their money this way.
The group talks about why girls get their periods.
At some point, Maureen accuses Frieda of being boy-crazy. Frieda yells at
Maureen. Maureen begins to tease Pecola. Claudia and Frieda defend her.
Claudia gets so upset that she lunges to punch Maureen but
 167
she misses and hits Pecola dead in the face instead. Maureen runs off,
calling the girls "Black e mos."
Claudia and Frieda return home to find Mr. Henry there alone. Mr. Henry
gives the girls a quarter and tells them to go buy ice cream. Thegirls buy
candy and then do a candy dance in the bushes outside their house.
They look inside the living room window and see Mr. Henry with China
and Miss Marie. They call Miss Marie "The Maginot Line" because that's
what the adults call her. Mr. Henry is sucking China'sfingers and she is
giggling.
After the women leave, Frieda and Claudia ask Mr. Henry what they were
doing there. Mr. Henry lies to the girls and says Miss Marie andChina are
old church friends. He tells them not to tell Mrs. MacTeer.Frieda and
Claudia decide not to tell their mother.
168
Winter, Chapter 5
Characters Involved
Geraldine, Junior, Pecola
Summary
The narrator describes good black church women. She says they are sweet
black women from good black neighborhoods where everyonehas a job.
They straighten their hair, they don't drink, smoke, or swear, and they
always go to church. While these women make perfect wives, they are
possessive, if not obsessive, about their home. These women also don'treally
enjoy sex, they hate sweating, and they never have orgasms withtheir
husbands.
Geraldine, the narrator tells us, is one such woman. She lives in Lorain.
She is light-skinned and has a light-skinned child named Junior. When
he was a baby, she never let him cry. Junior hates hismother, but directs
this hatred toward her cat. Geraldine's cat is theonly thing she really
loves.
Junior lives near the playground of Pecola Breedlove's school. He
considers the playground his territory. He longs to play with other black
boys but his mom won't let him because she thinks they are nogood.
One day Junior sees Pecola walking past the playground. He walks upand
asks her if she wants to come to his house to see some kittens.
Pecola goes to the house and falls in love with the lace doilies
everywhere and how nice everything is.
Junior leads Pecola further into the house. He picks up Geraldine's cat and
throws it in Pecola's face. The cat shrieks and scratches Pecola in the face.
Pecola begins to cry and tries to leave the house, but Junior blocks the door.
He tells her she is his prisoner now. Junior locks her inthe room with the cat.
Pecola starts to pet the cat and stops crying.
 169 170

Junior comes back into the room and snatches the cat. He starts swinging it
around by its tail. Pecola tries to get him to stop. She grabsJunior's arm and Spring, Chapter 6
the cat flies into the radiator. The cat stops moving.
Geraldine comes home and Junior tells her that Pecola killed the cat.She
Characters Involved
sees Pecola's torn dress, muddy shoes and yells at her to get out.Pecola
walks outside, sad and mortified. It's beginning to snow outside. Pecola
keeps her head down and watches the snowflakes dieas they fall to the Claudia, Frieda, Mr. Henry, Mr. MacTeer, Mrs. MacTeer, Miss Marie,
ground. Pauline, Pecola, little Fisher girl

Summary

Claudia is sitting in an empty lot playing in the grass. When she gets home
she finds Frieda crying on her bed. Frieda tells Claudia that theirdad beat up
Mr. Henry for touching Frieda's breasts. Frieda is crying because she
overheard Miss Dunion, a neighbor, say that she might beruined just like the
Maginot Line.
Claudia imagines Frieda as fat as the Maginot Line. The girls decidethat
in order to not get fat, Frieda should drink whisky. They decide that since
Cholly's always drinking, they should find Pecola and get whisky from
her.
Frieda and Claudia go to Pecola's, but she isn't home. They see the Maginot
Line on the porch and she tells them that Pecola is with Mrs. Breedlove at
the house of the white family she works for. The MaginotLine tells them she
works at a big white lakefront house. She says theycan wait on the porch
until Pecola gets home but they are too scared ofher. They say they aren't
allowed to be around her. The Maginot Line laughs and throws her root-beer
bottle at them. It breaks and the girls run away, scared.
Frieda and Claudia go to the lakefront house where Mrs. Breedlove works,
in Lakeshore Park. All of the houses are beautiful, but there isno sign of
life there. Blacks are not allowed in the park.
Frieda and Claudia find the large white house and see Pecola on the porch.
She tells them not to be scared of Miss Marie because she's really nice and
buys her nice dresses. Frieda and Claudia don't believeher.
Mrs. Breedlove finds the girls on the porch and tells them to wait inthe
kitchen while she finishes the laundry. Inside, the girls marvel at
 169
how fancy the house is. After Mrs. Breedlove leaves the room, a littlewhite
girl enters the kitchen asking for Polly - her nickname for Mrs. Breedlove.
Frieda notices a berry cobbler on the counter and the girls can't take their
eyes off of it. Pecola reaches out to touch the pan. At this exact moment,
the little white girl yells "Polly!" again, and Pecola accidentally knocks the
cobbler to the floor, splattering her legs with piping hot blueberry juice.
Pecola begins to cry. Mrs. Breedlove runs into the room and slaps Pecola,
knocking her to the floor. Pecola slipsin the hot juice. Mrs. Breedlove hits
her again and yells at her.
Meanwhile, the little white girl begins to cry and Mrs. Breedlove
consoles her. The little girl asks if she can make another pie. Mrs.
Breedlove says, "Of course."
171
Spring, Chapter 7
Characters Involved
Pauline, Cholly, Sammy, Pecola
Summary
We learn that when Pauline (a.k.a. Mrs. Breedlove) was 2 years old and
living in Alabama, she stepped on a nail, leaving her foot limp andcrooked.
Pauline had 10 brothers and sisters, and she always felt that her
physical deformity left her anonymous in the family.
Pauline always liked to arrange things - she was kind of compulsive. Near
the beginning of World War II (around 1939, if your history is fuzzy)
Pauline's family moves to Kentucky to find work. One by one, Pauline's
siblings leave to get married. Pauline stays home to take careof the house
and her youngest siblings, Chicken and Pie.
As she gets older, she fantasizes about love, daydreaming about a man
whose love would straighten her foot. She also loses herself in church
music.
One day, while taking a rest from her work and leaning on a fence, shehears
a man whistling. It's Cholly Breedlove. He approaches her and starts tickling
her foot and kissing her leg. Instead of totally creeping her out, this makes
her laugh.
Cholly and Pauline fall in love, get married, and decide to move to Ohio.
Pauline feels lonely once they move. The white people are coldand
unfriendly to her, and Northern blacks are, too. She starts to thinkthat if she
could buy nicer clothes, maybe the women in her neighborhood would like
her more.
Pauline starts to ask Cholly for money to buy clothes. They begin
fighting. Cholly begins drinking a lot.
Pauline takes a job as a housekeeper for a white woman. Cholly gets meaner
and meaner. Pauline complains about how dirty and selfish thewhite family
is.
 173
One day, Cholly comes to Pauline's work, drunk, demanding money todrink.
The woman she works for is frightened, and Pauline leaves her job. The
woman says she won't pay her or give her her job back unlessshe leaves
Cholly. Pauline refuses and loses her job, with no money toheat her stove.
One winter Pauline gets pregnant. Pauline and Cholly are happy aboutthis
and their relationship improves. Pauline starts watching movies and begins
to learn about physical beauty. She fixes her hair like the white movie star
Jean Harlow.
One day at the movies Pauline loses one of her teeth after eating hard
candy. Cholly begins teasing her about the tooth and their cycle of fighting
starts up again.
Pauline gives birth to Sammy, then Pecola. During Pecola's birth, thewhite
doctor delivering her tells his medical students that African- American
women don't feel any pain during childbirth; he compares them to horses.
Pauline returns to work. Her dreams of romance and love of moviesare
gone.
Pauline begins to attend church, fashioning herself into a good Christian
woman. She begins to view Cholly as a sinful burden thatshe is forced to
bear.
Pauline finds a permanent job with a white family, the Fishers. In the Fishers'
large house, oozing with beauty and wealth, Pauline can cleanand arrange
things as she likes. She stops cleaning her own house.
Cholly tries to set the house on fire. Pauline remembers how they
sometimes used to make love in the dark. Pauline stays with Cholly.
174
Spring, Chapter 8
Characters Involved
Cholly, Aunt Jimmy, Blue Jack, Jake, Darlene, Samson Fuller, Pauline
Summary
Now we get a flashback into Cholly's past.
When Cholly is four days old, his mom abandons him next to sometrain
tracks. He is rescued by his great aunt Jimmy, who names him Charles
Breedlove, after her brother.
Jimmy raises Cholly. One day, when Cholly is a preteen, he asks Jimmy
about his father. She says he's gone off to Macon and that hisname is
Samson Fuller.
Cholly takes a job at Tyson's and works for an old man named Blue Jack.
Blue Jack is kind to Cholly and regales him with stories about hislife.
One day, when Cholly is a teenager, Miss Jimmy gets sick. Her friendsask
M'Dear, a local folk doctor, to take care of her.
M'Dear diagnoses Miss Jimmy with a "cold in her womb." She tells
Jimmy's friends to give her broth and nothing else.
Near death, Miss Jimmy contemplates her life. She realizes she hasspent
it working for white men who beat up black men, and loving black men
who beat up black women.
After nibbling on some of Essie Foster's irresistible peach cobbler,Aunt
Jimmy dies.
At the funeral, Cholly hangs out with his cousin Jake. Jake asks Chollyif he
knows any girls. The pair approaches some girls and the group goes to a
field near the house to pick grapes. The boys start throwing grapes at the
girls and chasing them. Cholly chases a girl named Darlene until they run
out of breath and fall on top of each other.
Cholly and Darlene start to make out and then to have sex. In the middle of
things, two white men show up and laugh at Cholly, shininga flashlight on
the young couple. The men demand that they keep
 175
having sex while they watch. Humiliated, Darlene covers her face withher
hand. Cholly lifts up Darlene's underwear and pretends to have sexwith her.
The men watch and laugh. Convinced that being angry at white men would
kill him, Cholly directs his anger at Darlene instead. The men hear the dog
they are out looking for and leave Cholly and Darlene alone in the field.
They dress in silence.
The next day, Cholly convinces himself that Darlene might be pregnant
and that he should leave town to find his father. He takes some money
Aunt Jimmy had hidden in the stove and walks towardMacon. He walks
for a few months before buying a bus ticket.
In an alley in Macon (the novel never says how exactly Cholly woundup
there) Cholly finds a group of men shooting craps. He asks for Samson
Fuller and finds a short, mean man. Samson thinks Cholly is acreditor after
child support. He curses him and tells him to leave.
Cholly runs out to the street and, while trying not to cry, defecates on
himself.
Cholly runs to the river to wash his clothes. He begins to sob overAunt
Jimmy's death.
After this incident, Cholly drifts from town to town and from womanto
woman.
One day, he meets Pauline. Soon after he marries her he begins to feel
trapped. When he has children, he doesn't know how to take care of them.
Back in the present, Cholly comes home drunk to find Pecola doingthe
dishes. He rapes her. She faints, and he covers her with a quilt. When
Pecola wakes up, Pauline is standing over her.
176
Spring, Chapter 9
Characters Involved
Soaphead Church, Velma, Bertha Reese, Pecola
Summary
The narrator tells the story of Soaphead Church.
For as long as he can remember, Soaphead has been nauseated by
people, but he has always loved objects.
When Soaphead learned the word "misanthrope" he found the perfectword
to describe him. Though he hates people, he works closely withthem, as a
"Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams."
Soaphead comes from a light-skinned West Indian family proud of its
"mixed blood." (They have an English nobleman in their ancestry.)
Soaphead's family encouraged their children to marry "up" by only
marrying other light-skinned folks. When they couldn't marry a light-
skinned person, they would marry within the family.
Soaphead's father was a schoolmaster with a violent streak. He marrieda
half-Chinese woman who died while giving birth. Soaphead was born
Elihue Micah Whitcomb.
Attempting to escape his father's abuse, Soaphead married a woman
named Velma, but she left him after a few months.
Soaphead left the West Indies and moved to America, where he driftedfrom
career to career, entering the ministry, then studying psychiatry, sociology,
and physical therapy.
Soaphead settled down in Lorain, Ohio. The women in the town learned
that he was celibate and kept to himself. They thought he wassome kind of
supernatural shaman figure, and he embraced this role, taking on their
nickname for him, Soaphead Church.
Soaphead rents a room from an old woman named Bertha Reese. She has an
old dog with runny eyes that Soaphead hates. He buys poison tokill the dog
but can't get up the courage to do it.
 177 178

One day, Pecola visits and asks Soaphead to give her blue eyes. Soaphead is
sympathetic. He knows he can't do such a thing, but he tells her to give
some meat to the dog. If the dog reacts to the meat, hetells Pecola, she will
get her blue eyes.
Unbeknownst to Pecola, Soaphead gives her poisonous meat to feed the
dog. When the dog starts to gag and limp around, Pecola believesshe is
getting her wish for blue eyes.
After Pecola runs away, Soaphead writes a long letter to God aboutbeing
rejected by Velma. He talks about young girls' breasts.
Soaphead recalls two young girls, Doreen and Sugar Babe, who he used to
touch in exchange for money and candy. Soaphead alludes todoing things
with other young girls as well.
Soaphead tells God that he did not touch Pecola in any way. He bragsthat
he has made Pecola believe that she has blue eyes. He insists that God is
jealous of him.
Soaphead ends his letter and marvels over all of the objects he has
collected.
As he sleeps, old Bertha finds the body of her dead dog.
Summer, Chapter 10
Characters Involved
Frieda, Claudia, Pecola
Summary
In the summer, Frieda and Claudia sell marigold seeds to save up for anew
bike.
Through gossip, the sisters learn that Pecola is pregnant with her father's
child. They feel sympathy toward her and they're bummed thatno one else in
Lorain seems to care.
Frieda and Claudia decide to bury their marigold money and plant
marigolds for Pecola. They think that if their flowers bloom, Pecola'sbaby
will live. Claudia sings over the seeds, while Frieda says the magic words.
 179 180

Summer, Chapter 11 Plot Analysis - Table of Contents

Characters Involved Classic Plot Analysis

Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis: TragedyThree
Pecola, Cholly, Claudia, Frieda
Act Plot Analysis
Summary

Somewhere on the edge of town, Pecola is talking to an imaginary

friend.
Pecola is looking in the mirror at what she believes are her blue eyes. Her
imaginary friend keeps bothering her, telling her to stop looking atherself in
the mirror all the time.
Pecola tells her friend that she's just jealous of her blue eyes. She says that
everyone in town is so jealous of them that they won't look at her or talk to
her anymore. Pecola says her friend is the only one who evertells her that
her eyes are pretty.
Pecola wonders why she never saw her friend before, and the friendsays
Pecola never needed her before.
They start talking about Cholly and how he raped Pecola twice. The friend
asks Pecola why she didn't tell Pauline about the second time. Pecola says
Pauline wouldn't have believed her, and that she doesn't want to talk about it
anymore. She only wants to talk about her eyes. Pecola begins to worry that
somewhere out there, someone has bluer eyes than hers. She worries that her
eyes aren't blue enough and tries tolook for the person with the bluest eyes.
Pecola's friend says she won't play with her anymore. She says she'sgoing
away for a while, but she'll be back.
Claudia takes up the narration again. She describes seeing Pecola sometimes
after her baby died. Pecola spends her days walking up anddown the street,
flailing her arms like a bird and picking through trash.Claudia and Frieda
ignore Pecola when they see her, not out of fear orrepulsion, but out of guilt
that they failed her.
Claudia says that some people loved Pecola, including herself, the
Maginot Line, and Cholly, but that love is only as good as the lover.
 181 182

As if things couldn't get any worse for Pecola, when she is raped by her
Classic Plot Analysis own father, all hope that she might actually develop self-esteem or self-
sufficiency flies out the window.
Initial Situation
Suspense
Pecola's home environment is abusive and tumultuous.
Pauline and Pecola move to the edge of town.

As the novel begins, we see that Pecola's family life is violent and lacking
in structure, love, and support. When Cholly hits Pauline and nearly burns
their house down, Mrs. Breedlove moves in with her employer, leaving her
children to fend for themselves. Pecola gets sent to stay with the MacTeers
while she waits for her parents to handle their problems.
Pecola spends her days talking to herself in the mirror, flailing her arms likea
bird and sifting through garbage. It's unclear whether or not she is crazy, and
how much she actually remembers of being raped by her father. It's also
unclear how many times he raped her.

Conflict Conclusion

Claudia and Frieda ignore Pecola.

Pecola believes that blue eyes will change her life.

Pecola begins to believe that if she only had blue eyes, her family life
would be completely different and people would love her. This erroneous
belief - that by changing your physical appearance you could change your
familial, psychological, and social situation in life - consumes Pecola
throughout the novel.
At the novel's end, Claudia acknowledges that she and all of the
townspeople of Lorain are partially to blame for what happened to Pecola.
They do not ignore her out of fear or disgust, but because they feel
responsible for what she has become. They have failed her.

Complication

Pecola is repeatedly teased and abused.

It's going to take far more than blue eyes to change this girl's life. She is
teased at school, gets punched in the face, Junior attacks her with a cat, and
she ruins her mom's berry cobbler. Pecola's victimization is building here.

Climax

Cholly rapes Pecola.

 183 184

Destruction
Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis: Tragedy
Pecola loses her baby and her mind.

Anticipation Stage
While Pecola isn't literally destroyed, the pain of being raped by her father,
losing her baby, and having to leave school is too much for her to bear.
Pecola wants to disappear.
Pecola now exists in a complex fantasy world where she has blue eyes and
an imaginary friend who tells her how pretty they are. No one in Lorain
Pecola doesn't want to be seen and begins imagining the day when she will
talks to her or looks her in the eyes anymore; she is completely and utterly
disappear entirely from view.
ignored by everyone, including Pauline. Ironically, her initial wish to
disappear has come true.
Dream Stage

Pecola begins praying for blue eyes.

Pecola begins to fixate on Shirley Temple's whiteness and her blue eyes as a
way to get rid of her misery at being temporarily homeless. Pecola believes
that having blue eyes will make her happy and beautiful, and will make her
parents stop fighting.

Frustration Stage

A series of frustrations befalls Pecola - she gets punched in the face by Claudia, Junior attacks
her with his cat, and she knocks down the berry cobbler.

It's becoming increasingly difficult for Pecola to imagine having a normal

adolescence.

Nightmare Stage

Pecola's father rapes her.

If Pecola's two major wishes were to disappear and to become beautiful so

that she could be loved, Cholly's violation of her shatters both these dreams.
By raping his own daughter, Cholly completely violates her trust and her
ability to possess her own body in any real way.
 185 186

Three Act Plot Analysis Character Analysis - Table of Contents

Act I Pecola Breedlove

Claudia MacTeer
Pecola's family begins to fall apart. Her father tries to burn down her house
and her parents are constantly arguing. This, coupled with the constant Cholly Breedlove
bullying and teasing she gets at school, leads Pecola to start wishing she
Pauline Breedlove
had blue eyes. Pecola believes that if she possessed blue eyes, her life
would improve dramatically. Frieda MacTeer
Maureen Peal Miss
Act II
Marie Soaphead
Pecola is raped by her father while washing the dishes in the kitchen. He
Church
rapes her again when she is lying on the couch. She tries to tell her mother,
but Pauline doesn't believe her.

Act III

Pecola invents an imaginary friend to talk to her and affirm her. In a

delusional state, Pecola believes her eyes have turned blue. She spends her
days walking through town, picking through trash, and staring at her eyes in
the mirror.
 187 188

Character Analysis: Pecola Breedlove Pecola's need to achieve a white kind of beauty is not only linked to
America's beauty obsession, however. Pecola also thinks that if she were
prettier, her parents wouldn't fight so much. This is the classic "it's my
Aka (also known as):
fault" logic that many kids have when their parents fight, taken to an
extreme.
Pecola Breedlove, Pecola
Pecola is constantly victimized and humiliated throughout the novel. When
we first meet her she is homeless. Later she is teased by Bay Boy, Woodrow
Character Analysis
Cain, and Maureen Peal. Claudia accidentally punches her in the face; she
gets piping hot blueberry juice all over legs; and young Junior throws his cat
Pecola Breedlove is a young girl growing up black and poor in the early
in her face, then kills it in front of her. All of these events build toward the
1940s. She is repeatedly called "ugly" by nearly everyone in her life, from
ultimate victimization - when Cholly, her own father, rapes her.
the mean kids at school to her own mother. This constant criticism, the
relentless bullying she gets at school, and her rough family life (her parents
By the end of the novel, Pecola has completely lost touch with reality.
are always fighting, both verbally and physically) lead Pecola to seek
Unable to process and accept the fact that she has been raped by her father,
escape from her misery by fantasizing about becoming more beautiful.
she becomes convinced that everyone in town is looking at her strangely
Pecola begins to believe that if she could just achieve physical beauty, her
because she received her wish of blue eyes. She acquires an imaginary
life would automatically improve. This false belief turns out to be utterly
friend whom she talks to almost exclusively about her eyes.
destructive to Pecola, consuming her whole life and, eventually, her sanity.
While we might be quick to toss this off as simple insanity, that seems a bit
Pecola's story illustrates the way cultural conceptions of beauty can be
too easy. Instead, we might think of Pecola's imaginary friend as the only
devastating to young women who do not fit those conceptions. While
way she can make sense of her experience. Since no one in her life ever
Pecola is an African-American girl, the beauty icons America celebrated at
showed her love or affection, Pecola's young mind at the end of the novel
this time were almost always white. Throughout the novel, female
does the only thing it can do: it creates an imaginary friend to love and
characters big and small identify with and try to imitate the celebs they
affirm her.
love. While Pecola's mom wears her hair like the blonde bombshell Jean
Harlow (think the Gwen Stefani of the 1930s and 40s), the young Pecola
Claudia's last words about Pecola provide another lens through which to
obsesses over child-star Shirley Temple (think Dakota Fanning or Abigail
view her character. In Claudia's view, the townspeople of Lorain used
Breslin).
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
In Chapter 1, when Pecola drinks three quarts of milk out of a Shirley
low self-esteem and self-loathing.
Temple cup just so she can look down at Shirley Temple's white face, we
see a girl who is starting to obsess over Temple in a somewhat-creepy way.
Character Timeline
We don't think it's a mistake that she's drinking white milk in this scene,
either! The novel is really hitting us over the head with this whole white Pecola is born to Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. Pauline immediately
beauty thing. After all, Pecola is literally internalizing the whitest substance decides that she is an ugly child.
there is...get it?
 189 190

Pecola comes to stay with the MacTeers after her father, Cholly, triesto
burn down their house. Character Analysis: Claudia MacTeer
Pecola drinks three quarts of milk out of a Shirley Temple cup just soshe
can look at Shirley Temple's face.
Aka (also known as):
Pecola gets her period and finds out she is able to have babies.
As her parents fight, Pecola prays to be pretty. She prays for blue eyesso the
Claudia MacTeer, Claudia
world will see her differently and so she will be able to see the world
differently.
Pecola hangs out with three prostitutes - Miss Marie, China, and Poland.
Character Analysis
They are nice to her and tell her stories about love and sex.After she is
teased at school, Claudia, Frieda, and Maureen defend Pecola.
Claudia is the primary narrator of the book. An inquisitive, sensitive young
Claudia accidentally punches Pecola in the face while aiming for
girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio, Claudia is the product of a loving family.
Maureen.
Her narration is interesting in that it moves back and forth between her
Junior lures Pecola into his house. He picks up his mother Geraldine'scat
reflective, adult stance and a more innocent, childlike one.
and throws it in Pecola's face, scratching her badly. When Geraldine comes
home, Junior blames Pecola for the cat's death.
Claudia is somewhat of a rebel figure throughout the novel. Unlike Pecola
At the house of the white family where her mother works, Pecola
and Frieda, Claudia tries to actively resist popular beauty icons like Shirley
accidentally drops a berry cobbler on the floor, splattering herself withthe
Temple. Instead, she identifies with Jewish women and other, less popular
piping hot filling. Pauline hits her.
childhood stars like Jane Withers. When she receives a white baby doll for
Pecola's father rapes her in their kitchen.
Christmas, she completely dismembers it!
Pecola visits Soaphead Church and asks him to give her blue eyes.
Pecola gets pregnant with her father's child.
Claudia's rebellious nature also comes out in the way she treats Pecola.
Pecola's baby dies.
Rather than tease her as her peers do, Claudia is consistently kind to Pecola
Pecola invents an imaginary friend to talk to. She is convinced she hasblue
throughout the novel, going so far as to say that she loves her and feels
eyes.
genuinely guilty about Pecola's fate.
Pecola moves to the edge of town with her mother and spends her days
looking in the mirror, searching through trash and talking to herself.
At the end of the novel, Claudia and Frieda spend the entire summer selling
marigold seeds in order to buy themselves a bicycle. Once they learn of
Pecola's pregnancy, they sacrifice their seed money as a payment to God, in
the hope that he will allow Pecola's baby to survive.

Character Timeline

Claudia goes to the railroad tracks with her family to pick coal forZick's
Coal Company.
Claudia remembers getting sick once after picking coal. She recalls her
mother taking care of her, and Frieda singing to her. Although her
 189 191

mother yelled at her for vomiting on the floor, Claudia remembersbeing

surrounded by love. Character Analysis: Cholly Breedlove
While talking to Pecola and Frieda, Claudia thinks about her hatred of
Shirley Temple.
Aka (also known as):
Claudia recalls getting a white doll for Christmas one year, hating it,and
dismembering it in outrage.
Cholly Breedlove, Charles Breedlove, Mr. Breedlove, Cholly, Pecola's
Claudia and Maureen Peal are assigned lockers next to each other. Oneday,
father
Maureen offers to walk home with Claudia and Frieda.
When a group of boys teases Pecola, Claudia yells at one of them
named Bay Boy.
Character Analysis
When Maureen begins to tease Pecola, too, Claudia tries to defend Pecola
by punching Maureen in the face. She misses, punching Pecolainstead.
Cholly is a complex character, with a difficult life that is closely tied to
When Frieda gets groped by Mr. Henry, Claudia is jealous.
America's racist history. He's got major issues with women, which stem
In the summer, Frieda and Claudia sell marigold seeds to save up for anew
partially from the fact that his mother abandoned him when he was born,
bike.
but also from the complicated ways that racism and sex have intermingled
Through gossip, the sisters learn that Pecola is pregnant with her
in his life story.
father's child.
Claudia feels sympathy toward Pecola; she is sad that no one else in
In the middle of losing his virginity, he is completely humiliated by two
Lorain seems to care.
white men. He handles this humiliation by men who are socially and legally
After Pecola's baby dies, Claudia and Frieda ignore her when they seeher,
more powerful than him by turning his rage upon the black women in his life
not out of fear or repulsion, but out of guilt that they failed her.
(who are socially and legally less powerful).
Claudia says that some people loved Pecola, including herself, the
Maginot Line, and Cholly.
Cholly has no role model to teach him how to be a parent or love children.
When he becomes a father, he is at a complete loss at what to do. He starts
to use alcohol as a way to cope with fatherhood, married life, and the
pressure of being the breadwinner, which leads to bouts of violence and the
neglect of his family. After Cholly rapes Pecola, his daughter, near the end
of the novel, he slips out of view and dies alone at a workhouse.
 193 194

Character Analysis: Pauline Breedlove Character Analysis: Frieda MacTeer

Aka (also known as): Aka (also known as):

Pauline Breedlove, Mrs. Breedlove, Pauline, Polly Frieda MacTeer, Frieda

Character Analysis Character Analysis

Pauline is Pecola's mom, and her character allows us to see how cultural Frieda is Claudia's older sister. A fierce defender of both her sister and
conceptions of beauty can play themselves out in a more benign, though Pecola, she hits Woodrow Cain in the head with her schoolbooks when he
still unfortunate, form than in Pecola's case. makes fun of Pecola. While Claudia revolts against popular beauty norms,
Frieda embraces them, actively identifying with Shirley Temple.
Pauline's lame foot is a constant source of humiliation for her. Once she
moves to Ohio, she must contend with regional and social class barriers to
normative beauty that she had never imagined. Up north, Pauline's southern
accent makes her stick out like a sore thumb, and her inability to keep up
with the latest fashion takes its toll on her spirit as well. When Pauline loses
herself in Hollywood films and styles her hair like Jean Harlow feel prettier,
we see that not only were little girls influenced by white celebrity culture,
but older black women as well.

Once she loses her tooth, Pauline's preoccupation with making herself
beautiful is replaced with an obsession with being the perfect servant for the
Fishers. In this affluent white household, Pauline gets to pretend that the
Fisher kitchen is her kitchen, that the money she receives to buy their
groceries is her money, and maybe even that their little white daughter is her
daughter. Just like her daughter Pecola, Pauline creates an elaborate fantasy
world that consumes her.
 195 196

Character Analysis: Maureen Peal Character Analysis: Miss Marie

Aka (also known as): Aka (also known as):

Maureen Peal, Maureen Miss Marie, Marie, The Maginot Line

Character Analysis Character Analysis

Maureen is a snobby, uppity light-skinned girl with money who is new to Miss Marie challenges some of the characters' conceptions of beauty and
the neighborhood. Maureen comes to symbolize a different kind of black feminine decorum. Always eating, cursing, or laughing, she refuses to abide
family - the upwardly mobile, light-skinned African-American family that by society's rules regarding the so-called purity of women.
disdains darker-skinned black people.
 197
Character Analysis: Soaphead Church
Aka (also known as):
Soaphead, Soaphead Church, Elihue Micah Whitcomb, Little Elihue
Character Analysis
Soaphead is the novel's quintessential dirty old man. He internalizes his
family's obsession with whiteness but takes it in a surprisingly pedophilic
direction. Just as Pecola associates whiteness with purity and beauty,
Soaphead associates whiteness with purity and the innocence of children.
It's no accident that when he speaks of young girls he has molested in the
past, he refers to their "white laughter."
It seems important that the most religious character in the novel is also one
of the most immoral, stuffy, and unlikable characters. Where other
characters, like Pauline and Cholly, receive some kind of redemption -
either through their back-stories or the sympathy of the narrator - Soaphead
receives neither.
198
Character Roles
Protagonist
Pecola Breedlove
This is Pecola's story, but it should be clear that she is not a hero who goes
on a journey of self-discovery. Pecola's journey is a tragic one, and she ends
up far worse off than when we first encounter her. She does not learn any
major life lessons; on the contrary, she actually loses knowledge, and parts
of her mind, by the end of the novel.
Antagonist
Cholly Breedlove
Cholly is cowardly and abusive. His actions all point to him as the novel's
antagonist: he begins seeking an escape from his family as soon as Pauline
gives birth to Sammy; he hits Pauline; he tries to set the house on fire; and
he rapes his young daughter. Yet it is important to note that thought the
narrator doesn't excuse his behavior, by presenting a picture of his rough
past, he is portrayed someone sympathetically.
Guide/Mentor
Miss Marie, a.k.a. the Maginot Line
Miss Marie is the closest thing to a mentor that Pecola has. She is the only
character in the novel who openly gives Pecola affection and advice. She
calls her affectionate nicknames, takes her out on the town, and buys her
gifts.
Foil
Claudia to Frieda
 199 200

While Claudia revolts against popular beauty norms, Frieda embraces them,
actively identifying with Shirley Temple. Character Clues

Actions

We get to know each of the characters in The Bluest Eye in part through their
actions. Claudia displays her empathy and loyalty by trying to punch
Maureen Peal in the face for teasing Pecola. Frieda displays the same
qualities, defending Pecola by hitting Woodrow Cain with her schoolbooks.
Miss Marie expresses her disdain for societal expectations of female purity
when she laughs and curses loudly. Cholly displays his disgust and
disrespect for women and family life when he hits his wife, attempts to burn
down his family home, and rapes his daughter. We see Pauline's frustration
with her home life when she stops cleaning her own house entirely in order
to focus all of her energies on keeping the Fisher home perfect.

Family Life

The families and childhoods of many characters in The Bluest Eye

illuminate aspects of their personalities. Cholly was abandoned at four days
old and never knew his father, leaving him unable to properly nurture a
family or be a good father himself. Similarly, Pecola's rough family life
leaves her without the self-esteem to question America's norms of beauty, so
she succumbs to them instead. Soaphead Church's strict, abusive father
contributed to his obsession with cleanliness and order.

Names

There are plenty of strange and ironic names in this novel. The last name of
the central family, "Breedlove," is meant to be ironic, since there appears to
be little love among the family members, and when Pecola is forced to have
her father's child, it dies. Claudia and Frieda's last name, "MacTeer," might
highlight their compassionate nature, being an aural play on sympathetic
tears. They are some of the only characters who feel truly sorry about
Pecola's fate. We find the fact that Miss Marie is known as The Maginot
Line just hilarious. The Maginot Line was a fortification built by France in
 201 202

order to keep the Germans and Italians out of their country on the eve of
World War II. This series of barriers proved to be famously ineffective, as Themes and Quote Analysis - Table of Contents
Germany ended up getting through. So why is Miss Marie known as the
Maginot Line? Well, in all honesty, it's because she's easy to get into!
AppearancesRace

Sex and Love Women and Femininity

Jealousy
The ways characters approach sex and love in the novel, and the kind of
desire they have, reveals key aspects of their character. Soaphead's love of Society and ClassLove
little girls is inseparable from his obsession with cleanliness and racial
Sex Innocence
purity. Cholly's rape of Pecola is bound up with his own self-loathing,
internalized racism, and disdain for women and family life. Pauline spends
far more time thinking and dreaming about love and sex than she does
practicing it, revealing her tendency to lose herself in fantasy and
daydreams.

Speech and Dialogue

In the Afterword, Morrison says that she wanted to create "race-specific but
race-free prose." To achieve this specificity, Morrison uses a lot of African-
American vernacular in the novel. Mrs. MacTeer's musical nature is
revealed in the way she speaks (for example when she lilts, in a sing-song
voice, that she doesn't have "a thin di-i-me to my name"). Pauline and
Cholly Breedlove speak to each other in curses and insults, like "You say
one more word, and I'll split you open!" On a lighter note, Miss Marie's
proclivity for food gets expressed in her nicknames for Pecola, such as
"dumplin'" and "puddin'."
 203
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Appearances
Theme Summary
In The Bluest Eye, characters associate beauty with whiteness. The novel
constantly refers to white American icons of beauty and innocence such as
Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple. African-American girls
during this time period (the 1940s) were encouraged to aspire to be white;
all of the female African-American characters in the novel have grown up in
a society that does not find them beautiful or even worthy of being looked
at. Pecola is constantly identified by her ugliness, and she fixates onwhat
society deems to be a symbol of beauty and purity - blue eyes.
Pecola's belief that blue eyes will make her beautiful shows two specific
effects of racism on young African-American girls: low self-esteem and
envy of whiteness.
Study Questions
1. How does Pecola perceive beauty? How do Frieda and Claudia
perceive it?
2. How does the novel suggest that people learn to distinguish what is
beautiful from what is not? What role do magazines and television
play in notions of beauty?
3. How are beauty and race linked in the novel? Which characters are
described as beautiful, and why? Which are described as ugly, and
why?
4. Do the three prostitutes in the novel (China, Poland, and Marie) have a
different understanding of beauty than Pecola?
204
Sample Thesis Statements
While Pecola and Claudia both associate beauty with whiteness, Claudia
views this association ironically and Pecola believes in it wholeheartedly.
Miss Marie and Claudia offer alternative concepts of beauty in the novel.
Quotes & Thoughts on Appearances
QUOTE:
Frieda and she had a long conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple
was. I couldn't join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley. (1.1.35)
THOUGHT:
Claudia uses the example of Shirley Temple to differentiate herself from
Frieda and Pecola, and what she perceives as their internalized racism.
Go to CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY
QUOTE:
Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs - all the
world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was
what every girl child treasured. (1.1.39)
THOUGHT:
American culture promotes the idea that whiteness should be desired.
Go to CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY
QUOTE:
 205 206

Occasionally an item provoked a physical reaction: an increase of acid

irritation in the upper intestinal tract, a light flush of perspiration at the back
of the neck ..... The sofa, for example. It had been purchased new, but the
fabric had split straight across the back by the time it was delivered. (1.2.6)
THOUGHT:
An ugly sofa becomes a symbol of poverty.
Go to CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY
QUOTE:
Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could
relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what
there was to see: the eyes of other people. (1.3.21)

Go to CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY
THOUGHT:
Pecola lacks the self-esteem to not care what other people think.
QUOTE:
They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there
because they believed they were ugly. Although their poverty was
traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique. QUOTE:
No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A
aggressively ugly. (1.3.1) high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes
that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as
the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her
THOUGHT:
clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. (2.4.3)
Regardless of whether it is true or not, the Breedloves have internalized the
belief that they are ugly.
THOUGHT:
Maureen's skin color seems tied to her class status in complex ways.

QUOTE:
It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes. were different,
that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different." (1.3.18) QUOTE:
They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear
lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and
THOUGHT:
they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair. (2.5.4)
Pecola believes that physical appearance can alter one's psychological
condition.
THOUGHT:
 207
This quote shows how black women are taught to behave like middle-class
white women.
QUOTE:
In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and
collected self-contempt by the heap. (3.7.21)
THOUGHT:
Beauty gets associated with self-contempt here.
QUOTE:
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty. . . A little black girl who
wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue
eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly
wished he could work miracles. (3.9.21)
THOUGHT:
Soaphead takes pity on Pecola when he sees the extent of her self-loathing.
QUOTE:
She 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. (3.7.22)
208
THOUGHT:
This quote shows how popular films influence cultural and personal ideals
of beauty.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Race
Theme Summary
Whiteness in The Bluest Eye is associated with beauty, innocence, goodness,
cleanliness, and purity. Each of the characters who have internalized popular
and cultural concepts of goodness, beauty, and innocence tend to have some
kind of obsession - whether covert or overt - with whiteness. Race is a
powerful determinant in the novel. It is because Cholly is black that the
white men humiliate him while he is losing his virginity. This in turn leads
him to be somewhat repulsed by women and family, which leads to his
alcoholism, which leads to his rape of Pecola. In a similar vein, Soaphead
Church is raised in a family that marries light- skinned blacks in order to
"whiten up" the family features. This leads him toan obsession with purity,
both racial and otherwise.
Study Questions
1. Which characters in the novel worship whiteness? Which characters
reject it?
2. How is Pecola's blackness related to her ugliness, if at all?
3. How do light-skinned characters in the novel get treated compared to
dark-skinned characters?
Sample Thesis Statements
All of the characters who internalize ideas of middle-class whiteness are
 209
obsessed with cleanliness, order, and/or purity.
Race and class are nearly impossible to separate in the novel.
Quotes & Thoughts on Race
QUOTE:
The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having
temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there
because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they
believed they were ugly. (1.2.1)
THOUGHT:
The Breedloves internalize black self-hatred.
QUOTE:
I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with
Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have
been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying,
sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls
whose socks never slid down under their heels. (1.1.35)
THOUGHT:
Claudia revolts against the tyranny of Shirley Temple and white beauty.
QUOTE:
210
Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the
hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to
creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. (1.1.29)
THOUGHT:
The working-class African-American characters in the novel just barely
struggle to survive.
QUOTE:
The line between colored and nigger was not always clear; subtle and
telltale signs threatened to erode it, and the watch had to be constant.
(2.5.14)
THOUGHT:
Geraldine teaches Junior how to examine other black people in order to
separate the "good" ones from the "bad" ones. This method isn't foolproof,
however.
QUOTE:
Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an
emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He
was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind
did not guess - that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up
like a piece of soft coal. (3.6.61)
THOUGHT:
 211
Cholly is unable to hate the white men because hating them would have
destroyed him, as they are socially and legally more powerful than him.
Instead, he transfers his hate to the women in his life.
QUOTE:
His mother did not like him to play with niggers. She had explained to him
the difference between colored people and niggers. They were easily
identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and
loud. (2.5.14)
THOUGHT:
Geraldine internalizes, and teaches, a racial hierarchy.
QUOTE:
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty .... A little black girl who
wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue
eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly
wished he could work miracles. (3.9.21)
THOUGHT:
This passage fleshes out Soaphead's character a bit and suggests that he has
a great capacity for empathy. It also reminds us of Soaphead's own racial
self-hatred, so we can see why he would be inclined to try to help Pecola
battle her feelings of ugliness.
212
QUOTE:
The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her
way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and
milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world - which is what she
herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she
absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to
us. (4.11.5)
THOUGHT:
This passage suggests that the townsfolk of Lorain have used Pecola and her
family as a kind of emotional landfill. They took all of their negative
emotions about their race and social position and dumped them onto Pecola,
with tragic results.
QUOTE:
It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its
teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance,
their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness
and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the
hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming
whatever was in its path. (2.4.12)
THOUGHT:
The young boys on the playground taunt Pecola for being black as a way of
angrily expressing their own self-hatred and internalized racism.
QUOTE:
 213
Then the screen would light up, and I'd move right on in them pictures.
White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in
big clean houses with bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them
pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and
looking at Cholly hard. (3.7.23)
THOUGHT:
Pauline constantly compares her life as an African-American woman with
the lives of the white women she sees onscreen. Movies have the ability to
show us other worlds and create feelings (in this case, envy) that may not
have existed otherwise.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Women and Femininity
Theme Summary
The Bluest Eye is mostly concerned with the experience of African-
American women in the 1940s. It presents a realistic view of the options for
these women: they could get married and have children, work for white
families, or become prostitutes. The novel also thematizes the culture of
women and young girls, emphasizing beauty magazines, playing with dolls,
and identifying with celebrities.
Study Questions
1. What is the narrator's attitude toward gender restrictions?
2. What kinds of things do women talk about in the novel? How does
gossip among women function in the novel?
3. What does female friendship look like in the novel? Who are the
friends in the novel?
Sample Thesis Statements
214
Miss Marie, Poland, and China are feminist characters.
Women in the novel internalize racism more than the male characters.
Quotes & Thoughts on Women and Femininity
QUOTE:
Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound,
curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by
another: the two circle each other and stop. (1.1.19)
THOUGHT:
Claudia, eavesdropping, finds beauty in the sound of women talking.
QUOTE:
Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs - all the
world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was
what every girl child treasured. 'Here,' they said, 'this is beautiful, and if you
are on this day "worthy" you may have it.' (1.1.38)
THOUGHT:
Women's culture promotes identification with whiteness.
QUOTE:
Marie sat shelling peanuts and popping them into her mouth. Pecola looked
and looked at the women. Were they real? Marie belched, softly, purringly,
lovingly. (1.3.47)
THOUGHT:
Marie defies all societal notions of femininity.
 215
QUOTE:
This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A
high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes
that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as
the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her
clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. (2.4.3)
THOUGHT:
Maureen's light skin is associated with beauty and femininity.
QUOTE:
1She 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. (3.7.22)
THOUGHT:
Hollywood films promote certain ideas of beauty.
QUOTE:
Then the screen would light up, and I'd move right on in them pictures.
White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in
big clean houses with bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them
pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and
looking at Cholly hard. (3.7.23)
THOUGHT:
216
Pauline envies the lives of white people, as seen at the movies.
QUOTE:
I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute! (2.4.35)
THOUGHT:
Maureen insults Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia by using the same racially
loaded language as the young boys.
QUOTE:
She, like a Victorian parody, learned from her husband all that was worth
learning - to separate herself in body, mind, and spirit from all that
suggested Africa. (3.9.7)
THOUGHT:
Black women learn to dis-identify with blackness.
QUOTE:
Three women are leaning out of two windows. They see the long clean neck
of a new young boy and call to him. He goes to where they are. .... They give
him lemonade in a Mason jar. As he drinks, their eyes float up to him
through the bottom of the jar .....They give him back his manhood, which he
takes aimlessly. (3.8.82)
 217
THOUGHT:
Cholly presumably encounters Miss Marie, Poland, and China here, but the
text leaves this ambiguous. He has fun with them and rediscovers his
masculinity.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Jealousy
Theme Summary
Feelings of jealousy and envy permeate The Bluest Eye. From Claudia and
Frieda's jealousy of Maureen Peal to Pauline envying the uppity women of
Lorain, Ohio, women seem to experience envy all day, every day. In some
instances, jealousy can bring women closer together, as when the MacTeer
sisters bond over their mutual hatred of Maureen. At other times, jealousy
keeps girls and women from being friends with one another.
Study Questions
1. Who is jealous of whom in the novel? Who is never jealous of anyone?
2. Are women the only jealous characters in the novel, or are men
jealous, too?
3. How does jealousy impact the lives of characters that experience it?
Sample Thesis Statements
Pauline Breedlove learns how to be jealous from watching Hollywood
movies.
Many aspects of girl culture promote jealousy.
218
Quotes & Thoughts on Jealousy
QUOTE:
We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the
arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her
chewing mouth. (Prologue)
THOUGHT:
Frieda and Claudia exhibit working-class envy of their snotty neighbor.
QUOTE:
She eats the candy, its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to
eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane. (1.3.33)
THOUGHT:
Pecola's childlike thought patterns reveal themselves here: she believes that
eating the eyes of a white girl could lead to becoming the white girl.
QUOTE:
This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A
high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes
that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as
the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her
clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. (2.4.3)
THOUGHT:
The girls are jealous of Maureen's beauty, but also her proximity to
whiteness.
QUOTE:
"Oh, Claudia, you're jealous of everything." (3.6.8)
 219
THOUGHT:
Claudia gets upset when Mr. Henry touches Frieda instead of her, revealinga
key aspect of her character. Claudia is consistently inquisitive and hungry
for new experiences throughout the novel. We aren't quite sure if she wishes
this had happened to her or if she wishes there were some magical way that
she could know what it felt like.
QUOTE:
Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were
amused by her because she did not straighten her hair ..... Their goading
glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying "chil'ren") and
dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes. (3.7.18)
THOUGHT:
Pauline's jealousy is aroused by other black women judging her. Like her
daughter, Pauline believes that if she alters her appearance people will treat
her differently.
QUOTE:
She came into her own with the women who had despised her, by being
more moral than they .... She joined a church where shouting was frowned
220
on. ... She stopped saying "chil'ren" and said "childring" instead. She let
another tooth fall, and was outraged by painted ladies who thought only of
clothes and men. (3.7.25)
THOUGHT:
There is a trend in the novel of characters starting in one emotional state
(say, Cholly's anger at the white men who humiliate them) and sublimating
those emotions into ones that are easier to handle. Here Pauline takes her
jealousy of other women and turns it into martyrdom.
QUOTE:
But the dismembering of the dolls was not the true horror. The truly
horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white
girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only
by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic
they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say,
"Awwwww," but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they
approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch
as they handled them. (1.1.43)
THOUGHT:
Here Claudia uncovers one of the reasons for dismembering the white dolls
- she is truly envious of their allure. As we see throughout the novel,
Morrison complicates a simple emotion like jealousy by linking it to
something else: curiosity. Claudia's envy isn't detached or simply
emotional; jealousy drives her curiosity to know why exactly one set of
racial features would be privileged over another.
 221
QUOTE:
When she was assigned a locker next to mine, I could indulge my jealousy
four times a day. (2.4.6)
THOUGHT:
This is a great moment, where Morrison nails just how perversely
pleasurable jealousy can be. Although it drives Claudia nuts, she also really
likes plotting against Maureen. Jealousy is a guilty pleasure, like emotional
ice cream.
QUOTE:
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another -
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human
thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in
disillusion. (3.7.22)
THOUGHT:
Romantic love seems to feed on jealousy.
QUOTE:
Then the screen would light up, and I'd move right on in them pictures.
White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in
big clean houses with bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them
pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and
looking at Cholly hard. (3.7.23)
222
THOUGHT:
Pauline envies the lives of white people as she sees them portrayed in the
movies. In particular, she envies the monetary security, comfort, and
romance she finds in them.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Society and Class
Theme Summary
Race and class are nearly inextricable in The Bluest Eye, since there were so
many economic barriers for African Americans during this time period. The
African-American citizens of Lorain that we encounter are mostly working-
class folks who work in coal mines or as domestic servants for white
families. The breakdown of community is another aspect of this theme, since
many of the characters who identify with middle-class white culture feel the
need to separate themselves from lower-class blacks, or "black e mos,"
whom they associate with criminality and laziness.
Study Questions
1. How do class and race intersect in the novel?
2. Who is to blame for Pecola's fate?
3. How does the Great Depression influence the conditions of the novel?
Sample Thesis Statements
The entire town of Lorain, Ohio, is responsible for Pecola's fate.
Quotes & Thoughts on Society and Class
QUOTE:
 223
Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors
surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed
with it. (1.1.28)
THOUGHT:
Homelessness is an ever-present reality for working-class blacks in Lorain.
QUOTE:
There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors. If you
are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to
go. The distinction was subtle but final. .... Knowing that there was such a
thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. (1.1.19)
THOUGHT:
This passage illuminates a central difference between the MacTeers and the
Breedloves. The MacTeers are striving, and since they have never owned
property, it is a symbol of economic and racial independence for them. The
Breedloves, in contrast, are constantly on the verge of losing and/or
destroying their home.
QUOTE:
The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having
temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there
because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they
believed they were ugly. (1.2.1)
THOUGHT:
224
Morrison continually stresses that the Breedloves' poverty is not just
temporary. Here she highlights that it is multidimensional: not only their
race but their self-hatred and psychological issues keep them down.
QUOTE:
This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A
high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes
that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as
the richest of white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her
clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. (2.4.3)
THOUGHT:
Maureen's skin color and class status are both deemed oppressive to other
blacks here. Her hair is described as "two lynch ropes," presenting a loaded
image of racial oppression. The passage suggests that the success of
Maureen's family goes hand-in-hand with the oppression of poorer, darker-
skinned families.
QUOTE:
It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been
unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt
just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.
Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.
(from second Prologue)
THOUGHT:
This raises the question of who is to blame with regard to Pecola's fate.
 225
QUOTE:
We saw her sometimes. Frieda and I - after the baby came too soon and died.
After the gossip and slow wagging of heads. She was so sad to see. Grown
people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her,laughed
outright. (4.11.2)
THOUGHT:
The town reacts to Pecola's madness by ignoring her, expressing shame and
sadness.
QUOTE:
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the
land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right
to live. (4.11.7)
THOUGHT:
The passage seems to suggest that the town blames Pecola for her rape
because they cannot come to grips with the senselessness of it all. It is
almost too scary, too difficult, to think about how random and unfortunate
Pecola's fate is.
QUOTE:
She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her
from us simply because it bored us in the end. (4.11.7)
226
THOUGHT:
Claudia admits to being bored with Pecola's madness and feels somewhat
guilty about this.
QUOTE:
The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her
way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and
milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world - which is what she
herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she
absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to
us. (4.11.5)
THOUGHT:
The constant use of the word "us" here implicates the whole town in
Pecola's madness.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Love
Theme Summary
Love is something that many characters in The Bluest Eye desire. Claudia
admires the women in blues songs, pining after their lovers. Pauline spends
countless hours daydreaming about love at the movies. Pecola wants blue
eyes, which she thinks will make her more loveable. In the case of Pauline
and Pecola, the idea is: "if someone loved me, I would be saved; my life
would be completely different." The idea that love could lead to salvation is
one that gets tested in the novel, and the novel should get us thinking about
whether or not this vision of love is one that is sustainable.
Study Questions
 227
1. How many definitions of love are there in the novel?
2. Does anyone love Pecola?
3. What does the phrase "Love is only as good as the lover" mean?
Sample Thesis Statements
Cholly loves Pecola.
Pecola creates an imaginary friend in order to have someone to love her.
Quotes & Thoughts on Love
QUOTE:
Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I
could smell it - taste it - sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its
base - everywhere in that house. (1.1.10)
THOUGHT:
Although the MacTeer house is cold, they have their love to keep them
warm. (Aww!)
QUOTE:
Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not
look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are
weeds.' Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack.
Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed
puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of
being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. (1.3.31)
THOUGHT:
Pecola identifies with and loves the weeds because they are ugly.
QUOTE:
228
She eats the candy, its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to
eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane. (1.3.33)
THOUGHT:
In Pecola's mind, loving Mary Jane seems to be associated with becoming
her. This moment reminds us of Pecola's obsession with Shirley Temple.
Pecola seems to love people that represent what she wants to be.
QUOTE:
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another -
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive idea in the history of human
thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in
disillusion. (3.7.22)
THOUGHT:
This passage presents us with some of the dangers of love.
QUOTE:
She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the
spirit. (3.7.22)
THOUGHT:
Love is a kind of ownership for Pauline.
QUOTE:
Pauline and Cholly loved each other. He seemed to relish her company and
even to enjoy her country ways and lack of knowledge about city things. He
talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the
town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity,
pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and
 229
endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset. And
he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the
gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks. She was secure and grateful;
he was kind and lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in
the world. (3.7.14)
THOUGHT:
Cholly is Pauline's dream come true. Having always felt detached from her
family and left out of their fun, the laughter and innocence Cholly provides
makes her feel safe, young, and vibrant.
QUOTE:
What could he do for her - ever? What give her? What say to her? What
could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-
old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving
eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him - the love would move him to fury.
How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed
to do about that? Return it? How? (3.8.87)
THOUGHT:
Cholly's self-hatred seems to rear its head right before he rapes Pecola. He
doesn't understand how such an innocent creature could love him.
QUOTE:
Once there was an old man who loved things, for the slightest contact with
people produced in him a faint but persistent nausea. (3.9.1)
THOUGHT:
230
Soaphead Church believes that his "nature" is to love objects and not
people. This misanthropy leads him to become attracted to young girls.
QUOTE:
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly,
violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love
stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the
beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn,
neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye. (4.11.8)
THOUGHT:
Wow, this passage is intense. Here it seems that the way that people love,
and the quality of their love, is tied to their personalities. What do you think
is being said here? Do you agree with its assessment of love?
QUOTE:
Having no idea of how to raise children, and having never watched any
parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a
relationship should be ..... Had he not been alone in the world since he was
thirteen, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, but
whose age, sex, and interests were so remote from his own, he might have
felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As it was, he
reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at that moment.
(3.8.85)
THOUGHT:
Cholly's lack of love for his children is explained here. His experience
mirrors that of other characters in the novel - like Soaphead Church - who
 231
cannot love in a moral way because they were never showed how.
Childhood experiences shape the adult.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Sex
Theme Summary
Sex in The Bluest Eye is awkward, humiliating, shameful, violent, and
illegal - sometimes all at once. With the exception of Mr. MacTeer (whom
we basically never see), all of the major male characters - Cholly
Breedlove, Mr. Henry, and Soaphead Church - sexually desire young girls.
As far as we know, Soaphead never, or rarely, acts on these desires (the
novel keeps this ambiguous), but Mr. Henry gropes Frieda, and Cholly
rapes his daughter Pecola at least twice, maybe more.
The larger point of all this is that black girls in the novel are victims,
sexually and socially powerless. Adolescence for these girls does not involve
having harmless crushes or discovering sexuality on their own - things we
might expect of teenage girls. Rather, the young black girls in thisnovel are
used to make the men feel more powerful. When we think about the
importance of sex in the novel, we might consider how sex interacts with the
intense power dynamics that Morrison establishes between white men,
African-American men, and African-American women.
Study Questions
1. Who enjoys sex in the novel?
2. Do any characters associate sex with love?
3. How do women and men experience sex differently in the novel?
4. How do the characters' early sexual experiences influence their later
sexual practices?
5. How does racism influence sexual practices in the novel?
232
Sample Thesis Statements
It is a rare occurrence that anyone in the novel experiences sex as
pleasurable.
Perhaps Cholly would not have raped Pecola had he not been sexually
humiliated as a youth.
Quotes & Thoughts on Sex
QUOTE:
It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been
unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt
just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.
Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.
(Prologue)
THOUGHT:
In this novel, childhood innocence doesn't produce knowledge or hope.
QUOTE:
What could he do for her - ever? What give her? What say to her? What
could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-
old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving
eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him - the love would move him to fury.
How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed
to do about that? Return it? How? (3.8.87)
THOUGHT:
 233
Cholly seems to blame the rape on his inability to express his feelings
toward Pecola any other way. Does Morrison's attempt to contextualize
Cholly's behavior make you feel more sympathetic toward Cholly? Should
we feel sympathetic toward him?
QUOTE:
He would rather die than take his thing out of me. Of me. Not until he has
let go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a
power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young. (3.7.30)
THOUGHT:
Pauline associates sex with power.
QUOTE:
Into her eyes came the picture of Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove in bed. He
making sounds as though he were in pain, as though something had him by
the throat and wouldn't let go. Terrible as his noises were, they were not
nearly as bad as the no noise at all from her mother. It was as though she
was not even there. Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.
(1.3.54)
THOUGHT:
Even at such a young age, Pecola reveals her observant nature as she
analyzes her parents' lovemaking. Key aspects of the Breedloves are
revealed here: Cholly's painful sexual history and the fact that Pauline
rarely, if ever, experiences sexual pleasure when with him.
234
QUOTE:
These women hated men, all men, without shame, apology, or
discrimination. They abused their visitors with a scorn grown mechanical
from use. (1.3.51)
THOUGHT:
Various characters in the novel view sex in very different ways. For the
three prostitutes, sex is not associated with love or romance; rather, it's a
way to express hatred of men and to earn a living.
QUOTE:
She might wonder again...what it would be like to have that feeling while
her husband is inside her. The closest thing to it was the time she was
walking down the street and her napkin slipped free of her sanitary belt. It
moved gently between her legs as she walked. Gently, ever so gently. And
then a slight and distinctly delicious sensation collected in her crotch. As
the delight grew, she had to stop in the street, hold her thighs together to
contain it. (2.5.7)
THOUGHT:
When there are sexually pleasurable moments in the novel, they rarely take
place between two people. In this scene, Geraldine's pleasure is an accident
that occurs while she's alone. There seems to be very little space in her
world for female pleasure.
QUOTE:
 235
He hated her. He almost wished he could do it - hard, long, and painfully, he
hated her so much. (3.8.52)
THOUGHT:
Cholly was racially humiliated the first time he had sex with a woman.
Rather than aim his anger at the white men who wronged him, he redirects
it toward black women.
QUOTE:
His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of
innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness. He was what one
might call a very clean old man. (3.9.5)
THOUGHT:
Soaphead's rationalization of his behavior should be taken with a huge grain
of salt here. In any case, the passage shows how his sexual attraction to
young girls correlates directly with his attempt to purify himself, both
racially and spiritually. It also seems to be a way to combat his first wife
Velma's rejection. "Clean old man" is a funny twist on the phrase "dirty old
man."
QUOTE:
Three women are leaning out of two windows. They see the long clean neck
of a new young boy and call to him. He goes to where they are. .... They give
him lemonade in a Mason jar. As he drinks, their eyes float up to him
through the bottom of the jar .... They give him back his manhood, which he
takes aimlessly. (3.8.82)
236
THOUGHT:
Cholly presumably encounters Miss Marie, Poland, and China here, but the
text leaves this ambiguous. He has fun with them and rediscovers his
masculinity.
QUOTE:
And there wasn't nastiness, and there wasn't any filth, and there wasn't any
odor, and there wasn't any groaning - just the light white laughter of little
girls and me. And there wasn't any look - any long funny look - any long
funny Velma look afterward. No look that makes you feel dirty afterward.
That makes you want to die. With little girls it is all clean and good and
friendly. (3.9.41)
THOUGHT:
Dirtiness here seems to be associated with a lack of power. Long looks
make us feel accountable and recognized, and Soaphead cannot tolerate
them. The fact that he longs to be looked at differently reminds us of
Pecola, presenting another strange similarity between the two characters.
Theme and Quote Analysis on: Innocence
Theme Summary
Innocence is yet another quality that is primarily associated with whiteness
in The Bluest Eye. When readers pick up a novel about young girls, they
may expect to read about harmless crushes, long hours playing, and
innocent crushes. But from the beginning, we see that the lives of working-
class African-American children were far from innocent and free. Claudia
and Frieda spend their free time picking coal with their families, while
Pecola's innocence is violated soon after she begins menstruating. The
novel seems to suggest that innocence is a privilege, not a given.
Study Questions
1. Who gets to experience innocence?
2. Why is Shirley Temple innocent?
 237
3. Why does Soaphead Church desire young girls?
Sample Thesis Statements
Innocence is associated with whiteness.
Whiteness is associated with innocence.
Quotes & Thoughts on Innocence
QUOTE:
It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been
unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt
just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.
Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.
(from second Prologue)
THOUGHT:
Here Claudia looks back on her innocence as being literally unfruitful.
While there is something undeniably sweet and ethical about the girls
planting the seeds, Claudia reveals herself to be a particularly realistic (if
not pessimistic) kind of narrator here, as she claims that her innocence and
faith produced nothing good in Pecola's life.
QUOTE:
She eats the candy, its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to
eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane. (1.3.33)
THOUGHT:
The simple language here matches the simplicity of Pecola's desire to be
innocent, beautiful, and good.
QUOTE:
Pauline and Cholly loved each other. He seemed to relish her company and
even to enjoy her country ways and lack of knowledge about city things. He
238
talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the
town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity,
pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and
endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset. And
he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the
gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks. She was secure and grateful;
he was kind and lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in
the world. (3.7.14)
THOUGHT:
This idyllic scene is one of the few truly innocent moments we get in the
novel. It makes us wonder what the Breedloves' relationship might have
been like if they had lived in a different time and place.
QUOTE:
I was glad to have a chance to show anger. Not only because of the ice
cream, but because we had seen our own father naked and didn't care to be
reminded of it and feel the shame brought on by the absence of shame.
(2.4.31)
THOUGHT:
This passage suggests that Maureen is trying to make Claudia feel bad about
something innocent and normal - seeing her father without his clotheson.
We might also think about innocence itself as being defined by an absence
of shame.
QUOTE:
While he moves inside her, she will wonder why they didn't put the
necessary but private parts of the body in some more convenient place - like
the armpit, for example, or the palm of the hand. Someplace one could get to
easily, and quickly, without undressing. (2.5.7)
 239
THOUGHT:
Geraldine's opinions about sex reveal the extent to which she is still very
childish about these matters. The innocence about sex that many of the
women in the novel display contrasts with the behavior and mannerisms of
the prostitutes and the men.
QUOTE:
What could he do for her - ever? What give her? What say to her? What
could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-
old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving
eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him - the love would move him to fury.
How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed
to do about that? Return it? How? (3.8.87)
THOUGHT:
Adult men in the novel tend to either worship innocence or be disgusted by
it. We might think of Soaphead and Cholly as on opposite ends of this
spectrum. Pecola's innocence only reminds Cholly of his inadequacy as a
father, enraging him further.
QUOTE:
His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of
innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness. He was what one
might call a very clean old man. (3.9.5)
THOUGHT:
240
Soaphead - the sole academic figure in the book - uses his intelligence to
manipulate the concept of innocence, extending it to include his own
sexuality.
QUOTE:
And there wasn't nastiness, and there wasn't any filth, and there wasn't any
odor, and there wasn't any groaning - just the light white laughter of little
girls and me. And there wasn't any look - any long funny look - any long
funny Velma look afterward. No look that makes you feel dirty afterward.
That makes you want to die. With little girls it is all clean and good and
friendly. (3.9.41)
THOUGHT:
In this passage, innocence is not something experienced by young girls so
much as a quality seen and desired by an adult. The fact that children do not
experience innocence but instead have it taken away from them seems to be
one of the major tragedies of the novel.
QUOTE:
Look, look. Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They will
play a good game. Play, Jane, play. (First Prologue)
THOUGHT:
The chipper language of the prologue stands in stark contrast to the sexual
and racial horrors we confront as the novel unfolds. It raises the question of
who exactly gets to experience innocence in society.
 241 242

on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol. IX, No. 1,

QUOTE: 2017. http://rupkatha.com/V9/n1/v9n113.pdf
Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then.
Wefelt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses Gray, Richard. A Brief History of American Literature. Oxford:
released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
comprehend this unworthiness. (2.4.40)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. ‘Young Goodman Brown’.
THOUGHT:
https://www.owleyes.org/text/young-goodman-brown
Innocence means different things to different characters in the novel.
For Frieda and Claudia it means not allowing someone else's harsh Hurston, Zora Neale. Color Struck.
words to interfere with their own sense of worth. This is refreshing
example of howinnocence can be constructive and helpful.
Shmoop. Commentary on Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

Sparknotes. ‘Young Goodman Brown’: Analysis.

References:
https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/young-goodman-
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Heinle &Heinle: brown/
Boston, 1999.

Bloom, Harold (Ed.). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman

Brown”. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DUBOIS/ch01.html

Edwards, Jonathan. Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34632/34632-h/34632-
h.htm#Page_78

Ghani, Hana Khalief & Istbriq Talib Joody. “The Prblem of Being
Black in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck”. Rupkatha Journal

241 242