Pecola

 Pecola 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike. (34)

In the hierarchy of power, if white man is at the top, the black girl is at the bottom. In the world of novel, Pecola is the ultimate other. Neglected by the parents, harassed by the black boys and marginalized by the whole community, she tries to find its reason in her ugliness, in her blackness. Her irony here is that the secret is not going to be found within herself but within the culture that defines her ugly. However, unlike Claudia (the narrator), Pecola has unquestioningly accepted the white hegemony and so according to her, the solution to her problem is to acquire blue eyes – the magic key to beauty, love and happiness. The result of this desire is the tragic schizophrenia which totally damages her psyche.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison placed Pecola in an extreme situation rather than a representative one. Pecola’s case is unique for unlike Claudia, Frieda and other black children she is not loved by her parents. In fact, her mother Polly considers her ugly and therefore unworthy of love. Her father Cholly, himself unloved does not know how to love his daughter. Moreover, lack of supporting keen make Pecola alienated from larger African American community and deprived her of African American survival strategies – namely blues and signifying – which subtly subvert white hegemony and uphold African American racial pride. A blues song which originates in ‘an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger it’s jagged grain and to transcend it not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism’20 expresses a sweetness of pain which deconstructs black and white binary opposition between happiness (associated with whiteness and all joy) and sorrow (associated with blackness and irrevocable sadness). Similarly, the game of signifying, ‘a rhetorical self-defense which protects the integrity of the black slave through a clever inversion of the context in which (white) society defines value’21 provides a strong antidote to white hegemonic discourse which vilifies blackness. Unfortunately Pecola’s ignorance of blues and signifying make her totally vulnerable to the ‘epistemic violence’ (Gayatri Spivak’s term for the western European colonial production of knowledge that justified and consolidated colonial domination while creating and subjecting its ‘other’ via that knowledge.)22 of Primer, Mary Jane and Shirley Temple.

Gurleen Grewal gives us the etymology of the word ‘primer’. Its obvious meaning is ‘an elementary book for teaching children to read’. But it also means ‘a person or thing that primes’, the verb prime being defined as ‘to prepare or make ready for a particular purpose or operation’.23 Thus Dick-and-Jane Primer prepares children – both black and white – to accept the fictional world of Primer as true. The primer presents a standardized white American nuclear family, rich and affluent, beautiful and happy. It suggests that with whiteness, one is guaranteed beauty, morality, success and happiness. Thus the primer also teaches its young readers to unquestioningly accept the myth of white superiority. The subject matter of primer is also repeated in other forms like advertisement. Jane in the primer becomes Mary Jane on the candy rapper and Shirley Temple on the milk cups. The smiling white face of a small girl with blond hair and blue eyes makes people look at her with awful love and brings honey in their voices. In contrast, people avoid looking at Pecola, to speak to her and to touch her. In her class, she alone sits at a double desk. Teachers try ‘never to glance at her…and all her classmates make fan of her.’ (34)

If blacks try to turn a blind eye to Pecola, to the whites she is already invisible. e.g. when she goes to Mr. Yacoboshi’s (a white Jew’s) shop to buy candies. 

He dose not see her, because for him there is nothing to see…She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition--the glazed separateness. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes. (36-7)

Jane Kuenz writes, ‘When others Mr. Yacoboshi, her teachers etc – cannot or will not see her, then she ceases to be seen at all or sees herself in the iconographic images she can attain only in madness.’24 The primer focuses on Jane and her wish to play. But Pecola’s experience shows her that for other people, she and her wishes are always out of focus. She is not important enough to pay any attention. Eva Lennox Birch writes, ‘The opening extract from the primer, clearly punctuated, makes sense, but as the story progresses, the punctuation disappears and sounds like a child who reads words without understanding, until finally there is a chaos of individual letters making no sense at all. Reading is a sophisticated use of the eyes. It is the end result of an intellectual translation physical reality into a system of signs. The “naming” process involved in this exercise help children to make sense of external world. This process assumes, however, that the writer and the reader share the same sense of “reality”. What Pecola “reads” in her life bears no relation to what white society and the education process teaches her as being normal. What Pecola “reads” does not equate with her “reality” – what she “sees” is at variance with what she reads. But instead of questioning what is seen, she questions her means of seeing. Eyes and ways of seeing dominate the novel. With blue eyes, Pecola thinks, she would see – and be seen – differently.’25

As mentioned earlier, it is Pecola’s alienation from larger African American community that keeps her ignorant about African American double consciousness, which serves blacks as a self-protective mask. Blacks are simultaneous members of two opposing groups – first the dominant white America and second marginalized blacks America. Though they are looked upon by other people as the members of second group, they themselves take up the position as the members of first group when they look at others. In other words, they internalize alien white gaze and in the process fragment their psyche in two parts – their one part becomes observer/oppressor while the other becomes observed/oppressed. Then they turn their gaze outward, become the observer/oppressor of other people and thereby protect themselves from being observed/ oppressed. They project their feeling of guilt and shame for being black on an external object and thereby assume the subjectivity of being white. Pecola on the other hand, turns her gaze inward and becomes the observed /oppressed. She does not look back in anger and reflect the objectifying gaze back on others. This deprives her of subjectivity – the very thing she is in search of all the time and which she feels she will get only if she gets blue eyes. Instead of changing the gaze, she is bent on changing the eyes. The difference in the perspectives of Pecola and larger African American community makes Pecola a perfect scapegoat onto whom the community can project all its shadow and then ritually sacrifice her to feel the purgation. Pecola’s victimization by a group of black boys makes this point clear.

A group of boys was circling and holding at bay a victim, Pecola Breedlove…Heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of a majority, they gaily harassed her. 

“Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked. Black e mo . . .”

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control; the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant…Pecola edged around the circle crying. She had dropped her notebook, and covered her eyes with her hands. (50) 

By punishing Pecola for the crime of being black, they try to externuate and devisualize their own blackness. The fact that Pecola accepts her role as a scapegoat is evident from her reaction to dandelions. When she goes to Mr Yacoboski’s shop, she passes a patch of dandelions ‘why, she wonders do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty.’ (35) Yet her soft, glimmering joy of watching dandelions is brutally devastated by the vacuous, distasteful and shame inducing stare of Mr. Yacoboski when she returns from the shop with nine Mary Jane candies and again passes by the dandelions, she again thinks, ‘They are ugly. They are weeds.’ (37) According to Michael Awkward,

In her [Claudia’s] own view as well as in that of the omniscient narrator, Pecola’s appearance is not what distinguishes her from her black peers. Rather, she is held up as a figure of supreme ridicule strictly because, in her detachment from her cultural heritage, she exists unprotected from the disastrous effects of standards that she cannot achieve. She has not properly learned the rules of black (urban) life, or, rather, she has learned them too well. While other blacks pay nominal homage to the gods who created the standards by which America measures beauty and worth, and appear[,] as a consequence, to have “collected self-hatred by the heap,” they actually maintain strong feelings of self-worth. They hide these feelings from gods who are interested only in surface – and not spiritual – devotion…The community’s worship at the altar of white beauty is only gesture, only acts “smoothly cultivated” to fool the master, to appease the gods. Because Pecola never learns of the potential benefits of masking and self-division in a white dominated America, she represents a perfect target of scorn for the blacks who are armed with this knowledge. These Afro-Americans, in fact, use Pecola as ritual object in their ceremonies designed to exhibit to the master their, “rejection” of blackness.26

Pecola is scapegoated at various levels and by diverse people. Geraldine’s son uses her to kill Geraldine’s cat and Soaphead uses her to kill his landlady’s hateful dog. However the extremity of her helpless condition is underlined by her parents’ harsh treatment of her. The severity of Polly’s behavior is reflected in a scene in which Polly slaps Pecola very hard for accidentally spilling a blueberry pie onto the newly cleaned floor of Fisher’s kitchen. Then ignoring her burns and cries of pain, Polly further abuses Pecola, throws her out of house and proceeds to embrace tenderly the white Fisher child with a voice full of honey. Polly even disowns her relationship with Pecola when she refuses to tell Fisher girl, “who were they?” Claudia is bewildered by the fact that white Fisher girl calls her ‘Polly’ while Pecola calls her mother ‘Mrs. Breedlove’ who is more concerned with the condition of her floor than the welfare of her daughter. The only other scene which outweighs this one in severity is Cholly’s rape of Pecola; however it is described in Morrison’s characteristic ironic language.

The tenderness welled up in him, and he sank to his knees, his eyes on the foot of his daughter. Crawling on all fours toward her, he raised his hand and caught the foot in an upward stroke. Pecola lost her balance and was about to careen to the floor. Cholly raised his other hand to her hips to save her from falling. He put his head down and nibbled at the back of her leg. His mouth trembled at the firm sweetness of the flesh. He closed his eyes, letting his fingers dig into her waist. The rigidness of her shocked body, the silence of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline’s easy laughter had been. The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this list was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her – tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made – a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon. (128)

Commenting on it Donald Gibson says, ‘Pecola is an inverted virgin Mary....a virgin Mary demystified: not mysteriously and spiritually impregnated by god, the father, but brutally impregnated by Cholly Breedlove, the father, on the dirty floor of the kitchen of her storefront home. The offspring of this union is the Christ child, the stillborn Christ child who is incapable of saving the world because incapable of saving himself.’27 

Ultimately Pecola herself becomes the Christ figure when she takes on the sins of the world around her and absolves others of their guilt: ‘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. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.’ (163)

However, unlike Christ, there is no resurrection for Pecola. The path she takes leads not to salvation but to madness. In her fantasy of having gained blue eyes and in her need to confirm this fact (?), Pecola starts hallucinating a friend who can see her blue eyes and be envious of them. In this process, she has turned her gaze totally inward crating an imaginary ‘self’ (a blue-eyed Pecola) as subject and objectifying the real black-eyed Pecola even further by turning her into other. Unlike the double consciousness of African American community (which retains the awareness of truth) Pecola’s inverted consciousness breaks down all the boundaries marking the space between inside and outside, self and other, sense and nonsense. Blue-eyed Pecola feels that she is stopped from going to school because everybody is jealous of her blue eyes. Her own envy of Maureen’s beauty and popularity, she turns into indifference. When the black-eyed Pecola pricks her about Cholly and his behavior, she violently denies the rape on one hand and tries to recollect her feelings about it on the other.

How could somebody make you do something like that?

Easy.

Oh, Yeah? How easy?

They just make you, that’s all.

I guess you’re right. And cholly could make anybody do anything.

He could not.

He made you, didn’t he?

Shut up!

I was only teasing.

Shut up! […]

Well, I’m glad you didn’t let him.

Yes.

Did you?

Did I what?

Let him.

Now who’s crazy?

I am, I guess.

You sure are.

Still . . .

Well. Go ahead. Still what?

I wonder what it would be like.

Horrible.

Really?

Yes. Horrible.

Then why didn’t you tell Mrs. Breedlove?...

You don’t understand anything, do you? She didn’t even believe me when I told her.

So that’s why you didn’t tell her about the second time?

She wouldn’t have believed me then either.

You’re right. No use telling her when she wouldn’t believe you […]

I don’t like to talk about dirty things.

Me neither. Let’s talk about something else.

What? What will we talk about?

Why, your eyes.

Oh, yes. My eyes. My blue eyes. Let me look again.

See how pretty they are. 

Yes. They get prettier each time I look at them. (157-159)

Finally, their conversation again turns to the one and only beautiful and joyous thing in their life – the blue eyes. The blue-eyed Pecola desires to know whether her eyes are the bluest of not and is anxious of their not being so. The black-eyed Pecola assures her that only she has the bluest eye/I in the whole would and that she will come back and play with her whenever she desires. Thus, Pecola’s hallucination underscores her loneliness and lack of friends. Lourie Vickroy writes, ‘Neither her family nor community can offer Pecola support the latter are embarrassed or revolted by her incestuous pregnancy and madness. They blame the “dog” Cholly, but cannot offer her comfort because her situation is on extreme of their own unacknowledged powerlessness...It is this lack of understanding and response that Morrison attacks the toleration of isolated suffering, which in fact not only reflects but also perpetuates collective suffering.’28 Finally the adult Claudia sums up the main cause of wasting black beauty as, ‘This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers 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. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late at least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, its much, much, much too late.’ (164) 

Dr Manisha Patil