1. Like everything in Pecola’s life, her being pregnant is packaged with her ugliness. Instead of seeing compassion for Pecola, as a young girl in a difficult situation, they use this fact to criticize her. Morison includes a number of fragments of conversation on the issue. Some say that it is Cholly, her father. They imply that even though she is twelve, she is to blame for the pregnancy: “But you never know. How come she didn’t fight him?” (Morison, 189). Others use it to remind themselves how ugly Pecola is, “Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make them uglier.” Rather than saying that there should be a law against getting a twelve-year-old girl pregnant, this talk is about a law preventing ugly people from procreating.
Because of their friendship and discovering “the birds and the bees” together, Frieda and Claudia feel a kinship to Pecola’s pregnancy. One night in bed, Pecola asks Frieda how babies are, in fact, made. “Oh,” Frieda tells her, “Somebody has to love you.” Then Pecola asks the heartbreaking question, “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?”
2. People dislike Pecola for three reasons. The first is obvious, as it is mentioned so frequently in the book. It is because she is ugly. The second is because she is poor; people in general look down on poor families. The third reason is that she comes from a disreputable family that the town looks down upon. Proof of this comes out in the fragments of comments surrounding Pecola’s pregnancy, “Lord have mercy. That dirty nigger . . . Member that time he tried to burn them up? I knew he was crazy for sure then” (Morison, 189).
Soaphead Church is “A cinnamon-eyed West Indian with lightly browned skin” (Morison, 167). He received his given name was not Church; he was called this by all of the townspeople. No one knows exactly where the name “Church” originally was born. He is still governed by being deserted by his lover and seems to be when Pecola visits him a shadow of the person he may have been in his youth, before he became jaded.
Pecola comes to visit him in “dread.” Pecola believes that Curch has the power to make her eyes blue. Church finds this “the most fantastic and the most logical petition he had ever received” (Morison, 174). He feels compassion for Pecola, who he sees as an ugly girl petitioning for beauty. But rather than turning her away empty-handed, he gives her a mission to do so that the question of her blue eyes can be between her and God. In a sense, he is not granting her wish. But he is given her something else to focus on, and hope, which Church feels is better than just refusing her wish.
3. Cholly has a history of neglect abandonment. The must significant event in his childhood was likely the first time he was abandoned, when he was left in a junk heap as a baby. From the positive side of things, perhaps the most significant event in his life was being rescued from that junk heap by his aunt. But the aunt, in constantly telling him how she had saved him, was also scaring him by letting him know about his mother’s abandonment of him.
While Cholly inflicts malicious violence on others when he rapes his daughter, also throughout the book he is the victim of malicious acts, often at the hands of white people. He is capable of extreme highs of joy and can take joy in the simple things in life such as eating a watermelon. As Morison writes in her afterward, she did not want readers to hate Cholly, but to be sympathetic even to him, who was also formed with broken pieces from a difficult background.
4. Pauline is influenced by what she sees as the white standards of beauty. This is at play in her daughter’s understanding that in order to be beautiful, a person must possess blue eyes. This knowledge changes her because it gives her a standard of beauty that she can never achieve. She adopted standards that simply are not possible for a person of her race and complexion. With these standards, she goes through life constantly feeling that she is not living up to the standards that she holds for herself. Especially for someone of Pauline’s socioeconomic background, it is easier for her to adopt these unrealistic expectations and not have the perspective to see where they come from and how they negatively affect her life.
In the beginning, I adopted conceptions of beauty from a similar source. We see on TV as kids Barbie commercials that give a certain standard of beauty, which is out of sync with how most people look. Beauty is a billion dollar industry, and much of it is spent on founding these unrealistic expectations.
