The characters in this book seem to place much emphasis on their physical appearance. Even young children notice the division created by their skins. The quest for beauty—to find out what “beautiful” people have and take it as their own—becomes obsessive, especially for Pecola, who is eventually pushed over the edge. Of the white girl Maureen, Claudia realizes, “The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.” (74). The search for this “thing” becomes something much more than a basic, shallow pursuit of beauty. Beauty comes to represent happiness, fulfillment, and worth.

A world with warped values

How do you define beauty?

Chetna addresses how Pecola becomes a scapegoat for her community. There is so much despair in these characters lives that they seem to need something—an object, a person, on which to dump all their woes. Pecola thus becomes a measuring stick; she is the ruler of “ugliness” to which others can compare themselves.

The saddest part of the story is that Pecola just wants to be loved. She asks Frieda, “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?” (32) She wonders “What did love feel like?” (57). The children do not know, and the adults do not communicate with the children. So, as Law says, enough hate, enough lack of love, can lead to the acceptance of an unfair situation. For Pecola, the only escape from her nightmare of a world is either death or insanity. Morrison chooses to let Pecola live, but she is changed; she no longer responds to the outside world, nor is she responded to. Even when she “got blue eyes, bluer than theirs,” they were still “prejudiced” (197) against her. As Amanda says, she isolates herself; Pecola retreats from all that is painful and creates her own reality.

In a world all her own