Home Alone Chapter Summaries

Pecola’s misery is so complete, so deep, that she convinces herself that her only hope for a better life rests in changing her eye color. Even more pathetically, "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes … Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope" (Morrison 46). Pecola was doubly tragic in that she placed all her hope in something which could never really happen and, despite her earnest belief, change nothing if it did.

When she hears that Pecola has killed her cat, she calls her a “nasty little black bitch” (92) and throws her out of the house. Geraldine never bothers to get the whole story, so does not know that Junior killed the cat and Pecola was innocent. Despite the injustice, Geraldine does not care about what actually happen, but rather jumps at the opportunity to abuse Pecola. As an ugly, poor, black girl. Pecola epitomizes everything that Geraldine hates about herself. Like Soaphead, Geraldine hates everything about being black and she constantly tries to make herself feel more white. Because of this, she “cleans” herself on Pecola by screaming at her and throwing her out. Geraldine divides the population into people like herself and people like Pecola, then, by putting people like Pecola down, she boosts her ego and feels less like a black person.

            Pecola's friend Claudia is angry at the beauty of whiteness and attempts to dismember white dolls to find where their beauty lies.  There is a sarcastic tone in her voice when she spoke of having

Initially, as I read this quote, I began to sympathize with Pecola and the plight she faces as an African American female. This is the first time in the novel we are exposed to the desire Pecola vehemently prays for daily, this desire being blue eyes. The reason I sympathized for the girl beyond the fact that attaining blue eyes for her would be impossible, is because she blames her blue-lacking eye color, or her ugliness as she classifies it as, as a way to justify everything that has gone wrong in her life. Take, for instance, Cholly, her dad, and her mother, Mrs. Breedlove’s fights. Even though their fights arise from the problems they have between themselves, Pecola continues to believe that her ugliness has struck her with not only undesirable

She is raped and impregnated by her father, Cholly and this wrong is never truly righted. Her mother decided at the time of her birth that Pecola was ugly. Pecola’s mother either ignores and neglects her or abuses her. Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia visit her mother, whom she calls Mrs. Breedlove, at work where she is the nanny and housekeeper to a young white girl. While visiting her, she knocks over a blueberry pie and burns her legs.

First, their parents, Mrs. Breedlove Pecola's mother, also known as Pauline and Polly (as the younger daughter of the whit family call her). From the day Pecola was born, she heard that she is ugly. She is more anxious about the appearance of Pecola and she believes that her own daughter is completely ugly when She gave birth to pecola she says, “She looked like a black ball of hair” (Toni 124). she has a disabled foot.

Pecola is first introduced as a foster child coming to live with McTeer family after her father burned down the Breedlove house. She arrives with nothing but the clothes on her back, exhibiting a shy demeanor. The effects of years of abuse and neglect are immediately evident through her interactions with Claudia and Frieda. She is compliant with whatever they do, trying her best not to draw attention to herself: “When we discovered that she clearly did not want to dominate us, we liked her. She laughed when I clowned for her, and smiled and gracefully accepted the food gifts my sister gave her” (Morrison 19). As the three girls stay together, Pecola’s insecurities are unveiled. She is aware that others dub her as ‘ugly’, and believes she is

Her brother use the option of running away from the horrific domestic violence scenes that their mother and father participate in. Pecola doesn’t have this choice because of her age. So instead she begins to believe that she can only change what she sees by changing herself. Moments like this are when she is lying in her bed after her parents have their fight and she begins to imagine that her body is disappearing fully until she is, figuratively, only left with her eyes which in her opinion is the source of her ugliness. There are moments when she succeeds in separating connection between what she sees and how people see her.

Pecola’s view of love is strongly shaped by the critical eye through which both her family

In the last season "summer", Pecola becomes pregnant. Claudia and Frieda want Pecola's baby to live in order to validate their own blackness and to oppose the universal love for white baby dolls. The anger reaches Pecola to madness because Pauline also does not believe that Pecola is an innocent sinister of Cholly's drunken rape.

Pecola was a product of a loveless marriage and suffered because of that. Her father was a violent drunk and her mother tries to emulate white celebrities. One night she even witnesses their lifeless marriage. “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.” It is clear throughout the book that Pecola is character that never experienced love, which of course explains the lack she has for herself. It gets to a point that Pecola believes with blue eyes, her parents would begin to love her. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Her teeth were good, and at least her nose was not big and flat like some of those who were thought so cute. If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.” This quote shows how Pecola feels that being white and “beautiful” would help her home situation along with how her guardians

How does beauty affect a person’s life? The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel that opens in the fall of 1941, just after the Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. Claudia MacTeer and her sister Frieda live with their parents in an “old, cold, and greenhouse”. They take in Pecola who believes that whiteness is beautiful and her own blackness is inherently ugly. This paper will examine self-hatred in people especially women in order to show self-denial of whom they truly are.

Soon, Junior’s entitlement leads him to victimize Pecola Breedlove. Inviting her into his home to show her kittens -he attacks her. Upon returning home, Geraldine, instead of scolding Junior, looks at Pecola’s uncombed hair, “torn dress [being pinned up by a] safety pin, [and her] muddy shoes,” right before cursing at her and kicking her out of her home

According to the society in which she lives, when Pecola is raped by her father, the community treats her as an outcast because she could have prevented her pregnancy. Claudia and Frieda overhear women talking while they are selling seeds, and one of the women says, “She carry some of the blame… How come she didn’t fight him [Cholly]?” (Morrison 189). Her community believes that Pecola is equally responsible for being raped, even though the same people admit

Instead they start to insult her and break down her self-confidence. And that what happened with Pecola in THE BLUEST EYES. Her family didn't feel happy with her, and always says that she is ugly; what makes her believe that she is extremely ugly, but she doesn't know why. She always looks at the mirror and asks herself why they say that she is ugly. In addition to the family, Pecola’s friends, classmates and teachers also think that she is an ugly girl, just because of her skin