Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Beauty as Acceptance

In Autumn, Morrison presents two black families with varying social statuses and a group of female prostitutes. She weaves a story through these families, which at its core addresses beauty in a black community that adheres to beauty standards as represented by Shirley Temple, Dick & Jane and Mary Jane. Beauty is understood as “white and blue eyed” creating hierarchies of power. What stands out for me from the chapter Autumn, is the marginalization of women due to a socially constructed racialized beauty. Black women try to conform to femininity which is based on normalized white standards of beauty. Since these standards can never be achieved Morrison’s black female characters learn to hate their blackness which leads to a self hatred. Beauty is understood to be in relation to acceptance. For the children in the book a lack of acceptance is understood as ugliness. Pecola’s lack of acceptance resembles Amy Farrells construction of citizenship and fat bodies.

Black women learn to see themselves through white eyes, as symbolized by Pecola praying every night for blue eyes, “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” (47). In preplace of beauty Pecola finds anger, and through this anger she determines her worth. Her self determined worth is directly connected to the way people treat her because of her race. As a child she processes and internalizes racism as being ugly. The anger of being marginalized is present throughout the parent child relationships and is symbolic of the tension created between femininity and beauty. Anger plays out within and among the black community because it is the only outlet.

Pecola’s character portrays a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed. Her inferior body relates back to the Barkty reading we read earlier in the semester, which discusses women’s bodies as dociled. Pecola’s dociled body lacks agency in a world that does not value her race and gender. Agency leads me back to the issue of citizenship, how would changing standards of beauty influence ones citizenship and how can this be done?

2 comments:

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  2. I think its interesting that you make the comparison of Pecola's vulnerablility with beauty to Farrell's concept of fatness and citizenship. I think these two things are in close relation to each other because they propose the affects adm effects of standards. They show that standards take away difference, by conjugating everything that doesnt meet that particular standard as the "other" or more so by marginalizing those who do not meet that standard. Standards then produce these insecurities that people have of their beauty or whether or not they are competent, or civilized people. I think in general, we are a culture that lives in contradiction,we so often encourage difference but hate to recognize or even speak about that difference. This tends to get really complicating and ultimatley, it just doesn't make sense.

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