How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary. (p. 48)
Morrison uses this interaction between Pecola and Mr. Yacobowski to show the reader how Pecola's ugliness renders her invisible. Her ugliness is understood by Mr. Yacobowski through by her age, race, gender and location. However, Pecola cannot understand how these characteristics play a role in her invisibility. She instead believes that it is her appearance, in the simplest form, that makes her ugly.
In her navigating Lorain, Pecola takes great effort to monitor her actions in order to keep from offending others. However, in order to get Mr. Yacobowski's attention, she must make her presence known. This causes him discomfort and he immediately positions her back into her oppression position by showing impatience and going out of his way to make sure that they do not touch.
As Pecola leaves his store, in a moment of heartbreaking innocence, she transfers her anger and humiliation to the dandelions that she had previously admired. "'They are ugly. They are weeds." (p. 50) Morrison uses this moment to communicate Pecola's confusion concerning the root of ugliness. Her perception of the dandelions, which she initially finds appealing, transforms into the notions she has heard from others. Her understanding of the hatred and discomfort directed at her is mirrored in her understanding of the weeds. Rather than comprehending that the dandelions ugliness stems from gardening frustrations, she believes that they are inherently ugly just because. It's funny that a crack in the sidewalk, probably caused by weed growth, trips her -- hitting her again with the wave of humiliation that seems to follow her everywhere.
I don't think Pecola realizes that it's not her fault she's considered ugly. It's the mindset of the people at the time, black was ugly, white was beautiful. The reason she was treated badly by the white population was not because of her individual appearance, but her race's as a whole, as well as her lower-class family. I wonder what she would feel if she looked the same, but lived in a different time period, a more modern one where racial borders are faded.
ReplyDeleteIt is dangerous to assume that racial borders have faded. While "ugliness" may not have the same overt circulation around us, I think a standardized beauty ideal is obvious given our conversations about ads earlier in the semester. We named idealized beauty in concrete ways--that were and are still racialized. I'm not saying that we don't personally believe this, but we have cultural modes for understanding, too, and they matter.
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