Pecola and Gwendolen

. . the total absence of forgiving recognition. . . . This vacuity has an edge, . . . [a] averting. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. The distaste must be for her, her fatefulness. . . . Her b neglectness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes (Morrison 48-49).

Pecola's own father violates and rejects her, and simultaneously uses her a scap egoat for his deep indignation against the prejudiced nine which hates, fears and torments them. Morrison does non merely show that whites doubly judge Pecola as a black female, but as well that lighter-skinned blacks, such as her self-hating father, judge her perhaps even much harshly. Just as white society torments Cholly, her father, so does he torment and finally rape her. She is darker, weaker than him, and her gender deepens that weakness, allowing him to victimize her just as he has been victimized.

Pecola has been raised in a society in which females argon submissive and inferior to men, in which blacks are inferior to whites, and in which dark-skinned blacks are inferior to light-skinned blacks. White males are at the top of the cultural mountain, with the darkest-skinned black females at the bottom. Soaphead, a con-man, is one rare male use who is moved by Pecola's tragic situation to recognize this fact and sympathize with her wish to have blue eyes:

A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of he

at heart feminist circles, silence is often seen as the sexist " compensate speech of womanhood"---the sign of woman's submission to patriarchal government hop onncy (Hooks 6).

And through this journey we see her suffer rape, incest, racism, teenage pregnancy and loneliness. She endures the indignities of illiteracy and remedial education, falls in experience with a boy her sire describes as a ''dirty white'' and veers toward madness. We avouch the social and economic dynamics that force both Gwendolen and her mother to "remain alive for others. . . .

to look after members of their families, to boost the ego of the man in their lives, be the man a father, a husband, or even a son. . . . But to live for themselves was non to be" (McKnight 30).

When Pecola . . . remains stiff and silent, Cholly [thinks, in Morrison's words]: "The rigidness of her blow out of the water body, the silence of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline's easy laughter had been. The befogged mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden occasion excited him, and a bolt ran down his genitals, giving it length." Thus, on a symbolic level, Cholly expands as Pecola contracts (Miner 16-17).

It is telling that Pecola is finally operate into herself, into silence. As Bell Hooks writes, silence is equated with defeat and free fall:

The book begins with a remark about the protagonist's name, reflecting on her lack of, or unformed, identity, and ends with the protagonist giving a self-assured definition of female identity related to other females. This culture could not stand in more stark contrast to the ending of the Morrison novel.

Washington, Elsie B. "Buchi Emecheta: The Secrets of Black Women." Essence. August, 1990. 50-51.

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