Pages 110-31
Point of View
This chapter alternates between two points of view or "voices":
- The omniscient author describes Pauline's life, thoughts,
and
feelings and interprets their significance. The omniscience
narrator's passages are presented in regular text and are right and
left justified. A close reading
of these passages reveals that the point of view cannot be
Pauline's. For example, we're told that the wound in her foot
"saved Pauline Williams from total anonymity" (p. 110). Or, we're
told that Pauline "missed--without know what she missed--paints and
crayons" (p. 110). Pauline is incapable of making these statements
or of having these insights; it is the omniscient author who sees
and expresses these things.
- Morrison goes into Pauline's mind and articulates Pauline's
thoughts, feelings, and view of her life. In other words, the
author quotes Pauline; this is why Pauline's
statements are in quotation marks. Morrison presents Pauline's
point of view in italicized text which is left justified.
By giving Pauline a "voice," Morrison enables us to hear
Pauline
and to see through her eyes and with her perceptions. Why does
Morrison do this? Do we have a greater understanding of Pauline
and a greater sympathy or even more compassion for Pauline? Does
she become alive and more complex for us, or does she remain only
a Bad Mother and Wife? As I discussed in yesterday's lesson,
Morrison regrets not having
given Maureen Peal a voice; if she had, we could experience from
Maureen's point of view, to see her from
the inside, not just the outside. Would the novel be improved,
weakened, or not changed if Morrison omitted Pauline's point of view?
The Movies, Romantic Love, and Physical
Beauty
Before marriage, Pauline lacks any distinguishing or
individualizing characteristics, except for her
foot. Around the age of fifteen, Pauline develops romantic
fantasies about love. Her fantasies and
feelings are conventional; she dreams of a Stranger who will
transform her life and lead her to happiness-
-forever. Her dreams of the unknown lover who will redeem her
become mixed with the songs she hears
in church about Christ. Can you see how she could associate or blend
Christ in the hymn "Precious Lord take my hand" with
the stranger-lover of her fantasies (p. 114)?
Cholly is the free man who "came with his own music" (p. 114).
Later Morrison will say of
Cholly that only a musician could make sense of the fragments of
Cholly's life. However, Cholly is never
able to make sense of or find coherence in his own life; he lacks
the skills to achieve that end. Pauline too is unfulfilled. She has
artistic leanings which find
no outlet or encouragement, as indicated by her not knowing she
missed paints and crayons. She is intensely responsive to color
and visual images--the yellow lemonade
with seeds floating in it, the streak of green made by the june
bugs, the purple of berries, and the
rainbow after sex.
Pauline's loss of a tooth is a determining event in her life.
Morrison describes the process of the
tooth decaying and makes the comment, "But even before the little
brown speck, there must have been
the conditions, the setting that would allow it to exist in the
first place" (p. 116). Is Morrison talking about more than just
the tooth? Is she also referring to the conditions which contributed to
the failure of her marriage and her life?
Initially Pauline and Cholly "loved each other" (p. 115), but
their marriage fails. Why? Do the following problems cause its failure?
- She is lonely being alone in a small apartment while Cholly
works all day. How does Cholly respond to her wanting him to fill
her loneliness? Does her dependency threaten his freedom?
- She is unable to make women friends. Why? Cholly, on the
other hand, has no trouble making friends or finding drinking
buddies. How is this a problem in their marriage?
- Pauline tries to be accepted by other women by buying
clothes
and make-up. How does Cholly respond to her demands for money?
- How does her working cause the marriage to deteriorate
further?
In her loneliness during her pregnancy, Pauline turns to the
movies for entertainment, escape, and consolation. The movies have
a devastating effect on Pauline by teaching her about romantic love
and the
importance of physical beauty. Morrison calls the ideas of
romantic love and of physical beauty
Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of
human
thought. Both originated in envy, thrived
in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical
beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind,
bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust
and simple caring for. She regarded
love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It
would be for her a well-spring from
which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the
lover and seeking to imprison the
beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after
her education in the movies,
to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of
absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from
the silver screen. . .
It was really a simple
pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was
to hate. (p. 122)
Ironically, the movie theater, where Pauline learns the values which
contribute to the ruination of her life and
Pecola's, seems the only place she is happy. The (false,
idealized) picture of white women's homes
and their romantic relationships increases her unhappiness at
home.
Jean Harlow and William Powell in Libeled
Lady How realistic is her desire to look like Jean Harlow? When
her tooth falls out, she realizes that she will never be beautiful,
like Jean Harlow. She gives up not only her efforts to look like
Harlow but also any possibility of being beautiful and "settled
down to just being ugly" (p. 123). The quarreling and bitterness
of her marriage escalate.
She deliberately gets pregnant with Pecola. Throughout her
pregnancy she has a loving relationship with her baby, reassuring
it as she stretches hanging clothes and talking to it during her
daily routine. She promises to "love it no matter what it looked
like" (p. 124). Though the new-born Pecola is "a right smart
baby," Pauline makes a judgment about Pecola that will determine
Pecola's identity and the course of her life, "But I knowed she was
ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly" (p. 126).
Pauline judges Pecola using the standards she learned at the movies
and thereby condemns Pecola to seeing herself as ugly and to being
perceived as ugly. Pauline's judgment of Pecola also cuts her off
from her love for her baby and a nurturing mother-child
relationship.
Pauline and Identity
Pauline is seeking an identity. She lacked a sense of identity
before her marriage; after her tooth
falls out, she gives up her efforts to be beautiful; with the
responsibility of two children, she feels a need
to make sense of her life and to be an adult. And so she finds an
identity. She becomes the
breadwinner, a good Christian woman, and an ideal servant.
What kind of Christian does she become? What does Morrison
mean
when she says, "Holding Cholly as a model of
sin and failure, she bore him like a crown of thorns, and her
children like a cross" (pp. 126-27)?
Working at the Fisher home "filled practically all of her
needs"
(p. 127). It fills her need for beauty, for order, for acceptance,
for luxury, and for a sense of power. It also gives her an
identity: she is the perfect servant, and she finally has a
nickname. Having found fulfillment in her work, she neglects her
own home and forces her children
toward respectability, and in so doing taught them
fear: fear of
being clumsy, fear of being like their father, fear of not being
loved by God, fear of madness like Cholly's mother's. Into her son
she beat a loud desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat
a fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life. (p. 128)
She has some awareness of having lost something. Morrison
comments, "It was only sometimes, sometimes, and then rarely, that
she thought about the old days, or
what her life had turned to" (p. 129); Pauline herself thinks,
"Only thing I miss sometimes is that rainbow" (p.
131). What has she lost?
Why does Pauline want Cholly to have an orgasm before she has
hers? She explains,
I know he wants me to come first. But I can't. Not
until he does. Not until I feel him loving me. Just me. Sinking into
me. Not
until I know that he couldn't stop if he had to. That he would die
rather than take his thing out of me. Of me. Not until he has let
go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does,
I feel a power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young. And then
I wait. He shivers and tosses his head. Now I be strong enough,
pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me come. (pp. 130-
31)
White Folks
What is Pauline's experience with white people? How does she
feel
about living in the North? How do white people treat her? Think
of the employer
who urges her to leave Cholly, the obstetrician with his residents
who compares her to a horse, and the
Fishers. What is Morrison showing about the black-white
relationship?
Morrison Syllabus
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