SUMMER
Pages 187-192
The sections on winter, spring, and summer begin with
Claudia's
associations with the seasons, all of them negative. Winter is
harsh, as reflected in her father's face (p. 61). Spring connotes
beatings with new green switches (p. 97), and summer connotes storms
(p. 187). The
bleakness and pain of the characters' lives seem as inevitable as
the seasons and even determine the way Claudia experiences the
seasons.
This novel opens with Pecola's beginning to menstruate, the
transition biologically from childhood to womanhood. Menstruation
carries the possibility of creating new life. The novel ends with
summer, which is the
fulfillment of the year. Thus Pecola's life and the novel end ironically, for Pecola's creativity
ends in the death of her baby, the fulfillment of
her life is her madness, and no marigolds grow that year.
Pecola's pregnancy reveals the cruelty and irresponsibility of
the black community. The community feels no compassion for Pecola
and offers her no help. Pecola is forced to leave school because
of her pregnancy and is isolated from other children; moreover, she is
the
subject of titillating gossip for and judgmentalness by the adults.
Claudia
and Frieda listen for any adult to express compassion or sorrow for
Pecola,
They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or
even excited by
the story. But we listened for the one who would say, "Poor little
girl," or, "Poor baby," but there was only head-wagging where those
words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern,
but saw only veils. (p. 190)
The destructive side of the community is expressed in its
response to Pecola; it continues to treat Pecola as the outsider
and the Other, as it applies a standard of beauty that condemns
her to irredeemable ugliness. It is not the
white community that has directly destroyed Pecola, but the black
community
and her parents. They should have insulated her from the white
community's values and have protected her. Claudia, who has not yet
internalized the white
standard of beauty, wants
Pecola's black baby to be loved and to be appreciated for its
beauty. She imagines the black baby clearly, in images which
capture its beautiful blackness and which contrast with the
artificial, unattractive white-baby-doll standard of beauty,
It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with
great O's of
wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes,
the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk
of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue
eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than
my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black
baby to live--just to counteract the universal love of white baby
dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals. (p. 190)
The white baby dolls of course represent not only the white
standard of beauty but also the white domination of society and the
black community. The values and spirit of the black community have been
corrupted by the dominating white society.
Nevertheless the blacks still form a cohesive community which is a
source of strength, support, and pleasure for those who are part of
the community. The community is intact, as are individual
families. But some of the intactness of the community and of
individuals is at the expense of Pecola and, by extension, others
like her, as Claudia makes clear in the last three pages of the
novel.
In their innocence, an innocence which they will lose, Claudia
and Frieda decide to help Pecola. They are unaware of their
powerlessness, "Our limitations were not known to us--not then" (p.
191). They have developed strategies to deal with and defend themselves
against the adult world, "we had become headstrong, devious and
arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good
attention to ourselves" (p. 191). They are also unaware that in helping
Pecola and preserving her baby they are asserting their own value
and their own beauty.
To help Pecola and her baby, they agree to sacrifice something
important to them, so they plant the money they collected and the
marigold seeds, thereby giving up their hopes of getting a bicycle.
They
also create a ritual and say "magic words" (p. 192). At one level,
their
planting seeds and saying magic words show their
childishness; at another level, their efforts parallel primitive
people's using magic to affect their environments and produce
desired results. Their efforts also are in keeping with the black
community's belief in magic and the supernatural; their strategy is
not so different from M'Deer's advice to bury Aunt Jimmy's chamber
pot as part of her cure and is in keeping with the community's
acceptance of
Soaphead Church as a spiritualist.
Pages 193-206
Pecola and her Friend
The ironic connection of the primer quotation that heads this
chapter with the schizophrenic conversation of Pecola with herself
is obvious. The split or fragmentation of Pecola's psyche continues the
theme of splitting, which is also expressed in the imagery of splitting
that runs through this novel.
This chapter is told by the omniscient
author, who enters
Pecola's mind and reports Pecola's mental conversation. Pecola is
no longer capable of reporting her own life or of connecting to
the world outside herself. Claudia's description of Pecola's
behavior in the junkyard indicates that Pecola does not speak
aloud, for only her gestures are reported, "walking up and down,
her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could
hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like
a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly" (p. 205).
Pecola is pushed into madness by the rejections of her mother
(who beats her for reporting
Cholly's rape), of her brother (who runs away), and of the
community and by Soaphead's acceptance of her wish for blue
eyes. Her imaginary friend expresses
Pecola's subconscious desire for acceptance, love, and friendship. Her
friend reassures Pecola that she does indeed have blue eyes and
that they are bluer than other girls'. However, because the
imaginary friend expresses the subconscious or hidden, it also
expresses Pecola's unacknowledged doubts and fears. Thus at
times it verges on hostility and threatens to reveal unacceptable
truths. Much to Pecola's distress, it refers to the second time Cholly
raped her. It tells Pecola, "You didn't need me before" (p.
196), a truth so threatening and painful to Pecola and so close to
the psychological reality that it immediately adds, "I mean...you
were so unhappy before. I guess you didn't notice me before" (p.
196). [Note: Pecola's friend is female, but I refer to
the friend as "it" rather than "she," to avoid any confusion over
whether I mean the imaginary friend or Pecola.]
At some level, Pecola knows she does not have blue eyes; hence
her need for constant reassurance and her need to have the bluest
eyes. Also, her eyes are not producing the expected response,
general acceptance and her mother's love; she is still ignored and
her mother gives her strange looks. One explanation for this situation
could be that her blue eyes are somehow insufficient or defective. If
she has the bluest eyes of all (like the queen who wants to be
the fairest of them all), then her eyes are perfect and she is
unquestionably
beautiful.
Claudia and the Conclusion
The final section of the novel is narrated by Claudia as an
adult; she judges the past and states the significance of that
past. She is unsparing in placing responsibility for Pecola's
destruction on the black community. She sees Pecola walking
between "the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and
milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world--which is
what she herself was" (p. 205). These images of waste and beauty
echo the description of Cholly's abandonment in a tire rim on
a soft Georgia night. Morrison sees life whole and complex, with
beauty and ugliness inextricably mixed. But in the case of
Pecola, the beauty is inherently hers--her innocence and
vulnerability and potential; her waste and ugliness are projected onto
her by
the black community and her mother, thereby displacing her beauty,
All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she
absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she
gave to
us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we
cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood
astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt
sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness
made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made
us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even
her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she
let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on
her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the
fantasy of our strength (p. 205).
Pecola's outcast position in the community is reflected in her
spending her time in the junkyard and in her living "on the edge of
town" (p. 205).
Blacks in the community use Pecola to feel better about
themselves. By assigning to her their negative feelings about
themselves, they are able to feel good about
themselves or at least better about themselves. It is Pecola who
is ugly, not they; it is Pecola who is worthless, not they. Pecola, who
developed passivity as a strategy for survival in her
family and whose mother condemned her to ugliness from birth, accepts
the view which they have of her. She sees her ugliness in the eyes of
others, hears it in their voices, and experiences it in their behavior.
So she is the
perfect victim and the perfect garbage dump for the self-hatred of
the community. In other words, she is sacrificed for the
psychological protection and evasions of the community. Claudia
includes herself in her assessment of the community's behavior and
motives, as indicated by her references to "we" and "our." She and
Frieda do finally reject Pecola by avoiding her.
Claudia goes on to condemn the community and herself for their
abuse of Pecola, "...we were not strong, only aggressive; we were
not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were
polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to
call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life" (p. 205). As
suggested in the passage about Claudia's movement from hating white
baby dolls and little white girls to loving Shirley Temple(s),
Claudia has lost her innocence.
Claudia makes a final statement about love and concludes the
theme
of love. Claudia acknowledges that The Maginot Line
and Cholly loved her. Unfortunately for Pecola, Cholly's love is of a
mixed nature,
He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to
touch her,
envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was
fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony
with death (p. 206).
Love, in itself, is not necessarily enough; it is not a universal
remedy. It is the false ideal of love, which Morrison calls
"romantic love," which gives love the power to transform and make
perfect both the beloved and life: the forever-after love of fairy
tales, movies, and popular fiction. Moveover, the quality and
consequences of love are determined by the character of the lover.
Claudia continues with a statement which I regard as a profound truth,
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked
people love
wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly,
stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never
safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover along possesses
his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in
the glare of the lover's inward eye (p. 206).
She is using the term "free" in the sense of no attachments, as in
Cholly's having nothing left to lose. The free man in this sense
exists only for himself, for the indulgence of his own needs and
impulses; he is unaware of the other person and unconcerned with the
effect of his actions
on her or him. Because of his disconnection, the free man
cannot give or contribute to the beloved. Claudia uses the
image of the eye in the last sentence of this quotation; the beloved
does not see himself/herself reflected back by the free man and so
is depersonalized, i. e., is made an object or reduced to a sense of
non-being.
The last paragraph reverts to the failed marigolds of the
first
paragraph Claudia speaks (p. 5). Initially the sisters, in their
innocence and belief in themselves and their power to affect events,
blamed themselves for the
failure of the marigolds, the death of Pecola's baby, and her
descent into madness. But the adult Claudia, no longer innocent
and aware of her own complicity and that of the community, now believes
the failure "was the
fault of the earth, the land, of our town" (p. 206). Clearly the
failure of marigolds is symbolic,
not literal. What
destroys Pecola is the individuals who know Pecola, the racist
black community which transfers its self-hatred to her, and the racist
white
society which holds destructive values and imposes them on the black
community. It is not white society
alone which is responsible for the destruction within the black
community and the
destructiveness of the black community; the black community too
is
responsible, for it has accepted or internalized white values and
standards and not cherished or protected all its children. White
society is responsible for its racist attitudes and behavior,
which damage the black community, as well as individual blacks, and
corrupt their values. The marigold seeds which fail are also an example
of Morrison's use of magic.
There is the suggestion that nature itself or perhaps even
life
is hostile to certain black children,
I even think now that the land of the entire country
was hostile to
marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of
flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will
not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce
and say that victim had no right to live. (p. 206)
The novel ends on an elegiac note [an elegy is a poem
for
someone who has died; elegiac, therefore, means sad,
melancholy, sorrowful, thoughtful]. The concluding sentences
express a profound sense of loss and despair, "It's too late. At
least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers
of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (p. 206). Yet even into
this hopelessness, Morrison interjects the intermixture of beauty
and ugliness and of life and death with the image of "the garbage
and the sunflowers."
It may be too late for Pecola and Claudia's
community, but the reader is left wondering, did things have to turn
out this way? was the community's
mistreatment of Pecola inevitable?
Morrison Syllabus
|
