Toni Morrison portrays unimaginable dark-skinned young girl, Pecola, who finding herself by her family and the society embarks on a search for what she believes to be an acceptable self, by achieving in her imagination the blue eyes of a young girl. Light thinks Pecola is ugly but her ugliness doesn’t stem from a grotesque physical deformity, but is rather a quality arbitrarily assigned to her by a dominant culture that equate worthiness with skin color (33). Sugiharti also believes the novel dwells on the beauty which is the central focus of many women, it is something has been derived from the myth. The ideal beauty is depicted as a woman with a light skin and blue eyes, a physical feature, that white people more likely to have(2). She grows up in a family bare of any affection, zenith and self-esteem. She wants to have blue eyes because she only wants to be loved by the people and knows that her huge difference with whites is the definition of beauty in society. “It is [her] blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distastes in white eyes” (39). As Oshiro believes Pecola doesn’t want materialistic fulfilment, she only wants it to fulfil her wish (168). So Pecola is locked in a perpetual conversation with herself because the self is fragmented and she has no one to speak with to ease herself off. Quoted in Wen-Ching Ho, Naintara Gorwany points out succinctly, “the …show more content…
Claudia, the young girl narrator, at the very beginning of the novel, describes herself as indifferent to both white dolls and Shirley Temple. She also realises that she does not really hate light-skinned Maureen but hates the thing that makes Maureen beautiful: “and all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us” (58). It is the ideology of whiteness that makes Maureen appear beautiful (8) and Bouson argues in this