Discrimination In The Movies: Pauline Breedlove, Pecola

Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, also has a self-hate complex. It may not be as drastic as Pecola’s, but is revealed again and again. She goes to the movies to watch the white superstars of the silver screen. Pauline attempts to look like Jean Harlow, a white movie star, to feel better about herself. Soon after, Mrs. Breedlove loses a tooth. This incident sent her over the edge, bringing her to the realization that she will never live up to the caucasian standard of beauty. The movies become Pauline’s ideal of beauty, “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,” (122). By
Cholly was abandoned by his mother, and left to be raised by his Aunt Jimmy. At Aunt Jimmy’s funeral banquet, Cholly met a young girl by the name of Darlene. They left the banquet and made their way out to the pine woods. Here, they both lost their virginity. While they were having sex, two white men found them while looking for their hunting dogs. The men humiliated them; they treated the young black couple as if they were merely entertainment, not people. Cholly felt a deep level of shame and embarrassment. This experience affected him for the rest of his life. It changed him into the person he is perceived to be throughout the book. His motives were influenced by the hate he felt in that moment. He was unable to direct his hate towards the white men, “Never did he once consider directing his hatred towards the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess— that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men, but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence,”
The best example of this is the proof of ugliness within the characters that is not only seen from a physical standpoint, but also felt and deeply internalized. The narrator described the Breedlove family like this, “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one of them a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, ‘You are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; they saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance,” (39). These characters hate themselves due to what society has labeled them to be, which reinforces the social classes that are established by racial inferiority. Toni Morrison’s goal in The Bluest Eye is to explain where self-hatred stems from, and just how much it can affect the lives of the people it victimizes. Racism devastates the people of the African American community that are free by law, but still held captive by a society that forces them to hate themselves for who they are. Pecola thought that