"Which is what she herself was. 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." (205)
Pecola's impact on the other characters in the novel could arguably be defined by these few sentences. Morrison could not have conveyed Pecola's impact on the rest of the characters in the short story she intended. Somehow, nonsensically she was the dumping ground for the problems of the other characters. If they ever felt bad about their own lives, they could just look at hers and see that someone had it worse. Morrison elaborated their stories to show that they were all human, but they couldn't deal with their own problems in a humane way like Pecola could. They needed something (or in this case, someone) to unload themselves on---as if they were cleared of all burdens.
This passage might also prove the idea that Pecola's low self-esteem is in fact a huge reaction to the way society treats her. However, the fact that she is passive to all the hate that comes her way shows that she has given up on her own life. Her sole purpose seems to be to serve the community around her by making them seem beautiful in comparison. In the end, she slips into madness where she thinks she has blue eyes, but that might be because the whole community has rejected her. She has nobody to live with but herself, and if she can't tolerate even that, what has she got to live for? I think she might have deluded herself into thinking she had blue eyes because she couldn't live in desperation anymore. (And because Soaphead church had led her to believe she would get them.) That was her reaction to her situation because she didn't know what else to do with herself.
Q: Could Pecola have turned her life around? Was she in any stable state to do so? What were here options after her miscarriage?
-Madhu Singh
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