The Black Women Images in the Novels

. . the total absence of homophile recognition. . . . This nothingness has an edge, . . . [a] averting. She has go throughn it lurking in the eyes of all macabreen-and- dark-skinned people. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. . . . Her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes (Morrison 48-49).

The propensity of Pecola to be white with blue eyes is the result of images from the white culture, as well as from the hatred and rejection she suffers at the hold of both whites and other blacks with lighter skin. It also reflects the analysis of women's liberationist Bell Hooks: "Increasingly, young black people be encouraged by the dominant culture (and by those black people who internalize the values of this hegemony) to believe that enculturation is the alone possible way to survive, to succeed" (Hooks 76-77).

What Pecola wants is, after all, the complete assimilation of becoming white. However, this is only half of the story with respect to Pecola's blackness. As we read in Keith Byerman's essay, Pecola is reviled by others, including her own family and her own race, save she also plays a crucial role in the cosmea of the identities of those who despise her:

In the larger community, . . . white storekeepers, light-skinned children, and black middle-class adults all see this black child as a piece of filth repugnant yet necessity to their own senses of cleanliness (Byerman 59).

Geraldine, lighter-skinned, looks with contempt and drive upon Pecola:

Pecola has been raised in a society in which females ar submissive and inferior to men, in which blacks argon inferior to whites, and in which dark-skinned blacks are inferior to light-skinned blacks. White males are at the top of the cultural mountain, with the darkest-skinned black females at the bottom. Soaphead, a con-man, is one character who is moved by Pecola's tragic feature to recognize this fact and sympathize with her wish to have blue eyes: "A little black girl who precious to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. . . . For the first time he aboveboard wished he could work miracles" (Morrison 174).

Hooks, Bell. Talking Back. Boston: South End, 1989.

Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the berry ... New York: Collier, 1970.

Again, Thurman deals with the same issues as the first two books, just in a to a greater extent specific fashion. All third portray a society in which the most agentful---white males---gain their power in large measure because of their gender and their color, and the weakest---the blackest females---are seen and treated as weak because of their gender and their color.

We feel greater sympathy for Pecola than we do for the light-skinned Janie and the dark-skinned Emma Lou because the former is younger and more lost(p) than the latter two. Both Janie and Emma Lou advise be seen as more responsible for their own suffering, simply because they are more competent to make and implement decisions affecting their fates. Still, all three can be seen as victims of a society which creates racism and sexism as weapons to keep black women down.

Within feminist circles, silence is a good deal seen as the sexist "right speech of womanhood"---the print of woman's submission to patriarchal authority (Hooks 6).

n other words, Pecola is use by those around her---whites and lighter-skinned blacks---to make themselves feel better, superior. Morrison shows that
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