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Maureen Peal is Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia’s classmate, a wealthy Black girl with light skin. She contributes to the novel’s exploration of white privilege and Black girlhood, demonstrating how over-valuing whiteness hurts Black girls. Claudia takes an instant dislike to Maureen in the same way she dislikes white babydolls. She sees the unfairness in the kindness bestowed on Maureen because she has lighter skin and wants to attack her for experiencing that unearned kindness. In her narration, Claudia calls Maureen “the disrupter of seasons,” implying she upends some sort of natural order. Even though it’s winter, Maureen has a “hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.” Within the novel, Black girlhood, as portrayed by the MacTeer girls and Pecola, often means going without warmth and nurture, or metaphorically without spring or summer. If the order of things is that Blackness means living in winter, Maureen disrupts this order. As the novel makes clear, she is only able to experience such attention because she has both money and light-skinned privilege. This combination causes the outside world to see her as valuable, and she is thus able to thrive.
Like several of the adult Black characters with light skin, Maureen has already internalized the idea that she has more value than the other Black girls. While she is initially kind to Pecola, helping Frieda and Claudia defend her from a group of boys, the minute Frieda and Claudia call her out for making Pecola feel uncomfortable, Maureen retaliates by calling them Black and ugly. She knows that society sees her as cute because of her light skin, and this cuteness is a weapon that she can use against the darker skinned girls. In addition, her attempt to talk to Pecola about sex in the first place may be the result of stereotyping. Because Pecola has very dark skin, Maureen may associate her with all the negative assumptions falsely attributed to Blackness, including hyper-sexuality.
