Nine-year-old Claudia and
ten-year-old Frieda MacTeer live in Lorain, Ohio, with their parents.
It is the end of the Great Depression, and the girls’ parents are
more concerned with making ends meet than with lavishing attention
upon their daughters, but there is an undercurrent of love and stability
in their home. The MacTeers take in a boarder, Henry Washington,
and also a young girl named Pecola. Pecola’s father has tried to
burn down his family’s house, and Claudia and Frieda feel sorry
for her. Pecola loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is
beautiful and that she is ugly.
Pecola moves back in with her family, and her life is
difficult. Her father drinks, her mother is distant, and the two
of them often beat one another. Her brother, Sammy, frequently runs
away. Pecola believes that if she had blue eyes, she would be loved
and her life would be transformed. Meanwhile, she continually receives
confirmation of her own sense of ugliness—the grocer looks right
through her when she buys candy, boys make fun of her, and a light-skinned girl,
Maureen, who temporarily befriends her makes fun of her too. She
is wrongly blamed for killing a boy’s cat and is called a “nasty little
black bitch” by his mother.
We learn that Pecola’s parents have both had difficult
lives. Pauline, her mother, has a lame foot and has always felt
isolated. She loses herself in movies, which reaffirm her belief
that she is ugly and that romantic love is reserved for the beautiful.
She encourages her husband’s violent behavior in order to reinforce
her own role as a martyr. She feels most alive when she is at work,
cleaning a white woman’s home. She loves this home and despises
her own. Cholly, Pecola’s father, was abandoned by his parents and
raised by his great aunt, who died when he was a young teenager.
He was humiliated by two white men who found him having sex for
the first time and made him continue while they watched. He ran
away to find his father but was rebuffed by him. By the time he
met Pauline, he was a wild and rootless man. He feels trapped in
his marriage and has lost interest in life.
Cholly returns home one day and finds Pecola washing
dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and hatred that are fueled
by guilt, he rapes her. When Pecola’s mother finds her unconscious
on the floor, she disbelieves Pecola’s story and beats her. Pecola
goes to Soaphead Church, a sham mystic, and asks him for blue eyes. Instead
of helping her, he uses her to kill a dog he dislikes.
Claudia and Frieda find out that Pecola has been impregnated
by her father, and unlike the rest of the neighborhood, they want
the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they have been saving
for a bicycle and plant marigold seeds. They believe that if the
flowers live, so will Pecola’s baby. The flowers refuse to bloom,
and Pecola’s baby dies when it is born prematurely. Cholly, who
rapes Pecola a second time and then runs away, dies in a workhouse.
Pecola goes mad, believing that her cherished wish has been fulfilled
and that she has the bluest eyes.
