The Pain of Wanting to be Beautiful
"Starlight star bright" make me beautiful tonight. So many young girls gaze into the stars wishing that they could be beautiful so they would be accepted at school, as well as loved and acknowledged more. Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is no different than any other little girl. She too wants to be beautiful. America has set the standards that to be beautiful one must have " blue eyes, blonde hair, and white skin" according to Wilfred D. Samuels Toni Morrison (10). This perception of beauty leads Pecola to insanity because just as society cannot accept a little ugly black girl neither can she.
Children will always be children and the playground will always be a place where they tease and taunt one another. Pecola is unlike the other children; she does not participate in the teasing, she is the brunt of all the criticism because she is not only black but ugly too. On the other hand, there is Maureen Peal. Maureen is not white but is light- skinned therefore, accepted by everyone; the " black boys didn't trip her; the white boys didn't stone her, white girls didn't suck their teeth [at her and] the black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink?"(Morrison 62). Everyone was nice to Maureen regardless of their race and her own. One day Pecola's dream of acceptance is granted when Maureen rescues her from the taunting of the boys on the playground. During their short-term superficial friendship Maureen does not fail to point out that Pecola looks like a movie character that "hates her mother because she is black and ugly"(Morrison 57). Karen Carmean in her book Toni Morrison's World of Fiction makes the point that Maureen has succumbed to the "traditional white associations of darkness with ...