Pecola realizes the shopkeeper does not even acknowledge her as a human being worth looking at, because, Pecola believes, she is ugly. One such experience is an encounter with a shopkeeper when she goes to purchase candy: “He does not see her, because for him, there is nothing to see” (48). With every experience that confirms her ugliness, Pecola’s self-hatred grows. This impossible standard continues to remain a strong influence throughout Pecola’s life. Because of the influence of the world on Pauline’s ideas regarding beauty, Pecola is subjected to an impossible standard of beauty from the beginning moments of her life. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way” (118). Pauline, Pecola’s mother, passes on the standard of beauty she has acquired from the world around her: “The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. From the day Pecola is born, she is told she is ugly. Her mother’s first reaction to Pecola is that she had a “head of pretty hair, but Lord was she ugly” (126). Pecola is exposed to an impossible standard of beauty the moment she enters the world.
Morrison answers this call in her story centering on the self-hatred and destruction of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove. (71)įoucault’s idea calls for a necessity to examine truth further in order to eliminate false assumptions created by the power of the society, especially when these false assumptions are social constructs believed to be natural truths.
One no longer needs to be told what to do because one does it oneself automatically. Morality, all the various ways in which one is instructed to be “good,” becomes inseparable from voluntary compliance. Citizens learn to absorb and perform discipline themselves. Power seeps into the pores of society rather than occupying a single-state site over time power becomes part of the habitual everyday procedures and operations of such social institutions as the school, the hospital, and the workplace. The way knowledge is organized in the discourses of western society is allied with the organization of power in society.
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