Pecola's Credibility

Author/Speaker
The author, Toni Morrison, showed us throughout the novel how credible and trustworthy she is. Her credibility is shown through the way she uses Claudia to narrate most of the book. By using Claudia, a seven year old, as a narrator, it shows the readers how trustworthy it is, because she doesn’t censor anything she tells the readers. She doesn’t understand the the conversations she overhears between the black women. Claudia was deeply affected by the way Pecola was treated, even though she was young she understood that Pecola wasn’t treated fair. The author and speaker’s reputation conveys being controlled by authority. Claudia mentioned how she was never to start conversation with an adult. She had to treat adults with respect.

She attacks the way they treated each other when they should have stood together, not tear each other down. She felt that too many young black girls grew up hating what they looked like and thinking they were ugly. They were constantly compared to white girls, who were the beauty standards in that time peiod. In addition to that, their beauty was determined on a scale of how black they were. Lighter black girls, such as Maureen, a light-skinned, mixed girl, were considered to be the most beautiful. “When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their partners--” (Morrison 62). This quote shows how Maureen got treated better than Claudia and Pecola, just because her skin was lighter. Pecola’s teachers never smiled at her and she never failed to be the object of the boys’ stones. Morrison wanted to show that being black is beautiful no matter what skin tone one

The Breedlove family is the subject of inferiority due to their presumed ugliness. “The master had said, ‘You are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance” (Morrison 39). They believed that whiteness was the only beauty out there, because that’s what everyone else believed. All the movie stars and people treated well were white. Believing blue eyes could save her from her world of ugliness and tragedy, Pecola wished for them for so long. She thought that if she had something that was considered beautiful, people would stop treating her poorly. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights---if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 46). Through this book Morrison wanted to show that anyone could be beautiful, because beauty is something that goes beyond one’s appearance. “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (Morrison