iliation, frustration, loneliness and mental disorder are constantly haunting his life and his mind, and gradually, he abandons his responsibilities for his family and the society. Obviously, his mother’s abandonment, his father’s rejection, and his repudiation by the whites all lead to his frustrations and disintegration, which in turn results in his twisted love towards Pecola—he rapes her. Finally, Pecola withdraws into the refuge of insanity, and in madness she simply substitutes her inchoate reality with a better one: she has blue eyes which everyone admires and envies.
As a result, at home or in the black community, Pecola never has a sense of belonging and security, and is rejected both by the mainstream society and the black community. She has to cast her fate on the blue eyes which she can never get, and finally she is abandoned by her parents, the black community and the white society. To her parents, she stands for the experiences they intend to throw away; to the white society, she is only a marginalized “other’ haunting between the black culture and the white culture; to the black community, she becomes the scapegoat. Therefore, when the blacks in the community hear Pecola’s tragedy, they fail to offer their concern and sympathy, but instead feel disgusted, shocked and even excited. In fact, during the process of identification with the white culture and the abandonment of their native culture, they gradually lose their voices and cultural/ethic identity, and finally are rejected both by their native culture and the white mainstream culture.
Therefore, Pecola’ s tragedy lies in not only the rejection of the white mainstream culture, but more importantly, the inability of the black community to measure up to some external ideal beauty and behavior, and its inability to cherish and sustain its tradition and culture. During the process of identification in the mainstream society, she becomes the scapegoat of the black community and the black community’s shadow of evil (even as the black community is the white community’s evil).
Conclusion
Therefore, Pecola’s tragedy is not only the result of the rejection of the white mainstream culture, but more importantly the inevitable consequence of identification. The blacks in the community believe that the ugliness “came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious, all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. 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. ‘Yes,’ they had said, ‘you are right.’”(Morrison 133) What is worse is that they bear in their mind that all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that, a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group (the white) that created it. Naturally, when they hear the tragedy of Pecola, “they were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story.” (Morrison 148) The whole community is indifferent, “all of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain make us glow with health, her awkwardness make us think us believe we were elo
本论文由英语论文网提供整理,提供论文代写,英语论文代写,代写论文,代写英语论文,代写留学生论文,代写英文论文,留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。