Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Candy is Dandy

Every child has a favorite type of candy. Mine was and still is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I would look for them on Halloween at every house I visited, and hope desperately that it was not my friend’s favorite so that we could trade afterwards. Pecola Breedlove’s favorite candy is Mary Janes, but not because she loves the way it tastes.

In Autumn, the Breedlove’s are referred to as ugly people (38). They live in a storefront because they think that they don’t deserve better than to be stared at by people passing by as a sort of cautionary tale. However, the Breedlove’s are not inherently ugly people, they just assume it because they have never been told any differently. Each member of the Breedlove family has a different way of dealing with this assumed ugliness and going about their everyday lives- Mrs. Breedlove picks fights with her husband, Cholly drinks, Sammy runs away constantly, and Pecola dreams of being transformed into a beautiful blue eyed girl.

Pecola doesn’t just like Mary Janes because of the sweetness; she is obsessed with the ideal beauty of the character of Mary Jane. Pecola’s world has no place for a young black girl and it rejects her at every turn, even more so because of the ugliness that she takes upon herself to wear. Her eyes haunt her, and no matter how hard she tries she just can’t get them to disappear, even in her fantasies. She thinks that if they were a beautiful color then people would notice her, think of her as Pecola with the pretty eyes. In her mind, her life would be sweet like the candy if she had blue eyes because her parents would not fight and do such terrible things to each other in front of her. To Pecola, blue eyes are the epitome of beauty. She prays for them every night before bed, and chooses her candy accordingly. “To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.” (50). By the phrase, you are what you eat, if she eats Mary Jane then maybe by some miracle she will be allowed become her. And to become Mary Jane is to be beautiful and to be accepted by her family and society.

The theme of blue eyes is obviously important throughout the book judging by the title, and it’s easy to see that Pecola is obsessed and seduced by them. She drinks outrageous amounts of milk so that she can stare at the picture of Shirley Temple on the cup, and chooses her candy carefully while praying to become the girl on the wrapper. But eye color is not something that can be changed by wishing, and Pecola’s idea of beauty can’t be achieved no matter how many Mary Jane candies she eats.

1 comment:

  1. I'm really glad you chose to focus on the topic of milk and candy in the novel. I can understand how ingestion as a means for changing one's self would make perfect sense to a child. Imagine the existential tailspin Pecola would experience if she understood that her ugliness is decided and dictated by society. I imagine that her consumption of these products is both a misguided attempt to change her appearance and a defense mechanism against facing her powerless position in relation to society.

    ReplyDelete