The Terminale OIB English course complements and continues the work begun in Première OIB. We continue to sharpen our analytical and close reading skills as we probe issues of self and other, individual and society, assimilation and alienation. Some of our major texts are concerned in particular with race and colonization.
What Pecola Breedloves desires more than anything is to have blue eyes, because she sees herself, and is regarded by most of the characters in the novel, as ugly. She is powerless because she beats herself down so much, her lack of confidence in herself is what makes others see her as ugly and disrespect her as well. They see themselves through the eyes of white people and their worship of white beauty also has destructive effects on their own community. Shirley Temple, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired actress and doll is the standard of beauty that Pecola and her classmates subscribe to. The novel starts with a Dick and Jane passage, a description of an ideal white family. This passage not only reveals the role of education in both oppressing the victim, but also by teaching the victim how to oppress her own black self by internalizing the values that dictate standards of beauty. Pecola and her black peers are all trying to conform to an imposed ideal of femininity, absorbed by the “cultural icons portraying physical beauty”, whether they be in movies, books or dolls. Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, for instance, lives vicariously through white characters in movies: “along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” Colored skin is looked down upon to such an extent that when a mulatto, Maureen Peal, comes to school, she is practically praised, as if her lighter skin tone gave off a hierarchy of skin tone making distance in relation to idealized physical attributes. Pecola years to have blue eyes in hope that people will love her. Not only does she want to look more beautiful to others, but she wants to see her life from a more beautiful perspective, confident that her “new eyes” will do that for her, as everything she has seen and experienced to her was “ugly”, just as she. However, not all the characters believed that the fair-skinned were the more beautiful. Claudia, for instance: “Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?” She destroys her Shirley Temple doll in order to find what everyone finds so beautiful about her; she tears it open trying to find the beauty on the inside. She does not understand what everyone finds so beautiful in Maureen Peals, as she can not “tear her up to the heart”. Unfortunately, however, as Claudia grows up, she learns the social norms and gets “brainwashed” in everyone else’s naïveté: ““I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness...” She realizes that if she follows the white ideology of aesthetics she could gain beauty but only to a certain extent, and at the expense of others, of course. The black community has made up this entire white standard of beauty, which in itself has made Pecola see herself as ugly and therefore be everyone else’s scapegoat: “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares.” The ideology of white beauty standards can be dangerous and powerful, so powerful that it has literally driven Pecola crazy.
What Pecola Breedloves desires more than anything is to have blue eyes, because she sees herself, and is regarded by most of the characters in the novel, as ugly. She is powerless because she beats herself down so much, her lack of confidence in herself is what makes others see her as ugly and disrespect her as well. They see themselves through the eyes of white people and their worship of white beauty also has destructive effects on their own community. Shirley Temple, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired actress and doll is the standard of beauty that Pecola and her classmates subscribe to. The novel starts with a Dick and Jane passage, a description of an ideal white family. This passage not only reveals the role of education in both oppressing the victim, but also by teaching the victim how to oppress her own black self by internalizing the values that dictate standards of beauty. Pecola and her black peers are all trying to conform to an imposed ideal of femininity, absorbed by the “cultural icons portraying physical beauty”, whether they be in movies, books or dolls. Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, for instance, lives vicariously through white characters in movies: “along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” Colored skin is looked down upon to such an extent that when a mulatto, Maureen Peal, comes to school, she is practically praised, as if her lighter skin tone gave off a hierarchy of skin tone making distance in relation to idealized physical attributes. Pecola years to have blue eyes in hope that people will love her. Not only does she want to look more beautiful to others, but she wants to see her life from a more beautiful perspective, confident that her “new eyes” will do that for her, as everything she has seen and experienced to her was “ugly”, just as she. However, not all the characters believed that the fair-skinned were the more beautiful. Claudia, for instance: “Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?” She destroys her Shirley Temple doll in order to find what everyone finds so beautiful about her; she tears it open trying to find the beauty on the inside. She does not understand what everyone finds so beautiful in Maureen Peals, as she can not “tear her up to the heart”. Unfortunately, however, as Claudia grows up, she learns the social norms and gets “brainwashed” in everyone else’s naïveté: ““I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness...” She realizes that if she follows the white ideology of aesthetics she could gain beauty but only to a certain extent, and at the expense of others, of course. The black community has made up this entire white standard of beauty, which in itself has made Pecola see herself as ugly and therefore be everyone else’s scapegoat: “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares.” The ideology of white beauty standards can be dangerous and powerful, so powerful that it has literally driven Pecola crazy.
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