AUTUMN
-warmth
-shelter
Page 38-39:
The Breedloves ugliness: “it came from their conviction”, their self-understanding.
Page 20-21:
Doll passage: she is searching for the understanding of white beauty.
Doesn’t understand why people think that, she wants to see what’s inside, not satisfied, wants to find why whiteness is considered beautiful -> doesn’t find anything. She feels the need to question it, she’s not understanding the main stream yet
Different Claudias -> Claudia/child character + Claudia-as-narrator: adult?/older retrospective
Page 22-23:
She hates the whites so much, she realizes how horrible her thoughts are: disgusted by her thoughts -> convinced herself it would be better to lover her than to want to kill her. Hate becomes worshiping: “fraudulent love”. She doesn’t feel improvement just adjustment, doesn’t feel better about it: She is just accepting, hates them because they are considered beautiful, and she is not. To go to acceptance seams like a step back. Easier to go along with others and to not understand than to deal with hatred.
Claudia is very observant, forces by the norm to lose this quality: regression.
She can raise question of white beauty: she is a child and can
Emotion slipping into another
Page 49-50: Pecola feelings shift
Pecola: sees dandelions and finds them beautiful, doesn’t need society, but then feels fear and shame. Satisfaction comes from Mary Janes
->Shifts between anger & shame
Why sex in this passage?
Mr. Yacobowski is disgusted by her, doesn’t want to touch her. Anger comes out in Pecola then she feels shame.
She thinks it is better to be angry than to feel shame for there is “a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness” : Metaphor with puppy, thirst for anger quenched -> anger runs out and then only shame is left.
To console herself from shame, to stop from crying: she thinks of the Mary Janes : seams beautiful but blue eyes are “petulant, mischievous”
Association of whiteness with “clean comfort”
To Pecola: eating Mary Jane=satisfaction
-> wants whiteness in her : “Love Mary Jane, Be Mary Jane” wants to become Mary Jane, white, she needs love
-> she feels alone, needs comfort from candy
-> feels pleasure from eating candy -> relates it to sex (she can’t separate moral from physical) loving her, internalizes her by eating her.
-> Idolization, she wants to be like her: blonde, blue eyes. Becoming fantasy
-> Desire to see what’s “underneath”
She feels shame more than anger because then she would be alone, she has to accept norm before rejecting it to not be completely alone.
She suffers silently, (page 43): she knows she can’t get what she wants
Other example of shifting emotions:
-Cholly comes home drunk and sees Pecola washing dishes: feels confusion, guilt, pity ->turns into arousal, desire (rape) PAGE 161
Whores:
Connects to issue of violation.
They transform want for company to physical please (Pecola & Mary Jane). They turn prostitution into companionship, and into being ones own. They want to be beautiful but in their own terms->rebel to society.
Out of all characters, they are the most socially unaccepted, but are the happiest ones. They complain about past but not about presence. They make their won money now, enough to support themselves.
They appear as the most dysfunctional, but all families are dysfunctional. It makes the people calling them that feel better about themselves. Whores are however the most down to earth.
Pecola can get her fix of the desire she wants through their stories, she lives through their stories and their companionship.
Winter Notes
Ohai peoples of Ms. Hollow's class
Winter notes
Winter brainstorming: cold, barren, unfriendly, brutal weather, discomfort, dark, death, depression, ill health. :)
Opening of winter passage: "My daddy's face is a study."
Claudia and Frieda's father emulates the winter season.
Claudia describes his features:
- eyes= "cliff of snow threatning to avalanche"
-eyebrows="bent black limbs of leafless trees"
-skin="pale cheerless yellow of winter sun"
-jaw="edges of snowbound field"
-forehead="frozen sweep of the Erie, currents of gelid thoughts in the darkness".
"vulcan"
The narrator describes her father as a hardened man only in the face of the foul winter. He struggles to keep his family safe and protected during the harsh season with an intensity that earns him the title of "wolf killer", "hawk fighter", "night and day".
The passage with Maureen Peal
Maureen Peal is a huge source of envy for Claudia although she is determined to hate her.
This wealthy café-au-lait girl with "fluffy yellow sweaters", "pink cupcakes", and "egg salad", represents a fake spring that contrasts with the harder lives of the other children.
Freida wears ripped brown stockings, and hates her for the fact that Maureen reminds her constantly of where she comes from.
-If there were to be a scale that meant your happiness was determined by how dark you were, Maureen would be happiest (spring) , Claudia and Frieda figuring somewhere in the middle (autumn?) , and Pecola on the very bottom (winter).
When Pecola is being bullied by the other children at the playground, she is once again in the center of all the violent cold in the world, impugned for her father's "sleeping habits". Even the other children seem to regard her as more "black" than they ("black e'mo"). It seems that Pecola might even attract hatred or brutality.
Geraldine is another character who reminds the reader of a fake spring, but hers is warped. She finds no contentment in endlessly arranging her house with "fake flowers" and doilies, she has no goal to reach other than to seem more "white". She is never happy, because she can only be satisfied by knowing she is "whiter" than other blacks....which isn't going to happen.
She calls Pecola a "little black bitch".
She's brainwashed, running away from the truth.
As for the whores that Mr. Henry is entertaining at the Macteers, they seem to be the only sturdy characters that can last through any winter, and have lasted so far. They seem fearless and strong and wise.
SPRING
many people have their birthdays in the spring
SPRING
many people have their birthdays in the spring
- season of love and fertility
- season of warmth and beauty
- has a very positive atmosphere
- a time for new beginnings (Easter--resurrection, certain mammals come out of hibernation)
2.
- for Claudia, spring is associated with pain (they change the whips, these hurt more)
- passively negative: build-up to end on that note of the park where black children were not allowed to play --> it filled their dreams
3.
- Pecola is physically capable of conceiving a child
- physically fertile but it's an evil seed
- Pecola = unyielding earth?
- it's not her fault; never was
