She stood there, her hands folded across her stomach, a little protruding pot of tummy. “Maybe. Maybe you can do it for me.”
“Do what for you?” “I can’t go to school no more. And I thought maybe you could
help me.” “Help you how? Tell me. Don’t be frightened.”
“My eyes.” “What about your eyes?”
“I want them blue.” Morrison, 1970:137
4.3 Finding the Relation between Child Abuse and Adults’ Failures
Child abuse and Adult’s Failures are two terms which are somehow related one and another. When a child is experienced to child abuse, there’s a possibility that he
will become an abuser as well when he grows up. The remembrance which he brought makes him so. Just like what is happened to Cholly Breedlove. When he was
a child, he was sexually and mentally being abused. It turns him to suffer trauma of it. The light of the flashlight and the giggle made him insulted. He is hurt and becomes
not believe others. This is the also the reason of why he can’t really get along with others:
When he was still very young, Cholly had been surprised in some bushes by two white men while he was newly but earnestly
engaged in eliciting sexual pleasure from a little country girl. The men had shone a flashlight right on his behind. He has stopped,
terrified. They chuckled. The beam of the flashlight did not move. “Go on,” they said. “Go on and finish. And, nigger, make it good.”
Even a half-remembrance of this episode, along with myriad other humiliations, could stir him into flights of depravity that surprised
himself – but only himself. Morrison, 1970:37
When a child is going to middle childhood, parents influence children by the way they supervise them and the things they expect for them. Thus, parenting styles
relate to child development. Unlike Pauline, who still lived in a family, Cholly had lost his mother when he was four days year old and had been left by his Great Aunt
Jimmy in his thirteen. In addition, he also seemed to lose his track, not only after being mentally abused by the two white men but also after being unacknowledged by
his father. As a result, he has never felt how a child is supposed to be raised, let alone how to raise a child.
But the aspect of married life that dumbfounded him and rendered him totally dysfunctional was the appearance of children. Having
no idea of how to raise children, and having never watched any parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a
relationship should be. Morrison, 1970:126
Had he not been alone in the world since he was thirteen, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, for whose
age, sex, and interest were so remote from his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As it was
it reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at the moment.
Morrison, 1970:127
The accumulation all his past as well as the unstable family economy caused him to have escapade of drunkenness. Under the influence of the alcoholic drinks, he
likes to have quarrels and fights with Pauline. Pauline becomes annoyed. Both of them often have quarrels and fight which had started when Pauline had her first
pregnancy: “Cholly commenced to getting meaner and meaner and wanted to
fight me all of the time. Morrison, 1970:94
He didn’t hit me too hard, ‘cause I were pregnant I guess, but the fights, once they got starting up again, kept up.
Morrison, 1970:98 On the other hand, Pauline actually loves her children. She also loves Cholly.
She knows that the family isn’t supposed to be like this. Yet, she has no choice due
to her desperation because of the poverty that is faced by all of them as well as due to the fights that she always have with Cholly. She becomes a failed adult by not caring
her children, especially her daughter: I loved them and all, I guess, but maybe it was having no money,
or maybe it was Cholly, but they sure worried the life out of me. Sometimes I’d catch myself hollering at them and beating them,
and I’d feel sorry for them, but I couldn’t seem to stop.
Morrison, 1970:98 Besides, as a father who loves her daughter, he doesn’t really know how to
express his feeling since he had never been raised in a family. Under this drunkenness as well as his past, Cholly sexually abused her daughter by raping her
twice. Turning as a failed adult, he also failed his daughter. Growing up in the Breedloves’ family that is always full with quarrels and
fighting, makes a child like Pecola somehow has deviation behaviour. She lives in a fear under her introvert character. Hence, she becomes having no idea of what life is.
Beauty becomes her focus. She blames herself for not being beautiful and ends up with yearning for the bluest eye. Though this kind of thought can be prevented, the
parenting style of Pecola parents which is permissive and neglectful makes her have no place and no people to count on.
In reality, both family and community give a big affect in building children’s character. The introvert character which is possessed by Pecola is the result of the
isolation and abuses by both the family and the society. Accordingly, this made her more eager to have the bluest eye so she can receive more equal treatments both at
house, at school, and in the society. However, she is too innocent and naïve. Since God didn’t provide her with the answer that she wanted, she went and met the
Soaphead Church for the bluest eye. Adults like the Soaphead Church who is
