Her abnormal behavior of having the bluest eyes has broken her insanity. His
father’s rape is the climax of her sanity and when she believes that God grants her wish to have the blue eyes, by giving sign of a dead dog. Pecola becomes insane and
mentally disturbed. Pecola tells her friend to look at everybody’s eyes because she is afraid if there is someone with bluer eyes than hers.
The damage was done total. She spent her days, her trendil, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer
so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she failed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a
winged but grounded bird, intent on the bluye void it could not reach, could not even see-but which filled the valleys of the mind 204.
Pecola’s wish for the bluest eyes is her way to escape from her reality, which
has caused her lost insanity. Pecola’s deep sufferings, rejection, despise from her own parents give a big contribution in creating Pecola’s abnormal behavior.
4.2.2 On Pecola’s way of seeing others
The abnormality that Pecola’s suffers is caused by the rejections and hatred of her own family. She receives bad treatment from her parents. Pecola believes that the
main cause that her parents hate her because of her ugliness, skin color, and because they are poor. Because of the treatment of her parents, Pecola starts to think that if she
wants to live a better life, she must have beautiful face, bright skin color, and bluest eyes.
She also knew that when one of the girls at school wanted to be a particularly insulting to a boy, or wanted to get an immediate response from him, she
could say, “Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove” and never fails to gets peals of laughter from those in carshot, mock anger
from the accused 46. Pecola often becomes the object of mockery. Her friends will get others
attention just by calling Pecola’s name. Pecola often is insulted because of her skin color and her ugliness. It makes her believe that judging people is by seeing their skin
color and the color of their eyes. By thinking so, it can be understand that Pecola symbolizes the eyes as the things that determine how a person has his life. Thus,
whenever a person wants to change her life, she must change the color of her eyes first.
“Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her
pain anatagonized me. I wanted to opened her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the
misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes 73-74.”
According to Lidz, psychological trauma is the experience that destroys the sense of security, sense of ability, pride, and it will be hard to recover from the
trauma. This trauma will leave scars in a child’s life until she grows up 34. Pecola feels the deep pain inside, but she cannot share it with the others. She is powerless to
spit her pain out of her life. She cannot do anything to avoid the rejections of her parents and mockery of her friends. All she knows that everybody hates her because
she is black, poor, and ugly. But, she can do anything to change it. As a poor girl, she does not understand why there are so many people hate her. Because of the hatred and
treatment of Pecola’s parents and people around her, she suffers this psychological trauma.
“He holds the money toward him, he hesitates not wanting to touch her hand 49”. We can feel how much hatred and rejection that people show to Pecola. One
does not want to touch Pecola’s hand shows that how disgusted the storeowner is to Pecola. All of those treatments makes Pecola think that white skin color and blue eyes
are the best image of a girl to get love, affection, and respect. The readers can see that the symbols of beauty are blue eyes, yellow hair, and pink skin.
Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray,
blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The yes are petulant, PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
mischievous. To pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness id good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat cat eyes, eat Mary
Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane 50
Pecola knows that being black is ugly, and that is the main reason people hated
her. According to Lidz, factor that influencing abnormal behavior is when people become the victims in the discrimination based on a certain group 35. It is described
in the novel, a candy named Mary Jane has a picture of a girl with blond hair and blue eyes. To Pecola, that is the best image of beautiful. The blue eyes really attract Pecola,
because she knows that it is the eyes that becomes the symbol of beauty, and to Pecola, blue eyes are consider beautiful. Pecola adores something with white skin
color, blond hair, and blue eyes. She loves to drink from the Shirley Temple cup because she can see her beautiful face of Shirley Temple every time she drinks from
the cup. “We knew she was fond of Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face.” 23. Pecola worships
the symbols of beauty namely: white skin color, blond hair, and blue eyes. When she sees people with those symbols of beauty, she admires them. That is exactly Pecola
suffers from. She is differentiated by people around he based on her skin and eyes color. That is why Pecola wants to have blue eyes so passionately. That makes her act
abnormally and makes her finally lose her insanity because she could not be able to face the issue.
It is also described in the novel that Pecola’s parents have lead her to believe that her blackness is her ugliness, and her ugliness which makes her hated by people.
It makes her believe that her eyes are the source of her ugliness. It is her eyes that make her look ugly and nothing in front of people. It is the eyes that also make people
rejects and neglect her. Miserably, she believes that a pair of blue eyes will change her life better. She somehow believes that her parents’ fight is because of her ugliness.
She convinces herself if she has the blue eyes, her parents will not fight in front of her beautiful eyes. Her parents will stop fighting and hurting each other. Then her father
will treat her nicely, and she will get attention from her mother. It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held
the pictures, and knew the sights- if those eyes were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would not be different. Her teeth were good, and at least
the nose was not big and flat like some of those who were thought so cute. If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs.
Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say, “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes 46”.
According to Sullivan, parents who do not see their children as worthwhile persons or belittle and antagonize the children may cause the children to develop a
negative self-image 94. That is what happens to Pecola as it is described in the novel. Her parents always consider they are ugly, and that is like how Pecola think she
is, ugly. Pecola is seeking for some respect and better treatment toward her. All of this time, she knows that a white girl with blue eyes gets better treatment than a black ugly
and poor girl. According to Lidz, one of the factors of abnormal behavior is because the children lack of love from the parents; the parents do not provide their children
with love and enough attention in their lives 34. In Pecola’s life, she never experiences good things. She always suffers hatred
and ignorant from people around her. She really wants to change her life. She wants everybody to love her including her parents. All that she knows that everybody does
not like her because she is black, poor, and ugly. She puts her hope on blue eyes which she believe will change her life in front of people’s eyes. Although people look
down on her, but she still wants to make people like her. She wishes to live normally among people, but all that she receives is bad treatment from people. That makes
Pecola think that people will never treat her kindly. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
4.2.3 On Pecola’s Way of Avoiding Her Reality of Life
Pecola never feels happy with her family and her life. She falls into the feeling of unwanted and never states her wishes to anybody 28. The broken family forces
Pecola to build a mask and fortification. “She [Pecola] hid behind hers [herself]. Concealed, veiled, eclipsed-peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and
then only to yearn for the return of her mask 39.” For Pecola, she can only keep tight the feeling to run away from this situation of her family. She is under pressure
because of the eagerness to run away from home and the fact that she can do nothing since she is only an eleven-year old girl.
“Pecola, on the other hand, restricted by youth and sex, experimented with methods of endurance. Though the methods varied, the pain was as consistent
as it was the methods varied, the pain was as consistent as it was deep. She struggled between an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a
profound wish that she herself could die 43.”
As the result of her under pressure, she makes a hallucination and pretends that the features of her body disappear one by one.
“She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body. Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes,
that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too. Almost
done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left 45.”
Pecola likes to hallucinate when she is depressed. It happens when she sees her parent’s fight. She wishes herself to disappear so that she will not see her parents’
fight. According to Lidz, heavy stress could be the factor of abnormal behavior 34. It is the condition that makes people under pressure. Finally, when Pecola’s stress
reaches climax, she loses her insanity. She hallucinates of having a friend who understands her condition and the one who can tell Pecola of how blue her eyes are. In
her imagination, she becomes the most beautiful girl in her environment. Pecola believes that from that time, people who used to hurt her, now adore her. Everybody
acts different to her, they avoid seeing her. “Ever since I got my blue eyes, she look away from me all of the time … Everybody’s jealous. Everytime I look at somebody,
they look off 195.” Unfortunately, it is because Pecola looses her insanity, and she hallucinates something that she wishes for a long time. Because of her craziness, she
has unrestrained all of her burden, and all her fear that she keeps before. She is free to do what she wants to do than before. “Her birdlike gesture symbolizes the freedom
and the will to release what she had hidden before 204.” She feels happy because in her imagination, God has granted her wishes to
have blue eyes. She has an imaginative friend now. She only talks to her because since she loses her insanity, nobody has talked to her. Her conversation with her
imaginative friend focuses on her eyes only. Oh, yes. My eyes. My blue eyes. Let me look again.
See how pretty they are Yes. They get prettier each time I look at them.
They are the prettiest I’ve ever seen Really?
Oh, yes. Prettier than the sky?
Oh, yes. Much prettier than the sky. Prettier than Alice-and-Jerry Storybook eyes?
Oh, yes. Much prettier than Alice-and-Jerry Story book eyes 201 The conversation above is the conversation between Pecola and her imaginary
friend. Before she loses her insanity, she never has a true friend beside her. Only with her imaginative friend she can communicate because she never speaks to others since
she loses her insanity. How come what?
How come you don’t talk to anybody? I talk to you.
Besides me. I don’t like anybody besides you.
Where do you live? I told you once.
What is your mother’s name? Why are you so busy meddling me?
