“Brown Eyes”

I was right. Sort of. This girl (Pecola) must have severe Self-esteem problems. First of all, she is ugly. But not ugly, like simply put ugly, no. She comes from a family of uglies, all of which give a function to their ugliness. She, for one, hides behind hers. I feel she really feels ashamed of being black, of her brown skin and her brown eyes. The fact that when she went to go buy mary janes there was something peculiar to the look the man gave her, "Somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness." (49) She feels that somehow her misfortune is linked to her physical appearance, to which she blames her eyes. At one point she claims that " those eyes of hers were different, (beautiful)" (46) her parents would think to protect them from seeing the horrible things that they did. The kind of mental abuse that she suffers at home from her parents abusive relationship, and at school by being confined to an integral solitude must tear this girl into pieces.

Maybe that's why this novel is written so maturely. These girls were forced to grow up. To be held responsible for housework, for their families, all out of fear of possible physical reprimanding. This motivates me to question: what will happen to Pecola? That kind of solitude and segregation isn't healthy. This has been proven many times, for one, Jane Elliot proved with her eye-color segregation experiment A Class Divided, in which we can see the emotional burden that comes when a child, specifically, is treated lesser and the possible repercussions. The fact that this poor girl asks herself what it feels like to be loved, and how to be loved, and if the sound of her parents doing sexual actions is what it sounds like. Frankly, I wonder if she will commit suicide or become unstable or what role this will play in the rest of the novel.