“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” With these lines Morrison’s child narrator, Claudia MacTeer, invites the reader into a troubling community secret: the incestuous rape of her 11-year-old friend Pecola Breedlove. What are the advantages of telling Pecola’s story from a child’s point of view? Claudia would appear to connect the barrenness of the land to Pecola’s tragedy. In what ways does Morrison show how Pecola’s environment-and American society as a whole-are hostile to her very existence?
[Source: Oprah's Book Club Discussion Questions]
3 comments
Geryll says:
Jan 17, 2013
Pecola is living in an Apartheid system that (among other pursuits) supports aides and abets a culture of rape and silence. She is culturally perceived as a common and expendable embodiment of simple perfection. Reliable. Just like a marigold – usually… Disciplined little black gals with not much to look forward to yet filled with vision and creativity and wild imaginations. So fertile so beautiful. Paradox. To rape a child is to rape oneself. To relive and revive the inherited legacy of rape and terror and rape and terror and rape and… Is to rape the earth is to disconnect from your nature (the green of a junebug- rainbow orgasm) is to cease to exist as a self contained interdependent be-ing of infinite light. R/evolution Now!
Mary Webb says:
Jan 25, 2013
Telling Pecola’s story from a child’s point of view makes the story more accurate in terms of honesty. While Claudia might not have known the whole of Pecola’s troubles, she does justice to the parts she knows, which is more than many of the adults would have done. Claudia and Frieda are already Pecola’s champions. Having them tell the story is the only way Pecola could receive any sympathy.
Ambata says:
Feb 7, 2013
Hmmm, not sure that I agree that Claudia being the narrator makes the story more accurate, but I would say that her innocence provides an interesting perspective. Children tend to observe everything with a very open eye and then question everything. One example is when Claudia narrates her hatred for the white dolls she is supposed to love. Her bemused questioning of the adults’ demands that she love these dolls that don’t look like her displays a type of wisdom only a child can hold. She takes in all the adult anger at her dismembering the dolls, lays it all out in front of her, then tries to make sense of it all.
In the opening passage of the novel, Morrison seems to suggest that nothing good could grow from Pecola’s tragedy. There could be no flowers sprouting from Pecola’s womb, nothing beautiful that could be loved. Her miscarriage is something of a mercy. No one could have loved that child. Pecola’s madness is something of a mercy too. At least she can retreat into her own fantasy, looking out at her little world through blue eyes. It is the only way really that she can exist in her environment; to not really exist at all, to be a figure lingering on the outskirts, a sad story passed around. I don’t know that her environment is “hostile” to her, but it doesn’t seem to give her any space to grow either. Mostly she is pitied by everyone, but certainly her future is precarious. Madness becomes a way out.
On a side note I find it interesting that Claudia outs the “community secret” right at the beginning. What a reader (or listener) might expect to learn as the climax of the story is stated up front. Instead we learn about everything that led up to the tragedy and its’ aftermath. I think that is a clever writing technique, revealing that while this is what the story is about, it is also about so much more. Is the greater tragedy the rape or Pecola’s (and her family’s) life?