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Pretty (Ugly) Polly

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Polly’s main insecurity that has lasted her her whole life is just one incredibly multidimensional feeling: the feeling of being ugly. Throughout her life, she encounters many moments, places, people, and practices that all sustain her by providing pleasure and returning respect. However, they also end up becoming the disruptions to her development with time. One of the first things that makes her feel this ugliness is her lame foot. However, Cholly is the first person in many years who treats her foot as an “asset” rather than as a “bad foot.” He seems to be the only person in her life who provides her the simple pleasure of feeling confident enough to think that she is deserving of a gentle love. Instead of being ignored, Polly finally has a chance to feel beautiful because of his love and support. 

However, this feeling is soon distorted when Cholly becomes more abusive and unattentive. Unfortunately, the same man who had made Polly feel so beautiful despite her deformity is the one who is now actively rooting against her attempts to make herself feel more physically beautiful, which can be seen when she tries to fit in with the other women in their new town. Cholly’s change in temperament can be seen through the way he chastises his wife for buying new makeup and clothes. His lack of support in Polly wanting to change herself is not one of a supportive husband who wants his wife to see the natural beauty within herself. Rather, he is only upset that she is wasting money to feed her desires. Through this, it can be seen that Cholly slowly loses the love that he once had for Polly, and that he no longer provides Polly the feeling of being worthy. Now, she is back to being “unworthy” and she is considered a waste of money.

The movies also provide Polly pleasure but, later on, contribute as a catalyst to her disrupted development. She describes her times at the movies as “…a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate.” The things “she learned all there was to love” from the movies are all based on white femininity and beauty. She learns to love how white women look in films, the way that they are treated by their partners, and even the way their houses look; she learns to love all aspects of whiteness, which are the stark contrasts of her own black reality. Thus, by learning to love something so different to her own life is where she also learns “all there was to hate.” She learns to hate herself and the way she looks, the way that she is treated by her partner, and the way her house looks, which can be seen when she says, “them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard.”

 Additionally, the movie theater is also where Polly experiences a pivotal moment of feeling true ugliness: her front tooth falls out. This moment is critical to her disrupted development, and the irony of her situation is what makes her feel so hopelessly ugly. Before her tooth falls out, Polly is growing more aware of her ugliness, but she still has hope, which can be seen when she tries to improve her appearances by doing things such as dressing up to the movie theater as one of her favorite white actresses who she regards as very beautiful. So, it is when she is feeling her best when she finally ends up realizing that she could never be beautiful with her tooth missing. Polly is finally defeated, which can be seen when she un-pins her hair because she realizes that her ugliness can never be fixed.

The love for whiteness that she learns from the movies then becomes ingrained into her life when she starts working for the Fishers. Here, she is able to be around everything she learned to love, which provides her with both pleasure and power. She is not only able to enjoy her hobby of rearranging rooms, but she is also able to gain the respect of white people when she is around the Fishers. However, this site of pleasure and power only applies when she is with the Fishers; there are no other people in her life who tell her that they would never get rid of her, even if they only refer to Polly as a servant they would never get rid of, rather than a friend or family member. It is still where Polly feels most beautiful and wanted, which are the feelings Cholly is no longer able to give her, both because of his abuse and the aforementioned hate that Polly learned in the movies. 

This hate, however, does not just translate to her relationship with Cholly – it also translates to her relationship with her own daughter. This can be seen by the contrast in behavior between Polly and the little Fisher girl and Polly and Pecola. When Claudia and her sister visit Pecola, Polly comforts the little Fisher girl rather than comforting Pecola, who is crying out in pain. She acts very motherly to the white girl, which is a characteristic that has never been observed by the reader before. To her own daughter, however, she yells at her and even physically handles her and tells her to leave the house, as if Pecola is an intruder rather than her own child. This contrast is further sharpened when it is revealed that this pie was actually baked by Pecola for the Fishers; clearly, Polly had never baked her own family this pie, which can be seen by Pecola’s initial curiosity towards it. Thus, to Polly, her own family, and even Polly herself, are too “ugly” to be deserving of these beautiful pies; only the beautiful white Fishers with the beautiful house are deserving of them.

quick review of last week’s asynchronous session

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I just finished reading all of the blog posts from last Thursday’s asynchronous session. All were good, reflecting as requested on either of the “flashback” narratives focused on Pauline or Cholly. All convincingly and in detailed fashion described the external event and internal dynamics that lead to Pecola’s destruction through intergenerational trauma.

I do want to push you as a group, however, to move beyond summary as your central critical mode to embrace a more analytical approach. In other words:

  • assume we readers know basics of plot and character: If your work starts by telling us “what happens,” you’re not starting in the right place. We know what happens; we need to know what it means.
  • be a little “weird”: for this exercise, most casual readers probably get that the trauma of the parents is visited on the child. So an argument that sticks to that basic point will be convincing but not very original. Try to find something in the narrative–perhaps the face that Morrison gives us “testimony” from Polly and Cholly for the first time, or the role of color in the text or the analogy between the house Polly cleans and a movie set–that casual readers will have missed.

There were lots of good posts. I want to call out two in particular that do a lot of what I’m asking for here. Nadine’s post explores the machinery that produces “beauty” and “ugliness” in the novel, including some images of Jean Harlow and 40s “bombshell” actresses. George’s explores the ironic role of “freedom” in Cholly’s formation.

Pauline’s Stunted Mindset

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Morrison’s portrayal of Pecola’s mother, Pauline, initially stirs hatred and resentment in readers. It’s only until Spring do we find she felt neglected and ugly her entire life and then finally rescued when Cholly approaches her. It’s only after economic trouble does all her sadness come back. She has always  identified with being ugly and only for a small part of her life she doesn’t. This time would be when her and Cholly first got married and were still in love.

“He came, strutting right out of a Kentucky sun on the hottest day of the year. He came big, he came strong, he came with yellow eyes, flaring nostrils, and he came with own music.” (114) 

 Other than that she spent most of her self-reflection based on her color, economic status, home-town, and deformities. She finds pleasure in tidying up and movies, but these only aid to her superficial ideas of love and self-hatred. She always found cleaning and organizing as a personal interest to be liked. I believe because she felt secluded and shoved aside, even in her own family did she try to “fix” things and use that to be accepted. She goes so far to make it her profession and get ahead in life. Her movies also enable what her true definition of love is. Media morphs  Pauline into believing that true love revolves on money and skin-deep beauty, both of which she thinks she does not have much of. It was of these false ideas did she even fall in love with Cholly, for if she truly saw their dysfunction, she would not have considered his, “[firm] but [gentle],”(118) touch so valuable.

In a way, Cholly was her way of escaping her own self-immolation and simultaneously, the same entity to put her right back where she was as a younger girl. Pauline uses the abuse for the power she feels as a victim or a martyr, by “holding Cholly as a model of sin and failure,” (126-27) as she stays with him. She likes to go to church and come home to an abusive husband to accredit herself for being a good person. She never truly grows out of the narratives she created for herself as a child. Narratives with shallow and distorted ideals as its foundations. She uses these to daydream, and recreates them even as an adult. The same desires she had as a child, and never fulfilled, she finds as an adult. When she starts working for a family with money, and clothes, and food does this hunger get slightly fed. Her work then became her life, because it was the only place she had meaning, other than feeling ugly. When she worked she was, “queen of canned vegetables,” with “power, praise, and luxury.” (128) And when her shift ended she went back home to the store-front and the family she in turn neglected, and abused.

The Making Of A Predator

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One of the most hard to read moments in the novel comes at the culmination of Cholly Breedlove’s story, which ends with Cholly raping his daughter, Pecola. This scene can feel like a slap of harsh reality to the face of the reader, because up until that point we are reading Cholly’s backstory, sympathizing with him, waiting for him to overcome the hardships of his environment, yet that ending shows he never truly overcomes any emotional hardship he faced. The ending shows that Cholly was completely destroyed by the hardships of his childhood. Instead of using them to develop into a better person, he is a victim of his own environment that turns into an abuser, a predator, which is unfortunately a reality of abuse and predatory behavior to this day.

Cholly’s story begins with the information that his mother left him out to die, and he was basically saved by his aunt. When he asks about his dad, his aunt gives him very little information, and his aunt dies when he is thirteen, leaving him virtually alone in the world with no real parental guidance. After the traumatizing interaction he has with the white boys that caught him having sex with Darlene and made fun of him, encouraging him to continue as they shined their flashlights at them, he runs away to find his father.  He travels a long way to find his father, just because he goes through this experience and has no one to turn to about it, he’s dwelling on his emotions and in that moment he needed a parent, he needed someone that he could turn to and talk about what happened to him. His father, though, throws money at him, and essentially makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with him. This cements the fact that Cholly had no real parental figure when he needed them the most, and it’s something that Morrison capitalizes on right before he rapes Pecola. She writes “had he not been alone since he was thirteen” then “he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children” (pg 160-161). This suggests he’s unable to be a healthy parental figure to his children, he has no idea how to view his children as his children, because of the absence of parental figures in his childhood.

While Cholly’s relationship to his children is a product of his own relationship with his parents, I think it’s also important to note that Cholly’s relationship to women is also explored and his distorted view that is explored in his backstory aids to his ultimate predatory view of his daughter. After the altercation with the white men, Cholly is embarrassed and places all the hate he has towards Darlene and not the white men. He blames Darlene because she is “the one who bore witness to his failure”, “the one who had created the situation”, and “the one he had not been able to protect” (pg. 151). Cholly is embarrassed for Darlene seeing how powerless he is against the white men and also for not being able to protect himself or Darlene from them. The idea that he would feel obligated to protect Darlene, places himself above her, because she is a woman, but the white men’s appearance is a reminder to him that just as the woman is below him, he is below them. He doesn’t want to fight his oppressor, and instead would rather blame the person beneath him, the person he can have power over, the person he can oppress. So Cholly’s view of women can be defined by his unresolved emotions of this encounter and his anger that is incorrectly places at Darlene, his anger that will continue to dwell in him and fuel a hatred towards women. He uses women as a scapegoat for his own oppression and ultimately, in turns, becomes their oppressor.