The disruptions and shortcomings in Pauline’s upbringing, and indeed her whole life, reverberate outward through her coping mechanisms and the consequences they bring. Pauline herself considers “a rusty nail [that] punched clear through her foot during her second year of life” as the inciting incident to all of her miseries; the neglect that she endured as a result surely led to a repetition of the pleasure-denying pattern of her life (Morrison 110). The isolation she suffered throughout her childhood engendered an essential longing in her for human contact, which is most evident when she takes Ivy’s religious song for something much more secular. The conflation of a mysterious man, representing all of humanity, with the obvious analogue of Jesus partially explains her nearly immediate total love for Cholly, a savior in two senses; it is that sudden identification of him as not being that ideal “precious Lord” that worsens the effect when their relationship starts to sour (118).
The souring of Pauline and Cholly’s relationship is what really establishes the pattern of heartbreak in Pauline’s life, as it also again comes as a result of outer societal pressures bearing down on her. Although she “merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way,” rather than the trappings of luxury themselves, this desire edges out her desire to sustain her and Cholly’s relationship (118). This tension is somewhat eased, however, when Pauline chooses to stay with Cholly when her white employer conditions her job on leaving him. The white woman acts as a symbol of denial, with her claim that Pauline “owed her for uniforms” invoking both the forbidding world of fashion, and its related costs, as well as the omnipresent racism that comes through on a fiscal and social level (120). However, the resurgence of compromised happiness is around the corner again, as the nostalgic green memories of june bugs are confronted by “the peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs” (121-122).
Morrison characterizes “physical beauty” as “[p]robably [one of] the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought,” which tracks from how it initiates the most pronounced repetition of the joy-loss cycle of Pauline’s life (122). Her idea of beauty being “one she absorbed in full from the silver screen” of course meant a Eurocentric ideal of beauty, fully unchallenged by any alternate stream of culture (122). Her view of the day on which she lost her tooth as something she “don’t believe [she] ever did get over” is later sealed into place by the doctor’s statement to his peers that Black women giving birth feel “no pain… like horses” (123, 125). In her attempt to create a new life, for her an attempt to create beauty from a body where she sees none, she is reminded of the inherent cultural bias that puts a low ceiling on how beautiful she can be seen. The joy that her children could bring is curtailed by their blackness, so much so that the first impression we hear from her about Pecola is that she resembles “a black ball of hair” (124). Pauline’s existing dissatisfaction with her life is consistently magnified by learning about new expectations she did not know she was failing to meet, dooming the next generation raised by her to feel the ramifications of her emotional trauma.
