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.