Irony In Toni Morrison's Pecola

Dolls typically socialize young girls to be women and to be mothers, which alludes to the irony of Pecola who gives birth to her father’s child. Just like how everyone else around her treats her, Pecola is despised within her own home. Her parents suffer from the belief that they themselves are unworthy of love and as a result, their children have to bear with that self-hatred, especially Pecola. Pauline, Pecolas’s mother, is a domestic servant who believes in the superiority of white people including her employer and their children. But failing to love herself and who she is, Pauline fails to love her own child Pecola. Pecola’s father, Cholly, was abandoned as a child by his mother which is where his issues with women alone begin. As a teenager Cholly lost his virginity and was humiliated by two white men while in the midst of it.

Because he grew up without a mother, Cholly does not know how to love the women in his life and as an attempt to show love, he rapes and impregnates Pecola. The parents are to carry the blame of their daughters of sexual coming-of-age. Freida’s experience of sex is unlike Pecola’s not because she is raped but that her parents come to her rescue, protecting her for things she is not ready for unlike Cholly who brings harm to his daughter. Cholly’s rape of his own daughter is just a repeat of the sexual humiliation that he experienced when he was younger. The sexual violence that appears in the novel by Morrison hints that racism is just one of the many struggles black girls deal with. If authors are writing about sex, they really mean something else (Foster