Autumn

I’m about sixty pages into my first novel at the culmination of the portion of the book called Autumn. The story is about a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove at the age of eleven. Set in 1941, the novel has a strong theme of racism, which the naïve girl does not yet comprehend. There have been three separate sections of the novel so far that do not have much relation to one another at first sight, but have a common theme. Pecola is introduced as a young girl that has been given up by her family because her parents can no longer care for her. With the new family she witnesses a mother who does nothing but complain and care little for her children. Running through a field with her two new friends Frieda and Claudia, Pecola notices that she is bleeding. After discovering that she is experiencing menstruation, Claudia tells her that she can now have a baby, but must have love to do so. In the second section, Pecola’s birth parents constantly fought to the point that their children hated them and wanted the father dead. The kids ran away and when the mother had had enough and the dad was in jail, it became time to let Pecola go for the time being. Another thing that should be noted about this section is how much the author mentions how ugly the family is and that Pecola wants blue eyes like Shirley Temple. The final section up to this point shows how the young girl has become friendly with three prostitutes who live nearby. Although many sources, like this one, say that Pecola is searching for beauty, I believe that she is really trying to find love, or even be loved. She has experienced a few different types up to this point and the driving thought right now is that she must be pretty to find love. In the article, Morrison expresses how Pecola is searching for inner beauty in a racist world that has not yet learned to accept varying colors of skin. I can see how this is evident in her prayers for blue eyes. She just wants to accepted and does not believe she can do so in her own skin. So while the sources say she wants to be pretty deep down, she unknowingly wants to experience the love of another person in accordance with self acceptance.