reasons why they treat Pecola the way they treat her. Let's start off with the novel's narrator, Claudia and her older sister Frieda. The suggestion that Toni Morrison makes is that Frieda and Claudia come from a loving home. This allows them to be clear minded and treat Pecola as a friend rather than the subject of mockery the way most of the society treated her. It also allowed them to view society critically and not allow it to place stereotypes upon them, especially in the case of Claudia who was not going to allow herself to be brainwashed through societal conceptions of ugliness and beauty. She looks at a white doll given to her that is supposed to be beautiful and cute, an image not unlike that of Shirley Temple. She rejects this concept and she hates the doll. Not because she is bitter or that she thinks the doll is prettier than she is, but that she didn't think of it as pretty at all. And so she destroys the doll as society, given the chance, might destroy her. Then of course, are the children that haunt and taunt Pecola, Maureen Peal and the other boys who taunted her because they were unsure about their own past. And Junior whose mother, Geraldine, had lived her life a certain way took her lessons from society and refused to give her own son the chance to make decisions on his own. She enforced her past feelings about certain black people versus niggers (so she calls them) upon her son. She did not know how to feel love and so she did not know how to give it, even to her son. This in turn became Junior's reality. He wanted to play with the other black boys; he wanted attention from his mother. And because he could not get it, it turned him into the person his mother never wanted him to become -- a juvenile. That is why he taunts and ridicules Pecola. But Toni just doesn't leave these characters to be the only ones; she goes on to explain the nature of Mrs. Pauline Breedlove's past. A past which affects the ...
