way she reacts to her children and to her husband. Pauline loved the outdoors and she loved to arrange and to clean without interruption. She had fantasies of what the ideal man would be like -- what her man should be like. They were fantasies about love. That is why when she met Cholly Breedlove, she felt that love had finally come to her. She decided to move up North to Lorain, Ohio where her and Cholly could begin a family. To make a long story short, she began to see her dreams of love shatter. Her ideal household escaped from her and she began to realize that she and her family were "ugly". She even says that when Pecola was born, her "eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knew she was ugly." (Pg. 276) She began to hold this bitterness until she found an avenue. An avenue that allowed her to express her hidden desires now. And that avenue was when she began working for the white family. She needed to find beauty in something, and so she found beauty in her cleanliness and that is what this white family offered to her. They gave her power, praise and luxury. She loved hearing them say that they would never let her go she was able to keep order and she had found her own beauty. (Pg. 128) That is why she began to ignore her own family. Her past characteristics had enforced themselves in the present, not allowing her to understand or even see the pain of her children or that of her husband. So when Pecola drops the pie juice on the floor in that house her mother gets so upset. How dare Pecola invade on her beauty! Cholly Breedlove is another clear example of a character whose past creates his present. He is abandoned by his mother, rejected by his Father, and he grows up with his aunt and he despises the experience. He initially finds love and sanctity in the arms of Pauline Breedlove but that was only for a splinter of a moment, because the incidents in his past create this monster ...
