ue eyes is the result of images from the white culture, as well as from the hatred and rejection she suffers at the hands of both whites and other blacks with lighter skin. It also reflects the analysis of feminist Bell Hooks: "Increasingly, young black people are encouraged by the dominant culture (and by those black people who internalize the values of this hegemony) to believe that assimilation is the only possible way to survive, to succeed" (Hooks 76-77).
What Pecola wants is, after all, the complete assimilation of becoming white. However, this is only half of the story with respect to Pecola's blackness. As we read in Keith Byerman's essay, Pecola is reviled by others, including her own family and her own race, but she also plays a crucial role in the creation of the identities of those who despise her:
In the larger community, . . . white storekeepers, light-skinned children, and black middle-class adults all see this black child as a piece of filth repugnant yet necessary to their own senses of cleanliness (Byerman 59).
In other words, Pecola is used by those around her---whites and lighter-skinned blacks---to make themselves feel better, superior. Morrison shows that even Pecola's mother and father reject her and at the same time use her as a scapegoat for their deep rage against the prejudiced society which hates, fears and torments them.
Morrison does not merely show that whites doubly judge Pecola as a black female, but also that lighter-skinned blacks, such as her self-hating father, judge her perhaps even more harshly. Just as white society torments Cholly, her father, so does he torment and finally rape her. She is darker, weaker than him, and her gender deepens that weakness, allowing him to victimize her just as he has been victimized.
Pecola has been raised in a society in which females are subm
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