Pecola and Gwendolen, the protagonists in two novels, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Buchi Emecheta's The Family (also known as Gwendolen), are characters violated and oppressed in various ways by men and by the society and institutions which uphold the patriarchy. As black females, Gwendolen and Pecola are doubly oppressed--first, as blacks, and second as females. In addition, they suffer the oppression of two cultures, black and white. Morrison and Emecheta focus on poor, black female characters, which means characters who suffer on the three levels of socioeconomics, racism, and sexism.
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison explores the theme of male oppression of females in the contexts of racism, capitalism, and a world run by and for white people, especially white people with power and property. Black people, especially poor black people, and particularly poor black females, suffer in this racist, capitalist system. At the bottom of this system of oppression is the poor black female, personified by Pecola.
The rapes both characters endure are lifelong traumas, but "violation" comes in many forms. One of the most insidious and destructive results of this systematic violation is that Pecola comes to feel so negatively about herself that she sinks into a self-hatred which will finally drive her to silence. Here she thinks about the mere look of a man, a white shopkeeper, and the impact of a look he gives her, a look in which she feels invisible:
She looks up at him and sees the vacuum, . . . the total absence of human recognition. . . . This vacuum has an edge, . . . [a] distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. . . . Her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes (Morrison 48-49).
Pecola's own father violates and rejects her, and simultaneously uses her a scapeg...