Deprived of love from an early age and growing up in an abusive home environment, Pecola retreats into a fantasy world in which she is universally admired for her blue-eyed beauty. To some extent, Morrison presents Pecola as a metaphor for what she sees as the self-loathing of too many African Americans, unable to accept themselves and their racial identity. The absence of love that mars Pecola's upbringing mirrors a lack of self-love among African Americans.
As such, Pecola is forced to seek love elsewhere, namely in white society with its own standards of beauty. She appropriates those standards as her own, enabling her to feel, for the first time in her short life, that she actually belongs somewhere, that she will be loved, valued, and accepted. It's all a complete fantasy, of course, a very sad and tragic one at that, but given Pecola's dysfunctional upbringing, perhaps an inevitable one.
Pecola Breedlove is the central character in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. The lack of love in Pecola’s life began when she was born. Her father, Cholly Breedlove, is an angry man who feels trapped in his marriage and fights constantly with his wife, Pecola’s mother, Pauline. He goes so far as to attempt to burn down his family’s home, which lands Pecola in a foster home. Her mother grew up believing she is ugly and remains distant.
Pecola is continuously ridiculed by her classmates, other people in the town, and other children who pretend to befriend her, only to later make fun of her. Her parents show her no love, and even the two girls who live in the house Pecola is being fostered in keep their distance from her. This constant ridicule and isolation leads to Pecola wishing for blue eyes in the belief that this will make her beautiful. Pecola wants to literally change her appearance in order to fit in and feel accepted within her community, and she wants it so badly that after her father rapes her a second time, she descends into madness and believes she has the bluest eyes.
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