1. Sum up Chapter 6 in your own words and describe the key events in this chapter briefly.
– It’s Spring, Claudia says this season is like being whipped with a switch instead of a strap.
– Claudia is in an empty place alone then goes home, finds her mother singing and acting weird, doing the same thing twice. Frieda is crying because Henry touched Frieda’s breasts. Frieda told her parents what had happened, but Henry was gone. Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer attacked him, when he came back.
– A neighbour gave Mr. MacTeer a gun. He shot at Henry and he ran away. Rosemary came and told Frieda that her father would go to jail, and Frieda hit her. Then another neighbor, Miss Dunion, came in and suggested that they take Frieda to the doctor because she might be ”ruined”.
– Frieda and Claudia don’t know what “ruined” means and worry that Frieda will become fat like the Maginot Line. They say that China and Poland are “ruined” as well but think that they are not fat because they drink whiskey.
– Frieda and Claudia decide to ask Pecola to get whisky from her father in order to keep Frieda from getting fat. They go to Pecola’s house, but no one is home. The Maginot Line is upstairs on the porch drinking root beer, she invites the girls upstairs for a soda, but Frieda tells her that they are not allowed to visit her because she is “ruined.” The Maginot Line throws the root-beer bottle at the girls in anger, but then she laughs.
– Frieda and Claudia walk to the lakefront houses, they find Pecola at the back of one of the prettiest houses. She is surprised to see them, and they ask her why she is not afraid of the Maginot Line. Pecola is confused and talks about how nice Miss Maginot Line and her friends are. The inside of the house is beautiful, and a small white girl comes in and asks for “Polly.” Claudia is furious that the child calls Mrs. Breedlove by this name because even Pecola calls her mother “Mrs. Breedlove.” From upstairs, the little girl calls for Polly, and Pecola accidentally pulls a freshly baked berry cobbler off the counter. The cobbler splatters on the floor and burns her, and her mother comes in and beats her. Furious, Mrs. Breedlove sends the girls away and comforts the little white girl, who has begun to cry.
2. Discuss and analyse the incident with Henry.
Frieda is crying because Henry touched her breasts. Frieda told her parents what had happened, but Henry was gone. Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer attacked him, when he came back. A neighbour gave Mr. MacTeer a gun. He shot at Henry and he ran away. Rosemary came and told Frieda that her father would go to jail, and Frieda hit her. Then another neighbor, Miss Dunion, came in and suggested that they take Frieda to the doctor because she might be ”ruined”. Frieda and Claudia don’t know what “ruined” means and worry that Frieda will become fat like the Maginot Line. They say that China and Poland are “ruined” as well but think that they are not fat because they drink whiskey.
3. Sum up chapter 7 in your own words and describe the key events in this chapter briefly.
– Mrs. Breedlove’s story, grows up in Alabama as Pauline Williams, and when she is two years old, she impales her foot on a nail, afterward, she walks with a slight limp, and she believes that this accident made her destiny. During her childhood, she is isolated from other family members, and therefore cultivates her own pleasures. She enjoys arranging things, creating order and being perfect. Her family moves to Kentucky, Pauline is put in charge of caring for the house and her two younger siblings, Chicken and Pie. She enjoys this life, but once she turns fifteen, she becomes restless and she begins to dream of a stranger; a man, or a god who will take her away with him.
– stranger arrives, pauline is standing in the garden and hears a young man whistling. Suddenly she feels him tickling her bad foot and turns to meet the gaze of Cholly Breedlove. They fall in love, and he is nice to here. They decide to marry and move up north to Lorain, Ohio, where there are more jobs. Then life becomes more difficult. Pauline feels lonely and isolated, and she is surprised by how unfriendly the other women are. They are amused by her country ways. She begins to long for clothes that will make the women look at her differently, and she and Cholly begin to argue about money. Cholly’s drinking becomes a problem.
– Pauline gets her first job as a housekeeper in a white woman’s house. The white woman is well-off but petty and foolish. Her family has dirty habits. One day, Cholly shows up at the woman’s house drunk and demands money, and Pauline leaves her job. The woman will not give her the job back or the rest of her pay unless Pauline leaves Cholly. Pauline refuses and is left without money for cooking gas.
– Pauline realizes she is pregnant. Cholly is happy and their marriage improves, but Pauline is still lonely in their apartment. She takes refuge in the movies and develops destructive ideas about physical beauty and romantic love. She tries to make herself look like a movie star, but then while chewing candy at a movie, she loses one of her front teeth. From then on, she feels ugly, and she and Cholly begin to fight again. Her first baby fails to fill the hole in her life. She talks to her second baby in the womb, vowing to love her no matter what. When she gives birth in the hospital, a doctor tells a group of students that black women do not feel pain while giving birth; they are “just like horses.” Despite this insult, Pauline is pleased with her new baby, Pecola, but knows the baby is ugly.
– Pauline then takes on her identity as martyr. She joins the church and becomes the family breadwinner, securing a job with the Fishers, a wealthy family who appreciate her good work. She loves her work because it allows her to make things beautiful and orderly. She begins to neglect her own house and family. At times, she remembers the good times with Cholly, when their lovemaking turned everything into rainbows. Now their lovemaking occurs while he is drunk and she is half-asleep.
4. Look further into how this chapter is narrated.
4.morrison shifts perspectives so the readers to use different ways of judging characters. The perspective of Pecola’s mother in the previous chapter was that she behaved terribly towards her daughter but in this chapter we get to know why she did that. Here our perception changes and we get to know that things got like this because of her complicated past.
Pauline narrated this chapter herself so and it gets more personal.
Pauline creates narratives to explain her life.
Morrison uses color to emphasize the beauty of Pauline and Cholly’s relationship. Pauline describes the green flash of the june bugs that she misses from her hometown. When she falls in love with Cholly, this green imagery merges with a memory of having her hips stained purple while picking berries and the yellow of her mother’s lemonade. When she remembers her and Cholly’s lovemaking, these colors reappear and form a rainbow. This repetition gives a lyricism to Pauline’s memories.
5. Give your own account about how Cholly Breedloves story after reading chapter 8.
– Cholly’s point of view in this chapter. Understanding how it was possible for Cholly to commit incest does not change our knowledge that he has caused tremendous suffering to his daughter but does change the how we look at him. Cholly’s violence is not frightening because it is senseless; it is frightening because it makes all too much sense, given the kind of life he has lived. Knowing Cholly’s story may not change the horror of what he does, but it does make his action more bearable to us.
– We sympathize with Cholly not only because he has suffered abandonment, sexual humiliation, and racism, but because there was once real beauty and joy in his life. We are given a long description about the breaking and eating of the watermelon, as if it were “[t]he nasty-sweet guts of the earth.” Cholly’s childlike joy in sharing the heart of the watermelon with Blue Jack is vividly rendered.
6. Discuss the effect Cholly’s account of the rape has for the story – for the reader’s perception and interpretation of the story?
7. Sum up chapter 9 in your own words and describe the key events in this chapter briefly.
-Story Soaphead Church “Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams” in Lorain’s black community. A light-skinned West Indian, raised in a family proud of its mixed blood. His family has always been academically and politically ambitious, and always corrupt. Family members have always tried to marry other light-skinned people, and, if unable to do so, they have married one another. Soaphead Church’s father was a sadistic schoolmaster and his half-Chinese mother died soon after he was born. Born Elihue Micah Whitcomb, Soaphead Church soon learned the art of self-deception and developed a fascination and revulsion for dirt and decay.
Soaphead married a woman named Velma, but she left him two months afterward. Next, he pursued the ministry but soon discovered that the profession was not right for him. He studied psychiatry and other social sciences, took different jobs, and finally came to Lorain. He rents a back room from an elderly lady named Bertha Reese, and his only hardship is her old dog, Bob, which disgusts him with its runny eyes. Soaphead buys poison to kill the dog but is too repulsed to go near it.
At this point, Pecola comes to ask him to give her blue eyes. He is touched by this request—his own attraction to whiteness makes it easily comprehensible. He knows he cannot help her, but he tells her to give meat—which he has secretly poisoned—to the dog. He tells her that if the dog reacts, her wish will be granted. The dog convulses and dies, and Pecola runs away.
Soaphead then writes a rambling and incoherent letter to God in which we learn more about his understanding of his life. He still feels rejected by Velma, who left him “the way people leave a hotel room.” He describes his love for the newly budding breasts of young girls (we have already been told that he is a pedophile). He remembers two girls, Doreen and Sugar Babe, who let him touch them in exchange for money and sweets. He tells God that he did not touch Pecola and brags that he has rivaled God by granting her wish—she will not literally have blue eyes, but she will believe she does. Soaphead closes his letter and thinks lovingly about all the miscellaneous objects he has collected. He is asleep when his landlord discovers her dead dog.
8. Soaphead is made into a parody not only to make obvious to us that he is a bad person. Through his character, Morrison also wishes to critique yet another deceptive method of dealing with racial self-hatred. While education may seem to be an escape, the Western education that Soaphead’s family has received reinforces and even exaggerates their self-denial and perversity. While religion may be an escape, it also promotes self-denial and encourages a dangerous, delusional self-righteousness. True freedom and happiness, Morrison suggests, come from a feeling of connectedness with one’s own body, not a denial of it.