Who is Pecola?

Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist of Morrison's novel, is the truest of all victims, for she is an innocent little girl born into a family that does not provide her with any support to endure society's racial prejudices. When Pecola' lives temporarily with the MacTeers after her family is evicted from their apartment, we learn of her obsession with white female beauty when she sits at the table with Claudia and Frieda to snack on milk and graham crackers. She continues to drink quart after quart of milk just to be able to use the cup with Shirley Temple's picture on it, almost as if she was trying to drink Shirley Temple's beauty. Much like her mother, Pecola longs to be beautiful, to have blue eyes specifically, because she thinks that fulfilling white society's idea of beauty will bring her the love she has never received. Pecola's life is consumed by this desire, and after she is raped by her father, she is so desperate that she goes to the town's pedophilic fortune teller, Soaphead Church, for help in obtaining blue eyes. Even the fraudulent Soaphead pities her and writes in a letter to God that he may not have been able to give Pecola blue eyes, but she thinks she has them and will, therefore, live "happily ever after." Soaphead is, of course, horribly mistaken, and Pecola descends into madness She continues believing that her eyes are bluer than any others, illustrating the danger for an unloved black girl who accepts white society's definition of beauty.