Justine Absolu

December 4, 2006

Prof. LaTortue

Eng. 64.4 Black Women in Fiction

Gender Abuse. Where Did It Start? When Will It End?

Gender Abuse is not something that one faces alone. In fact, a whole group, or gender of people suffers gender abuse. Usually this group or gender is women and/or females and the abuse is almost always sexual. However gender abuse is not only experienced by females, men can be subjected to the same sex abuse as well. The violation is not always sexual, it’s psychological, verbal and emotional too. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and The Women Of Brewster Placeby: Gloria Naylor are two exceptional texts that portray, and capture gender abuse in it’s psychological, sexual, verbal and emotional content in both the female and male sex.

Pecola, from The Bluest Eye was definitely abused, and not just in one way. Pecola was psychologically abused, sexually abused, verbally and emotionally abused. Not only was she maltreated by society, (the people who were not obligated to like her or even notice her) but Pecola was misused by her family, her friends. The family and friends that were supposed to love her, correctly, and accept her blindly. The abuse did not begin “at an early age”. IT was always there. With verbal slurs like “…their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly…Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove-wore their ugliness, put it on…although it did not belong to them”. (Morrison 38) Pecola and her family were viewed as persistently ugly, determining-ly ugly, an ugliness given to them by society, not by nature. This was the psychological abuse.

However it didn’t stop there. There was the store clerk who just completely disregarded Pecola at the candy shop. Pecola “looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition-the glazed separateness.” (Morrison 48) So there’s emptiness, hollowness in Mr. Yacobowski’s eyes when he stares at Pecola. One can say that Pecola is invisible before him.

“The apple never falls too far from the tree” is normally a saying implied when comparing a parent and child relationship. Thus was the case in the Breedlove family. Cholly Breedlove (Pecola Breedlove’s father) too was mentally and emotionally violated when he was a child. “When he was still very young, Cholly had been surprised in some bushes by two white men while he was newly but earnestly engaged in eliciting sexual pleasure from a little country girl…They chuckled…. “Go on” they said… “And, nigger, make it good”’ (The Bluest Eye 42) An experience, such as losing one’s virginity, should only be experienced by the two people involved, in this case Cholly and the little country girl. But Cholly’s privacy was invaded, his manhood subjected, and his conscience permanently shattered, because those two white men violated his mentality and his integrity as Cholly was losing his virginity. Instead of hating the white men, Cholly hated the girl for having put him in the position to be violated in the first place, and Cholly grew as a man to hate his wife, Pauline Breedlove for the very same reason. Stated here, Cholly “…poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact”. (Morrison 42)

Cholly hated Pauline because she reminded him of his inadequacy to protect not only himself, but his girl-friend, against those white men in the bushes.

The same, male gender abuse continues in Gloria Naylor’s The Women Of Brewster Place. Ben was the drunk, old handy man who lived in the basement of a building on Brewster Place. Yet, Ben did not willingly move to Brewster Place, he was beaten into Brewster Place, by his wife’s verbal and psychosomatic cruelty, as well as his own guilt, expressed here in this dialogue,

“Nigger, what is wrong with you? …You better get some sense in you head ‘fore I knock some in you! …Ben stood with his hands in his pockets…balling his fists up in his overalls…

“It ain’t right, Elvira… She came to us, Elvira…She came to us a long time ago”.

“She came to us with a bunch of lies ‘bout Mr. Clyde ‘cause she’s too damn lazy to work. Why would a decent widow man want to mess with a little black nothin’ like her? No, anything to get out of work just like you”.

(The Women Of Brewster Place 152)

So, Ben was mentally and emotionally mistreated by his wife’s comments, but what caused Ben even more emotional and psychological abuse was his incompetence toward his own daughter. Ben did not and could not confront and punish Mr. Clyde (the white land owner) for sexually abusing his daughter, after she made it clear to Ben. Therefore, Ben could no longer endure seeing his daughter with a saddened mind and spirit, so he turned to alcohol to numb his senses and guilt and went to Brewster Place to continue numbing any emotion.