If Morrison seems to focus on female self-hatred in Pecola, it is clear that feelings of self-hatred are not limited to black girls alone. Boys receive just as much negative feedback from the white community, but they are far more likely to direct their emotions and retaliation outward, inflicting pain on others before the pain turns inward and destroys them. Cholly and Junior are prime examples.
After the publication of The Bluest Eye, Morrison explained that she was trying to show the nature and relationship between parental love and violence. One of the novel's themes is that parents, black parents in this case, do violence to their children every day — if only by forcing them to judge themselves by white standards. The topic of child abuse, once a socially unmentionable subject, remained unaddressed far too long even though everyone knew about it. Mr. Henry's touching Frieda's breasts is a subtle preparation, or foreshadowing, of Cholly Breedlove's rape of Pecola. When Cholly rapes Pecola, it is a physical manifestation of the social, psychological, and personal violence that has raped Cholly for years. His name is "Breedlove," but he is incapable of loving; he is only able to perform the act of breeding. Because he has been so depreciated by white society, he is reduced to breeding with his own daughter, a union so debased that it produces a stillborn child, one who cannot survive for even an hour in this world where self-hatred breeds still more self-hatred.
