Heart Wrenching Realities-both terrifying and beautiful

“Public fact becomes private reality, and the seasons of a Midwestern town become the Moirai of our small lives”(188).

    I find this passage and the story of the storm previous to this quote to be quite interesting and complex.  The storm of 1929, which was a public fact, is something that can be perceived differently based on the individual’s “private reality”.  Claudia mixes up a summer storm with the tornado her mother told her about, revealing Claudia’s admiration of her mother.  Claudia describes her mother as “...strong, smiling, and relaxed while the whole the world falls down...”(187).  In the midst of a tornado, even as she is getting pulled up into a spiral of chaos, Claudia’s mother is ironically strong and happy.  Within the terrifying storm of the loss of innocence, Claudia’s mother provides stability to Claudia.  The novel’s foundation is set on trying to find truths in a world that includes frightening realities and spiraling storms of disbelief and disturbance.  The first chapter starts out with, “Nuns go by as quiet as lust…”(9), paradoxically pointing out the dysfunctional nature society has thrust upon them.  Another way of interpreting the idea of a “public fact” and a “private reality” contrasts the perceptions of Pecola’s baby.  Claudia and Frieda hear only horrible things about the painfully ugly features the baby is sure to have if it lives.  The townspeople look only at the baby with disgust because of where it came from, a disturbing relationship between a father and his daughter.  Although Claudia and Frieda hear the story an abundance of times, they think of what happened in their own terms.  Since they don’t know how babies are made, of course they don’t find the origins of the baby to be anything but beautiful which is how they think the baby will turn out, revealing their innocence, but also their wisdom.  Claudia looks past the white standards of beauty and knows she would love the baby even more than she hated Shirley Temple, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing.