Yet after suffering the embarrassment of Mr. Yacobowski's vacant, shame inducing stare the faint glimmer of happiness she experienced in seeing the dandelion was destroyed. When she left and passed the dandelions again she thought, "They are ugly. They are weeds" (Morrison, 50). She had transferred society's dislike of her to the dandelions and it was not until the end of the novel that Morrison fully explained these metaphors. Through an adult Claudia, Morrison says, "I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we say that the victim had no right to live" (Morrison, 206). Even nature retained the right to dictate which seeds it would bear to fruition and those that it would reject. Pecola was one of these "certain seeds" that never had a chance to grow and succeed because she lived in an environment that rejected her, one that would not and maybe could not have nurtured her. .

             Morrison did not stop at the forces of nature, but she also placed a responsibility for this social dilemma on an ambiguous god and/or the church. This omniscient being, the creator of all things, both noble and corrupt, and his messengers had in a sense sanctioned the unfavorable in order to validate the hatred and scorn of the "righteous." In her introduction to the Breedlove family, Morrison impugned the Breedlove's acceptance of ugliness to a higher power saying, "It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear" (Morrison, 39). This divine being not only created ugliness for them but it also ambiguously created an environment that rejected and scorned this ugliness. In her youth Pauline struggled with the same type of ambiguity and contradiction in trying to "hold her mind on the wages of sin," while "her body trembled for redemption, salvation and a mysterious rebirth that would simply happen, with no effort on her part" (Morrison, 113).