In her moments of racial "misrecognition" or Lacanian "meconnaisance," carefully

prepared and staged by the dominant white culture, Pauline temporarily becomes the

image she desires by identifying with white film stars. As the mirrored imago in Lacan's

mirror stage gathers the infants' fragmented body image into an integrated form,

providing an illusionary sense of autonomy and power,106 so do the images of white stars

on the silver screen transform Pauline's black body with a deformed foot into a perfect

personification of white beauty while she immerses herself in the movies and identifies

herself with the image she sees. Consequently, as the subject emerges from the mirror

stage with an alienating, illusionary identity, Pauline also ultimately emerges from her

education in the movies with a fractured psyche and a confused racial identity.

Examining frequent cultural phenomena of racial misrecognition whereby "an

unconscious that seems to be 'white' has displaced a conscious black identity," David

Marriott asks, "If the act of identification produces a fractured doubling of self, how can

we distinguish what is interposed from what is properly desired?"107 Pauline is like those

blacks in Marriott's analysis who "cannot love themselves as black but are made to hate

themselves as white."108 Pauline, in indulging in and desiring the glamour of the white

world, cultivates self-loathing. So when her front tooth falls out, crushing her fantasy of

emulating and thus becoming the white beauty, she also falls out of her illusionary world

and leaves the theater with complete resignation: "Look like I just didn't care no more

after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly" (123).

 For Pauline, her race fails to provide her with mirroring and idealizing selfobject

functions and her affiliation with the white Fisher family offers a good opportunity to

build substitute selfobject fantasies as another persona, "Polly," the "ideal servant." Her