Pauline loses a front tooth at the movies

Pauline loses a front tooth at the movies when a bite of candy pulls it from her mouth. The accident interrupts her attempt to resemble Jean Harlow and turns a small, material mishap into a lasting rupture in her sense of beauty: she gives up the imitation, describes herself as settling into ugliness, and says she never got over losing the tooth. The scene links the injury to the movies’ power over her desires and to the renewed fighting in her marriage to Cholly.

The Moviegoing Ideal

Pauline’s recollection places the tooth’s loss within a longer education in moviegoing. In the dark, she could move into pictures of white men caring for their women, who lived in large, clean houses with bathtubs in the same room as the toilet. The films gave her pleasure, but their idealized domestic world made returning home difficult and made looking at Cholly difficult too. The theater offered not just entertainment but a standard against which she measured beauty, romance, and ordinary life.

That standard extended beyond Pauline’s private viewing. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, and window signs all seemed to agree that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. The surrounding culture made the ideal appear universal, even though its features were white. Pauline’s later effort to reproduce a movie star’s appearance belongs to this wider pressure: the images she watched supplied a scale of beauty she came to apply to faces and to herself.

Imitation and the Accident

On one visit to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, Pauline arranged her hair as she had seen Harlow’s in a magazine: parted to the side, with a little curl on her forehead. She thought it looked just like the star’s, though she qualified the resemblance as almost exact. The careful styling let her enter the fantasy without entirely confusing imitation with identity; she went to the movie and enjoyed herself.

During the show, Pauline got up to buy candy, returned to her seat, and took a large bite. The candy pulled a tooth out of her mouth. She emphasizes that her teeth had been good, with none rotten, so the loss could not be explained as the expected failure of an already damaged tooth. Its suddenness gives the episode its force: the bodily accident breaks into a performance of glamour at the moment Pauline is trying to make the screen image her own.

The injury occurred while Pauline was five months pregnant. That circumstance brings the star imitation into sharp contrast with her actual life: she was not simply arranging a fashionable curl but living through pregnancy as the front tooth vanished. She says she could have cried and remembers the loss as a decisive blow. The scene does not make the tooth a literal cause of every later difficulty; it does show how a physical mishap becomes bound up with her sense of herself and with the collapse of the pleasure she had found in looking like Harlow.

Aftermath and Marital Conflict

Pauline marks the loss as a turning point. She says that everything went wrong after it and that she seemed to stop caring. She let her hair grow back, plaited it, and settled into what she calls being ugly. The contrast with the earlier effort is stark: first the carefully copied part and forehead curl, then the abandonment of the style and a self-description organized around ugliness. Yet she continued going to the pictures, even after the imitation had become a source of disappointment rather than uncomplicated pleasure.

The loss also enters Pauline’s conflict with Cholly. She recalls wanting her tooth back; Cholly made fun of her, and they began fighting again. Pauline says she tried to kill him, while he did not hit her too hard, she guesses because she was pregnant. The account connects bodily vulnerability, mockery, and marital violence without presenting the tooth itself as the origin of their troubled relationship. Instead, the accident becomes one remembered point at which her appearance, her disappointment, and the couple’s renewed fighting converge.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The episode shows how an ideal learned from popular images can shape experience beyond the theater. Pauline’s hairstyle imitates a magazine image of Jean Harlow, while the films’ white households and romantic care make home feel harder to face. The tooth’s abrupt removal exposes the fragility of the desired resemblance: a bodily event that cannot be edited out of the image interrupts the effort to appear as the star.

Pauline’s recollection also complicates any simple account of beauty as a matter of appearance alone. The tooth is a concrete loss, but its significance grows through what follows: she remembers it as something she never recovered from, changes how she wears her hair, describes herself as ugly, and recalls mockery and renewed fighting with Cholly. The movie theater scene therefore links the pressure of white beauty ideals to intimate consequences without suggesting that imitation alone explains Pauline’s life. It is a vivid instance of how images that promise pleasure can sharpen dissatisfaction when the viewer returns to a world the screen has taught her to judge.