Variation From The Ugly To The Beautiful: A Critical View On Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Alice walker is one of the most prominent contemporary writers in America. Her masterpiece, The Color Purple, wins her Pulitzer Prize as the first black woman writer and the spread of her ideology of "womanism" as well. Presumably, the critical reception of the novel is too voluminous to summarize with any degree of accuracy. Based on the previous study, this paper will expound the eternal charm of the novel by analyzing the aesthetic perspective shifting from the ugly to the beautiful as symbolized by the patchwork quilt.Patchwork quilt is not only an important cultural and artistic metaphor, but also represents Walker's philosophical position as well as her aesthetic ideology and artistic style. Based on the close reading of The Color Purple and through multi-dimensional analysis and comparison, the writer of the paper finds that aesthetics of the ugly and aesthetics of the beautiful, the two completely different artistic perspectives, successively turns up and dominates the novel. In the first part of the novel, Walker introduces the perspectives on the aesthetics of the ugly. She presents incest, violence, depression, isolation and alienation and absurdity as well so as to explore the deep layer of the human nature and reflect the historical maladies; in the latter part, Walker mainly turns to the aesthetics of the beautiful and depicts beautiful women images and redeemed humanity and constructs the ideal living pattern. Just as the processed patchwork quilt in black culture finally represents wholeness and beauty, Walker's praise for the purity and beauty is her conscious artistic exploration to melt the ugly fragments of the black's living reality into a complete and beautiful whole, suggesting her deep humanistic concern for the blacks. In The Color Purple, the successive domination of the two aesthetic perspectives of the ugly and the beautiful rightly agrees with Walker's aesthetic philosophy of "womanism". The aesthetic pattern "from the ugly to the beautiful" no doubt highlights Walker's highly conscious aesthetic orientation. This thesis argues that the variation from the ugly to the beautiful is the soul of the creation of The Color Purple. It attempts to concretely and systematically understand and analyze The Color Purple from the perspectives of aesthetics mainly on the level of ethics and morals, and thus expounds and demonstrates the inseparable relationship between Walker's highly conscious aesthetic orientation and her "womanism" symbolized by the patchwork quilt in black culture.