Dream Of Dreams

From its nascent utilitarian beginnings, a patchwork quilt has evolved into an object of aesthetic desire, and most recently it has begun to enjoy an iconic status. No longer merely a bedwarmer or an art object, the quilt now is increasingly connected to the community's own spiritual self-understanding and has become a striking cultural text, presenting America's most knowable representation of the form and function of collective relationships. In fact, the patchwork quilt"has come to replace the melting-pot as the cultural metaphor of American cultural identity, and become a new metaphor of national identity". It acknowledges heterogeneity, multiplicity, and incorporates contemporary concerns for gender, race, and class. Not only does it transform and enrich our notions of the agents, actions, purposes, and individual creativity, but also highlight the relationship of form to idea, of medium to meaning, of fragments to fusion.As the only African-American female Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison's novels have aroused numerous scholarly works and critical essays. However, no one has ever tried to explore systematically the functions and meanings of quilting aesthetics embedded in these novels except for a few articles briefly mentioning the quilt image in her Beloved. This fact inspires us to start sewing our critical quilt—a study of Morrison's artistic appeal stitched in her literary text.As our reading goes deeper into the patchwork quilt, we also realize that the pattern of life is like a patchwork quilt, the world is like a patchwork quilt, the earth, and the universe…. Writing that aims to reflect our life and the world is like patchwork quiltmaking on every level. The resemblances between the patchwork technique of joining miscellaneous fabric pieces and the novel's ability to shape details from everyday life into a meaningful pattern, is also obvious. Patchwork quilts and novels share the common thread: putting together pieces and working towards a whole.Drawing on quilting aesthetics both metaphorically and methodologically, we...