Stepping Into Perfect Harmony

Alice Walker is one of the leaders in the contemporary black American literary circle. Her works deeply reflects black people’s state of existence, which evokes strong social sensation. What’s more, the novel The Color Purple wins her three big prizes since its publication, which arouses great interest of critics at home and abroad. They try to study this novel in various aspects, and analyze how black people especially black women shatter double shackles and step into perfect, independent and happy life.This paper aims to analyze The Color Purple under the perspective of queer theory and base on the framework of black people’s unique culture "quilting":broken---sew up---perfect. This paper is divided into four chapters. Chapter one is introduction, which gives us some information about the author, The Color Purple, and the affinity of queer theory with Walker’s womanism. It also states the purpose and practical meaning of this paper. Chapter two and Chapter three are main bodies of the paper. Chapter two aims to describe black people’s broken state of existence just as the raw materials of quilts are a pile of fragments, and analyze the reasons which lead to this situation. It will describe black women’s miserable state of existence under double shackles as well as black men’s because black men are victims of patriarchy and racialism too. Chapter three focuses on methods to sew up the broken state of existence. Characters in The Color Purple try their best to sew up the broken state of existence in order to step into perfect and harmonious state of existence. Lesbian love between Celie and Shug, sisterhood among black sisters, breaking gender stereotype and anti-racialism are their methods to sew up broken state of existence. Chapter four comes to conclusion.The significance of the paper not only rests in the combination of queer theory and The Color Purple, but also in the practical inspiration to people. The paper aims to wake up people to change their traditional consciousness, thus to build perfect and harmonious state of existence energetically.