Ugliness has been the part of what matters in womanhood. ‘Inferior’ to male-being, women in general in the story suffered from discrimination and biased perspective with few exceptions. Needless to say that Celie’s step father attaches a stigma around her of ‘being spoiled’ and ‘telling lies’ to conceal his own crime. Yet even in this discrimination towards woman, what constructs Celie inferior to other black women characters is that she is ugly. Her step father adds: “She ugly. [He say.] But she ain’t no stranger to hard work.” This clearly shows how he can simply ‘say’ and she can be defined according to men’s taste. This single fact justifies the whole situation from being sold out as a wife (which is almost a slave) to being sexually and physically harassed by her husband. Celie recognizes this fact, and shows self-abandonment kind of behavior and comments. First time when she looks into the picture of Shug Avery, she says that Shug is ten thousand times prettier than herself. Internalizing the fact that she is ‘womankind who can be beaten,’ she does not dare to fight for herself since she knows that there is nowhere she can go.
It becomes clearer that how woman looks determines her identity and the social status as well. Like binary opposition, there in the story exist only two types of female—pretty or ugly (whether she is loved or not loved by men). Especially the role of Shug contrasts to Celie extremely. She is beautiful, Albert (Celie’s husband) has loved her from the first to the end, and Celie admires her body when she gives bath. Since Shug knows this fact well, she can choose men and even manage them. Different from Celie, she has somewhere to go. It is interesting to note that this ‘classification’ works among women too. At the first meeting scene of Shug and Celie, it is described: “She (Shug) looked me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain’t believed it.” Even from the woman, ugliness is despised, justifies oppression. It happens since under the patriarchal system, even if there are women who can exercise their power of being beautiful, women have to compete for men. Ugliness is weak position for men of course, but we can easily see money covers it up for him.
However, what it means to be ugly? Could ugliness be one of the identifiers or social status? To answer those questions, Walker develops the relationship between two women characters. Celie, who has a trauma from being sexually harassed by men, shows preference to woman. She falls in love with Shug and innocently expresses her feeling that “only time I feel something stirring down there is when I think bout Shug.” For Shug’s part, she seems to think Celie as her maid and look down on her as being ugly, but when she was told by Celie that Celie is beaten by Albert when Shug is away for the first time, she starts to sympathize for her. She determines to keep Celie from violence and even teaches her to look into and explore her pussy. This scene implies a sense of solidarity as being woman. What is impressive is that when both women are looking into Celie’s body, Shug comments that Celie looks so cute too (though she laughs a bit). In another scene when Celie confesses the rape from her daddy and cries, saying that nobody ever loved her, Shug says ‘I love you.’ Then they kiss and touch each other. Now, Celie’s ugliness disappears. Ugliness could be another word for difference. Like Celie overcoming other biased categories—being woman, black and poor—and being herself (Let’s hear Celie’s voice: “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook…But I’m here.”), ugliness weighs light in her identity. There are so many differences in human look and the term ugliness can be applied to nothing. Old fashioned it could be, but love helped overcome this strange name tag.
“Sofia and Shug not like men, he say, but they not like women either.” “You mean they not like you or me.” At the end of the Color Purple, after the reconcilement between Celie and Albert, they chat, sew and smoke together in front of Celie’s house. This brilliant Celie’s answer contains the whole concept of this book—there are no classifications with names but just differences. In addition, ‘pants’ which Celie makes firstly for Shug and then develops to her own business means a lot in that pants has to be comfortable according to one’s preferences and physical appearances regardless of gender, ethnicity and economical status. Yet, returning to the reality, even if we define our society as postmodern which diversity is regarded as the core concept, we still witness discriminations and attaching stigma of being ‘ugly.’ Giving tolerance to many other differences, it seems that ugliness is easily neglected. Many people (and most of them are still women!) are obsessed to plastic surgery to ‘overcome’ the identity and social status of ugliness. However, at the same time, I found the potential of ugliness—like the term ‘queerness’—as a disturbing concept. The existence of ‘World Association of Ugly People’—which popped up when I typed ‘ugliness’ in Wikipedia—does not have to be a mere joke, but could be another alternative encouragement and perspective to see our society.
2008-05-10