Much of All the Living is about desire, and what Aloma seems to look for most in life is beauty and imperfection. When she first meets Orren, it is noted that he was common-faced and not pretty, but she notices his crooked finger that was once broken and not properly set and she liked the ‘wicked’ way that he glanced at her sideways (16-17). Despite Orren’s common face, when he and Aloma veer off an icy road and almost drive into the creek, Aloma watches him work on the car and thinks of him as beautiful and permanent (23).
Aloma also finds beauty in music and in playing the piano, but both Orren and Bell don’t take care of the pianos in their homes, leaving them untuned and decaying. Aloma becomes upset by this and wonders “why everyone let the best things pass into disrepair” (136). In Orren’s case, he was genuinely surprised when Aloma mentioned that his piano was unplayable, but she had expected more from Bell and this new discovery dimmed her attraction to him.
Moreover, Aloma couldn’t find beauty in the land that Bell and Orren thought was pretty. When Bell took her to his favorite place and showed her the stretch of farmland and coaled ridges, “the prettiest thing [he] ever saw in [his] life,” she found it hard to stand (140). When Orren looks out onto his fields and the mountains, Aloma doesn’t see what he sees, but she knows it pleases him (197). Aloma just sees the land as the dirt under her feet and when Bell shows her his farm and how close it is to the ridge, she gets ‘earthsick’ (134).
Nevertheless, Aloma is still attracted to both men and we see in Orren’s interactions with the calf why she is with him in the first place. His smile when he feeds the calf, laughs loudly as he wrestles with it, and sings, finally showing some appreciation for music, which Aloma loves (183-184). The way he acts after the calf is born is the way that Aloma remembers him; she had mentioned that he had changed and wasn’t laughing the way he used to (33). At the end of the novel, his playfulness and cheerfulness lead to his asking her to marry him, something she had been wanting for some time.
While neither man may be the right match for Aloma, she was drawn to them because of her perception of beauty and love of imperfection. Although she didn’t understand the beauty they found in the land or why they left their pianos to rot, she was attracted to both men and develops a long-lasting relationship with Orren.
Beauty does play a large part in All the Living; however, as your post indicated, there is not much that actually happens with this theme. Aloma definitely has thoughts about beauty, but I think you grasped the disconnect when you wrote as your final sentence simply, “…she was attracted to both men and developed a long-lasting relationship with Orren.” That’s really all you can say about the theme of beauty, isn’t it? It’s a path that leads to nowhere; a thread cut off before we can see what it’s tied to. Aloma, as you described, finds beauty in some things and does not find beauty in others, but in the end she acts on none of this—things are broken off with Bell because Bell wanted them to be, and she is now married to Orren because Orren wanted them to be. Her view of beauty and what she finds beautiful (or not) in relation to each man seems of little to no consequence. So, while the motif is there, it provides no action or drive to the story. Perhaps that is because the character it is attached to also fails to be an active agent in the story as well, and we see the motif entirely through her.
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