“Beauty and ugliness. Moments of shame and moments of grace. These things are around us all the time, but it takes an artist to force us to see them.” How would I write an essay explaining Patrick White’s handling of these themes—beauty, ugliness, shame and grace—in The Aunt’s Story?

The Aunt's Story follows the journey of Theodora Goodman—physically, through Australia, Europe, and the United States—and internally, as she goes through transformations brought about by her insights into the kind of people and environment she finds herself in. The themes of ugliness and beauty, shame and grace, are at the heart of Patrick White's work, mainly in Theodora, who sees things through an artist's lens. She does not subscribe to the societal mold of what it means to be a woman in her time, as evidenced by her interest in hunting. She is not one to wince at the unsavory details of life. For instance, when Mrs. Goodman forbids her to touch the roses, she goes on anyway and inspects them. She sees one with a grub stirring underneath its petals, and immediately the fair Fanny calls it a horrid thing. As for Theodora, who proceeds to open its petals to the light,

[S]he could not condemn her pale and touching grub. She could not subtract it from the sum total of the garden. So, without arguing, she closed the rose.

She recognizes the duality of nature with a sense of innocence that rings with wisdom, rising well above society's proclivity to shun or sugarcoat all that falls outside its standards of acceptability. To her, beauty and ugliness exist in the same rose, and neither is superior to the other; a person cannot embracing one without embracing the other. It is for this reason that Theodora is seen from the outside as eccentric. As she explores the raw honesty of coming to terms with life and its full existence within herself, she finds herself falling farther away from the external world in an act of defiance. By presenting Theodora as awkward yet exceptional woman, as seen with the way she almost effortlessly shoots the hawk that Frank missed, Patrick White demonstrates the way polar opposites coexist in a single body. He goes even further, stretching the limits of the dichotomy by fleshing out Theodora's desire to triumph and framing it within her self-destructive ways.
There exists a certain grace in wanting to slip away from the shackles of society and the material world, as much as there is shame. The very nature of this story being set in different locations suggests the different stages of displacement Theodora has to go through as she closes in on and finally arrives at the many-layered center of herself, where all contradicting aspects, at last, exist in absolute harmony: freedom from everyone and everything that had ever owned her, but within the confines of an asylum. It takes an artist to open up this reality for all to understand, as artists are the people who have their blinders peeled all the way back.