A2 Synoptic material on ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker
ITEM 1
This is an extract from
The Color Purple by Alice Walker, published in 1982. This is the first of
Celie's letters in the novel, which is not written to God, but to her sister
Nettie, who is in Africa. Celie has discovered that her real father was lynched.
Her stepfather, who she thought of as Pa, abused her and married her to Mr. __,
who does not love her. Mr.__'s old lover, Shug, a blues singer, has come to live
in their house, and she and Cetie have formed a relationship.
Dear Nettie,
I don't write to God no more, I write to you.
What happen to God? ast Shug.
Who that? I say.
She look at me serious.
Big a devil as you is, I say, you not worried bout no God, surely.
She say, Wait a minute. Hold on just a minute here. Just because I don't harass
it like some peoples us know don't mean I ain't got religion.
What God do for me? I ast.
She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman
that love you to death.
Yeah, I say, and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a
step pa and a sister I probably won't ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I
been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I
know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.
She say. Miss Celie. You better hush. God might hear you.
Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world
would be a different place, I can tell you.
She talk and she talk, trying to budge me way from blasphemy. But I blaspheme
much as I want to.
All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did, I say. But deep
in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he
don't think.
Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon. But it
ain't easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain't there, trying to
do without him is a strain.
I is a sinner, say Shug. Cause I was born. I don't deny it.
But once you find out what's out there waiting for us, what else can you be?
Sinners have more good times, I say.
You know why? she ast.
Cause you ain't all the time worrying bout God, I say.
Naw, that ain't it, she say. Us worry bout God a lot. But
once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us
like.
You telling me God love you, and you ain't never done nothing
for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all
like that?
But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that.
Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes.
Like what? I ast.
Oh, she say, I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy.
Have a good time.
Well, this sound like blasphemy sure nuff.
She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in
church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any
God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks
did too. They come to church to share God not find God.
Some folks didn't have him to share, I said. They the ones
didn't speak to me while I was there struggling with my big belly and Mr.___’s
children.
Right, she say.
Then she say: Tell me what your God look like, Celie.
Aw naw, I say, I'm too shame. Nobody ever ast me this before,
so I'm sort of took by surprise. Besides, when I think about it, it don't seem
quite right. But it all I got. I decide to stick up for him, just to see what
Shug say.
Okay, I say. He big and old and tall and graybearded and
white. He wear white robes and go barefooted.
Blue eyes? she ast.
Sort of bluish-gray. Cool. Big though. White lashes, I say.
She laugh.
Why you laugh? I ast. I don't think it so funny. What you
expect him to look like. Mr.____?
That wouldn't be no improvement, she say. Then she tell me
this old white man is the same God she used to see when she prayed. If you wait
to find God in church, Celie, she say, that's who is bound to show up, cause
that's where he live.
How come? I ast.
Cause that's the one that's in the white folks' white bible.
Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to
do with it.
How come he look just like them, then? she say. Only bigger?
And a heap more hair? How come the bible just like everything else they make,
all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is
gitting cursed?
I never thought bout that.
Nettie say somewhere in the bible it say Jesus' hair was like
lamb's wool, I say.
Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we
talking bout he'd have to have it
That's the truth, I say.
Ain't no way to read the bible and not think God white, she
say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost
interest. You mad cause he don't seem to listen to_your prayers. Humph! Do the
mayor listen to anything colored say? Ask Sofia, she say.
But I don't have to ast Sofia. I know white people never
listen to colored, period. If they do, they only listen long enough to be able
to tell you what to do.
Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is
inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only
them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself
even If you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for
most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.
It? I ast.
Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.
But what do it look like? I ast.
Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It
ain't something_you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I
believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will
be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.
Shug a beautiful something, let me tell you. She frown a
little, look out cross the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose.
She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then
air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and
feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of
being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my
arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all round the house. I knew
just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it. It sort of like
you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.
Shug! I say.
Oh, she say. God love all them feelings. That's some of the
best stuff God did. And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more.
You can just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking
what you like.
God don't think it dirty? I ast.
Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you
love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love
admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I
think' it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere
and don't notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all
God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to
please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and
springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and
dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice
that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Well, us talk
and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out
of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God
make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come
from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.
Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool. Next to any
little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr.____s evil sort of shrink. But not
altogether. Still, it is like Shug say. You have to git man off your eyeball,
before you can see anything a'tall.
Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in
your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you
think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on
the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers,
wind, water, a big rock.
But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long,
he don't want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us
fight, I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
This is an extract from notes about the novel, written for A Level students
In her
assessment of Walker's earlier works, Gloria Steinem pointed out that 'a
disproportionate number of people who seek out Walker's sparsely distributed
books are black women,' and that a 'disproportionate number of her hurtful,
negative reviews have been by black men.' ...
In the following months, the novel received high praise,
particularly for its poetic language and its innovative form, from reviewers in
national commercial magazines such as Newsweek and intellectual and political
journals such as The New Yorker and The Nation. Mel Watkins, a black reviewer
for The New York Times, called Walker 'a lavishly gifted writer.' He was taken
with 'the density of subtle interactions among the characters,' and 'the
authenticity of [the novel's folk voice.' He noted, however, ‘weaknesses in
the novel,' what he called 'the pallid portraits of the males,' and that Netties
letters seemed like 'mere monologues of African history." These are points
that would be made about the novel in other reviews. Watkins ended his review
with a superlative comment: These are only Quibbles however about a striking
consummately well-written novel."
During the rest
of 1982, The Color Purple received similar praise in mainstream publications.
But black feminist critic Barbara Smith, in her review for Callaloo, a respected
black literary journal, wondered if many of the reviewers had actually read the
work ... Smith focused on the womanist aspects of the novel. She called The
Color Purple a classic because it does something new: what Walker has done for
the first time is to create an extended literary work whose subject is the
sexual politics of black life, as experienced by ordinary blacks.' Smith also
pointed out that "no black novelist until Alice Walker in The Color Purple
has positively and fully depicted a lesbian relationship between two women, set
in the familiar context of a traditional black community.' Smith ended her
review with a provocative comment: 'The Color Purple offers an inherent
challenge to the Black community to consider fighting for the
Praise for The Color Purple as a womanist novel characterised
reviews by other black women - Dorothy Randall-Tsuroto's review for The Black
Scholar (published inSummer 1983, but apparently written before the novel
received the Pulitzer), and Yvonne Porter's review for Colorlines, written just
as Walker was awarded the Pulitzer.
Porter began her review with the statement that 'The Color
Purple is a woman's womanist book...' She did warn her readers that some of them
may be disturbed by Celie and Shug's sexual relationship, and reminded them that
'lesbianism is an aspect of the black woman that has seldom been dealt with in
any depth.'
These positive reviews by black women were followed by others
during 1982-84, not all of which were entirely complimentary. Maryemma Graham in
the Summer 1983 issues of
Another review by black woman critic Trudier Harris, in Black
American Literature Forum, asked whether Walker hadn't reiterated white
stereotypes of both black women and men. Ms. Harris, who had previously written
essays on Walker's earlier work, was clearly disturbed by the characters of The
Color Purple.
These two pieces are from a section about Alice Walker's work
in Writing Women.
The sparingly used metaphors stand out against the dramatic
simplicity of Walker's discourse. Two key metaphors are those of colour and
quilting. They stress black artistry and link disparate episodes with patterning
structures.
The title represents a complex symbol: at first Celie has no
decent garment, only drab cast-offs; what she longs for is a sexy dress. When
she is able to buy one, she chooses the bold, affirmative colour purple. The
purple flowers in the field signify joy and freedom. In the Foreword Walker
explicitly states that her womanism is to feminism what purple is to lavender:
that black womanhood asserts strength and creativity.
When Celie inherits a house from her stepfather she decorates
Shug's room in brilliant colour, symbolising her new economic choice and an
intention of affirming her personality. When sewing trousers she selects
materials and colours to suit diverse personalities. They bring beauty and
colour into everyday design, for the use of friends and families.
The word 'coloured' had been used, like the word 'negro', to
denigrate a whole race. Therefore the use of coloured metaphors signals a bold
denial of humiliating associations. Morrison and Angelou both lovingly describe
different shades of blackness; Walker makes the admired Shug very dark, and
beautiful.
The symbol of quilt making links episodes and characters. It
represents women coming together, sewing in sisterhood, as frequently quilt
making was a group activity, for long winter evenings. Pieces discarded by
others were used to make something new and beautiful. Alice Walker kept the
quilt her mother made for her and still uses it 'for comfort’.
Quilt making begins the moment Celie has a few scraps of
spare material and time, and wishes to make peace with her turbulent
sister-in-law, Sofia: 'Let's make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains,
Sofia say. And I run git my pattern book. I sleeps like a baby now.' (p 39) Not
only does the shared sewing bring peace to Celie, it helps the women make up.
After this they no longer allow their men to divide them.
When Shug slowly recovers from her illness, Celie decides to
sew for her, 'Shug gets out of bed, asks "How do you sew this damn
thing?" I hand her the square I'm working on, start another one. She sew
long crooked stitches, remind me of that little crooked tune she sing'(p 51),
stressing the parallels between the two art forms allowed to women. Shug soon
donates her old yellow dress: 'I call it Sister's Choice." (p 53) This
name, suddenly created by Celie, symbolises the emerging understanding and love
which will help transform her from ugly to beautiful, in her own eyes and those
of the world. Quilting transforms discarded pieces into beauty, as Walker's
metaphors transfer her message into art.
Men in The Color Purple
Walker presents a range of men, from the ideal Samuel to the
violent, crass, irredeemable stepfather. The stepfather is irretrievably brutal,
abusing Celie sexually and openly despising her. He feels no remorse, but turns
his predatory eyes to the slightly more attractive younger sister Nettie. He
gives no sexual pleasure in his frequent assaults, and finally, to get rid of
Celie, gives her away to a violent lazy bully as husband. Till he died Celie did
not even know that he was called Alphonso; he was a force, not a human being, to
the violated girl. Celie discovers only from his will that he had made money,
which she had never seen. He had bought some property, aping white capitalists
and their meanness, like Macon Dead in Morrison's Song of Solomon. At least when
he dies, his house is left to the girls. Celie's first thought is to refuse to
live in it but Shug's reactions are sensible, unsentimental and realistic: see
the cruel as they are, and accept that some good may come from evil -
"Don't be a fool, Shug say. You got your own house now. That dog of a
stepdaddy just a bad odor passing
Walker shows courage in not avoiding the topic of male
brutality. Angelou and Morrison, aware of the racism of American society, are
less trenchant, and recall a time when black men treated their women as equals,
since all were equally exploited in the fields. Perhaps as she is_younger.
Walker can state publicly that there is no excuse for taking white racist
violence into their homes. She depicts their interiorisation of white values in
the desire to humiliate. Celie's husband insists that he should be called
"Mr. __' precisely because white males call him "boy" and deny
his manhood publicly. However, he is represented as improving slowly once the
economic situation improves. Above all his women teach him to respect them:
first Shug by being herself and refusing sexual, emotional and intellectual
domination; then Celie by rejecting his view of herself, and teaching him,
against his will, to respect her. Respect earns love and love allows the
possibility of self-love, which he attempts movingly to express: 'I start to
wonder why us need love. Why us black. Why us suffer ... I think us here to
wonder ...The more I wonder, the more I love.' (239) This resembles
psychotherapy in teaching that love and respect for self are needed for us to be
able to love others.
This is an extract from The Female Gaze, edited by Lorraine
Gammon and
The happy coincidences with which Celie's story concludes -
the appearance of her long-lost children, the discovery that the man who raped
her as a child was not her biological father, the return of her beloved sister -
can be read as an improbable fairy-tale ending. In a sense, of course, it is.
But it can be read as something other than a failure of the realist imagination.
Folk tales and fairy tales traditionally reward the heroine/hero at the end,
often in an excessive way (great wealth, marriage to the prince, sainthood).
Celie's reward at the end of The Color Purple may seem equally excessive (at
least by the criteria of the realist novel). But, in the manner of a folk-tale
protagonist, she has earned it through her own subversive efforts; and, like the
heroine of a morality tale, she deserves it. Seen within the context of the oral
culture of American blacks, the happy ending is that of the folk tale or
parable, and as such entirely appropriate in form and content.
For this is not just an optimistic book, but an
optimistically didactic one. Black women must learn to respect themselves, it
says, to be respected; learn to speak for themselves to be listened to; speak up
for themselves to be recognised. They must not internalise oppression by
responding with self-hatred and submission. They can, and must, look to
themselves, and to those who can give them the support they need in this
struggle - that is, other black women - and draw sustenance from them. Then they
will realise that they have strength in community and can give as well as
receive. Then they will find each other as sisters, discover that their past was
worse than had been admitted, but not as bad as they'd feared (Celie's children
are the product of rape, but not of incest), and thus forge their own future in
autonomy and freedom. This would be a cruel message without the happy ending.
Despite the atrocities she suffers, Celie has the courage to
speak of them. In giving voice to the unspeakable, she discovers that it can be
spoken. She defies the taboos and thereby deprives them of their power to
destroy her. In speaking to God she discovers herself and her own strength,
because 'God' is not another powerful and potentially hostile force - 'God' is
everything that lives:
God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world
with
God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it
just
manifest itself even if you are not looking, or don't know what you are
looking for... It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look
at
apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is
everything,
say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever
will be. And when you feel
that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it.
Celie learns to "chase that old white man out of [her]
head' and recognise her own 'divine' humanity - her own capacity for joy,
freedom, control, autonomy and love. She learns to notice 'the color purple in
the field', so that she can no longer dismiss her life as merely the sum of her
oppression or accept suffering as her destiny. Here too is a message for black
women generally - indeed for all oppressed people. Celie's redefinition of the
meaning of her life is one that rescues oppressed people from the negative
implications of their status as victims by pointing to ways of transcending it,
without minimising either the intensity of their oppression or the difficulties
of resistance.
This also gives her the strength to forgive. The capacity to
forgive is much emphasised in black women's novels. It cannot, in The Color
Purple at least, be read as a sentimental spirituality which aims to transcend
the political, or as an act of Christian charity for the benefit of the
individual's immortal soul. Rather, it is an essential mechanism in the black
women's liberation, which allows her both to free herself from the
self-destructive emotions of hatred and bitterness, and to shift her emotional
focus back where it belongs - into the black community. For it is Mr. and his
son Harpo who are forgiven; white people are not such much forgiven as
excommunicated from consciousness.
This is an article by Alice Walker about the writing of The
Color Purple.
When I was sure the characters of my novel were trying to
form (or, as I invariably thought of it, trying to contact me, to speak through
me) I began to make plans to leave New York.
New York, whose people I love for their grace under
almost continual unpredictable adversity, was a place the people in The Color
Purple refused even to visit. The moment any of them started to form - on the
subway, a dark street, and especially in the shadow of very tall buildings -
they would start to complain.
What is all this tall shit anyway?
They would say.
I disposed of the house, stored my furniture, packed my
suitcases, and flew alone to San Francisco (it was my daughter's year to be with
her father), where all the people in the novel promptly fell silent, I think, in
awe. Not merely of the city's beauty, but of what they picked up about
earthquakes.
It's pretty, they muttered, but us ain't lost nothing in no
place that has earthquakes.
They also didn't like seeing buses, cars, or other people
whenever they attempted to look out. Us don't want to be seeing none of this.
they said, it make us can't think.
That was when I knew for sure that these were country people.
So my lover and I started driving around the state looking for a country house
to rent. Luckily I had found (with the help of friends) a fairly inexpensive
place in the city. This too had been a decision forced by my characters. As long
as there was any question about whether I could support them in the fashion they
desired (basically in undisturbed silence) they declined to come out. And no
wonder: it looked a lot like the town in Georgia most of them were from, only it
was more beautiful, and the local swimming hole was not segregated. It also bore
a slight resemblance to the African village in which one of them, Nettie, was a
missionary.
Seeing the
sheep, the cattle and the goats, smelling the apples and the hay, one of my
characters, Celie, began, haltingly, to speak.
But there was
still a problem.
Since I had
quit my editing job at Ms. and my Guggenheim fellowship was running out, and my
royalties did not Quite cover expenses, and - let's face it - because it gives
me a charge to see people who appreciate my work, historical novels or not, I
was accepting invitations to speak. Sometimes on the long plane rides Celie or
Shug would break through with a wonderful line or two (for instance, Celie said
once that a self-pitying sick person she went to visit was 'laying up in the bed
trying to look dead'.) But even these vanished - if I didn't jot them down - by
the time my contact with the audience was done.
What to do?
Celie and Shug
answered without hesitation: Give up all this travel. Give up all this talk.
What is all this travel and talk shit anyway? So, I gave it up for a year.
Whenever I was invited to speak I explained I was taking a year off for Silence.
(I also wore an imaginary bracelet on my left arm that spelled the word.)
Everyone said Sure, they understood.
Where was the money for our support coming from? My only
steady income was a three hundred dollar a month retainer from Ms. for being a
long distance editor. But even that was too much distraction for my characters.
Tell them you can't do anything for the magazine,
said Celie and Shug. (You guessed it, the women of the drawers.)
Tell them you think about them later. So I did.
Ms. was nonplussed. Supportive as ever (they continued the retainer).
Which was nice.
Then I sold a book of stories. After taxes, inflation and my
agent's fee of ten percent, I would still have enough for a frugal, no-frills
year. And so, I bought some beautiful blue and red and purple fabric, and some
funky old second hand furniture (and accepted donations of old odds and ends
from friends) and a quilt pattern my mama swore was easy, and I headed for the
hills.
There were days and weeks and even months when nothing
happened. Nothing whatsoever. I worked on my quilt, took long walks with my
lover, lay on an island we discovered in the middle of the river and dabbled my
fingers in the water. I swam, explored the redwood forests all round us, lay out
in the meadow, picked apples, talked (yes, of course) to trees. My quilt began
to grow. And, of course, everything was happening. Celie and Shug and Albert
were getting to know each other, coming to trust my determination to serve their
entry (sometimes I felt re-entry) into the world to the best of my ability, and
what is more - and felt so wonderful - we began to love one another. And, what
is even more, to feel ommense [sic] thankfulness for our mutual good luck.
Just as summer was ending one or more of my characters: Celie,
Shug. Albert, Sofia or Harpo, would come for a visit. We would sit wherever I
was sitting, and talk. They were very obliging, engaging and jolly. They were,
of course, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the
beginning. Things that made me sad, often made them laugh. Oh, we got through
that, don't pull such a long face, they'd say. Or, You think Reagan's
bad, you ought've seen some of the rednecks us come up under. The
days passed in a blaze of happiness.
Then school started, and it was time for my daughter to stay
with me - for two years.
My daughter arrived. Smart, sensitive, cheerful, at school
most of the day, but quick with tea and sympathy on her return. My characters
adored her. They saw she spoke her mind in no uncertain terms and would fight
back when attacked. When she came home from school one day with bruises but said
You should see the other guy. Celie (raped by her stepfather as a child and
somewhat fearful of life) began to reappraise her own condition. Rebecca gave
her courage (which she always gives me) - and Celie grew to like her so much she
would wait until three-thirty to visit me. So, just when Rebecca would arrive
home needing her mother and a hug, there'd be Celie, trying to give her both.
Fortunately I was able to bring Celie's own children back to her (a unique power
of a novelist), though it took me thirty years and a good bit of foreign travel.
But this proved to be the largest single problem in writing the exact novel I
wanted to write between about ten-thirty and three.
I had planned to give myself five years to write The Color
Purple (teaching, speaking, or selling apples, as I ran out of money). But on
the very day my daughter left for camp, less than a year after I started
writing, I wrote the last page.
And what did I do that for?
It was like losing everybody I loved at once.
First Rebecca (to whom everybody surged forth on the last page to say
goodbye), then Celie, Shug, Nettie & Albert, Mary Agnes, Harpo and Sofia,
Eleanor Jane, Adam and Tashi Omatangu. Olivia. Mercifully, my quilt and my lover
remained.
ITEM 6
This is an extract about Alice Walker from Writing Women.
Alice Walker:
The Color is Purple
Alice Walker
is one of the younger pathbreaking black women novelists to come to prominence
in the 1980s. Already she has produced thirteen remarkable volumes of poetry and
prose. She was born in 1944 in Georgia, 'halfway between misery and the
sun". The South has provided Walker with spiritual balance and an
ideological base, despite racist domination through sharecropping (giving half
the crops to the landlord) or by wage labour. A southern writer also inherits a
'trust in the community. We must give voice not only to centuries of bitterness
and hate but also of neighbourly kindness and sustaining love.’
Sustaining care came from her mother, who had married for
love, running away from home to marry at 17. By the time she was 20 she had two
children and was pregnant with a third.
Five
children later, I was born. And this is how I came to know my mother: she seemed
Her mother laboured beside - not behind - her father in the
fields. Their working day began
She
planted ambitious gardens, brilliant with colors, so original in design, so
Indeed Alice Walker claims that a black southern writer has
not an impoverished but a rich inheritance given by 'compassion for the earth.
The heat is so intense and one is so very thirsty, as one moves across the dusty
cotton fields, that one learns forever that water is the
When she was eight Alice Walker lost one eye in a traumatic
accident. This led her to believe she was ugly and made her shy and timid
forbears.
It
was from this period - from my solitary lonely position, the position of an
outcast -
This is an extract from a critical commentary on The Color
Purple for A Level students.
Walker's description of the emergence of her characters'
voices indicates how important the oneness of creation, as symbolised by the
color purple, is to the novel's theme and to its title. For as she immersed
herself in the countryside she realised that although one does not usually think
of purple as a prominent color in nature, it is everywhere if one only takes the
time to see it. As well, the language that her characters speak is related to
the natural setting in which they live.
If we look at Walker's entire body of writing, we can also
see how The Color Purple proceeds from her previous work. At the beginning of
the novel, Celie resembles the Copeland women of Walkers first novel in that her
body and spirit are battered, and she is seeking a language through which to
articulate her condition. "Burial," and other poems in Revolutionary
Petunias, are compressed narratives of rural Southern women and men that are
developed in The Color Purple. Walker experiments with the letter/diary form as
early as "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay' in In Love and Trouble and as recently
as '1955' in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. Like Roselily in In Love &
Trouble, Celie wonders "if she will ever know what it is to live,' and like
Hannah, in "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff," Sofia is almost crushed by
racism. Poems in Good Night Willie Lee relate directly to the image of woman as
mule, a central motif in this first half of The Color Purple. And like Meridian,
Celie is haunted by the loss of her children.
One of the most arresting aspects of this novel is its form,
a tour de force in that it is written entirely in letters. Letters are short
units, each of which is complete in itself and, when stitched together with
other letters, creates a series of patterns - a quilt. Just as important,
letters tell us about the objective conditions of a person's life while being a
subjective reflection on her life. The letter is a form of narrative that
combines both the objective and the subjective. This dual quality may be one of
the reasons why letters were written so consistently by women in the past, when
their experience was considered trivial and was usually omitted from history.
Through writing letters, women not only recorded their lives but also reflected
upon them, a source of personal growth. Feminist historians have used women's
letters as an important source of researching women's history in its
concreteness as well as in its subjective ramifications. Walker has adopted this
genre, so useful in history as a specifically female literary genre.
In order to understand how typical and/or atypical Celie's
experience is, we need to consider a few facts about woman's status at the turn
of the century. In much of the world, as well as in the United States, woman was
seen as inferior to man. She did not have many of the rights we now take for
granted. As recently as the nineteenth century, many American women could not be
legal agents and thus could not own property or negotiate contracts, except
through their fathers, husbands or brothers. American women could not act as
political agents; they could not vote or be elected to political office. They
were not expected to speak in public or operate in the public domain and were to
remain primarily within the family. They were not regarded as economically
independent. 'Respectable' women were not expected to work, particularly if they
were married and had children. And women's goal in life was supposed to be
marriage and motherhood.
In effect, women, 'the weaker sex,' were under the control or
"protection" of their male relatives, and in many ways were conceived
of as property. Husbands and fathers could not be prosecuted for physical or
sexual abuse, and in many states, fathers, rather than mothers, had the right to
children. Incest then, as now, existed although it was not often spoken about
-young orphaned girls were considered particularly unfortunate since they had no
access to power or even to protection. The Women's Rights Movement of the
nineteenth century protested these conditions but it took some fifty years to
achieve the vote for women.
Many people miss the fact that The Color Purple is not about
a poverty-stricken black Southern family. Pa and Mister both are landowning
blacks, of which there were many in Georgia
at the turn of the century. In focusing on this class, Walker reminds us that
many Southern blacks were economically successful during Reconstruction, though
because of the Southern racist system, some were eventually dispossessed of
their property.
In the case of The Color Purple, Walker does a critique of
patrimony and how it is linked to the pursuit of power. Mister owns land that he
has received from his father who, in turn, received land from his father, who
was a white slave owner. Mister's father objected to his relationship with Shug
Avery, a woman who refuses to be owned. Mister doesn't marry Shug and complies
with his father's wishes partly because his father determines whether or not he
will inherit land. In a real sense, Celie's abuse is derived from that fact, for
Mister gives up the woman he loves, and becomes a bully to his first.
One aspect of woman's condition critical to Celie's story was
the denial of education. Ironically,
it was the creation of The Freedman's Bureau, which taught one and one-half
million blacks to read and write between 1864 and 1970 that resulted in general
public school education for poor Southern whites and women. But because of the
passage of segregationist laws, blacks did not have equal access to education.
Being able to read and write was considered as valuable a prize as it had been
for slaves.
Black women, of course, had an even lower status than white
women, who were often placed on a pedestal, even as they lacked independence. In
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston characterises the status of black women as
that of a mule, an animal bred to work; creating an image that comes out of
slavery. Walker makes great use of this image in the first part of The Color
Purple as well as in the section set in Africa.
This is not to say that black women did not oppose these
conditions in many different ways. Walker presents three different ways in which
black women resisted their lot. Sofia represents the strong black woman who does
not accept the definition of woman as weak and helpless and resists whites'
attempts to diminish her. Often women like her have been denigrated both in
black and white society as Amazons, or matriarchs, and punished for their
resistance. Nettie represents women who did not marry but became missionaries,
leaders, etc., and who used education as a means to transcend the low status of
the black woman. As well. Walker uses Nettie to demonstrate the long history of
relationships between Afro-Americans and Africa. Often these women had to
separate themselves from their families and become 'exceptional' women. Shug
represents another avenue, that of the blues tradition, an area in which black
women could express their creativity and eroticism, and be economically
independent. Though maligned as immoral by the middle class, female blues
singers were often seen by other blacks as Queens. They were openly sexual,
often bisexual, and explored pleasure as a woman's right. They, too, risked the
possibility of separation from their children and experienced volatile economic
changes in the music business as well as intense racism from the white world.
That few novels, until recent|y, have used female blues singers as central
figures indicates the ambivalence with which particularly the black middle class
has related to these women. Their economic independence, overt eroticism, and
spiritedness subverted the society's definition of the good woman.
EXAM TASK
Answer all
three questions.
Read
Item 8, printed after the questions.
30 minutes are
allocated in the examination to the reading and consideration of
Question 1. Compare
the ways these two writers deal with the situation of black women in
America in the early twentieth century by examining:
• the attitudes of women to men, and to their own situation
• the relationships between women and men
• the attitudes of women to authority figures
• the concept and presentation of religion
• the writers' uses of form
• the effects achieved by the choices of language.
(40 marks)
Question 2. Compare and contrast some of the
different interpretations offered in Items 2, 3 and 4. Which do you find the
most persuasive, and why?
(20 marks)
Question 3.
Using Items 5, 6 and 7, explain what sources and values, in your view,
most influenced Alice Walker in her writing of The Color Purple.
ITEM 8
This is an
extract from the novel 'Jazz' by Toni Morrison.
Other women, however, had not surrendered. All over the
country they were armed. Alice
worked once with a Swedish tailor who had a scar from his earlobe to the corner
of his mouth. 'Negress,' he said. 'She cut me to the teeth, to the teeth.' He
smiled his wonder and
shook his head. 'To the teeth." The iceman in Springfield had four evenly
spaced holes in the side of his neck from four evenly spaced jabs by
something thin, round and sharp. Men ran through the streets of Springfield,
East St. Louis and the City holding one red wet hand in the other, a flap of
skin on the face. Sometimes they got to a hospital safely, alive only because
they left the razor where it lodged.
Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the
less money they had the deadlier
the weapon they chose.
Who were the unarmed ones? Those who found protection in
church and the judging, angry God whose wrath in their behalf was too terrible
to bear contemplation. He was not just on His way, coming, coming to right the
wrongs done to them, He was here. Already.
See? See? What the world had done to them it was now doing to itself. Did the
world mess over them? Yes but look were the mess originated. Were they
berated and cursed? Oh, yes but look how the world cursed and berated itself.
Were the women fondled in kitchens and the back of stores. Uh huh. Did police
put their fists in women's faces so the husbands' spirits would break along with
the women's jaws? Did men
(those who knew them as well as strangers sitting in motor cars) call them out
of their names every single day of their lives? Uh huh.
But in God's eyes and theirs, every hateful
word and gesture was the Beast's desire for its own filth. The Beast did not do
what was done to it, but what it wished done to itself: raped because it wanted
to be raped itself.
Slaughtered children because it yearned to be slaughtered children. Built jails
to dwell on and hold on to its own private decay. God's wrath, so beautiful, so
simple. Their enemies got what they wanted, became what they visited on others.
Who else were the unarmed ones? The ones who thought they did
not need folded blades, packets of lye, shards of glass taped to their hands.
Those who bought houses and hoarded money as protection and the means to
purchase it. Those attached to armed men. Those who did not carry pistols
because they became pistols; did not carry switchblades because they were
switchblades cutting through gatherings, shooting down statutes and pointing out
the blood and abused flesh. Those who swelled their little unarmed strength into
the reckoning one of leagues, clubs, societies, sisterhoods designed to hold or
withhold, move or stay put. make a way, solicit, comfort and ease. Bail out,
dress the dead, pay the rent, find new rooms, start a school, storm an office,
take up collections, rout the block and keep their eyes on all the children. Any
other kind of unarmed black woman in 1926 was silent or crazy or dead.