A Reading of Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’

A READING OF ALICE WALKER’S
“THE COLOR PURPLE”

Since the publication of her first novel “Third life of Grange Copeland” in 1970, Alice Walker has enjoyed a long and profilic career: three books of poetry, two short story collections, two novels and a biography of Langston Hughes for young readers ­each work impressive not only in its own right but also by virtue of its appeal. Alice Walker occupies a significant place in the con­temporary black Women Writers in America. Born into a large family of sharecroppers in the Deep South, she displays in her fictional corpus a keener interest in the plight of the black woman than do the other members of the contemporary black women writers quartet (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor). Although she uses protagonists of both sexes, Walker reveals a strong bias in favour of the black woman she regards her as the bearer of enormous social, racial, and sexual burdens.

Though “womanist” (she prefers “womanist” to “feminist” a word she finds limited a little weak) in tone and character Walker’s writings have placed her in the mainstream of modern literature. Walker is a highly gifted writer of powerfully expressive fiction. Her work consistently reflects her deep concern with racial, sexual, and political issues, particularly with the black woman’s struggle for spiritual political survival. Her political awareness, her southern heritage and her sense of the culture and history of her people form the thematic base of her fictional world. Walker’s unsparing vision of black women’s victimization in sexual love – their isolation, degradation or grotesque defeat by despairing or aspiring black men – has been a major element in her growing body of work. Walker’s first collection of short stories “In Love and Trouble” (1973) won her the prestigious Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her second novel “Meridian”, is often cited as the best novel of the Civil Rights Movement; and her recently published novel “The Color Purple” (1982) is awarded both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983.

“The Color Purple” is acclaimed as Alice Walker’s “the most impressive” (Watkins: 1982) but a poignant tale of five women­–black, battered, and ultimately triumphant over a world that seems to have been designed to drive a black woman mad. Walker’s language is incandescent, heated with love and rage, and her vision is clear and hard as cut glass.

Celie is a 14-year old black girl in the Jazz Age South: spunky, vulnerable, and the downest and outest of women. Be­cause she must survive against impossible odds, because she has no one to talk, she picks up a pen and pours out her soul to God. Raped repeatedly by the man who mayor may not be her real father, robbed of the two children that result bereft her beloved sister Nettie – who fled to seek a better life in Africa­–Celie writes about her tragic life in the guise of letters to “white God” because she is ashamed to tell any one else. Celie is black, ugly, not good at school work; she lives in rural Georgia. Celie has such a low opinion of herself that she meekly submits in marriage to an older man named Albert (always referred to by her as Mr....) who wants someone to take care of his four motherless children. In the first few pages, Celie is raped by her mother’s husband, deprived of the two children she is forced to bear and married off to a widower. Her life seems hopeless and over. To Albert, who is in love with a beautiful and determinedly independent blues singer named Shug Avery. Celie becomes merely a servant and an occasional sexual convenience. When his oldest son, Harpo asks Albert why he beats Celie, he says indifferently:

“Cause she my wife. Plus, she stubborn.
All women good for - he don’t finish.
He just tuck his chin over the paper like
he do. Remind me of Pa” (p. 30)

For a time Celie accepts the abuse stoically;

“He beat me like he beat the children. Cept
he don’t never hardly beat them. He say
Celie, get the belt......It all I can do not
cry. I make myself wood. I say myself,
Celie, you are a tree. That’s how come I
know trees fear men”. (p. 30)

She watches with curiosity as Albert’s teenaged son Harpo falls in love with and marries Sophia, a big strapping girl who tells Celie she is “big” with Harpo’s child. She watches with admiration as Sophia successfully stands up to her husband and father-in-law and moves out of the house with her children. She watches with horror as Sophia is carried home later from prison, beaten and abused for having walked to the town’s white mayor. Several women came into Celie’s life, among them Shug (Sweet as Sugar) Avery, a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold and Albert’s former lover who he brings to the house one day. She is ill with “the nasty woman disease” and no one else will take her in. Celie nurses Shug to health, admires her with a consuming passion, and in one of the novel’s most tender scenes, becomes Shug’s lover. Above all, she loves to hear Shug sing. This event which should break up any household, proves oddly restorative. Through Shug, who is bold, passionate, and outspoken, Celie slowly learns to stand up for herself and to resist the brutality and tyranny of men; through Shug’s sisterly embrace, she discovers the sensual possibilities of her hitherto unawakened body. The love that Celie feels for Shug is returned in ways both sisterly and sensuous. Celie frees herself from her husband’s repressive control. When she finds out that Albert has intercepted all the letters from her younger sister Nettie - who, with Celie’s help, has fled to Africa with a missionary group – allowing her to think that Nettie is dead. When she discovers halfway through the novel that Nettie is still alive, Celie’s callous heart breaks open and her rage pours out:

“The God I been praying and writing” to is
a man. And act just like all the other means
I know. Trifling, forgitful, lowdown”. (p. 175)

Celie’s rage finally breaks through her passivity. She wants to kill Albert but is restrained by Shug. Eventually Celie discovers that laughing at him, standing up to him, and just leaving for awhile cause him to have a change of heart. Here the novel takes a sudden swerve. While Ceile has been slaving in America, Nettie has been playing Albert Schweitzer in Africa, ministering to the needs of a primitive tribe called Olinkas. Always the scholar as a girl, her letters to Celie betray her missionary education arid wide travels. Her writing simply doesn’t move the reader the way Celie’s does. She gives us decorous and pedantic travelogues instead of raw, dramatic, and deeply felt transcriptions of experience. Celie eventually leaves Albert and moves to Memphis, where she starts a business designing and making clothes. Ironically, it is Albert’s real love and sometimes mistress, Shug Avery, and his rebellious daughter-in-law Sofia, who provide the emotional support for Celie’s personal evolution. And in turn, it is Celie’s new understanding of and acceptance of herself that eventually lead to Albert’s re-evaluation of his own life and reconciliation among the novel’s major characters. As the novel ends, Albert and Shug sit with Celie on Celie’s front porch “rocking and fanning files”, waiting for the arrival of Nettie and her family.

“The Color Purple”, according to Peter Prescott (1982), “is an American novel of permanent importance, that rare sort of book which (in Norman Mailor’s felicitous phrase) amounts to “a diversion in the fields of dread”; for her, story begins at about the point that most Greek tragedies reserve for the climax, then becomes by immeasurably small steps a comedy which works its way toward acceptance, severity and joy”. Her narrative advances entirely by means of letters that are either never delivered or are delivered too late for a response, and most of these are written in a black English that Walker appears to have modified artfully for general conception. In “The Color Purple” Alice Walker can be said to have attempted a kind of encompassing imaginative empathy with the world of the Southern black woman giving due weight to the ubiquitous presence of physical and psychic violence and its burdening effect on the human capacity for self-expression.

One of the major concerns of the novel is the bonding of oppressed women. What particularly distinguishes walker in her role as apologist and chronicler for black women is her revolutionary treatment of black women: that is, she sees the experiences of black women as a series of movements from women totally victimi­zed by society and by the men in their lives to the growing develop­ing women whose consciousness allows them to have control over their lives.

“The Color Purple” is about the strength of the relationships between women, their friendships, their love, their shared oppression. Even the white mayor’s family is redeemed when his daughter cares for Sofia’s sick daughter.

Africa, the land from which free black men and women were forcibly uprooted and brought to America in chains, has long been imagined in black American folklore and literature as a Paradise Lost, to be returned to one day in pilgrimage. The quality of modern black life in America has done little to diminish the need for such a myth, not the force with which it is embraced by black culture at large. Alice Walker in “The Color Purple” clearly wants to revise the myth – to toss it out entirely, in fact. Africa, as pilgrim Nettie presents it in her letters, is as repressively patriarchal as America. The Olinka men can’t believe that women should be educated – at least not their women.

“They are like white people at home who
don’t want colored people to learn.” (p. 173)

Nettie realizes with a start. And Africa’s not much of a paradise for Olinka males either. With the second World War about to erupt, British colonials descend upon the helpless tribe, bulldozing roads through their village and ripping out their sacred roofleaf bush in order to plant rubber trees. The resentful black men rape, but game, and treat their women like animals. They remind Nettie, more than anything of her Pa.

If Africa is no Paradise for a black woman from America what does Walker offer in its place? Her vision is a complex one, and she works it out artfully through the character of Celie. The inescapable logic by which she forces Celie to see that man is the true oppressor, the boundless rage that results – these are her as much as Celie’s and two-thirds of the way through the novel we ‘begin to suspect that she has given up on men altogether. Celie and Shug slam the door on Albert and move up North to an old house in Memphis that Celie has inherited from her mother. The two women cook, fix up the house, open a shop that sells homemade pants for women. They weave their lives into a “common dream” in which male lovers and kinsmen have no place. As Shug tells Celie one night before the two women drop off to sleep in each other’s arms, “Us is each other’s people now”.

In the traditional way, Walker ends her comedy with dance, or more precisely with a barbecue. The final mood of the novel is that of forgiveness, reconciliation and faith in the work of God.

Alice Walker is a remarkable novelist, sometimes compared to Toni Morrison, but with a strong, individual voice and vision of her own, and a delicious humour that pervades in “The Color Purple” and tempers the harshness of the lives of its people. Opening with a dedication to the spirit, Walker ends her novel with a postscript: “I thank everybody in this book for coming. A.W., author and medium”.

Dignitia Smith, in her review of the novel, quite appropriately comments, “Despite its occasional preachiness, the “Color Purple” marks a major advance for Walker’s art...It places her in the company of Faulkner, from whom she appears to have learned a great deal:” Walker has not turned her on the Southern fictional tradition. She has absorbed it and made it her. By infusing the black experience into the Southern novel, she enriches both it and the reader. It is indeed a sort of tour de force”.

NOTES

¹ Prescott, Peter S.: “A Long Road to Liberation”. Newsweek Inc, Vol. XCIX No. 25. June 21, 1982 P. 67-68.
² Smith, Dignith: “Celie, you a Tree” The Nation Vol. 235 No.6, September 4, 1982.
³ Walker, Alice: “The Color Purple” Newyork: Washington Square Press. 1982.
⁴ Watkins, Mel: “Some Letters Went to God” in New York Times Book Review July 25, 1982. p. 77.