Women’s Writing

Submitted by-
Name-Geetanjali Naiding
Roll number-67

Question. Color Purple gives an account of the terrible ways

in which the poor black women were abused both by society
and in context of their household. Discuss.
Answer-
The Color Purple is one of Alice Walker’s most famous works and
the novel is in epistolary form, set from the beginning of 1900
through the mid-1940s. Walker presents deep insight into the black
community in the United States, its colourful and vivid nature in
opposition to the fatality of its situation in the world of inequality,
segregation, injustice and lack of understanding and communication
between whites and blacks. She concentrates on women’s personal
struggle for freedom in a brutal and violent society where women are
looked upon as unimportant and inferior and are objectified by men.
The novel presents how the Black women are oppressed and
humiliated by men.
We are introduced to Celie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Georgina in
the beginning of the novel who is raped by her stepfather Alphonso,
whom she thinks is her father. The novel starts with the striking
words: “You’d better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your
mammy.” These words are articulated by her stepfather, so as to
silence the young Celie, because he rapes her. The opening sentence
of the novel, foregrounds a dominant concern—male oppression.
Even the rape, which Celie describes, also clearly depicts silencing:
“He never had a kin word to say to.me. Just say you gonna do what
your mammy wouldn’t. First he put his thing up against my hip and
sort of wiggle it around. Then he push his thing inside my pussy.
When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up
and git used to it.” Celie is continuously tortured by Alphonso and is
asked to keep silent about it. She is denied to go to school, because
according to her stepfather, she is ‘too dumb to keep going to school’.
She has nobody to tell about her sufferings she faces at the hands of
her father and thus, she starts writing letters to God which reflects her
internal conflict, her silent suffering, and the impact of oppression on
her spirit, her victimization at the hands of the male members of the
society. She confides those traumatic experiences to God, because
they are extremely shameful to her. Alphonso impregnates her and
then gets rid of them very quickly. Alphonso calls Celie a “liar” and
“ugly” and soon after Alphonso loses interest in Celie and starts
disturbing her younger sister, Nettie. Although Celie tries to protect
her, her father marries her off to Mr. ____ who we get to know
through Shug Avery that his name is Albert. Celie’s husband is as
abusive as her father and even he rapes her and even tries to rape
Nettie but is then forced away from his house by Albert. Barbara
Smith depicts that Alice Walker by changing the location of Celie’s
abuse, marks how little is the difference between an abused daughter
and an abused wife. She also adds that: “Walker does not step back
from the reality that the mistreatment of women is often rooted in
Afro-American culture, that there are indeed shared values in the race
about that mistreatment”. This comment can be justified by the
instances of how the black women in the text are abused both by the
society and their family members. Celie fears the men in her life,
because they handle her so violently. For example, her stepfather
beats her when he sees her winking at a boy in church, even though
Celie tells God in her letters that she is scared of men and does not
look at them. “I don’t even look at men. That’s the truth. I look at
women because I’m not scared of them”. The men in her life has
taken such a hold of her life that she is even scared to look at men.
Celie struggles against the dominant language of patriarchy and
racism. Constant mistreatment at the hands of her stepfather leads her
to hate herself so much that she is not interested to know about her
body which has been a constant source of exploitation. Walker
explores the themes of gender discrimination, racial discrimination,
rape and sexism. She displays how gender discrimination can
influence black women’s subjectivity and lead them into misery. This
novel indicates how racism influences black people's social and
personal lives. Black women are in the margins of the margins, among
black men and whites. In fact, black women are like white and black
men’s slaves. Celie is treated like a slave by both her father and her
husband and in fact even by Harpo, her husband’s son. Celie bears up
with the life of being looked upon as a piece of property, and sees her
marriage with Albert as an avenue of escape and takes mainly to look
after his unruly, children and to keep house, as well as to satisfy him
sexually. Celie becomes a sexual servant to Albert and a step-mother
to his children. Blacks in a white American society were considered
as mere objects during slavery and afterwards it took a long time to
consider them as equal. Celie’s life continues to be miserable. She is
beaten, abused, exploited, and
humiliated by Mr.____. Mr.___’s sister asks Harpo to help Celie but
he answers saying: ‘Women work. I am a man’ which reflects the
power of oppression of men and Harpo thinks it is the duty of women
to work and not of men. Celie bears the inhuman behaviour of her
husband because she is unaware of any other form of behaviour and
she does not have any other purpose in her life and she has lost the
sense of her individuality. Celie suffers not only because of her step-
children but also at the hands of her husband, Albert. To be wife
means to be obedient, submissive, and Celie describes how
Mr.____ treats her: ‘He beat me like he beat the children. Except that
he never hardly beat them. The children be outside the room peeking
through the cracks. All I can do is not to cry. I make myself wood. I
say to myself, Celie you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear
man’. Celie transforms herself into a tree which is an example of
black women’s closeness to the suffering and agony
of nature. Walker exposes the various ways in which male American
society tyrannizes over black women. Celie represents the plight of
black women exploited and enslaved economically and sexually in a
patriarchal and racist society.
The abuse of Black Women on account of their physical
appearance is the most common and dangerous and the Black Women
were object of continuous exploitation. Another character that is
abused because of her identity of being a black woman is Sofia, who
is the first wife of Harpo. Although Sofia has always been able to
defend herself when Harpo tried to abuse her, her physical ability
didn’t save her at all times. When Sofia is offered
work by the Mayor’s wife at her home which she rejects in an
insulting tone and consequently, she is jailed for many years and
made to work at the mayor’s home as a punishment. White people
like the mayor and his wife assume that it’s a great honour to be a
white lady’s housemaid. Because Sofia is unwilling to place herself in
this position as maid for white people, the white mayor and police
beat her in order to reassert their racial dominance. Therefore, just
because a black woman hit a white man, Sofia is put in prison
and sent to work as a maid in the mayor’s house for twenty years and
is kept away from her daughter. Even though, Sofia trains Miss Millie
the mayor’s wife to drive the car, she condescends to drive Sofia
home and she refuses to allow her to sit beside her which makes Sofia
to sit in the back seat without an argument. Miss Millie even says,
‘Have you ever seen a white person and a colored sitting side by
side in a car, when one of them wasn’t showing the other one how to
drive it or clean it’. These lines reflect racism in the novel and how
the white people behave with black people because of the colour of
their skins i.e. being black. Another example of racism in
the novel is when Sofia feels like seeing her children after five years
and the mayor’s wife doesn’t reverse and return home.
It is an oppressive society in America in which the
emasculated black male feels the need to recapture his masculinity
through the oppression of the female and dominate the female, or in
much independent society like the Olinka in Africa before the arrival
of the British, the result is similar: the male always oppresses the
female. Sofia struggles for a meaningful existence and shows her
strong power to transcend the racist and sexist society. She struggles
for dignity and self-respect in spite of getting defeated by male
domination and she even brings up Eleanor Jane, the mayor’s
daughter with love and affection.
In the Color Purple, women tolerate racism, sexism and gender
discrimination. Men are against women's progress at first and are
opposed to it, as they think that with women's power and success their
manhood will be under question. As a result of patriarchy, they are
blind to women and intend to put barriers in their way. This novel
reflects Walker’s new black women who verbalize their needs and go
after them.