Women’s Writing

Unit I: The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

the form in which the narrative emerges is an epistolary form (through letters) - these are letters addressed to god,
but not with the intention to be mailed - a kind if a diary-writing, a confessional mode - there are gaps and absences
- its through her perspective - how much does celie orally articulate herself, she cries in the first letter - when celie
writes, there is an act of agency - the silence is real life is subverted through the voice in her writing
● on the one hand she is writing a letter (agency and selfhood is being asserted - writing as an action has a
degree of selfhood in it - on the other hand, in the content there is a paradox - the letter starts with a
silencing followed by the content where she is silenced physically
● writing orders and structures thoughts

walker is a pulitzer winning writer - born in 1944, a novelist and writes short fiction, essays and children’s fiction -
part of the civil rights movement: how she is centred around african american femininity - born in rural georgia - this
work invited huge criticism due to the way in which the domestic life of an african american household was depicted
(that she was throwing away the credibility of the community that was hard earned - her identity as a woman comes
into play here)
● in search of our mother’s garden: womanist prose - coined womanism: in relation to feminism
● she wins the pulitzer for the novel
● you can’t keep a good woman down
● she writes a novel which is a sequel to colour purple: possessing the secret joy

epistolary + diary writing - not necessarily everyday, but sporadic: allows to cover a decade - the distinct dialect or
way of writing she uses (aave: african american vernacular english) - a conscious choice to choose this dialect in
her novel
● realistically, it makes sense - a 14 year old girl who hasn’t gone to school - hasn’t been inducted into
standardised language
● epistolary and diary format comes under the rubric of confessional writing - considered as feminine mode
of writing - written in the privacy of home - absence of an omniscient narrator - there is a lack of a unified
eye - its in the present tense - looking at a certain dialogic writing: the author is in conversation with the
reader (the implied reader here, is god - so is the reader) - an intimate private exchange between celie and
god/reader - a certain way in which intensely personal details are introduced to the reader - how the domain
of private is foregrounded through writing
○ themes of guilty and shame: writing that involves self reflection + self discovery - involve the
process of confiding
○ a kind of child’s guilt - she strikes off I am - sets the tone for what comes after
○ a feminine genre which is consciously used in a novel format
● the way in which this mode of writing becomes a subversive act - the traditional kept apart boundaries
between the public and private, internal and external, art and life, femininity and writing are blurred
○ the idea of “quilt” in african american women’s fiction: looking at alternate sites of creativity
● female bildungsroman + not a white woman’s bildungsroman

pg 3-5: trauma she experiences is with the belief that it's her father
● form of the novel: epistolary - in the form of a diary - confessional mode - not addressed with the intention
of mailing it to god - diary entries are spread out - does not give dates - gaps in the narrative - maintains a
narrative coherence
○ even though here celie and notice her speaking, in real life, she doesn't speak much
■ few times she speaks, she writes it down
■ silenced, quiet, demure woman
■ her silence in real life is worked through a certain assertion in her letters
○ paradox:
■ writing letters is an assertion of selfhood and subjectivity (understanding that you have
agency, the power to voice, an opinion - define subject in opposition to object)
■ content of the first letter (first sentence)
● said by her step-father
 ● letter starts with an act of silencing
● later in the letter, she is reduced to an object - traumatised
■ she is reduced to an object when raped by her father, but she gains agency through
writing
● god is an absent presence throughout the novel
● stereotyping on black femininity as evil and containing excess sexual desire

shug avery: only model of confident self-affirming black femininity available to celie, more than lesbian desire -
wholeness seen in shug - not encountered directly as reader but through ceile looking, reading & describing
photograph: always objectifying something + presented for analysis - shug’s photograph as being in circulation —
male desire distinct from celie’s desire & response: celie describes & observes every detail, including the sadness in
shug’s eyes (empathetic reading – feminine) - nature of desire/reading elicited by photograph seen differently by
man & women - shug represents a woman, a real human being – aspiration, desire, empathy
● milk running down breasts – animalisation, de-romanticisation of motherhood - conventional bourgeoisie
ethos considers motherhood as generational, desirable & productive space - white bourgeoisie ideal
disengaged
● i don’t bleed no more: always pregnant
● broken african-american families of 1930s georgia
● look at culture from below (grassroots) v/s attempt to look at culture from above, to give a sense identity
● notion of ideal domesticity: white bourgeoisie understanding family space deromanticised
● celie seems acutely aware of need for education to gain social ascendance, despite not being educated

pg 9: a transactional communication between two men: bargaining - there is a use value assigned to both the girls -
the qualities assigned to her are based on what she does in the house: cook + clean + work like a man (implying the
sexual division of labour)
● the cow she raises: can be equated to dowry - pure transactional nature of the conversation
● irigaray: all kinds of transactions are essentially male transactions - women are mere commodities -
homosocial relations between men where women are just “goods that get together in the market”
● she is constantly couched in stereotypes - the way she dresses is likened to that of a tramp - she isn’t fresh
or smart + ugly - she tells lies: her credibility is challenged - her complete de-legitimisation - how can self
love emerge when you are constantly told that you are nothing and good for nothing - the novel is about
celie growing to love herself, her body and finding beauty in the little things

pg 15: but i don’t cry…arm around him

● marital rape: there is no access to pleasure + no self confidence that emerges from a healthy sexual activity

the interactions that celie has with the female characters in the novel

pg 20: the way god is written: removal of god and hyphens between the letters (almost as if she is spelling the letters
out - an invitation of orality into the reading experience (also done through aave)

pg 21: black as my shoe: internal divisions + heterogeneity - homogeneity is an understanding from above - how the
heterogeneity is subtly invoked in the novel
● celie looks up to shug and thinks about what she would wear - not the white standards or aesthetic
● harpo: a child - internalised idea of sexual divisions of labour

the relationship between nettie and celie:

● pg 11: she doesn’t address his name: less about respect and more about fear - she is always scared of men -
she hasn’t seen a kind man - she hasn’t even looked at many man - celie looks into the eyes of women and
they reciprocate it and understands her desires - men look through her - albert reminds her of her pa - she
uses the name when she gains a sense of self - she recognises albert as albert only when she starts coming
into herself
○ the position of marginality: in the name and language she uses
○ registers a site of trauma - distances herself from men
● pg 18
comment on knowledge processes and the history of american nation - the subtle mention of july 4th - how nettie is
in the process of educating celie about africa through her education: the rich oral tradition of the continent -
bildungsroman: not just celie’s personal discovery of her body, but her discovery of her ancestry + the history of a
collective ancestry
● nettie teaches celie of christopher columbus - he is foundational to the history of the nation - celie compares
him to cucumber: he is marginal to celie’s existence - a subtle parody of the national hero and the national
tradition - a conflation of the public and the private (compared to something from the kitchen, associated as
the feminine sphere) - celie never regrets this marginality
● the black female experience + black woman in lieg: tool to critique the grandiosity of the narrative of a
white nation
● nation + patriarchy + white imperialism + religion
● nettie, like kate, asks her to fight - the creation of a community in the process
● celie says that she is too tired to think
● strong idea of sisterhood that emerges - all women are names and described in great details
pg 30: harpo bring her…
pg 33: sofia look..
● masculine attributes that sofia is described to have - the black stereotypes around women continue to
surface, but these women respond differently to it - repeated references to the movement and physical
strength of sofia
● pg 35: celie doesn’t admire her much? asks harpo to hit her - she feels guilty for it
● references to skin colour: the heterogeneity under the identity of african-american women
● pg 37: violence - the women giving it back to men
● pg 38: a huge sense of guilt that haunts her - character growth - she admits of being jealous
● pg 41: sisterhood forged through sharing of lived experiences + pain - celie and sofia’s experiences are
similar except for the part where sofia fights
● pg 39: there is a sense of jealousy - but in the end of the chapter, there is a sense of sisterhood that’s being
born

female relationships: direct conversations with characters and the way in which they are organised in manner that it
looks like a dialogue between the sisters - celie’s learning is not from the traditional modes of learning - celie’s
education is not through the traditional channels of white knowledge
● dialogic mode: how the shared experiences are exchanged - sense of empathy is nurtured
● epistemic processes amongst african american women through dialogic exchange
● ideas associated with history and religion is revised
● epistolary form: novel engages with the private sphere - it's not just a novel about women’s private sphere,
it’s a way of revising history - in a very unassuming angle, the novel takes on the larger questions of history
pg 54 + pg 56: the quilt scene recurs - quilting as a recurrent trope in african american women’s writing - scraps of
clothes are brought together and stitched together, manually to make the quilt - the quilt is not a symmetrically
packed, single piece of cloth - it has multiple pieces, colours and textures
● a sense of multiplicity
● built of scraps of clothes (disregarded pieces) - becomes a metaphor for colour purple itself as a novel and
various other forms of creativity that characterises african american women’s experiences
● quilting parallels other pieces creativity like that of literature + music - any creative pieces that is otherwise
deemed as scraps, put together to form a piece of art
● alternate sites of creativity that one gets to access + the quilt as a metaphor for the novel itself and other
creative processes that puts the experiences of african american women into a medium
● polyvocality: multiplicity is invoked + foregrounded - similar to the dialogues: sharing of multiple
experiences
● quilting is an important process of community creation + sisterhood + sharing + storytelling - can be
considered similar to the solitary victorian women, knitting - but here, it's a collective activity - moving
beyond the gender boundary as well, when albert sits next to celie?
● weaves together the narratives of the traditionally silenced bodies
● comes in immediately after moments of sharing and intimacy - against the unidirectional flow of
knowledge: a episteme through community and empathy

shug avery
pg 9: the nature of desire and gaze is generated amd activated - quite different from the male gaze - a apathetic
association when she looks at the photograph: a differential act of reading built on empathy, adoration different from
the reductive and objectifying male gaze

pg 14: the mechanical nature of sexual activity for celie - a demystification of sexual activity
● the act of rape invokes a dual consciousness in the person who is being raped - a fragmentation that is
experienced - rape essentially reduces the subject to an object of pleasure
● they see themselves reduced to an object - a self upon which the violence is down - upon recalling, the self
sees itself as an object of violence
● franca rame’s the rape - she was assaulted in 1970s by extremists because she wrote against the state - she
comes out and doesn’t talk about it for a long time, but eventually writes about it - she describes the
experience: a constant shifting between the subject position and the object position - she is presenting her
memory through performance - the self is trying to make sense of what happens - the self through
recollection (act of self assertion) sees itself as an object of violence - a simultaneous fragmentation of self
- a dual consciousness that is imposed on the self
● john berger talks about the female experience: women always see themselves through the gaze of the man -
self conception mediated through male, you are thinking of yourself through a male gaze

desire requires a subject, and in the act of desiring it constitutes the subject
● it is through celie’s desire when she looks at shug, we can mark the idea of self love (it’s very much
associated with her relationship with shug) - it only increases - shug teaches her self-love, pleasure, touch
and so on: there is development
● despite the segment orienting around shug, but the text is not about the relationship between shug and celie
● through celie’s relationship with shug, we see the development of the realm of erotic: one of love, harmony
and creativity - celie’s trajectory of growth (bildungsroman) has to do with realignment of religion, history
and spirituality
how shug (in terms of action and appearance) was representative of the 1920s and 30s harlem renaissance - how she
is viewed in the church - women are constantly judging shug for being out there and unapologetically sexual and
assertive - an almost pornographic projection of shug done by the men
● she threatens the norms of morality as imparted through church + threatens the ‘family’

the reference to miss beasley: pg 11: she run off…have her

● any women that challenges or threatens the black patriarchal system is thought of as useless - any woman,
who has economical, sexual or intellectual freedom, and threatens the norm is considered useless or
excluded

shug emerges as a character who poses a threat to the order of the male system - shug speaks occasionally +
characters judging her - she is almost redeemed through celie’s reception of shug: a holistic and positive one
(negates every other perception that surrounds shug)

pg 25: the first time albert ever talked to celie - a mix of different rhetorics - the queen honeybee… not exactly her
words

pg 43: i stick my head and my arm…

● the relationship of celie and albert gets strengthened through their mutual love for shug

pg 47: certain humanisation of albert - a dimension of him that was not available to celie before - albert cannot think
for celie how he does for shug - and albert bond towards the end because of their common love for Shug
● celebration of shug and the black body
● not over-sexualisation of shug’s body: compares shug to olivia, nettie, her mother - trying to foreground
realm of erotic - evolving dimensions of celie’s relationship with shug
● I have become a man
● magazine that shug is reading: text acknowledges the existence of white consciousness, but doesn't focus
on it - inward reading
pg 68 - 75: celie’s sexual awakening + self-discovery - reclamation of her body - desire constitutes and requires a
subject - celie’s positioning has changed from object to subject, who not only desires but also feels (feels herself)
● simone de beauvoir: Women have accepted themselves as objects in relation to male subjects
● affirmation of self in moving away from object position to subject position
● mirror stage: lacan - stage in self development - child has not seen herself as a cohesive whole, only in
fragments - when child looks at the mirror can the child see all this connected to the whole
● beginning of ego can be traced back to the mirror stage (metaphorical way of talking about the sense of
wholeness) - child becomes cognisant of i am - celie’s act of looking at herself through the mirror - linked
to lacanian idea of mirror stage
● complex relationship between shug and celie - education that's happening - touching breasts:
○ memories associated are that of motherhood - memories construct us
○ celie was never a child - entire trajectory of growth disrupted - her sense of body is in complete
disarray
○ wrong - shame, guilt - shug will dismantle later - consistent indoctrination of certain deviant
activities within heteronormative structures
● female erotic: 'The uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power' by Audre Lorde
○ idea of erotic is brought in - erotic: not sexual activity, but conceived as generative principle which
involves self-love, creativity, harmony + kind of sexual and spiritual liberation (eros)
○ grounded within politics of the time: black women decided to prioritise race issues over gender
issues in 60s and 70s - acquiring a certain respectability, and aligning towards a black pride -
homosexual desire and relationships were also repressed and invisiblised as part of this movement
because it was central to maintain that respectability - conscious exclusion of these stories in the
name of black pride
○ foregrounding sexual relations between women - trying to politicise love by representing it and
bringing it into public mainstream - Cultivating Black Lesbian Shamelessness in The Color Purple
by christopher s Lewis
■ politics of respectability
■ shame and silencing were part of black identities
○ not a question of just sexual activity
■ earlier had been very reductive. This one is generative
■ Thus, think of it in terms of the erotic.

squeak

pg 76 - 79: her race: yellow skin - a case of interracial violence - the heterogeneity within the black race

her name: a comment on her general appearance and oral delivery - in opposition to sofia, she is meek - cannot
demand the kind of presence that sofia or shug demand
● why does celie ask her to make harpo call her by her real name? individuation - internalisation - internalise
the name squeak - naming is an act of power/claiming - infantilisation
● squeak: diminutive for the sense of self - growth of squeak who follows harpo around to a woman
● harpo has been emasculated by sofia

pg 86: it is the mayor’s wife who proposes the idea of sofia being a maid - women turning against women: the racial
divide is strong - the white and black divide is stark even among women - sofia has never been broken, she has
always fought back: she is broken and beaten up so hard

pg 90: conversation between squeak and odessa - miscegenation as a dangerous territory: to keep a clear boundary?
her uncle is distancing from her to keep a check on the miscegenation
● direct intervention on inter racial conflicts - doesn’t start off with it - comes to it by emerging from a
domestic plot line
● the beginning is focusing on the black household - the middle focusses on inter racial issues and later part
talks about both
pg 86 - 92: songs become a way she pins down her feelings - recurrence of music in the work: songs keep coming up
(spiritual, shug’s songs and squeak’s songs) - orality and music as modes of expression and creativity - how music
becomes an avenue to explore an alternate paradigm
● the content of squeak’s music: has she lost her sanity or is she creative? painful experiences as providing
subject for music
● pg 92: they: it's not the whites, it's the blacks - a division within from what we see from the above - the
othering: her in-betweenness (she is constantly labelled and if she were to call them blacks they would get
offended)
● while intersectionality has been a useful paradigm for black women amd south asian women, it should not
be reduced to a diagnostic mechanism - it shouldn't be a tool to identify intersections - one should cognify
that certain experiences are privileged to certain others
○ if squeak hadn’t told her story, then we would have privileged sofia’s story over what happened to
squeak (because she is yellow)
○ trauma being the catalyst to her self expression

pg 107 - 112:
● shug narrating her story + an important act of repentance: what she did to annie julia, another woman -
sofia had a similar conversation with celie - as these women are sharing their stories, they are making us
aware of the terrible nature of their lives - shug appears to us through celie’s eyes, all throughout - we have
black women sharing their stories to each other + the trope of the quilt: creation of the community -
recognition of the harm that they have done to other women
● the stamps that celie sees: funny looking stamps - the fat white woman: the queen - her alienation, illiteracy
becomes a way of critiquing and parodying some of symbols of white civilisation - the african american
woman becomes a tool of critiquing the ethos that underlie the white nation and nationalism that it endorses
- these women become a point to puncture these narrations
● the illiterate reader: she is unfamiliar with these geographical spaces - the nature v/s culture divide (africa:
nature oriented imagery - england: royal imagery) - he innocent act of reading makes these divisions
apparent, even though celie herself is unconscious about it

there is a shift happening in the narrative: we are looking at nettie’s letters to celie
● letter writing as a narrative mode, but now it’s a device towards the development of the plot itself - there is
a substitution of god in the address, there are two women talking to each other through these letters: there is
a format of dialogue between two women coming through this form of narrative technique (not
unidirectional anymore)
● patricia collins: about a new kind of epistemology that is being constituted - a horizontal mode of dialogic
experience - a different mode of knowledge constitution
● earlier there were letters that talked about celie’s reclamation of her body - one cannot think of her growth
as complete without a certain realignment or change in her awareness of history, religion and culture - her
self transformation cannot be deemed complete without a psychological transformation - what began with
the body is now moving to the political and religious understanding: we are to see a formation of an
alternate collective through her
● a time-lapse in the narrative: celie’s reading of these letters are delayed by over five years - through the plot
intervention of her finding the letters + delay, there is a parallel: nettie’s already experienced all of this,
celie’s on her way to self development and the reader in the act of reading, converges both the timelines
● moving beyond the borders of america: transnational kinship - 1960s and 70s: increasing awareness of
african roots - transnational and pan african sensibility at the time walker is writing (despite the novel being
set in 30s) - tracing alternate epistemological system enabled through the movement beyond borders

a consciousness of the multiplicity of african (or african american) experiences - a recognition of this multiplicity
through characters like squeak - nettie’s letters bring africa to the forefront: personalised narrative beguilingly looks
simple - that’s just a superficial engagement with the text - the novel makes political engagement - the political
stance that the novel makes is very fundamental - the text is not just about celie: she is someone who is at the
peripheries of western knowledge, but she is also an important literary tool

pg 117 - 119: what does nettie’s introductory letters tell us?

 ● nettie’s perception of africa as a place with grander cities - they are trying to locate africa in the western
epistemology available to them - at the same time, they are also creating and tracing the history of the
continent - nettie is sharing the knowledge she has on the historical landscape of africa with celie
● the reference to sofia: she is being talked about in a different perspective - the contrast in how the mayor’s
wife and sofia are being introduced: wet cat and an indomitable figure
● pg 119: the emphasis on her position as a missionary: a paradoxical position - missionary feminism as an
institution - alongside localised reforms, there was also transnational interaction of feminists through
missionaries
○ when white missionaries came to india, these women became the models of femininity to indians
○ a lived phenomenon where women travelled across the world and dissemination information
through the christian ethos
● nettie is a black woman embracing a white religion, and taking it to africa - she isn’t aware of the larger
framework, she is just happy about the freedom and education - as the letters progress, she becomes aware
of the contradiction - she becomes more accommodative of the olinka roofleaf god
● even though this return to africa happens in the narrative, it isn’t romanticised - there is a desire to find an
ancestry, but nettie is also looked down by the olinkas as pathetic - the recognition that her sentiments
aren’t reciprocated by the olinkas

what is nettie saying about these places? (pg 120,123)

● important processes for celie's growth

harlem
● harlem is to black people what shug is to celie
● economic concerns as prompting rise of harlem
○ pg 121: situations that prompted harlem
● motivations with donating generously - when africa is mentioned - emergence of pan-african identity -
emotive behaviour and sensibility vis a vis africa is symptomatic of this movement
● fashion as claiming the body - black people reclaiming their bodies through fashion which is theirs
● progress in financial and material terms
● harlem - progress in terms of social mobility - almost self-sufficient community of black people - society
re-imagined where black people can locate themselves
● african-american community wanted to refashion themselves in the figure of the “new negro”
● philanthropic urges of the people in harlem
● affective value associated with the donations
● pg 120: rural-urban divide
○ celie located in southern america, and nettie who has travelled to the urban space
○ great migration that has happened
○ stringent restrictions/ghettoisation of the black people + segregation
○ notions of modernity, economic differences that become central and strongly implied
● difference between how black people responded to africa and whites
○ desire for a transnational kinship
○ pan-african identity motivating a certain sense of collectivity and kinship
○ emotions, passion, feelings
○ in opposition - pg 122: duty-bound, distanced, detached attitude adopted by white missionaries
○ sense of patronising attitude associated with black missionaries travelling to africa
■ ironic position of samuel etc as black people going to africa as part of a colonial mission
○ pg 122: reference to white woman and image of white missionaries
■ colour becomes important
● harlem offers an alternate possibility
○ africa is not just a geographical space, it is also invested with great deal of imagination and hope,
and is constructed as a utopic space
● text systematically moves outwards
○ poor black woman is at the centre (celie)
○ culture, national imagination, harlem, africa, etc
○ later, these aspirations are immediately deferred - painful reality of racial segregation
● consciousness of african-american cultural identity
 ○ celebration of beauty and their cultural identity
○ recentres white aesthetics of beauty
● note the affirmative, positive adjectives used in this section and have become part of african identity
● idea of double consciousness
○ nettie seeing herself differently at the end of it, re-discovering herself

senegal

gateway to africa = nettie’s entry to africa]

● pg 126: ...something magical…: something resplendent about the black body - clear movement away from
the white beauty standards
● singing: squeak sings post her trauma - musical streak is almost like a subtext in the novel
● monoculture:
○ often seen in context of colonisation
○ intensive, cheap labour - emphasis on planting one kind of plant
○ disruption of existing lifestyle + can't eat this food
● several colonial powers:
○ nettie as missionary
○ french, followed the dutch
○ dutch, preliminary
○ senegal continued to experience colonisation - olinka sees early stages of colonisation
■ critique of imperialism and colonisation
■ text as actively becoming voice of critique of imperialism
● colonisers are also bringing in capitalism and exposed to market forces
○ need to buy their food and suppliers are colonial powers
○ the colonised are forced to also become the consumed
● heart of darkness: critique by chinua achebe
○ things fall apart as a response
○ africans are represented as mysterious and strange + africans always being in collectives/droves
○ nettie sees the white as an aberration
● pg 126 - 127: There are bunches…for a swim
○ proxy government
○ black man is referring to his own people as natives because he's parroting white rhetoric +
parroting and buying into colonial idea of progress and development without thinking about
whose development he's talking about - colonial/imperial critique
● a kind of alienation from the african space as it exists now

olinka
● pidgin english - when two linguistic communities are brought together, mostly by force, a rudimentary
language develops (no grammar or syntax) - useful in communication between the communities
○ first generation of contact
● creole - when pidgin moves forward and becomes mother tongue of next generation
● pg 133: mention of pidgin and creole
○ first stage of colonisation
○ His Christian name is Joseph: had a different name earlier

nettie's cyclical journey that panned over a period of thirty years from a small southern town in america to new york
to london to olinka in africa and back to her small town in the america—described in her letters to celie, is also the
cyclical journey of the black americans in search of their roots which, according to the novelist, are not anywhere
else but in the america
● the idea of jungle: wildlife and terrain that differs from the american imagination of the african landscape
● the stark contrast in how houses are made and the gendered structures are subtly mentioned right off the bat
- They pick it and dry it and lay it so it overlaps to make the roof rainproof. This part is women‘s work.
Menfolks drive the stakes for the hut and sometimes help build the walls with mud and rock from the
streams.
 ● judging by either parties based on the appearance
● the food preferences: We got there around four o‘clock, and sat under the leaf canopy until nine. We had
our first meal there, a chicken and groundnut (peanut) stew which we ate with our fingers. But mostly we
listened to songs and watched dances that raised lots of dust.
● the possibility of an abundance of village lores and myths: The biggest part of the welcoming ceremony was
about the roofleaf, which Joseph interpreted for us as one of the villagers recited the story that it is based
upon. The people of this village think they have always lived on the exact spot where their village now
stands. And this spot has been good to them.
● the cropping and the influence of british colonialism: cassava fields + groundnuts + yam and cotton and
millet - all kinds of things - but once, a long time ago, one man in the village wanted more than his share of
land to plant - He wanted to make more crops so as to use his surplus for trade with the white men on the
coast. Because he was chief at the time, he gradually took more and more of the common land, and took
more and more wives to work it. As his greed increased he also began to cultivate the land on which the
roofleaf grew - even his wives were upset by this and tried to complain, but they were lazy women and no
one paid any attention to them
○ great storm: no longer any roofleaf to be found - Where roofleaf had flourished from time‘s
beginning, there was cassava. Millet. Groundnuts. The people prayed to their gods and waited
impatiently for the seasons to change. As soon as the rain stopped they rushed to the old roofleaf
beds and tried to find the old roots. The chief was given all his storebought utensils and forced to
walk away from the village forever. His wives were given to other men. The roofleaf became the
thing they worship.
● oral literature - as a factor towards coming together of a community - a sense of stability created through
the folklore: important to preserving the sense of community - how folklore becomes an alternate history -
the lack of any ordering - the novel doesn’t tie itself to the specificity of timelines that history with a
‘capital h’ demands - these tales have a strong sense of emotions and subjective appeal - the pitfalls of
greed - form of a folktale is renarrativised in the letters - looking at a dominant tradition of History - how
celie as a black woman from rural south of the us is someone who is marginal to this mode of history: the
parody of cucumber in the early part of the novel
○ pg 143: dissociation between the christ - the dissonance between the christian missionary and the
olinkan god - rarely seen in missionary narratives
○ achebe: white historian tends to represent africa as a foil to europe: as a place of negation - the
african body and space is reduced and seen as antithetical to the west - nettie opening herself to
other forms of god, the oriental agenda is being challenged - develops into a puncturing or
renarrativisation of biblical figure: attempts to decenter the bible and renarrativise it
○ the text moves towards to the roots through routes
○ the double consciousness termed by dubois - peculiar sensations that arise due to the peculiar
situations of the africans in the white landscape - they are looking at themselves through others
eyes - the experience of dualness that the african self goes through - strong sense of longing in the
text at a personal and social level to break away from it - revisiting olinka becomes a part of this
project
● the event that clarifies how politically useful the missions are to the european imperialists, standing as
agents or prophets of spiritual progress, is the coming of the big road - generous in their estimation of
human nature, the olinka refuse to understand that the theory of property and propriety under which they
live is irrelevant to the western juridical code - modern natives assume that the superpower force that cuts
through the jungle builds a road to the tribe, for the tribe; they admire western technology, viewing it as
they view roofleaf, something nature makes in abundance for the well-being of its devoted people
● pidgin language
● english rubber planters that demolish the village of the olinka, destroy the roofleaf that they worship and
use to shield their homes, and leave them no choice but to either flee into the jungle, or survive by working
for the plantation and getting the means of accepting tokens of the “modern” life at the mercy of what the
plantation owners will grant them - the missionary work of corrine and samuel is also administered through
london: while both french and dutch imperialism is mentioned in the novel, it is the british empire that
works the most direct, and the most devastating, violence against the olinka

the question of women with respect to nettie’s perception of olinkan women

● pg 140: the olinka do not believe…all the time (142)
 ● pg 145: our women…rainy season
○ a highly patriarchal society - nettie realises certain commonalities between the olinkas and people
in her own community - cross-cultural comparison that emerges with respect to the treatment of
women - the condition of the women remains pitiable even in the great nation of America
○ the self and the other where the self defines itself against and through the other: beauvoir uses this
yo think about femininity - women has always been seen as the other of man - man continues to be
the norm and all things positive, and women are often ascribed that which is negative - she
highlights the history of women’s continued association with women and their positionality that
comes from men
○ possessing the secret joy: protagonist of this novel by walker herself, is tashi - the central theme of
genital mutilation is dealth in depth
○ there is a possibility of connection between women in both spaces in the eyes of nettie - but not
from the side of olinkas; they think of nettie’s situation as an unmarried missionary woman as
pitiable (an inversion) - a lack of common ground
● pg 150: no one in this village
○ there is no sense of shared history - the desire for kinship that nettie has is not present at the end of
olinkas
○ the circulation of folktales and the changes that comes forth - the imagination of continuity is
punctured when the narrative says that there is no sense of shared history
○ she is the most industrious of…killed: the text is drawing parallels to cultures in olinka and
elsewhere - friendship amongst the wives is quite fascinating to nettie: these men are nothing but
grown children: infantilization of the head of the family - it however doesn’t the systems - a
woman is identified in terms of the children she gives birth to and her husband
● gender neuteration: sexist, patriarchal practices
○ within the context of nettie’s narrative, it is presented as a barbaric act - her position as a coloured
missionary, that mark her departure from any association with the Olinkas
● tashi and adam - what does the text think about it?
● pg 216: I didn't know this…she said
○ understanding that woman's body continues to be the site upon which the olinka people assert their
ownership and masculinity and honour
○ no attempt in the narrative to romanticise africa or england
■ in the beginning of travelling to africa, there was a fascination and possibility of
romanticisation - not anymore
● white supremacist narrative that worked with the great american nation: racially and ethnically positioning
● africa as not a romanticised space: positioned as part of a political movement - walker is aware of the
pitfalls of this romanticisation of africa as a space - when nettie travels and sees africa: there is a kind of
disenchantment from the vision of africa - the principles of the narrative of shared history doesn’t work
now that time has passed - walker is aware that the notions about africa can’t be placed as a utopian idyllic
space
○ gilroy: history of nation is a terrestrial history - when we look at the history of the oceans,
interesting notions come to life: the slave trade - terrestrial history as white history - the atlantic
history: how the blacks were central in the making of the american nation - instead of seeing them
as aberrations to the fluid of the nation, to acknowledge their inputs to the american culture
○ nettie is also taking on an oceanic voyage and also looking into the idea of america as a nation -
nettie’s disenchantment with olinka is breaking down the long held binaries between whites and
blacks (one is associated with the urban space and the other in rural spaces)
○ the position that the text adopts - death of this dream (pg 214: the conversation between nettie and
samuel) - last page: the idea of july 4th: the black community has not been integrated into the
nation: they continue to be alienated - the realisation that the way forward is coming back - the
positioning of coming together

social ideas:
● nettie reports with pride about an afro-american church in which god is black - and there's the great text of
racial ressentiment: in the olinka origin narrative, white men are secondary productions of african culture
expelled into the nakedness and vulnerability of otherness - the pure pleasure nettie derives from reading
 blackness from a proper and sanctified point of view is the affective origin of the specifically nationalist
politics previously repressed in the colour purple
○ Pg 175: nettie and celie’s version of god
○ Pg 249: the olinkan genesis theory
● gender: the issue that brings to the surface the contradictions inherent in the missionaries' creation of a
pan-african consciousness is in the sphere of gender relations - samuel feels compelled to lecture the olinka
women on the virtues of monogamy over polygamy, even though the alliances made among the wives of
individual men render the polygamous women far more powerful than corinne, for example, feels in her
ambiguous relation to nettie - nettie, in turn, smugly offers to reveal to the olinka women the movement
among women in civilized nations toward liberation from patriarchal oppression in the public and private
spheres - but there too the olinka women see the limitations of nettie’s apparent freedom of movement and
knowledge: she is the missionary's drudge, an object of pity and contempt (pg 145, 149) - in short, as
samuel later painfully realizes, what passed for racial identification across borders and historical differences
was really a system of cultural hegemony disguised as support and uplift
● but samuel, corinne, and nettie are no more sophisticated in their understanding of the ways of civilized
culture than are the natives: this is one instance where the pan-national racial identification between
american and african blacks proves sadly accurate - too late, the mis- sionaries realize that the road
threatens their mission; desperately, they exhaust their resources trying to protect the tribe - the only
survivors are the tribal citizens who can read well enough to see their death sentence in western culture and
join the mbeles, the underground group of radicalised olinka

the tragedy of the olinka is a less direct but still devastating result of a racial ideology that has been so well
institutionalised that not even the descendants of slaves are aware of it - the black missionaries are incapable of
criticising the exploitation of native people who have neither technology, military power, political influence nor
understanding of the processes of modernisation - to the native africans, the greatest danger is not racism alone, but
uncontrolled capitalism on a still colonised continent

decolonising the mind - ngũgĩ wa thiong'o

● division of that otherwise organically existing entities -alienation: with respect to colonisation, related to
imperialism
○ imperialism: more psychological and ideological - more insidious way of establishing hegemony -
coming of english language, english missionary
● colonialism - causes alienation of people from their own land - senegal: calling your own people natives -
alienation from your own people and culture - mental colonisation

womanism: in search of our mother’s garden: in prose and poem, walker coins the term womanism - womanist is to
feminist as purple is to lavender - a subtle difference, but comes from the same palette - womanism is a more
universal conception under which feminism falls. womanism as a concept would work towards the nourishment of
man, woman etc in unison as opposed to feminism that's separatist - walker’s womanism is set in black context
● racially rooted in black women's conception of a kind of unified understanding
● bell hooks, simone de bouvouire - women are interspersed, no unity
● feminism is a movement - womanism is not; it is a concept - feminism is a political movement - womanism
doesn’t have the history that feminism has: no radical politics that governs it - womanism comes from the
dissatisfaction from the feminist movements that looked past intersectionality: therefore its one which
recognises oppression, multiplicity
● concerns of womanism expands from black women, then to other black women in the country, then across
the globe, and then expanding to other subjugated groups of women: a concentric structure
celie occupies the innermost circle, other women second circle, community third circle (idea of community comes in
- real father of celie was a victim of interracial violence - he was lynched) - albert comes in the next circle (his
moment of redemption in the end)
● womanism is ethically and culturally situated and attempts to harmonise the various individuals involved +
reconcile the experiences of the black women to that of the black man and then the community at large

pg 173: marking a departure when she says that she no longer writes to god - her association with god is through
distance, through alienation - she realises that the god she has always imagined is white
 ● the distance or the hierarchy between the creator and the created - the distance between the sacred and the
everyday/mundane - an operative framework within christian faith systems - the text is trying to collapse
the gap - the creator is in the creator
● a post christian neo-pagan voice: eco-spirituality, one which has a harmony with with nature
● the holistic understanding of being one with everything else - the transformative vision of god + the new
spiritual consciousness comes along with the critique of christianity in two ways: its racially grounded
eco feminism looks at nature through the perspective of gender - feminine perspective in environmental concerns:
feminine system of patience, care, gentility + masculine system is fast paced, aggressive and profit oriented
● staying alive: women, ecology, and development by vandana shiva: women coming from rural spaces who
draw on nature for subsistence
● women-led environmental movements in india
● elephant whisperer

pg 191: relevance of pants in the text - the letter ends with an address, the only letter with celie putting down her
address - the beginning of the initiative, that gives her great pride + her education through the many routes that nettie
takes, to learn about the roots - through the many routes: nettie’s engagement with africa + celie tracing her ancestry
- she is unburdened from the guilt and shame associated with incest - the break of language “pa is not pa” - a
reclamation of one’s own history - she goes to find her father’s grave - an unmarked grave: lynched people don’t git
no marker - in the absence of the grave, shug hugs her and says that they are each other’s peoples now - a
commentary on how lynched people whose lives were invisibilised in the building of the nation - there is a historical
anonymity or erasure - celie not having located her father’s grave is a comment on the many lives invisibilised -
monuments is an act of memorialisation: giving history - literature provides access to these memories otherwise
excluded from the archives - patricia collins: to look into alternate sources to construct the black epistemology - the
domestic circle as a point we often tend to overlook
● skills honed through domesticity aids in creativity: alternate sites of knowledge production
● these designs are highly personalised, in contrast to the capitalist mode of production which works on
alienation (the worker is removed from what they are making) - celie’s curated pants in that sense is
bringing in a new idiom which is grounded in feminine care and empathy
● these pants for both men and women - there is an emphasis on functionality
● gender destabilisation: in the beginning of the novel sofia was said to be like a man by celie because she
wore pants - pants becoming everyone’s comfort attire towards the end - womanist ethic that is ushered in
through pants
● when she created these non-standardised products, she is celebrating heterogeneity
○ connects back to the idea of quilting that stands for the heterogeneous black experiences
○ lived experiences
● self autonomy that celie now occupies, no longer the fourteen year old - she now employs other women

pg 194: intervention on language: the language politics ushered in by walker + aave used by women in south at the
time - walker chooses to go back to the roots and represent everyday reality through aave - realism + epistolary
format
1. the text is reasserting these now - celie’s register + nettie’s register which has streaks of missionary feminist
language - celie doesn’t revert to a different register - her use of aave is now shown as a choice: not a realist
representation alone or because celie lacks education - the assertion over language: not just economic
autonomy but also social and cultural autonomy

pg 242: dear celie, she wrote me…graves

● not just celie who has lost her children, something very common to the african reality in the early 20th
century rural south
● the indian reservation: they were displaced at the time the british (now americans) moved to the land - very
subtly, colonisation was mentioned through columbus; there is a recurrence now - america didn’t emerge
out of nowhere: there is a history of subjugation + exploitation - the red indians were pushed to areas
(reservations)
● teacher at the indian reservation: another space that is being talked about - he is a black white man (similar
to nettie’s position in olinka) - the revisionist perspective we see in the novel is the visibiling all the
moments invisibilized in history + spaces that are otherwise not given attention to
pg 259: the salutation is now embracing nature (neo pagan version of spirituality that celie has now espoused) -
affinity to a conceptual articulation that is now inclusive
● next week is fourth of july…: an important moment in white or national history, it doesn’t see itself
including the black community - the question of the white nationalist ethos and the black exclusion is
present till the very end
● the work is looking forward to the civil rights movement, the text hasn’t seen it yet
● celie is probably in 60s (the reference to grey hair) - the time the text has traversed: almost fifty years

Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker’s Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Colour Purple - Martha J Cutter

● The presence of the myth of philomela in the contemporary african american women writers - persistence
of a powerful archetypal narrative that connects rape + silencing + erasure of the feminine subjectivity -
silencing of philomela + physical violation inscribed on her body + captivity
○ Morrison’s bluest eye + Gloria Naylor’s The women of Brewster palace
○ Left with just two words: tereu, tereu
● Rape as a central trope for the mechanisms whereby a [atriarchal society writes oppressive dictates on
female bodies and minds; destroying subjectivity + voice - Men, potential rapists, assume presence,
language, and reason as their particular province. Women, potential victims, fall prey to absence, silence,
and madness”
● Philomela: alternate modes of communication that women devise for themselves post-silence only creates a
deeper silence upon further violence inflicted upon them - women’s alternative texts fail to transform in any
lasting way the social or linguistic forces of patriarchal domination
● Patricia joplin: women in yielding to violence, become just like men - the motion of reciprocal violence -
an endless cycle of linguistic violence against women (final silence where they are stripped off their human
voices)
● Walker: re-envisioning the myth through an alternative methodology of language - how a woman can
define herself differently, disengage her self from the cultural scripts of sexuality and gender that produce
her as feminine subject - celie’s acquisition of public and private languages
○ The text gives philomela a voice that successfully resists the violent patriarchal inscription of male
will onto a silent female body - revises the myth of philomela by creating a female voice that
reconfigures the rhetorical situation of the sender-reciever-message - articulates celie’s movement
away from an existence as a victim in a patriarchal plot toward a linguistic and narratological
presence as the author/subject of her own story
○ Creation of an alternative discourse that allows the expression of both male and female
subjectivity
○ Celie’s skills as a seamstress: retrieves and refigures the myth - Celie’s sewing functions as an
alternative methodology of language that moves her away from violence and victimization and
into self-empowerment and subjectivity - conflating the pen and the needle - binary oppositions
between the masculine and the feminine + spoken and silenced + lexical and graphic - speech
becomes the instrument for a radical metamorphosis of the individual + subjective deconstruction
of the power structures that undergird both patriarchal language and patriarchal world
○ The fear of rape permeates a woman’s life - the way to tackle this is simple to not be (denial of
being a self or a body) - celie’s imagines herself as a wood - begins her story in the mythic way,
the rape has already happened: she is silenced by external sources
■ Celie’s story starts with the fact that the one identity she has always known is no longer
accessible: “I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl” (11). No
longer a “good girl,” Celie has no present tense subjectivity, no present tense “I am.”
■ Her semiotic collapse by the rape - philomela connection: celie is constantly made to
grapple with bird and blood imagery (albert’s final comments) - the birds in the rape
scene are a positive symbol to celie of how nature persists in displaying its beauty despite
despoiling patterns of humanity - blood is generative when she says “blooming blood”
■ Like Philomela, whose breast feathers are stained “blood-colored” with the “red marks
of the murder” after she is transformed into a bird (Ovid 151), Celie’s breasts are stained
with blood. However, Celie eventually transforms the blood of this attack into blooming
blood, into a red that is creative and regenerative. A more mature Celie uses the color red
as a positive element in her sewing, transforming it from a color of pain to a color of joy.
 She sews purple and red pants for Sofia (194), orange and red pants for Squeak (191),
and blue and red pants for Shug (191). She paints her own room purple and red (248).
The blood that marks Celie becomes a positive symbol of her artistic creativity, rather
than (as in the myth) a negative symbol of how she is damned in perpetuity by her deed
■ Blood and bird: not to reduce celie from human to subhuman - but from victim to
artist-heroine
● Celie’s letters: creates a resistant narratological version of events that ultimately preserves her subjectivity
and voice
○ Susan brownmiller: Rape by an authority figure can befuddle a victim. . . . Authority figures
emanate an aura of rightness; their actions cannot easily be challenged. What else can the victim
be but ‘wrong”?
○ The fact that celie says she never gets used to it demonstrates that she knows that pa’s behavior is
improper - through writing, she externalises her experinces so that they don’t destroy her
○ Later this enables her to speak about this to shug
○ Ellen rooney: scenes of sexual violence can be privileged sites for investigating the construction of
female subjectivity because they articulate questions of desire + power + agency with a special
urgency + foregrounds the opposition between subject and object
○ how Celie creates her own spoken and written version of events which emphasizes her cognizance
and functions as a counterpoint to her own earlier erasure of body and identity
○ In the novel, rape doesn’t lead to erasure, but rather starts a struggle toward subjectivity and voice
● Multiple + repeated rape - celie is impregnated twice and her children are given away - raped by albert - her
letters repeatedly emphasize that sex with Albert is the equivalent of rape - father and husband are
conflated -
● Celie’s resistant voice is enabled by her creation of an alternative conception of her audience and by a
reconfiguration of the rhetorical triangle of sender-receiver-message
● However, in a text where “[c]riss-crossed letters, letters written to an absence, letters received from the
dead, hidden and confiscated letters, all of these point to the instability of language” (Wall 94), perhaps it
is no surprise that Albert’s simplistic gesture of locking up Nettie’s voice in his trunk does not actually
disrupt the “conversation” between Celie and Nettie.7 Although Nettie has never received a letter from
Celie, Nettie still feels as if she is communicating with her sister: “I imagine that you really do get my
letters and that you are writing back: Dear Nettie, this is what life is like for me” (144). Similarly, Celie
discovers that she can converse with Nettie despite receiving no response, and even despite the possibility
of Nettie’s physical death: “And I don’t believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe,
like God, you changed into something different that I’ll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead
to me Nettie. And never will be” (229–230). In a more positive version of the interchange between
Philomela and Procne, Celie’s letters to Nettie create an imagined linguistic persona with whom she can
speak “differently.” By doing so, Celie finds an alternative conception of the communicative process that
allows her to bypass Albert’s invalidation of her discourse and enables her survival. In most rhetorical
situations, after all, the sender expects that the receiver will actually receive the message and shapes the
message accordingly. But Celie subversively reconfigures her audience so that an imagined, rather than
actual, person is the receiver of the message, and this allows her to shape her message in such a way that it
cannot be erased or silenced, in such a way that it can exist despite Albert’s attempt to deny both the
communication and the communicator
● Philomela is denied of traditional channels of speech, so she resorts to an alternative text woven in purple -
celie’s alternative text leads to her reconstruction and not destruction - nettie and celie returns - a home: she
signs her address in the letter where she talks about her pants -
● Alternate methodology of language - language is often an instrument of coercion and dominance - used by
men to silence women - in page 187: she uses language to suppress albert - celie has now learnt to use both
physical and linguistic violence to erase others - celie is to learn the language that can be used to
understand, rather than destroy, another’s subjectivity - in the end, she accepts that albert is able to use
language in a constructive voice and she no longer denies his speech, now us sit sewing and talking and
smoking our pipes
● Sewing and conversation are allied and inseparable - alternate methodology of speech - sewing functions as
a language + curtains to welcome sofia + spoilt parts of this curtain is later made into a quilt
 ○ Teresa tavormina: sewing is an act of union, of connecting pieces to make a useful whole.
Furthermore, sewing with others is a comradely act, one that allows both speech and comfortable,
supportive silence” (224).
○ sewing does more than enable conversation: sewing is conversation, a language that articulates
relationships and connects and reconnects networks of individuals to create a community.
○ Sewing as the language that can replace patriarchal discourse + revise the mythic pattern of
silence/violence/silence - novel’s form itself is quiltlike
○ Furthermore, rather than allowing Nettie’s letters to remain as separate blocks of narrative
“fabric,” Celie weaves them into her tapestry by interspersing her own voice into them: “Dear
Celie, the first letter say,” (119), “Next one said” (120), “Next one fat, dated two months later,
say” (122). Celie’s narrative voice, then, is not just another square in a quilt, equal to all the other
squares. Rather, in the text as a whole narrative voices are interwoven, imbricated, threaded
together, and interconnected by the needle/pen of the spinner, Celie herself.
○ Weaving + embroidering + sewing: analogies for the novel’s form - metaphors for the kind of
conversation that walker envisions replacing the patriarchal discourse
○ Celie’s sewn gift to nettie is an act of interconnection and rejuvenation - Nettie’s recovered letters
are like Philomela’s tapestry: they speak the oppression of women, they incite the sister (or all
sisters) to violence. But Walker suggests that violence will only end in more silence. An
alternative must be found, and this alternative is sewing and conversation, sewing as conversation.
Sewing is a language that explicates an alternative to the violence of patriarchal discourse
○ Thread and word can't be separated
● Walker’s language of the sewn denies binaries and hierarchies of the hegemonic world, such as those
between oral and written language, between informal and formal diction, between art and language, and
between discourse and “craft.”
● Nor is this alternative language of the sewn limited to women. By the end of the novel, Albert is sewing,
too. Indeed, sewing facilitates a retrieval of an earlier maternal conversation in which Albert once
participated: “When I was growing up, he said, I use to try to sew along with mama cause that’s what she
was always doing. But everybody laughed at me” (238). Through sewing, Albert becomes part of Celie’s
community; when Nettie returns from Africa, Celie introduces both Shug and Albert as “my peoples”
(250). It is significant that Walker allows Albert, an image of Tereus, of the father/rapist, to participate in
the conversation of sewing. His transformation and inclusion in Walker’s new version of the myth of
Philomela shows that indeed the violence of the cycle can be broken. In Walker’s revision of the myth of
Philomela, both the sisters and the rapist turn from the violence of patriarchal discourse and find alternative
methodologies of language that speak their recapitulation of self rather than their deconstruction of self and
other.

Sewing, Quilting, Knitting: Handicraft and Freedom in The Color Purple and A Women’s Story - Catherine E
Lewis

● Handicraft has been reclaimed and accentuated, apparently in recognition of its ability to bond or its use as
a medium to pass along information of former generations; furthermore, it frequently becomes neutral
ground where everyone who participates is free to speak without fear or inhibition
● But works have many contexts: time, author, genre, among others. While The Color Purple and A Women’s
Story may digress in stylistics and ethnicity, at the core of each is the study of the changing roles of women
in evolving societies; consequently, the works are not products simply of coincidental parallel
evolution—borne of struggling political systems in their respective countries—but become, rather, products
of convergent evolution, which means they may evolve in many ways from diverse sources, but at some
point they intersect
● From early 20th-century Southern United States black communities to late 20th-century Chinese
communities, women find means of liberation within the roles allotted them: in domestic duties and bonds
the women in these works relate to one another, find individual and group strength, and turn skills from
those roles into avenues for independence. In The Color Purple and A Women’s Story alike, beyond
intercultural differences, the heroines demand that patriarchal sanctions collapse upon themselves when the
women use hand-crafts to free themselves from restrictions and take strength from female influence.
● Albert’s sister Kate tells him Celie needs a new dress; she cannot even declare her most basic needs, much
less those that are psychologically intricate. Celie imagines Albert thinking of her as “It,” objectifying
 herself in his mind as though she were a floor that needed a new rug. Later, Celie asks Shug to remain in
their home because Albert beats Celie when Shug is not there, a confession that leads Shug to reject Albert
eventually in favor of Celie.
● Concern with voice-ness: sofia - arrested - beaten up savagely - rendering her speechless - Sofia must be
punished at the mouth that offended, according to white legal and political dictates in the novel. When
Celie, Albert, Harpo, and Shug are allowed to visit her and Celie asks her how she copes, Sofia answers in
a way that reinforces the significance of voiceless female passivity in their community: “Every time they
ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I act like I’m you. I jump right up and do just what they say” (88).
Sofia condemns Celie’s docility, intimating that despite the trouble, she would still rather have fought than
be trod over anyway while remaining quiet.
○ Sofia continues her vituperation at the white patriarchy, and her visitors “don’t say nothing” (89).
Sofia is quiet to her jailers but retains her voice in her own group, an act that Celie cannot yet
muster. Whether it is the white jailers or the black men in Celie’s life, each embodies the
patriarchy, silencing the women physically, legally, or ideologically.
● Commentary on creativity in Victorian England includes the idea that much artistic production was the
result of rechanneled energies in the repressive times. During the times of tension in the book and the film,
creative energies are omnipresent. Much of this creativity takes place in domestic situations, particularly in
The Color Purple
○ Whether combing hair, cooking or cleaning, necessary domestic endeavors provide Celie with
routine when the psychological, social, and sexual parts of her life are anything but predictable.
○ Celie’s ability to relate to women: sewing or quilting - Celie’s quilt becomes a celebration of
fragments, a recognition and reverence for pieces”
○ Elsley notes that at the heart of the Sister’s Choice pattern is a nine-square patch, the design
Corinne uses when making quilts of her and Olivia’s old dresses (77). It is one of Corinne’s quilts
Nettie uses to exonerate herself and Samuel in Corinne’s accusations of adultery and then to prove
Adam and Olivia’s maternity. Walker links six women in the quilting scene, strengthening the
bonds among them all that have seen and will see each woman through much hardship
○ And everyday we going to read Nettie’s letters and sew. A needle and not a razor in my hand, I
think.

Women, Letters and the Empire: The role of the epistolary narrative in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple -
Maria Berg Jørgensen

● The use of letters as an agent of storytelling is – of course – a matter of narrative technique, which
theoretically is independent of the content and focus of any text. It is highly questionable if the epistolary
novel can be considered a “genre” merely because of its narrative peculiarities, and a more correct usage
would likely be to consider it a “form
● Colour Purple: an untraditional autobiography or a twisted Bildungsroman - Celie starts writing letters at
the age of fourteen, and keeps on writing for four decades, ending sometime in the nineteen forties, when
her journey through life and love, and Nettie’s journey through the world, reunite them in their childhood
home
● The novel begins as Celie stops talking and starts writing, after she has been raped by her father and
threatened that she “better not never tell nobody but god
● Harpo is a victim of his father’s bad example as a husband; he loves children and enjoys domestic work
normally associated with women, but knows no other image of marriage than the one where a husband
beats and dominates his wife
● But where Sofia is free because she will not let men dominate her physically, Shug is spiritually liberated
● celebrates the feminine sphere of living - quilting becomes a symbol of female friendship - The
traditionally feminine occupations are in fact what saves the men in the novel from their misery: love,
family and the comfort of caring for others are the powers that save and reform abusive men who have been
brought up into an understanding of the world were the woman, and what the woman does, are seen as
inferior to the male actions and values
● The problems of race are not as harmonically resolved, although the novel hints that the next generation
might bring conciliation. However, the novel firmly establishes that the victim can also be a perpetrator:
Shug and Albert's treatment of Annie Julia and in the beginning also of Celie is evidence of this, as is
 Nettie, Samuel and Corrine's discovery that the Olinka consider them to be no better than the white
missionaries that were there before them.
● The historical influence of the epistolary novel: The writing of fiction takes training and talent, and the
publication of it was and largely still is a matter of market demand and the approval of individual
publishers and editors. The letter might appear trivial compared the print of the mass media or the works
included in literary canons - a form of writing that was much more accessible than the production of a
newspaper editorial, far less a novel - Anyone who can write and read and afford the stamps can also write
and mail a letter, and the writing of letters was an activity so universal that their authenticity are rarely
questioned except in cases of known censorship
○ the “artless” language made it easier to believe that these words had not been filtered by a narrator
○ it did not violate the Puritan scepticism towards the falsehood of fiction (Perry x), and because the
personal nature of many letters was such that it opened for the soul-searching and introspection
highly valued in the Puritan theology
○ The Enlightenment and the spread of Puritanism in Britain created a demand for “truth” in art, for
which the letter was a particularly well-suited form: there was a new demand for realism, and the
simple, everyday language of the private letter was something that the reading public could
recognise from their own lives – an important departure from the flowery tales of the romances of
the previous times
○ Symptomatic of the developing novel was also a secondary mission of many letter manuals: they
intentionally made use of emotional subtleties to train the “sensibilities” of their audience
○ The epistolary novel first appears alongside the publication of letters for informative and didactic
purposes, and it would soon become a major figure in the literature of the Enlightenment
○ The novel of letters is an inescapable part of many national literary canons, which may be seen in
the critics that consider Pamela to be the first true novel in Britain, the effect Les Lettres
Portugaises had on the French writers of the seventeenth century, or the space that Die Leiden des
Jungen Werther occupies in the German literary canon (not forgetting its part in fuelling Goethe's
rise as a literary name).
○ The novel of letters sits comfortably in many early turning points in the history of narrative
fiction. It is impossible to ignore the presence of the letter novel in the history of western
literature, although its contribution to the art of writing and to the development of the novel as a
genre has traditionally been considered to be of little notice - but the twentieth century saw the
form taken up and used in various ways as an inroad into the mind of the characters. The last
decades of the twentieth century in particular saw a number of female revisions of the genre.
● Women and the Epistolary Novel: The British literary canon has its most infamous examples as Pamela and
Clarissa, both penned by Samuel Richardson in the voice of young women who, deprived of other means of
confidant communication, write letters telling about their desperate situation - The Epistolary Woman”.
This is a figure she detects in a particular mode of women’s writing in France, and which she believes was
a particularly dangerous manner of representing the feminine mind
○ Literary theorists – inevitably male – posed the doxa that while men studied language, women
attained it subconsciously; lacking the training to write proper literature and being victims of a
biology that was believed to limit them to naïve emotion, their natural talent was for the kind of
writing in which primitive passion was preferable – in love letters
○ the only acceptably feminine mode of writing was the love letter, preferably that of an “anguished
and abandoned” woman desperately writing to the lover who had left her, and it was not
considered on a par with the male forms of writing
○ the letter novel became a female way of writing a form that was invented by men, in a period
when publication and editing of literature was controlled entirely by men. this happened as a
reaction to the salon culture of the Enlightenment France, where women participated along with
men and where the idea of galanterie came to question a culture where love and marriage were
institutions in which women acted as possessions traded between men
○ “The Epistolary Woman”, eventually established as the norm of the French woman writer, became
the antithesis of the “sexually dominant, literary empowered” woman writer of the salon culture.
Now, the ideal image of the writing woman is one who has been seduced and abandoned by her
lover, and who is writing her unfulfilled emotions
○ how industrialisation brought on women's gradual loss of economic independence and social
influence, and ultimately reduced them to an infantile legal status, where their survival was fully
 dependent on men (the father or the husband), where any possessions they brought into marriage
fell to their husbands, where they received no education, and where the separation of workplace
and home excluded them from influence on the dawning capitalist economy
○ The wife was the servant of the husband, and even their bodies – their chastity – were seen as male
possessions. There was a shift in how woman's place in society was seen: where the nun had once
been an independent, scholarly and respected figure in the Middle Ages, she was now an object of
pity because she was not married, and became a staple figure of repressed female passion in the
novels of the time. Perry notes that the development of the novel corresponded with a period when
women – particularly in the growing middle class – were reduced to a state where they were
expected to stay away from public life and devote themselves to their families, living on the mercy
of their fathers and, as they grew older, their husbands
○ the novel's focus on women's sexuality, and the implications this had for the epistolary form - “if a
novel had a male protagonist it could be about almost any sort of subject and circumstance, but if
it was about a woman, it was almost certain about her relation to a man; nothing else was germane
○ The epistolary form foregrounded subjective experience and emotions, which made it a perfect
vessel for romantic fantasy, but this had an insidious flip side: the connection between
consciousness and sex. In a medium where a person exists solely as the words they put onto paper,
and where these words are assumed by the reader to be the unguarded view into the writer's mind,
the conflict around which the story centres is often not physical, but mental. Seduction is sexual
persuasion, and many epistolary novel seem to suggest that a woman who opens her mind to a
man, in due time will open her body to him as well. Perry connects this to the “proper” courtship
rituals of the day, when young men and women interacted only within strict social rules – to the
point where a young man writing a letter directly to a woman was displaying unpardonable
frankness. Ultimately, the letter becomes a representation of the self that cannot physically be with
the addressee, and violation of the confidence placed in the letter works as a metaphorical rape;
the spiritual penetration forebodes the physical
○ epistolary novel might have given women writers a “respectable” manner of being published in a
period when their social position was otherwise inhibited, but that it also was both a result of, and
perpetrator in maintaining, a view of the women's place in society that was limiting the ways in
which it was appropriate for them to express themselves, and what kind of female writing was
judged worthy of being published.
● Epistolary narratology: the private letter was a unique opportunity to gain access to the mind of another
person - the third person fiction would insert letters in moments of emotional turmoil under the assumption
that no heterodiegetic narrator could satisfyingly convey the raw emotions in moments of passion
○ Letters: first person narrative - temporal aspect makes it work on different principles than the story
of the I - multiplicity of associations depending on how the reader approaches it
● Letter fiction and diary fiction: colour purple as a diary novel - letters written without the expectations that
someone will read it? - the degree to which the addressee is given an independent life and an active textual
role in the work - The particular you whose constant appearances distinguishes letter discourse from other
written discourse (memoir, diary, rhetoric) is an image of the addressee who is elsewhere. Memory and
expectation keep the addressee present to the imagination of the writer. But it is not only on the level of
the psychological state of the letter-writer/narrator that the existence of this other person is a crucial
influence: the very rhetoric of letters – as opposed to diaries – relies on the presence of another
person, and a unique, tangible relationship between the writer and the reader
○ Gerald Prince writes, it is not a superficial journal shape which particularizes a diary novel. I say
this not only because a third-person narration respecting that convention, or a fictional log, a
ledger, a cashbook, would not constitute a diary novel, but also because some well known diary
novels do not adopt to that exterior shape. Prince defines the diary novel as “a first first-person
novel in which the narrator is a protagonist in the events recorded”, and in which the time of
narration is fragmented, where events are narrated as they happen rather than in retrospective. The
lack of an addressee is no does not distinguish the diary novel from the letter novel, as there are
many examples of diarists writing with one or more readers in mind. Prince concludes that “what
makes a diary novel unlike any other kind of narrative is, rather, a theme – or more precisely, a
complex of themes and motifs”.
○ Writers in epistolary novels might write to another person, but they will often write for
themselves, to settle their own feelings and find their own catharsis.
The Colour Purple and the Novel of Letters
● The Colour Purple and the Epistolary novel of the eighteenth century: celie as an antithetical figure to the
letter writer in 18th century england - she finds love and meaning in life not in marriage, but in the leaving
of it (in a reversal of the eighteenth century ideology of love and marriage as a woman's lot in life, Celie's
ultimate triumph is when she, faced with the loss of love, finds that her life has more meaning than ever).
● The Era of the “Classical” Epistolary Novel: The epistolary novel held a formidable position in the early
years of the British novel. Joe Bray dates the heyday of the epistolary form to have begun with the English
translation of Les Lettres Portugaises in 1678, and ended between 1797 and 1798 when Jane Austen
reworked “Elinor and Marianne”, believed to have been epistolary, into the third-person Sense and
Sensibility. English-language epistolary fiction existed before this period and continues to be written to this
day, but its influence on the development of the novel was never as great as in this period, and it was
popular. “There were between 100 and 200 epistolary works published and sold in London during the early
eighteenth century (…) all of the best selling Grub Street hack writers dealt in letters (…) they translated
them, edited them, 'presented' them or wrote them outright”

The Colour Purple and the Epistolary Narrative

● 92 letters - 22 from nettie - 14 to nettie - 56 god - 1 shug to celie - no dates
● Altman’s levels of diegesis involved in a typical epistolary novel- the first intermediary level is not
mentioned
● The Color Purple consequently does not depict a correspondence. There is neither intercourse nor
communication between Celie and Nettie. Celie responds to some of the content in Nettie's letters, but
mainly to other characters who are mentioned later in her own letters to Nettie; she clearly does not tell
Nettie these things out of a wish to initiate discussion etween the two of them. Nettie, who never receives
Celie's letters and cannot know if her sister even is still alive, writes into a void. Celie likewise does not
stop writing to Nettie even after she receives news of her death. There is a wall between the two of them
that only Nettie's letters to Celie manage to overcome by the middle of the novel, and which keeps Celie's
letters from reaching Nettie until Nettie herself can return to pick them up in person. Whatever the purpose
a letter exchange might have – discussion, intimacy, gossip – it is something that Nettie and Celie cannot
have, making the effect of their letters different from those that are exchanged between mutually aware
correspondents. In The Color Purple, the letter has lost its most basic function: it fails to communicate.
Consequently, the very purpose of the letter exchange is absent from the novel, because not only do letters
not reach their addressees, but the writers are at least partially aware that their words will not be read.

Black Feminist Thought - Patricia Hill Collins

● Because elite White men control Western structures of knowledge validation, their interests pervade the
themes, paradigms and epistemologies of traditional scholarship.As a result, U.S. Black women’s
experiences as well as those of women of African descent transnationally have been routinely distorted
within or excluded from what counts as knowledge
● U.S. Black feminist thought as specialized thought reflects the distinctive themes of African-American
women’s experiences
● Black feminist thought can best be viewed as subjugated knowledge. Traditionally te suppression of black
women’s ideas within the white male-controlled social institutions led African-American women to use
music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for constructing a black
femisnist consciousness - higer education + media: differently subjugated
● subordinate groups have long had to use alternative ways to create independent self-definitions and
self-valuations and to rearticulate them through our own specialists.
● Far from being the apolitical study of truth, epistemology points to the ways in which power relations shape
who is believed and why. For example, various descendants of Sally Hemmings, a Black woman owned by
Thomas Jefferson, claimed repeatedly that Jefferson fathered her children. These accounts forwarded by
Jefferson’s African-American descendants were ignored in favor of accounts advanced by his White
progeny. Hemmings’s descendants were routinely disbelieved until their knowledge claims were validated
by dna testing
● Eurocentric knowledge validation: Two political criteria influence knowledge validation processes. First,
knowledge claims are evaluated by a group of experts whose members bring with them a host of
sedimented experiences that reflect their group location in intersecting oppressions. No scholar can avoid
 cultural ideas and his or her placement in intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and
nation. In the United States, this means that a scholar making a knowledge claim typically must convince a
scholarly community controlled by elite White avowedly heterosexual men holding U.S. citizenship that a
given claim is justified. Second, each community of experts must maintain its credibility as defined by the
larger population in which it is situated and from which it draws its basic, taken-for-granted knowledge.
This means that scholarly communities that challenge basic beliefs held in U.S. culture at large will be
deemed less credible than those that support popular ideas. For example, if scholarly communities stray too
far from widely held beliefs about Black womanhood, they run the risk of being discredited.
○ When elite White men or any other overly homogeneous group dominates knowledge validation
processes, both of these political criteria can work to suppress Black feminist thought.\
○ Moreover, specialized thought challenging notions of Black female inferiority is unlikely to be
generated from within white-male controlled academic settings because both the kinds of
questions asked and the answers to them would necessarily reflect a basic lack of familiarity with
Black women’s realities.
○ Even those who think they are familiar can reproduce stereotypes. Believing that they are already
knowledgeable, many scholars staunchly defend controlling images of U.S. Black women as
mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels, and allow these commonsense beliefs to permeate their
scholarship.
○ But because Black women have been denied positions of authority, they often relied on alternative
knowledge validation processes to generate competing knowledge claims. As a consequence,
academic disciplines typically rejected such claims.
○ One way of excluding the majority of Black women from the knowledge validation process is to
permit a few black women to acquire positions of authority in institutions that legitimate
knowledge, and to encourage us to work within the taken-for-granted assumptions of Black female
inferiority shared by the scholarly community and the culture at large.
○ Black women stress their struggles with job discrimination, inadequate child support, inferior
housing, and street violence, far too much docila sciene research seems mesmerized by images of
lazy “welfare queens” content to stay on the dole. The methods used to validate knowledge claims
must also be acceptable to the grou controlling the knowledge validation process.
○ Criteria for methodological adequacy associated with positivism illustrate the standards that Black
women scholars, especially those in the social sciences, would have to satisfy in legitimating
Black feminist thought. Though I describe Western or Eurocentric epistemologies as a single
cluster, many interpretive frameworks or paradigms are subsumed under this category. Moreover,
my focus on positivism should be interpreted neither to mean that all dimensions of positivism are
inherently problematic for Black women nor that nonpositivist frameworks are better.
■ Positivist approaches aim to create scientific descriptions of reality by producing
objective generalizations. By decontextualizing themselves, they allegedly become
detached observers and manipulators of nature
○ Requirements to typify positivist methodological approaches
■ Distancing of the researcher from her or his object of study by defining the researcher as
a subject with full human subjectivity
■ Absence of emotions from the research process
■ Ethics and values are deemed inappropriate in the research process - either as the reason
for scietififc enquiry or as part of the research process itself
■ Adversarial debates - preferred methodof ascertaining the truth
○ The historical conditions of Black women’s work, both in Black civil society and in paid
employment, fostered a series of experiences that when shared and passed on become the
collective wisdom of a black woman’s standpoint. Moreover, a set of principles for assessing
knowledge claims may be available to those having these shared experiences. hese principles pass
into a more general Black women’s wisdom and, further, into what I call here a Black feminist
epistemology.
● Lived experience as a Criterion of Meaning
○ In describing differences separating African-American and White women, Nancy White invokes a
similar rule: “When you come right down to it, white women just think they are free. Black
women know they ain’t free
 ○ Geneva Smitherman, a college professor specializing in African-American linguistics, suggests,
“From a black perspective, written documents are limited in what they can teach about life and
survival in the world. Blacks arequick to ridicule ‘educated fools,’ . . . they have ‘book learning’
but no ‘mother wit,’ knowledge, but not wisdom”
○ This distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and the use of experience as the cutting edge
dividing them, has been key to Black women’s survival. In the context of intersecting oppressions,
the distinction is essential. Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom
is essential to the survival of the subordinate.
○ Thus lived experience as a criterion for credibility frequently is invoked by U.S. Black women
when making knowledge claims. For instance, Hannah Nelson describes the importance that
personal experience has for her: “Our speech is most directly personal, and every black person
assumes that every other black person has a right to a personal opinion. In speaking of grave
matters, your personal experience is considered very good evidence.With us, distant statistics are
certainly not as important as the actual experience of a sober person”. Similarly, Ruth Shays uses
her lived experiences to challenge the idea that formal education is the only route to knowledge: “I
am the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of education, but both my mother and my father had
good common sense. Now, I think that’s all you need. I might not know how to use thirty-four
words where three would do, but that does not mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about. . . .
I know what I’m talking about because I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about what I have
lived”. Implicit in Ms. Shays’s self-assessment is a critique of the type of knowledge that obscures
the truth, the “thirty-four words” that cover up a truth that can be expressed in three.
○ Connected knowers: Such women felt that because knowledge comes from experience, the best
way of understanding another person’s ideas was to develop empathy and share the experiences
that le the person to form those ideas.
○ These theorists suggest that women are more likely to experience two modes of knowing: one
located in the body and the space it occupies and the other passing beyond it. Through multiple
forms of mothering, women mediate these two modes and use the lived experiences of their daily
lives to assess more abstract knowledge claims
○ African-American women’s lives remain structured at the convergence of several factors: Black
community organizations reflecting principles of African-influenced belief systems; activist
mothering traditions that stimulate politicized understandings of Black women’s motherwork; and
a social class system that relegates Black women as workers to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
○ “Sisterhood is not new to Black women,” asserts Bonnie Thornton Dill, but “while Black women
have fostered and encouraged sisterhood, we have not used it as the anvil to forge our political
identities. Though not expressed in explicitly political terms, this relationship of sisterhood among
Black women can be seen as a model for a series of relationships African-American women have
with one another
○ while Black men participate in the institutions of Black civil society, they cannot take part in
Black women’s sisterhood. In terms of Black women’s relationships with one another,
African-American women may find it easier than others to recognize connectedness as a primary
way of knowing, simply because we have more opportunities to do so and must rely upon it more
heavily than others.
● The Use of Dialogue in Assessing Knowledge Claims
○ “Dialogue implies talk between two subjects, not the speech of subject and object. It is a
humanizing speech, one that challenges and resists domination,” asserts bell hooks
○ A primary epistemological assumption underlying the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge
claims is that connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of the knowledge
validation process
○ This belief in connectedness and the use of dialogue as one of its criteria for methodological
adequacy has African roots. Whereas women typically remain subordinated to men within
traditional African societies, these same societies have at the same time embraced holistic
worldviews that seek harmony.
○ Not to be confused with adversarial debate, the use of dialogue has deep roots in African-based
oral traditions and in African-American culture
○ The widespread use of the call-and-response discourse mode among African-Americans illustrates
the importance placed on dialogue. Composed of spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction
 between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker’s statements, or “calls,” are punctuated by
expressions, or “responses,” from the listener, this Black discourse mode pervades African-
American culture. The fundamental requirement of this interactive network is active participation
of all individuals
○ June jordan: Our language is a system constructed by people constantly needing to insist that we
exist. . . . Our language devolves from a culture that abhors all abstraction, or anything tending to
obscure or delete the fact of the human being who is here and now/the truth of the person who is
speaking or listening. Consequently, there is no passive voice construction possible in Black
English. For example, you cannot say, “Black English is being eliminated.” You must say, instead,
“White people eliminating Black English.” The assumption of the presence of life governs all of
Black English . . . every sentence assumes the living and active participation of at least two human
beings, the speaker and the listener
○ With many women writers, relationships within family, community, between men and women, and
among women—from slave narratives by black women writers on—are treated as complex and
significant relationships, whereas with many men the significant relationships are those that
involve confrontations—relationships outside the family and community”.
○ Alice Walker’s reaction to Zora Neale Hurston’s book Mules and Men is another example of the
use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims. In Mules and Men Hurston chose not to become a
detached observer of the stories and folktales she collected but instead, through extensive
dialogues with the people in the communities she studied, placed herself in the center of her
analysis.
○ Black women’s centrality in families, churches, and other community organizations provides
African-American women with a high degree of support for invoking dialogue as a dimension of
Black feminist epistemology

Re-Visions, Re-Flections, Re-Creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women - Elizabeth

Campbell
● Although such novels have always been about sexual politics, contemporary ones are more blatantly
political in theme and more radical in form, and many are written by women in post-colonial cultures, in
which women have been doubly oppressed, from outside by a chauvinistic imperialism and from within by
a patriarchy which itself has felt oppressed by outside forces
● above writers play in a postmodernist sense with epistolary conventions to produce revolutionary texts
● the letter as a subversive and freeing agent and also as a mirror in which they not only seek themselves
and/or another but attempt to change their lives to reflect the mirror image
● In many contemporary women's novels, women find their and their selves in the act of writing. Women
today are doing consciously what women writers have always done, what feminist theorists call l'criture
feminine, or writing in the is, writing themselves in a way which reflects their experience "other" in a
culture in which thy have been voiceless and thus powerless
● Sartre associates the open (epistolary) literature eighteenth century with "doubt, refusal, criticism, and
contestation". If epistolary writing, which I will show lecrituure feminine, is a revolt against the dominant
culture, it should not be surprising that most epistolary literature from Ovid's heroides to present-day novels
has been written in a woman's voice and women writers.
● The most common subject of epistolary novels in the past the love and/or seduction story. The earliest
epistolary novels love letters without replies (as Ovid's Heroides first appeared), exchange of letters
between two lovers (or would-be lovers). The latter type is usually a seduction story, in which the man
attempts to seduce the woman with his pen; the former type usually expresses the sorrow and rage of the
abandoned woman (as in the "portugaises" genre). In many novels the story opens with the seduction
letters, takes the woman's resistance and final seduction, and closes with her sorrow, anger, isolation, and
very often her impending death, unless
● the seducer, in which case the novel may end with a marriage. This is the main pattern for most epistolary
novels throughout the century. In those emerging in the second half of the twentieth century, however, as in
other types of modern novels by women, the women are concerned with much more than their love lives.
They are most of all with seeking their individual identity, and in doing epistolary novels they write do not
always conform to th style just described; radical content and radical form seem to go hand in hand.
● that these books appear at a time when women are both conscious of new freedoms available to them and
angry about past and present repression. Previous flowerings of epistolary litera- ture-in first century B.C.
 Rome and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France--are also connected with a positive
change in the status of women, and with a sense of the validity of the writer's own culture in relation to the
rest of the world
● Wwii: colonised society - begun to take pride in its roots and culture - geographical. As women and
"others" gained more freedom and status, they were allowed to use their own voices - They were allowed to
be heard as well as seen. While the voices in epistolary literature often seem to be angry revolutionary
voices. The revolution has always occurred before the form appears in litearture
● Epistolary fiction, with its fragmentation, subjectivity, abandonment of chronology, repetitiveness,
associative and sometimes seemingly illogical connections, and, most of all, unconventional use of
language, embodies the definition of l'ecriture feminine
● Jane Gurkin Altman connects the epistolary style-with its experimenting with elliptical narration,
subjectivity and multiplicity of point of view, polyphony of voices, interior monologue, superimposition of
time levels, presentation of simultaneous actions-to modernism - today as women experiment with ways of
using the letter as they remember, return, reflect, and write and rewrite their lives.
● recurring motifs and symbols- windows, walls, dolls, dreams, fathers, mothers, masks, dance, self/other,
absence/presence-the most important of which become associated with mirrors and reflection. Women seek
themselves in mirrors, use the text as a mirror, question the validity of their reflections in the text (and the
mirror), see multiple or fractured images, talk to themselves in mirrors, use the mirror (and the text) bring
split images together. They dance in front of mirrors, break mirrors and, in some contemporary works, use
the mirror as a metaphor for what happens when a writer attempts to represent reality in fiction
● Epistolary writing is subjective and emotional; it reaches out as it looks inward, opening up and presenting
a consciousness to a specific sympathetic listener. While it appears to be stream-of-consciousness writing,
the reader of the epistolary novel is aware that within its boundaries there is another reader, and this is an
important difference between epistolary writing and the stream-of-consciousness style we associate with
modernist writers. Altman says, "The basic formal and functional characteristics of the letter significantly
influence the way meaning is consciously and unconsciously constructed by writers and readers of
epistolary works"
● Altman shows that women as writers in epistolary fiction open up their consciousness in letters because the
form, with its distancing yet mediatory nature, frees the writer to say what she cannot say in the presence of
the addressee
● Epistolary fiction is therefore, very often confessional, and "in works where the theme of confession is
important it is not surprising to find the priestly confessor figure"
● In the epistolary novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth enturies we are more likely to find despair as the
letter writer feels herself succumbing to the temptation of her seducer or, having been seduced and
abandoned, bewails her fate to another. In contemporary epistolary novels we are still likely to find despair,
but more often we see women moving away from despair

LIZA SELTZER ~ Race and Domesticity in The Colour Purple

● Celie receiving letters from Nettie — turning point in narrative

● Introduction of new narrator
● Celie’s transformation from writer to reader

● Celie: Personal v Political

○ Celie clearly occupies a domestic place in the story (as evidenced by her inability to identify
where Africa even is)
○ Her inability to interpret the envelope that Nettie’s letter comes in underscores her tendency to
understand events in terms of personal rather than political consequences (not knowing
“where Africa at” is a problem because this means she doesn’t know where Nettie is)
○ Berlant: Celie’s narrative emphasises individual essence in false opposition to institutional history
○ Walker’s chosen treatment of the constricted viewpoint of an uneducated country woman
may constrict the novel’s ability to analyse issues of “race” and class.
○ Bell Hooks: the focus on Celie’s sexual oppression takes away from the slave narrative tradition
that it draws from.
● Seltzer does not agree with this view: walker critiques and analyses race relations even as she does it
through the domestic perspectives of Celie and Nettie. This is done through 2 strategies:
a. Development of an embedded narrative that offers a post-colonial perspective on the action.
● Juxtaposition of the “little fat queen of england” with the “peanuts, coconuts, rubber trees” of the
African stamps — serves as a reminder of imperialism
● Celie’s ignorance of the political implications of this imagery does not take away from the critique
of class and race offered by it.
● This individual letter thus becomes a textual analogue for the novel’s overall epistolary form —
illustrates how the novel’s domestic perspective is “stamped” with signs of race and class
b. Using family relationships as an extended textual trope for race relations.
● Olinka Creation Narrative (an alternative to the judeo-Christian account) : Adam was not the
first man, but the first white man born to an Olinka woman — cast out for his “nakedness”, his
lack of colour, he is filled with vengeance to crush the black Olinka people like serpents.
○ An alternative to the Original Sin — defined not in terms of appropriating knowledge or
resisting authority but precisely in terms of breaking kinship bonds.
○ The myth defines racial inferiority as a construct of power relations that will change
over time— the Olinka believe that the whites will kill so many of the coloured that they
will become the hunted instead — they will become the new serpent to be crushed.
● Raises the question: is progress possible in racial relations?
○ Celie believes that this cycle of discrimination will repeat endlessly (ouroboro?)
○ Others believe that racial harmony is possible through a new valorisation of kinship
bonds — “the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept
everybody else as a child of God, or one mother’s children, no matter what they look
like or how they act” — a domestic ideal is expressed with an ethic of acceptance
grounded in recognition of kinship.
● This domestic ideal for race relations is put to test within the novel particularly through 2
integrated family groupings —
1. Doris Blaine (white missionary) and her black grandson
○ At first this relationship seems to be built around the ethic of treating all people as “one
mother’s children”.
○ Their relationship is actually far from ideal — according to Nettie, though he seems to be
fond of her boy is strangely reticent in her presence, not speaking much. He opens up to
Adam and Olivia — suggesting that he may feel more at home with the transplanted
black Americans than with his white grandmother.
○ Doris and the Akwee villagers’ kinship
- Doris’ wish to be a missionary stems from a desire to escape the claustrophobia
of her upper-class English family, her endless line of suitors.
- Nettie’s letters make it clear that she is not too sympathetic to doris’
reasoning. From her perspective(a black woman familiar with the trials of the
Olinka), doris’ aristocratic troubles seem trivial.
- Doris’ “kinship” with the Akwee is characterised by her self- interest.
- Unlike the Olinka myths, her relationship with the Akwee is paternal rather
than maternal — she is presented with 2 wives by the Akwee.
- Despite her professed love for her black grandson, she never overcomes her
belief in the essential difference between the Europeans and the Africans —
her use of the word “heathens” for them, “She thinks they are an entirely
different species from what she calls Europeans. . . . She says an African daisy
and an English daisy are both flowers, but totally different kinds” (her
promotion of a theory of polygenesis)
○ Monrovia
■ Whites sit on the country’s cabinet, black cabinet members’ wives dress like
white women, black president refers to his people as “natives”
■ Monrovia’s people and culture is highly westernised
○ Displacement of the Olinka for the expansion of road — colonial process of integration
that Nettie witnesses first hand; a process that she and other black missionaries are
unwittingly complicit to
○ Black Missionaries: walker’s embedded narrative enables us to sympathise with them
while also exposing the limitations of their perspective
 ■ Samuel and Corrine’s aunts, Theodosia and Althea — on the one hand they have
battled great odds and achieved much; on the other walker also exposes their
complicity in furthering colonisation and displacement of Africans. (Dubois
speaking up at Theodosia’s party)
■ Du Bois in Theodosia’s domestic sphere — embedded political commentary
that recontextualized Nettie’s narrative.
■ Nettie’s missionary work gives her a credible pathway into the African domestic
sphere.
● The relationship between Doris and her black grandson exposes the missionary pattern of
integration in Africa aa one based on false kinship.

2. Sophia and Eleanor Jane — serves as analogue to the American South

○ Sophie ending up as maid at the mayor’s house is a result of an overtly violent confrontation with
white officers — foregrounds issues of race/class.
○ Eleanor is the only person sympathetic to Sophia in that house —although initially she is
indifferent to Eleanor’s affections, later she is forced to admit that she feels something for her.
○ Whatever affection between the two however, has been shaped by the perverted “kinship” relation
it was situated in — the myth of plantation kinship, the “black mammy” in particular.
○ The Black Mammy — a stereotypical black mother on a southern plantation
■ This stereotype is why Miss Millie thinks Sophia a perfect maid, why Miss EJ
continually expects her to love and care for herself and her son. ( in her own words “all
other coloured women I know love children)
■ Sophia, in particular, is someone extremely unsuitable in this role — she is someone who
prefers to fix the roof, leaving her children to her husband
■ The black mammy stereotype was used by apologists for slavery to argue that the
plantation benefited the enslaved because of the blacks’ inherent inferiority and
incompetence .
■ Walker however subverts the plantation narrative — miss Millie’s inability to drive
reveals her childlike dependence on Sophia
○ Predicated on the plantation model of integration, relations between blacks and whites in the
South reveal a false kinship like that of Doris and the Akwee.
■ Miss EJ’s husband remarks on the importance of black mammies in the community
casually : “everybody around here raised by coloured. That’s how we come out so well”.
■ On the other hand white men refuse to recognise the children they father from black
women — Squeak and her white uncle, the warden — when he recognises her as kin,
his instinct is to deny the kinship by raping her — “if he was my uncle he wouldn’t
do it to me”.
■ This underscores the individual and institutional power of whites to control the
terms of kinship.
○ Sofia’s rejection of the baby challenges the Olinka kinship ideal for race relations.
■ EJ claims that Sophia should love Reynolds Stanley because he is an innocent baby. To
Sofia though he is the grandson of the man who brutally beat her in the street.
■ To Sofia however, he is both the living embodiment and literal heir to the system that
oppresses her.
○ Sophia’s position as an unwilling domestic in the mayor’s household underscores the impor-
tance of the personal point of view to the novel’s political critique of race relations.

The Conclusion: a celebration of kinship

● Wrapping up the EJ/Sophia story

○ EJ learns the reason why sophia came to work for her family, their relationship improves
considerably after
○ EJ comes to sophia’s house to help with the housework and take care of Henrietta — EJ’s new
found understanding is the catalyst
○ Sophia’s acceptance of EJ at her home also signals progress. Yet when asked if Reynolds comes
with his mother, she sidesteps the question by saying that Henrietta doesn’t mind him. Sophia’s
 comment maintains the legitimacy of her own hard-earned attitudes toward the child, even
as it reserves the possibility that different attitudes may be possible in future generations.
● Sofia’s employment at Celie’s store also signals progress for race relations
○ Celie’s father worked hard, bought the store and hires his 2 brothers to work for him. His model of
industry fails because the white merchants complain that he took away their black customers —
Celie’s Pa’s tragic history tells us of the inability of African-Americans to access the
“American Dream”.
○ Alphonso's approach involves buying off the whites, getting a white boy to run the store — an
“accommodationist” model of integration
○ Alphonso is identified with white men in the novel:
■ In the beginning, he is seen going off with a group of white men armed with guns.
■ His relationship with other blacks reeks of white paternalism — his new wife is but 15,
married to him because her family works for him.
● When Celie acquires the shop — for the first time in its history the shop has an integrated workplace;
she keeps the white man and Sofia (to wait on black customers)
○ When the white clerk tries to define their relationship in terms of plantation kinship by calling her
auntie, she mocks him by asking “which coloured man his mama sister marry”.
○ Sofia’s job represents both personal and communal triumph.

The Evolution of Racial Identity separately in Africa and America

● The mbeles — they are not defined by traditional village bloodlines but by their shared experience of racial
oppression and their shared commitment to active resistance.
○ Through them, the novel accurately depicts the historical origin of many African “tribes” or
nations in the reorganisation of older societies decimated by colonisation.
○ They’re representative of the evolution of an emerging Pan-Africanism in Africa defined by
racial identity rather than national identity.
● Tashi’s easy integration into the American South
○ 4th July is a day of rest for black folks (harpo) — his kinship group distinguished from the whites
by the latter’s privilege and national identity.
○ “black folks” here includes Tashi but not EJ.
○ Tashi’s easy integration — racial identity overcoming national identity

● Novel provides no assurance that boundaries between races can always be successfully negotiated
○ Mary Agnes is easily integrated into Cuba because like the Cubans, she too is a person of colour.
(Feelings of racial identity among marginalised becomes the basis for kinship)
○ But Shug’s son who is a missionary on the Indian reservation in the American West fails to be
integrated into the community.

LAUREN BERLANT ~ Race, Gender and Nation in The Color Purple

● “I am I have always been a good girl.”

○ Novel opens with Celie’s crisis of subjectivity that has both textual and historical implications:
■ Textual — her status as subject is clarified through the course of her novel when she
emerges from the enforced privacy of letters to God to public speaking, of a sort at a
community celebration on Fourth of July in the ‘40s.
■ Historical — Celie’s personal liberation happens at the nation’s mythopolitical origin; 4th
July — a day that resolves identity of Anglo-Americans while simultaneously raising
questions for Afro-Americans.
● Fourth of July — As long as slavery existed, most blacks refused to participate in celebrations on the
Fourth of July, setting aside July 5 for that purpose.
● TCP aims to problematise tradition-bound origin myths and political discourse in order to create & address
an Afro-American nation —
○ For this, Walker deliberately doesn’t use patriarchal languages, logics of power
○ She deliberately separates aesthetic and political modes of representation — opting to use
only the former to represent a national culture that operates according to “womanist” values
rather than patriarchal forms.
 ■ Political language — historical, patriarchal power
■ Aesthetic discourse — spirit of everyday life relations among women
● <TCP emphasises multiplicity of voices — Celie’s autobiography is firmly in the Afro-American
tradition of cultural self-exemplification epitomised in and theorised by Du Bois.>
● Walker plays with expectations from historical novel —
○ places text within traditionally confessional, local concerns of autobiographical epistolary novel
○ Using autobiographical epistolary form — she expands POV to include broader institutional
affiliations + experiences of Afro-American women.
○ From this perspective — reemergence of nationalism at the end of the novel is puzzling.
● TCP problematises nationalism — both Anglo-American and Afro-American. Afro-American brand of
national pride is lampooned.
○ Celie and Nettie first encounter concept & myth of American national identity as a part of basic
education disseminated by public schools: The way you know who discover America, Nettie say, is
think bout cucumbers. That what Columbus sound like. I learned all about Columbus in first
grade, but look like he the first thing I forgot.
○ What’s revealed here is the manifest irrelevancy of the classic American myth to Celie.
○ Her reduction of American origin tale to vegetable phonetics —
■ Vital importance of oral and folk transmission to less literate communities
■ Crucial role oral transmission plays in the reproduction of nation, from generation to
generation.
○ Shug and Celie’s rambling discussion of the world during WWII — the war, US government theft
of land from an “Indian tribe”, Hollywood, local and national scandals — represents ad hoc,
haphazard fashion in which nation disseminates and perpetuates itself among its citizens,
even in everyday life.
■ To maintain power among the people, America must maintain an accessible, intimate
presence like the familial name.
● Native Americans in TCP
○ Negation/ erasure affected by American racism on contested subcultures: what happens to cultures
that neglect to witness their history
○ In TCP, native Mexicans have lost the ability to read its own history, registered in genetic traces of
its dispersal among AMerican/ Afro-American population —
■ “Sixty years or so before the founding of the school [Spelman], the Cherokee Indians
who lived in Georgia were forced to leave their homes and walk, through the snow, to
resettlement camps in Oklahoma. A third of them died on the way. But many of them
refused to leave Georgia. They hid out as coloured people and eventually blended
with us. Many of these mixed-race people were at Spelman. Some remembered who
they actually were, but most did not. If they thought about it at all ... they thought
they were yellow or reddish brown and wavy haired because of white ancestors, not
Indian.”
■ A people that is culturally illiterate with respect to itself — even oral memories passed
through family/community aren’t strong enough to keep the meaning of national signs
alive
■ They take their cultural negation as a given: shug’s son, working on an indian reservation
in Arizona experiences racist treatment by the Indians and also witnesses with sadness
the Indians’ reproduction of their cultural disempowerment: “But even if he [Shug's son]
try to tell them how he feel [about their racism], they don't seem to care. They so far gone
nothing strangers say mean nothing.”
● The epigraph: Show me how to do like you/Show me how to do it. ~ Stevie Wonder
○ Showing me an action that is something you do — intimately pedagogical
○ Epigraph can be read as novel’s explicit political directive — to turn individuals into
self-conscious & literate users/readers of a cultural semiotic.
○ Thus epigraph intertwines private and public acts and consciousness signified by ambiguity of
epigraph’s ‘you’
○ Shug — the novel’s professor of desire and self-fulfilment — a symbolic as well as practical
example
 ■ Shug’s picture Celie finds fallen from Mr’s wallet — she “learns” from what Shug “does”
in the picture about connection between male sexual desire and desire to degrade women
■ Reading not passive — reading as act of cultural self-assertion, engagement in mimesis
of social relations
● You’d better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.
○ This unsigned, double negative message marks the contested ground on which Celie’s negative
relation to discourse is established
○ Though never directly said, from linguistic repetition its clear that the disembodied voice here is
Pa.
● Celie’s self-negation and Rape
○ “Sister Celie” is raised to become female exemplum when every women in the novel tells her
“you got to fight”.
○ Stripped of any right to the privacy of her body, and sentenced to vocal exile, she manages to
"speak" in public by becoming a talking book, taking on her body the rape, incest, slave labor, and
beating that would otherwise be addressed to other women, her "sisters”.
○ Celie responds to incursions in her autonomy by situating herself squarely on the ground of
negation(I am).
○ Rape only intensifies existing negation that grows from patriarchal subjugation of women; her
oppression (early in the novel) stems from the vulnerabilities effected by her gender.
● Story of Celie’s father’s Lynching
○ Story of Celie’s real father — realisation that gender oppression is not the only/main factor in
oppressive paternal ideology
○ Behind story of a father’s right to violate his “private” resources (which includes women) is the
story of social and historical placement of the family
○ Noticeable generic shifting: when Nettie narrates story of lynching she shifts from epistolary to
fairy tale (“Once upon a time, there was a well-to-do farmer who owned…”)
○ No eyewitnesses of the lynching, no spot or discursive mark to verify father’s life/death — unlike
Celie after her rape, father can’t speak, act or desire for himself (Pa: Lynched people git no
marker).
○ Through this revised, autobiographical tale, racism succeeds sexism as cause of social violence in
narrative — switch from sexual to racial code & new info challenge Celie’s perception of the
world (that systematic sexual violence is the distinguishing marl of women’s family life)
○ Father’s Lynching as structural equivalent to celie’s rape in its violent reduction of victim to a
“biological sign”, an exemplum of subhumanity.
■ Gender for Celie-Nettie isn’t a sign of +ve identification just like race isn’t for their father
■ Lynching — mode of vigilante white justice that was a common threat to southern blacks
in the ‘30s

Black people and Religion

● For [black people] religion is personal--never an abstraction disassociated from experiences that shape the
life situations suffering and dying and struggling against understand. Black Christians have never God;
rather they personalize Him and include situations. Hence a Black God is not only tical. (149-50)
● James Cone has pointed out that logical racism in America has been conception accepted by many black
the period to which the narrative World War I-it is not surprising that self from these partic
● "Pa is not pa revealed more than a genetic fact about Celie's fication of divine authority, patriarchy and that
defines Celie's symbolic status as "Black "Pa is not our Pa" undermines and cracks a an oppressive form of
life. To say "Pa is not our stories that a racist and patriarchal imagination simply lies. With lies revealed,
new possibilities emerge.
● serious enterprise. Since undergirds Celie's life as a slave, valuable only ductive sexually and economically,
Shug's God by identifying divinity with a holy pleasure play. Shug's God is a God who glories
● God as "everything." was or ever will be" (178). Shug's Lincoln's terms, into a more personal, mate that
Celie may feel this Spirit her own flesh and bone. This makes cal character of God in many black not
passive, for what good could a nothing? Rather God is also omnipotent, revealed not as an abstract
possibility, ative agency, God everywhere infusing creativity.
● This emphasis on creativity is expresses itself not in destruction angered, Shug assures Celie, "it make
pleasure (178).9 In this narrative, God's making it the locus of creativity rather oppression. God is primarily
Creator. man pleasure, desiring human pleasure ship manifests itself as pleasure, what what I have been
● This picture of a God who desires the God before whom Celie has stood who, Celie assumes, desires no joy
celebration by the oppressed is therefore resistance to the ideologies and imaginations ery of the oppressed.
Celebration those committed to their liberation the historical situation in which they Specifically, implicit
within a discourse and the Creator as good is the possibility imitates the Creator in work. Just as it good,
just as the world continues to process of death and regeneration.
● In other words, like the call-and-response singer of West African tradition, she achieves personal autonomy
without sacrificing a sense of community with kin and friends; the affection of others nourishes her art.
Celie is no longer dependent on black men, nor is she exploited (apparently) by whites or their "systems”.
● Celie's sublime sense of completeness at the end of the novel - her economic independence enfolded within
a rich associational life - mocks the snare of subordination that trapped most black women in the rural
South, at home and in the workplace.
● Walker seems to suggest that a revitalization of Amer- ican-African ties will not offer black people any
salvation from the various evils that beset them on either continent - sexism and ideologies of race-based
exclusivity in particular. Rather, Nettie can appreciate her African heritage without romanticizing it or
inflating its potential for radical political change.
● Nevertheless, the theme of pan-Africanism beyond the stage of Afro- American openness the end, the
Olinkas remain steadfastly unsympathetic missionaries and all they represent; in Samuel's love them. We
try every way we can to show that reject us. They never even listen to how we've they listen they say stupid
things. Why don't language? They
● Colour purple as a historical novel : With this statement Walker does not mean to diminish the concept of
history; rather she intends to reorient our historical perspective, to move it away from the objective and
specific notions generally associated with the "science" of history and towards an idea of history that,
grounded in the events of ordinary life, is more humane.
● Essentially, her concept of history is rooted in folklore, as from a folklore tradition the larger and endur- ing
patterns of human thought and action are derived. Ac- cessory to this concept of history is a particular idea
of time. Walker accepts the world and its structure of time not as an option, but as a fact. Time and its
influences are pre- sent in every thought and feeling of her characters simply because they contain time.
Time is part of their individual destinies, and its passage is in their very breath and bones.
● This temporal acceptance, however, does not imply that Walker's sense of time is strictly chronological or
fatalistic. On the contrary, the acceptance of time presented in her "historical" novel opens up possibilities
for a transcendent, even a religious redemption of time. Her characters' lives change, deepen, and improve
as the years progress. Thus, her view of time, like her view of history, is at once realistic and humane.
● Because she is a black writer, Alice Walker feels an obli- gation to remain faithful to the black folklore
heritage and its ideas of history and time. She also believes in the universality of the imagination, but that
universality grows out of her own particular experience. experience. Her commitment to folklore and her
belief in the universality of the imagination are linked by virtue of a responsibility common to all writer.
● Alice Walker chose to step into imagination by becoming writer, while also keeping a foot in the reality of
her folk- lore history, thereby allowing this reality to inform her im- agination and thus redeem the world
about which she writes. Her life taught her "how to be shocked and dis- mayed but not lie down and die
(MG, p. 37), and her deci- sion to write was the means of her survival. Walker believes that this attitude
toward survival makes her revolutionary, which means simply changing and growing.
● For her, the real goals of a revolutionary outlook are the least glamorous stuff - they are spiritual and
practical needs being satisfied. Her writing, therefore, is her contribution to the essential needs of people;
her mission is "to create and preserve what was created before [me]," because, "the artist is the voice of the
people and she is also The People.
● So in one sense Alice Walker sees herself as a writer mitted to reality, but in another sense bound to see it,
because [tļhere is always a reality deeper than what we see, and the con- sciousness of a people cannot be
photographed, but to some ex- tent it can be written.
● Walker is careful to qualify her religious beliefs, claiming she needs "a wider recognition of the
universe"12 than she finds in formal religion. As she says, "I am trying to rid my consciousness and my
unconsciousness of the notion of God as a white-haired British man with big feet and a beard."18 Her
image of God is more expansive because it must be in order to include her own experience of God as
 present in the harsh reality she depicts in her novel. So while she wa- vers in her convictions about who or
what God is, she never hesitates to affirm the spiritual and moral responsibilities she feels as a writer.
● Walker believes is necessary to cleave to reality, to what we know, what we think about life. In doing such
we "bear witness" to all as- pects of time and existence (MG, p. 393)
○ because [w]hat is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective,
connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in
one's glance at the varied world, the common thread, the unifying theme through immense
diversity, the fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking that enlarges the private and the public
world. (MG, p. 5)
● As previously noted, the novel is informed by her folk tradition, her sense of the past, because she claims
that one must begin a novel with a sense of history: "I have strong feelings about history and the need to
bring it along: I can't move through time any other way."
● The story reveals how much of her mother's stores she absorbed, her folk tradition, not just plots and
incidents but the manner in which they were told, the urgency that involves the knowledge that these stories
The story reveals how much of her mother's stores she absorbed, her folk tradition, not just plots and
incidents but the manner in which they were told, the urgency that involves the knowledge that these
stories.
● So while The Color Purple is in the line of a folklore dition of a realistic and visual appraisal of the
chronological and sequential time as it ticks off the the characters' lives, it is also a novel of universal
imagination, one of hope and the transformation into timelessness and a realm of possibilities.
● The Color Purple is the sort of novel Alice Walker she should have been able to read in her education
because it includes characters whose lives teach the understanding that any experience which one has as an
ordinary human being is valuable. Her style, therefore, reveals a preference for concrete moments of
sensory or imaginative sympathy over and against more analytical modes of observation.
● She places emphasis on personal moments of experience which are unresolved by authorial or any other
delegated interpre- tation, leading to an immediacy of condensed feeling and situation. The characters
speak to the reader without inter- ference; what we hear is the authentic voice of folk history, and what we
feel are the universal qualities of despair and hope, expressions of our lives in to God.
● God is the only being with whom she can freely communicate because, as her sis- ter Nettie described it: "I
remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you
had to write it, bad as you thought ing was."18 This God, while not explicitly described until late in the
novel, comes to be viewed by characters and readers alike as a God best described by the words of an old
spiritual: "He may not come when you want Him, but he's right on time" (MG, p. 10). Initially, Celie is not
intellectually prepared to articulate her ideas about God, but as she grows and develops in relationships
with others, she be- comes able to express her understanding of the remote God whose presence has
sustained her.
● Ironically, it is Albert's real love and sometime Shug Avery and his rebellious daughter-in-law, provide the
emotional support for Celie's personaltion. In turn, it is Celie's new understanding and confidence in herself
that eventually lead to Albert's réévaluation his own life and a reconciliation among the novel's characters.
● What makes the novel so affecting is the choice of narrative style that, with- out the intrusion of the author,
forces intimate identifica- tion with the heroine. Especially effective is how, as the novel progresses and
Celie grows in experience, her observa- tions become sharper and more informed.
● The letters take on an authority, and the dialect, once accepted, assumes a lyrical cadence of its own. The
girl who initially knew only "how to survive" becomes a woman who can honestly and eloquently reflect
on her own life and the lives of others. For example, Albert is viewed no longer as Mr. cold and aloof
master, but as Albert, age. "Here is us, I thought, two old fools keeping each other company under the
cumulative effect of the novel is convincing authenticity of its folk voice.
● It is a sense of the future, however, that energizes The Color Purple as through Shug, who is bold,
compassionate, and outspoken, Celie slowly learns to stand up for herself. Celie also learns that Shug, for
all the shamelessness of her behavior, not only believes in God but tries to realize Him in her own
full-blooded response to life. The Color Purple is steeped in the religious element that, however unconven-
tional in its expression, seems to flow directly from the piety of church-going Southern blacks, a piety with
roots in the folklore tradition which Alice Walker respects and defends.
● The fullest development of ideas about God comes late in the novel during a conversational exchange
between Celie and Shug. At this point God is indeed "right on time," because Celie, now strong and
independent and trusting of Shug, is able to appreciate the God about whom Shug speaks
 ○ All my life I never care what people thought about 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. 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 aint 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 . . . But if God love me Celie, I
don't have to do all that . . . Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the
other folks did too.
● Shug goes on to defend God not on the basis of Celie assumed ideas about God but on the basis of her
rience of God as a living's assumed ideas about God but on the basis of her rience of God as a living :
Heres the thing say Shug. The thing I believe, God is inside and inside everybody else. You come into the
world with But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes just manifest itself even if you not
looking or don't know you're looking.
● At first Celie writes letters as a means of survival, as if in recording all she has endured she will be
stronger, mindful that things couldn't get much worse.
● When she receives the letters Nettie wrote to her from Africa - with the informa- tion that Nettie is well,
that Celie has not been raped by her father but her step-father, that her children are alive - Celie's letters,
like her life, take on a new enthusi- asm. Instead of diaries of suffering, they become records of growth.
The revelation that her old life was not what she thought it was (ruined) creates possibilities for a new life.
When Celie's sister Nettie returns home and she holds her for the first time in years, Celie begins to feel, as

● Alice Walker's remark when she finished writing The Color Purple : "It was like losing everybody I loved
at once" (MG, p. 360). What does remain, however, is a feeling of continuity, a sense of time's renewal and
prom- ise. The radical temporality of the endless succession of Ce- lie's days became a kind of timelessness
- not timelessness in the sense of the annihilation of time, but in the sense of the endurance of time, how it
provides and nourishes, what it can bring as we live in character's life. And as Celie's history progresses
and her sense of self develops, so too does her sense of God.
● This God is a God in time who comes right on time, one who shows the possibilities for en- joyment, for
growing younger. A new sense of timelessness emerges, only now not timelessness as endurance but as
promise. The novel reveals that in time there are opportu- nities to recover what was believed to be lost,
and the chance to keep alive a tradition of patient endurance which witnesses the dignity of the human
condition in time.
● Walker teaches us that the God in time may not come when you want him, but he is always right on time.
These lessons on time are symbolized in the color purple itself. Purple is the color Celie chose for her first
new dress, which she got long after her marriage to Albert. There was no purple cloth available then; God
didn't come when she wanted him.
● Years later, however, after her move to Memphis and her discussion with Shug when Celie learns that God
created the color purple and put it in a field so that she might enjoy it, then God is right on time; purple
cloth is plentiful and Celie makes purple trousers, decorates her room in purple shades, and, finally, Albert
himself carves her a little purple frog. The color purple is like time: that which has always been - the past;
that which we must pay attention to - the present; and that which conjures up hope - the future. In asking
where the color purple comes from, we look back- wards to the past, to the purples that grew in our
mother's garden, and we look forward to the future, the promise that God will always put a little purple in
wise colorless field

Self-Writing
● Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker herself makes note of the power of writing to provide a conscious
awareness of history, and at the same time notes the oppressive uses of writing: "It is possible that white
 male writers are more conscious of their own evil (which, after all, has been docu- mented for several
centuries - in words) ... ." (emphasis added)2 We should read this statement in conjunction with another
Walker makes in the same work: "How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year
and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a
punishable crime for a black person to read or write?"3 When we take these two quotes together, we see
that Walker is very aware of the power of writing, and by extension, literacy, to preserve and value one
culture while destroying and devaluing another. We also see that her concern focuses on the particular
experience of black women under a system in which writing is used for cultural devaluation.
● In Walker's novel, both Celie and Nettie learn to master the written word and to modify its form and
function so that they, as black women, are no longer complete victims of the racial and sexual oppression a
white, ethnocen- tric use of writing can dictate. By mastering and modifying writing, Celie and Nettie
change it into an implement that is no longer solely the property of men and whites, but one used by black
women to gain a greater awareness of themselves and to preserve their oral history.
● That Celie writes to a God she envisions as white and male indicates the thoroughness with which whites
and men have asserted their dominant position in her mind. It is her stepfather who tells her, "You better not
never tell nobody but God. your mammy."4 That she writes out of desperation shows that literacy
accompanied this dominance, supplanting the role of the oral. Since writing can be a tool of racial and
sexual dominance, it is not surprising that perceives it as she does God, all-powerful, and feels it is the only
form expression which is able to alleviate her confusion.
● Although the sisters lead very separate and different lives, writing tant to each of them. The more Celie
writes, the more she is able to analyze experience and subsequently herself. She uses writing to fix the
events life, thereby lending them coherence and making their review and standing possible. Like Celie,
Nettie, too, feels compelled to place her ience in written form, so that she may gain a greater awareness
consciousness; while Nettie does this, however, she also records the experience of Afro-America, giving it
the tangibility of a written text, its oral history is not lost.
● That both sisters choose to write is a direct result of their being imprisoned in a male-dominated,
literacy-oriented culture where men arrange their riages, and men decide how much access they will have
to the written Though the most evident male dominance in the sisters' world takes form, overtones of
literacy as an element of power are present. When vated by sexually selfish desires, their stepfather makes
the following parent excuse to a prospective suitor, "I can't let you have Nettie.... her to git some more
schooling.... But I can let you have Celie." (17) stepfather shows that he not only has the power to barter
them into but should he choose, also the power to decide on the availability of literacy to them.
● The power of literacy to provide an escape from sexual subjugation evident as illustrated by the events
following Celie's rape. When Nettie to be next in line for the same violation, Celie vows to protect her
sister, realizes the best way to do so is to insure that Nettie has power, the literacy: "I see him looking at my
little sister. She scared.... But I say care of you.... I tell Nettie to keep at her books."
● Though initially only vaguely aware of their potential to mold reading writing into tools to benefit their
purposes, Nettie and Celie relationship with literacy, and the image of literacy is often present as a
backdrop to the sisters' lives and daily routine: She be sitting there with me shelling peas or helping the
children with they spel- ling. Helping me with spelling and everything else she think I need to know.... All
day she read, she study, she practice her handwriting, and try to git us to think. (25) Both
● Celie and Nettie instinctively know literacy is the way out of their oppressive world: "Us both be hitting
Nettie's schoolbooks pretty hard, cause us know we got to be smart to git away" (19), and they also know it
is the bond which will hold them together and fortify them against the dominance of a male world, as
illustrated by their closing words to each other.
○ She say, What? I say, Write. She say, Nothing but death can keep me from it.
● Nettie's closing remarks link life, death, and writing, and illustrate just how vital reading and writing will
be to the sisters' personal, psychological, and familial survival. While writing certainly becomes a bond
joining the two sisters, it also evolves into a vehicle which lends order to psychological confusion and per-
manence to transience. Celie's entreaties to God in the opening paragraph of the novel show a confused
character searching for answers: Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl.
Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.
● It seems odd, at first, that Celie should seek answers from a deity alien to the African roots of her culture,
and use a form traditionally denied her and used to oppress her. But, as we shall see later, Celie will alter
her perception of God, just as she alters her use of literacy by infusing it with elements of oral expression.
● Oral expression is a large part of Celie's writing, and though she records her experience in written form, she
renders it in an oral manner. The spelling, syntax, and grammatical construction all evoke the way Celie
sounds. The use of the Black English to be verbal conjugation and the omission of are in the sentence, "She
be my age but they married" (14) serves as an example.
● If we summarize Walter Ong's definition of orality and use it as a convenient basis for analysis (while
ignoring the ethnocentricity shadowing his literacy/oral- ity contrasts) we have the following characteristics
of oral expression: rhythmic balanced patterns, repetition-antithesis, assonances, use of proverbs known to
a large body, conservative use of language due to the need for repetition of tried and true expressions.5 All
of these traits, to varying degrees, are evident in Celie's letters.
● In Celie's hands, an antagonistic device once used to conquer and repress her now becomes an instrument
assisting in her deepest self-examination. As she creates her own writing form, she also becomes more
artistically expres- sive. She no longer merely states situational facts, she invents metaphors for her
feelings.
● Often, she speaks of her experiences in terms of nature, an element which, like Celie, also has been
exploited by man. As she describes her pain and humiliation during the routine beatings administered by
her husband, she makes an analogy between her experiences and nature's: "I make myself wood. I say to
myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man."
● The following passage, beginning with Celie's statement, "I talk to myself a lot" (emphasis added), is
indicative of her new expressiveness, and again reminds us that she has joined talking and writing to create
a quasi-verbal form. In the passage we notice the recurrence of her nature metaphor as she places abstract
concepts such as happiness and sadness in the concrete context of trees, earth, and stars.
○ I talk to myself a lot.... Celie I say, happiness was just a trick in your case.... [Y]ou thought it was
time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole
earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert. (229)
○ By joining her abstract emotions to the more concrete elements of nature and the universe,
elements which man has abused, Celie creates company for herself and no longer feels like a
completely isolated entity. As Celie takes the written word and makes it her own, she is able to use
it to crystallize her thoughts and come to realizations concerning her world.
○ Such realizations spark the emergence of a stronger Celie. As she challenges her husband, Albert,
whom she refers to as Mister, we see her writing again containing metaphors, as she speaks of
leaving him, and similies, as she describes his reaction to her new assertiveness
● Perhaps the most telling effect of Celie's making the written formsive to her needs is her shifting choice of
audience. Realizing God has been indifferent to her writing, she now addresses an audience she know cares,
her sister: Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you.... [T]he God I been praying and writing
to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.... If he ever
listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place.... (175)
● By imbuing written words with her own oral forms, Celie creates a new literacy which enables her to
explore her own consciousness, create a new world vision, and even question the role God plays in her life.
No longer is she isolated, writing only to a male God who does not heed her. She has found a human
audience in her sister, and a holistic universal audience in the trees, stars and sky.
● Now viewing God not as a man, but as a presence found in many places including natural elements, she is
even able to include God in her audience, and she writes to everything: "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees,
dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God." (249) It is important to note here that Celie's
heightened consciousness and self- awareness grows out of a coupling of her own written expression and
the reading of Nettie's letters. Upon their discovery and after Shug places the letters in temporal order for
Celie, the cohesion and order Celie seeks in her life begin to take form. In her letters, Nettie draws on their
shared early experiences, adds them to her own in Africa, and formulates a new text for them both. She too
alters literacy and takes it out of its imperialistic function of dominating oral cultures and allows it to record
an oral history that would otherwise be lost.
● As Nettie states, "Well, I started to fight him, and ... I hurt him bad enough to make him let me alone. But
he was some mad. He said because of what I'd done I'd never hear from you again, and you would never
hear from me." (119)
● In Nettie's frustration at having the communicative link between her and Celie severed, again we see
writing cast as a powerful unifying device providing continuity to personal experience and family history:
[A]lways, no matter what I'm doing, I am writing to you. Dear Celie, I say in my head.... And I imagine that
you really do get my letters and that you are writing me back: Dear Nettie, this is what life is like for me.
 (144) From this passage it is evident that Nettie's imagined correspondence with Celie is her way of
maintaining Celie's presence with her and sustaining their relationship.
● That Nettie visualizes writing to Celie rather than just recalling her sister again shows how indelibly the
power of writing was etched in her mind; it is the only instrument capable of bridging the vast distance and
time gap between them. In many instances, Nettie's perception of the act of writing is similar to Celie's. She
too views it as a tool for introspection and as a private receptacle for thoughts and emotions too painful to
be spoken.
● And, like Celie, Nettie realizes the impotency inherent in having a seemingly indifferent God as an
audience, and thus makes writing a private act between herself and her own sister. But though there are
similarities, there are also differences in both the form and function of each sister's writing.
● Traditionally, the standard form of a language is used primarily to impose unity on the community which
employs it. In spite of cultural differences all groups within a community are urged to speak the same
language, ostensibly for communication purposes; however, this goal of social unity can deteriorate into the
standard language being used to classify groups different from the dominant cultural group, and exclude
them from the dominant group's privileges because they are not versed in the standard language.
● Nettie alters this restrictive use of the standard, allowing it to give cohesion not only to her and her sister's
experience, but also to African and Afro- American experience. By placing Nettie's letters in order and
reading them, Celie can recreate their family history and the history of Afro-Americans. At this point Nettie
has changed the use of the written word from traditionally obliterating oral cultures to preserving histories
which if not written down would ultimately be forgotten in a literacy-oriented society.
● As she learns more about Africa, Nettie enshrines her discoveries in letters to her sister. Step by step,
through her letters Nettie creates a new world for Celie, but more than that, she creates a new lexicon:
"[W]e left right away for Olinka, some four days march through the bush. Jungle, to you. Or maybe not. Do
you know what a jungle is? Well. Trees and trees and then more trees on top of that." (139) Ironically it is
Nettie's writing, the tool used to debase them, which ultimately frees the sisters from the confines of a
world which tells them they have no history, and their culture is of little value.
● Through writing, Nettie is able to record the many cultural wrongs commit- ted by European cultures
against African, so that these wrongs will be recog- nized, evaluated, and remembered. She begins by
discussing one of the major devices used in executing these wrongs, another written text, the Bible: All the
Ethiopians in the bible [sic] were colored. It had never occurred to me, though when you read the bible it is
perfectly plain if you pay attention only to the words. It is the pictures in the bible that fool you.... All of the
people are white and so you just think all the people from the bible were white
● All of the people who manufactured the Bible were also, for the most part, white. And though the major
peoples of the Bible are non-European, Europe- ans and cultures derived from theirs have ignored this fact
while they have manipulated biblical texts to oppress cultures outside their own (the use of the pictures
within Nettie's Bible serves as an example).
● After addressing the primary text used in European dominance, Nettie's writing goes on to detail the
cultural traditions of the village in which she is a missionary: "The biggest part of the welcoming ceremony
was about the roofleaf, which... became the thing they worship." (141-42) Later, unfor- tunately, she will
also have to detail the destruction of these traditions: "Then [the builders] proceeded to plow under the
Olinka village and everything else for miles around. Including every last stalk of roofleaf.
● Nettie's recording of the physical destruction of the Olinka village and its customs is accompanied by a
recording of linguistic destruction, as the lan- guage which would keep the oral history of the Olinkas alive
dies with its people and their culture. Ironically, one of the builders destroying the village makes note of the
language form expressing enthusism "about learning the language. Before, he says, it dies out." (173)
● Remarking on the inevitable results of colonialism, Nettie's writing docu- ments the psycho-pathology the
imposition of European cultural values can produce on a colonized people. One example is the internalizing
of the European beauty aesthetic and the problems of cultural identification which follow.
● In speaking of her first impression of the president of Liberia, Nettie states, "he has a lot of white looking
colored men in his cabinet," and then goes on to say, The president talked a good bit about... his problems
with the natives.... It was the first time I'd heard a black man use that word. I knew that to white people all
colored people are natives.... I did not see any of these "natives" in his cabinet. And none of the cabinet
members' wives could pass for natives. (132)
● As much as documenting African life, Nettie's record also preserves the links which join African culture to
Afro-American culture. Her description of an interchange between Tashi, a child of the village, and Olivia,
actually Celie's daughter, as they recall oral tales is an example: Sometimes Tashi comes over and tells
 stories that are popular among the Olinka children. I am encouraging her and Olivia to write them down in
Olinka and English.... Olivia feels that, compared to Tashi, she has no good stories to tell. One day she
started in on an "Uncle Remus" tale only to discover Tashi had the original version of it!... But then we got
into a discussion of how Tashi's people's stories got to America....
● Nettie has thus used writing to do exactly what it has not done in the past, preserve rather than destroy oral
culture. In this instance, she has also en- couraged her charges, members of a new generation, to do the
same, thus attempting the continuity of oral history. In the experiences of both Celie and Nettie, then, we
see writing trans- formed. Working within a culture that is literacy-oriented, where, as Ferdi- nand de
Saussure notes, "Most people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because these are sharper
and more lasting than aural impressions ... ,6, the sisters revise and reuse writing. No longer is it an
oppressive implement, for Celie transforms it into the instrument that will end the male- oppressiveness of
her world. No longer is it antagonistic to oral expression, for Nettie uses it for the preservation of oral
culture.
● When Celie and Net- tie's letters reach each other and are looked at as a unified body, they, and thus the
novel, echo the larger themes that are part of Afro-American history.
● The cycle of rape or attempted rape, oppression, escape, and awareness that each sister becomes a part of is
a smaller representation of these elements within the course of black history: rape, manifested when blacks
were forcibly taken from their home land; oppression, manifested when blacks were enslaved and treated as
second-class citizens; escape, manifested as blacks sought avenues out of enslavement and eventual
emancipation; and awareness, manifested in a growing black pride in African ancestry.
● While telling the story of two sisters, Walker has also told the story of African, Afro-American, and
Afro-American female experience. In The Color Purple she has created a unique monument to these sagas,
as her characters take the written form which ignored Afro-American history and culture and use it to
preserve both

The Colour Purple : an Existential Novel

● In The Color Purple , womanist1 writer Alice Walker views oppression as an essentially masculine activity
which springs from the male's aggressive need to dominate. In the novel, man is the primum mobile, the
one by whom and through whom evil enters the world. Not unlike the great feminist Simone de Beauvoir,
Alice Walker believes that human reality is such that there exists in each individual a consciousness of a
fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed -
he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object
● Accordingly, man expresses reality in terms of conflict and he perceives social relations and even nature
itself as a se- ries of dualistically opposed contrasts which create a dynamism of survival. These ideas form
the core of the relation- ship between Mr. - and Celie. The Color Purple's most daring and enduring quality
is the novel's rejection of racial emotionalism and its emphasis on the main character's (Ce- lie's) existential
fight for recognition.
● However, as a militant writer who is en- gaged in liberation struggles, she feels that the cause of women
can be best served if she focuses on the violent reality of what can be termed as the inhuman condition of
wo- man.
● In an interview granted to Sojourner, she explains the reasons behind her emphasis on black male/female
gender conflicts: Of course, the [whites] oppress us; they oppress the world. Who's got his big white foot on
the whole world? The white man, the rich white man. But we also oppress each other and we oppress
ourselves. I think that one of the traditions we have in Black Women's literature is a tradition of trying to
fight oppression. And then, she adds: If someone is beating you up at home, you don't then just sit in the
room afterwards and write a novel about the white man's rule. I mean to deal with the guy who beat you up
in your house and then see who's beating you up on the street. ( Sojourner 14)
● Alice Walker prefers the term womanist over feminist. According to the writer, it expresses more
completely the totality of her being.
● For Alice Walker, racism does not fully explain the op- pression of black women by black men. For
whether it is an oppressive society (America) in which the emasculated black male feels the need to
recapture his masculinity through the oppression of the female, or in a much "freer" society like the Olinkas
(Africa) before the arrival of the British, the end result is similar: the male always oppresses the female.
● Thus, it may be concluded that in The Color Purple racial factors are irrelevant to the understanding of the
existential fight between Mr. - and Celie. The element to which the writer accords greater importance is not
race but power, the power to be, to concretize one's self, or to mold others .
● As we saw in our discussion of reality as ap- prehended through existentialism, power as a concept and as a
tool is more relevant to the interpretation of social mo- res and the understanding of the novel's thematic
construc- tion. The relationship between Harpo and Sophia is based on power, between Celie and Mr. - on
power, between the English settlers and the Olinkas on power, and between whites and blacks in America
on power.
● Accordingly, it can be argued that in a multiracial society like the United States, the dominant race uses its
power to dictate the exis- tential modalities of the minority races. This power is so intense that it controls
the minorities' cultural and physical perception of self. - because white is synonymous with control,
manhood, In reference to the social dynamism of American society, Walker had this to say: They [Black
men] never examine their relationship to Black women and rarely to Black children. Because their whole
thing is to be manly. Not only to be men but to be white men. Their whole number is to be white men. (
Sojourner 13)
● From an existential standpoint, the white man is for the black man "the one who looks at," the one whose
eyes give shape to and determine his existence, "the being for whom [he is] an object."4 The sociologist
Hubert M. Blalock be- lieves that oppression of one group by another results not when there is an inherent
opposition to another race (racial, physical differences) but when "the majority group views discrimination
as an effective tool for reducing the ability of the minority to act as a social competitor.
● Thus it can be stated that the one single funda- mental difference between oppressor and oppressed, be-
tween subject and object, to use existential terminology, is the dominant group's freedom in dictating the
social norms by which the minority group must abide. It is in this con- text that Jean-Paul Sartre declared
that the subject pos- sesses "pure and total freedom" (Sartre 362), because he is determined by none other
than himself.
● The above-mentioned social dynamism is highlighted in The Color Purple by the conflict between Celie In
Mr. - 's eyes, Celie is the ultimate object, someone exists to satisfy his despotic whims and whose fate is
mined by her very essence. He tells Celie, "You pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam all."7 For Mr. - ,
Celie is what he wants to the extent that he interprets his wife's existence, she exists only by and for self.
This observation is echoed in Sartre's statement on the relationship between subject and object: "Insofar as I
am the object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on the qualification or even
to know it, I am enslaved.
● Celie's subservience to Mr. - was so complete that she could not bring herself to pro- nounce his name, for
to name is to take possession, to pro- ject one's own perception on the Other. Celie could not call out Mr. -
's name until she regained control of her own existence.
● The Color Purple's human dimensions reside in the suc- cessful coming into existence of Celie, who
concretizes her- self by revolting against Mr. - 's rule and determinism. In this most revealing quest, she
will be helped and supported by Sophia and Shug, two independent women who become Celie's doors into
a world of self-definition and self- fulfillment.
● Gradually, as the novel unfolds, we witness Celie's meta- morphosis - from a wretched woman who accepts
her condi- tion - into a free being who decides to take charge of her life. While threatening Mr. - with a
knife, Celie declares: "It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the
welcome mat I need" (p. 22)
● This quote conveys both the extent of Celie's alienation as her understanding of the true existential meaning
of power: power to decide for oneself, to decide for others, power to punish and to kill. The rapport
between Mr. - and Celie clearly exemplifies this creator-to-creature interplay: He say, Celie git the belt. The
children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I
say to myself, Celie, you a tree. (p. 22)
○ This depersonalization we witness in Celie (her wanting to turn into wood, to become inert) is
standard clinical behav- ior of alienated people who, when facing seemingly insur- mountable
problems, pretend to be other than who they are and attempt to transcend their situation by
transforming their reality.
○ Often, this depersonalization of the self results from the subject's im- possibility to determine
his/her life; it is a loss of feeling him- self[/herself] as an organic whole ... an alienation from the
real self.8 Celie 's alienation, the result of Mr. - 's oppression and ob- jectification, is best
illustrated by the following quote, which expresses for the reader the character's estrangement
 from the real self as well as Mr. - 's destructive and dehu- manizing influence: Buy Celie some
clothes. She (Kate) say to Mr. - . She needs clothes? he ast. He look at me. It like he looking at the
earth. It need something ... his eyes say. (p. 20; emphasis.
○ And yet, it is within this emptiness, this absence of love, that she musters the will to survive. In
that respect, it is interesting to note that Celie's quest started with her origi- nal "hatred" for
Sophia. When she tells Harpo, Mr. - 's son, to beat his wife Sophia like she so often is beaten by
Mr. - , she does so not out of meaness or simple evilness but because she envies Sophia's will and
freedom.
○ I say it 'cause I'm a fool, I say. I say it 'cause I'm jealous I say it 'cause you do what I can't. What
that? she say. say. (p. 38)
○ By telling Harpo to beat Sophia, for perhaps the first time in her life, Celie expressed her own
volition and, through Harpo, attempts to impose her will upon another being. And such is the
paradox of existence: that one's redemption should emerge from another beings' subjugation.
● Again, it is easy to understand and accept Celie's attitude if we consider that before Shug's arrival, Sophia
was Celie's only model of the indomitable woman. Sophia confesses to Celie: ... all my life I had to fight. I
had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't
safe in a family of men. (p. 38) More than Shug, perhaps, Sophia's struggle against Harpo's will was the
catalytic moment which made Celie aware of the existence of alternative rapports between male and
female.
● Celie comes to associate Sophia's freedom and Shug's detach- ment from social contingencies with their
apparent mascu- linity, i.e., freedom. Actually, Celie's lesbianism is rooted more in the character's search
for a role model, a kind of alternative reality rather than any "transsexual neurosis" symptomatic of past
traumas or inner imbalance.

Lesbianism in The Color Purple is for Celie and Shug the expres- sion of a self directly in conflict with a
man-made, man- dominated society.

● Alice Walker's own quest as well as her characters' in The Color Purple is a quest for authenticity. Her
charac- ters' lesbianism is not an end in itself but an expression of being, a philosophical attitude based on
the individuals' rapport with their physical and moral environment. Many critics would argue, though, that
by emulating man's social mores or behavior, Shug Avery lacks authenticity, that she in fact transvestites
her "feminine essence" and borrows the trappings of man's power.
● However, in response to this argument, one may contend that the so-called feminine es- sence is more
societal than inherent, that it is more a set of learned behaviors than predetermined ones, and that it is
society which has created the myth of the "true woman" in its articulation of what a woman's existence
should be
● As Simone de Beauvoir expresses it, "she [the true woman] is an artificial product that civilization makes,
as formerly eunuchs were made. Her presumed 'instincts' for coquetry, docility, are indoctrinated, as is
phallic pride in man" (de Beauvoir 408).
● Shug Avery, in her bisexualism, may be symbolic of an absolute being - both subject and object in her
feelings for Celie and in her rapport with Mr. - , who is struggling to resolve the gender and social
limitations im- posed upon her by society's definition of "normal," "natural" being.
● Simone de Beauvoir has clearly pointed the conflict existing between a woman's self-accomplishment and
her "role" as an object, "tool" to be used to fulfill man's needs: Woman is an existent who is called upon to
make herself object; as subject she has an aggressive element in her sensuality which is not satisfied on the
male body. . . . Woman's homosexuality is one attempt among others to reconcile her autonomy with the
passivity of her flesh, (de Beauvoir 406-07)
● In Shug's lesbian embrace, Celie finds not only a refuge but also the crystalization of an otherwise
unformulated wish: the wish to be other than what society (Mr. - ) wants her to be. It is Shug who awakens
Celie's body to love and the enjoyment of love's mystery. It is Shug who helps her tran- scend her
objectification by Mr. - and to finally accede to the rank of subject. Thus it can be concluded that Shug's
feminine/masculine embrace, according to de Beauvoir's theory, allows Celie's own femininity to blossom
in its full plenitude:
● The relationship between Shug and Celie is in direct opposition to the one between Celie and Mr. - , for
whereas Shug is bent on helping Celie discover her true self, Mr. - thinks only about power, control, and
 self-realization through the oppression of others (Celie, Harpo). This redefinition of human relationships, of
human val- ues as found in The Color Purple, is also encountered elsewhere in Alice Walker's work.

● This womanist philosophy is a humanist one, for it is geared not only toward the full development of one
gender but toward the recuperation of male and female, toward the "survival and wholeness of entire
people, male and female." Within its parameters, it encompasses love, joy, music, artistic pleasure, and,
above all, the reattachment of human- kind to a cosmogenic worldview where everything is part of
everything else, a world that would give importance to all living creatures, big and small, for they are
expressions of the divine.
● To Celie, who objects to Shug's use of It in re- ferring to God, Shug replies: Don't look like nothing, she
say. ... It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is
everything. . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. (pp. 166-67)
● It is Celie's conviction that she herself is part of God's de- sign and forms one with all beings. This
conviction will carry her in the final stage of her voyage of self-discovery.
● No longer a shadow in the light, she has rejoined munity of men and women; she has found herself, place in
the great chain of being and is able the creation, at life itself: Now that my eyes are opening, I feels like a
fool. Next little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr. - 's evil shor shrink, 168)
● Celie's final letter is a song of glory, the revelation of a newfound harmony between the heroine, the
universe within and without: "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything.
Dear God," wrote Celie (p. 242). And this is the true meaning of The Color Purple, which is a quest and a
celebration, a song of sorrow and of joy, of birth, rebirth, and the redeeming power of love.

Revising and Reclaiming the English Language

● Celie is only directly repressed by black men, not often by white people. Still, the shadow of a
once-colonial nation still reaches her life through rude shopkeepers, her lynched father, and Sofia's fate
within the legal system. The idea of “taking back” the language of the colonisers is a central motive in
many literary works considered to be post-colonial: as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argued in The Empire
Writes Back, “The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing
defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the
colonized place” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 37). In The Color Purple, there is no-one who can control the
words that Celie puts down on paper as she writes highly private letters to recipients that will remain
discrete.
● If it is peculiar that Walker tells Celie’s story in letters, it is even more striking that it is told not in the
Standard English Celie was taught to write, but in written black vernacular. Reading Celie's written word is
an experience that is remarkably easy to mistake for reading Celie's spoken word, and it reinforces that the
great mission of this novel is to give Celie a voice and the ability to tell her story.
 ● The issue of Celie’s spoken language breaks the surface of her narrative in an episode fairly late in the
story, where Celie has hired two others to help her with her sewing: “Jerene and Darlene come help me
with the business. They twins. Never married. Love to sew. Plus, Darlene trying to teach me how to talk.”
● Think how much better Shug feel with you educated, she say. She won't be shame to take you anywhere”
(215-216). But even though Celie never pays much attention to the politics behind the language she uses,
there is a jab at something darker than stubborn individualism beneath the language she writes. Every time
I say something the way I say it, she correct me until I say it some other way. Pretty soon it feel like I can't
think. My mind run up a thought, git confuse, run back and sort of lay down (...) Look like to me only a
fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind.
● Celie might not consciously recognise the power that lies in depriving people of their language, but
following the theory of power and oppression in the wake of classical colonialism, the fool who would
want to talk in a way that feels peculiar to her mind might not be so far removed from the woman who let
her father, her mother, her husband, his lover and even his children abuse her, because she did not know
that she could rebel against their authority, or that she could possibly stand up against a seemingly endless
tsunami of abuse and contempt.
● To happily adopt the language of the coloniser is to implicitly admit that your own language is not good
enough. Celie has been liberated from men, from the economic slavery of a racist society, and from the idea
that she herself is worthless. Darlene, much as she might love to sew and might well have chosen to stay
unmarried, is Celie’s inferior because she has yet to understand the central purpose of Celie’s text: Darlene
believes that Celie's language, the very thing that liberated her by enabling her individuality to grow, is
inferior because it is markedly black, and not an imitation of white, standard English.
● Celie’s non-standard use of the English language is important in itself, but also works as a more overt
mirror to her non-standard approach to the medium in which she writes. Celie is empowered in part by her
taking control of the English language and moulding it after her own preference, in stark contrast to Nettie
who submits to the standardised language and the system that is part of the exploitation of the Africans.
● This conquest of language is mirrored in a conquest of genre: The Color Purple has a number of
peculiarities for belonging to a tradition as conventionally straightforward as the epistolary novel. This is,
again, something that is contributed by Celie: where Celie twists, bends and outright ignores the trademarks
of epistolary language and form, Nettie conforms to them as she keeps account of her service to the
colonial system that the novel attacks.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple: Emergent Woman, Emergent Text

● It was Tillie Olsen who spoke so eloquently of a "literary history ... dark with silences," of "mute inglorious
Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate;
women" (6, 10). Yet writing is more than an act of bringing ourselves into existence; it also determines the
way we are shaped. Women's self-creation is influenced, impeded, constrained by language that has
embedded in it the codes of patriarchal culture. For the black woman writer, the search for voice-the rescue
of her subjectivity from the sometimes subtle, yet always pervasive, dictates of the dominant white male
culture- is even more problematic.
● Alice Walker, aware of black women as a particularly muted group, has addressed herself in much of her
work to the problem of the black woman as a creator.' In her "womanist" prose work In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens, for example, she describes those "grandmothers and mothers of ours ... not Saints, but
Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no
release" (233).
● "Perhaps," Walker continues, "she sang ... perhaps she wove the most stunning mats or told the most
ingenious stories of all the village storytellers. Perhaps she was herself a poet-though only her daughter's
name is signed to the poems we know" (243). There is no release for these mothers, but their hopes lie in
the abilities of the artist-daughters who will be able to enunciate the experiences and feelings of their
maternal ancestors. However, the journey back to the mothers necessitates the creation of a history that
Western humanistic tradition has denied the black woman. Historians, says Walker, are the enemies of
women, especially of black women; what history there has been is "a history of dispossession" (143). What
the black woman artist must do, then, is to create a history for herself by first re-possessing the past. She
must create out of what was not taken from her, about which there has been nothing written, and fashion,
from these sources, an authentic discourse-her own experience in her own language.
 ● The Color Purple represents a more explicit turning toward the question of the making of a text by a black
woman. With this work, Walker has created a truly modernist text; that is, a text that manifests itself as an
artistic production in which language is essential to the shaping of vision.
● She has created a text that shows language as power and has also demonstrated through this work what the
nature of black women's discourse might be. Since a discourse is an enunciation that requires a speaker or
narrator, and a listener or reader, the use of the epistolary form is especially effective. First, it sets up within
the smaller (con)text two speakers, Celie and Nettie, who are also the addressees.
● Their texts combine to make a larger text in which we, as readers, view the disruption between speaker and
listener (Albert appropriates Nettie's letters to Celie) and the ways in which patriarchal society appropriates
black discourse (Celie can only write to God, who, as a white male listener, is ill-equipped to hear what she
has to say). The larger text displays the weaving of more than one woman's voice and demonstrates the
means by which women have been silenced and their linguistic powers appropriated.

Pants

● that Nettie is the children's aunt and not their real mother, and also the means of destroying her suspicions
about Nettie. Celie's most remarkable creation with her needle is her pants. These are truly a product of the
imagination, a product of both female consciousness and female economy, and they are fashioned for
individuals so as to encompass both their physical and emotional needs.
● The first pair of pants that Celie makes, however, is at the suggestion of Shug, who is at a loss to see how
Celie manages "plowing in a dress" (124).
● While functionality, "everyday use," is maximized, and pants making becomes a profitable outlet for Celie's
enormous but mostly unrecognized energies, pants also suggest mobility. Beyond the need for more
sensible working clothes, pants have always represented a freer form of clothing, one usually forbidden to
women.
● It is no coincidence that Celie turns her art into an enterprise only after she herself has been mobilized-has
moved out of Albert's house and up to Memphis to live with Shug. Thus, Celie's pants are associated with
freedom and movement-all kinds of movement. They become part of Celie's text when she signs a letter to
Nettie: Your Sister, Celie Folkspants, Unlimited Sugar Avery Drive Memphis, Tennessee (182)
● Her creativity is seemingly unlimited, born out of and nurtured by Shug's faith in her. Her new home on
Sugar Avery Drive is free female space, a space that bears the signature of Shug. Walker has described The
Color Purple as a historical novel: "My 'history' starts," she says, "not with the taking of lands, or the births,
battles, and deaths of Great Men, but with one woman asking another for her underwear" (In Search 356).
● Shug, as the dynamic essence of textuality, has helped create that history, first by getting Celie to articulate
the incest incident and her early life with Nettie but, more importantly, by her discovery of the theft of
Nettie's letters by Albert. Even the discovery is made in terms of language. To manipulate Albert, "Shug
talk and talk," Celie says (104).
● The theft is such a serious one because at the very least it amounts to a severing of the bonds of sisterhood
in both emotional as well as linguistic terms, and also because Celie's recovery of Nettie's letters introduces
a second major text.
● In their early years together, both Celie and Nettie have been drawn to books and language, for, as even
Celie knows then, "us know we got to be smart to git away" (11). She seems to understand that language
and mobility are related. Indeed, Nettie's linguistic aptitude has enabled her getaway from the father, from
Albert, and finally, from America.
● Her years in Africa are not, however, an escape from oppression, for she discovers a history of white
exploitation and the existence of a gender bias that transcends race. Nettie's letters, despite some technical
problems I shall discuss later, add substantially to the depth and variety of the entire novel, for in them
Nettie reveals a world beyond the limited one that Celie knows.
● They take Celie out of her rural environment and help her to gain an awareness of African life, of a land
where blackness carries multiple images, where villages suffer tragically from white exploitation, and
where women submit silently to male oppression. To her description of her travels, Nettie also adds other
stories that become part of a larger text. Not surprisingly, she brings to her letters her own reading about
Africa-a black woman's view.
● A new "reading" of the Bible comes to Celie from Nettie too. Nettie discovers for Celie that the Bible is a
black text: "All the Ethiopians in the bible were colored.... it is perfectly plain if you pay attention only to
the words," she tells Celie (113). Nettie also relates the "story of the roofleaf," a kind of creation myth
 which unfolds a spiritual, albeit different, version of God. Like all creation myths, the telling of the original
event-here a violation of ecological sacredness and its consequences-is a ritual act that has become the basis
of the Olinkas' worship of the roofleaf. Their reverence for this essential vegetation is understood by Nettie,
who writes to Celie, "We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?"
(131
● It should be noted that Walker has carefully structured the introduction of these different texts. For
example, after the discovery of Nettie's letters, Celie's epistolary voice recedes, and seven of Nettie's letters
are given in sequence. These are followed by three of Celie's that explain the struggle that she and Shug
have undergone and the closer relationship that has emerged (Shug now sleeps with Celie, for example).
● This is also the time when Celie creates her first pair of pants, and the making of the pants accompanies the
reading of the letters. More of Nettie's letters follow. These relate the roofleaf story and Nettie's life with
the Olinkas. Most important in these pages is the emergence of a re-vision of the sisters' own family story.
Nettie has learned from Samuel the circumstances surrounding his adoption of Celie's children and the fact
that Celie's "father" is, in truth, her stepfather.
● This discovery, disturbing as it is for Celie, has positive ramifications. First, it removes the stigma of incest
from Celie's children. Second, it symbolizes the diminution of patriarchal power. Third, it serves to
mobilize Celie.
● It is at this juncture that Celie-like so many of the other women in the novel who go off on journeys and
attain new freedom and/or strength from the experience-leaves Albert and goes to live in Memphis. Celie's
words to Albert, "It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation" (170), are particularly significant.
"Creation" seems to refer to an almost cosmogonic rendering of Celie's world; it suggests the creation of a
whole woman in place of the numb, frightened, servile creature that has inhabited the early pages of the
book.
● It also signals the trip to Memphis where Celie's business will originate. And these important creative
awakenings are accompanied by another important textual transformation, as Celie ceases to address her
letters to God and begins to address them to her sister. With this change, the sisters become both writers and
addresses, women speaking to one another.
● While the function of Nettie's letters seems clear, the letters themselves have given some readers problems.
After "listening" to Celie's voice for so many pages, readers are wont to find Nettie's language dull,
devitalized, too correct. And her letters are long. We might ask ourselves if Walker has overextended
herself, whether the strategy of weaving the two sisters' voices into one fabric fully succeeds.
● Perhaps, however, we are supposed to find Nettie's letters less successful. For one thing, they are written in
"white" missionary language. Metaphorically speaking, Nettie wears her language much like she wears
Corrine's clothing-without total authenticity or comfort.
● In spite of a new home, a new career, and a new self, at the end ofof the novel, Celie has held onto one
precious possession, her language. Although urged to become "educated," to learn to talk as the books do,
she refuses to change her speech patterns by submitting to white language. "Books," she says, have
"whitefolks all over them, talking bout apples and dogs.... Pretty soon it feel like I can't think" (183).
● She also continues to regard silence in males as a positive character trait and language as an oppressor.
Furthermore, after Nettie's letters make their appearance, an important discussion between Celie and Shug
on the nature of God gives evidence of a more female mode of religious consciousness, a movement away
from the dominant society's imposed concept of divinity. Shug's idea of God is now added: "My first step
from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people.... I think it pisses God off if you
walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it"
● Shug’s God described in such transformative language, is more of a process than an abstraction, and her
"step from the old white man" has been part of a necessary "moving away" that has energized the text from
the beginning. Another change in Celie's text occurs in a scene with Albert (who has undergone quite a few
transformations himself by now, and has even learned to sew).
● She tells him an African re-vision of the Adam and Eve story, a story we have not heard from Nettie but
hear as it has been transmitted to and transformed by Celie. The fact that she can articulate it to Albert
shows how their relationship has changed. The story itself involves the Olinka version of Genesis.
According to their text, black people have the first white children (albinos, "colorless" babies can be
explained, they reason, more easily: black babies don't happen without a black person involved).
● All these white babies have been killed off as freaks except for Adam, who got away. Furthermore, Celie
tells Albert, Adam and Eve are naked because all white people are naked. They are missing their black
covering.
 ● In any case, all the characters are eventually united as they finally wend their ways from England and
Africa and Memphis to a home that is now appropriately feminized. Their getting there has involved over
thirty years of time and a lot of making and unmaking of bonds.
● Although the victim-mothers are part of the story too, and it continues to bear their signatures, they have
been vindicated. Celie, we remember, spoke in reference to her mother's death of the belief that "his story
kilt her." By the novel's end, his story (history) has been deconstructed, has become herstory, a story of
female love, female work, female song, and, most importantly, female bonding, which does not, finally,
exclude the males at all, but accommodates, redeems, even celebrates them.
● Walker, like the quiltmaker, has pieced together from the only materials available-materials of poverty,
ignorance, brutalization-a work that, like the product of the quiltmaker, may seem artless, but is instead a
carefully crafted and brilliantly patterned piece of work.
● Thus in Once, her first volume of poems, the then twenty-three-year-old Walker wrote, during the heyday
of Afro-Americans' romanticizing of their motherland, about her stay in Africa, in images that were not
always complimentary. In her poem "Karamojans" Walker demystified Africa:
● Such a perception was, at that time, practically blasphemy among a progressive element of Black thinkers
and activists. Yet, seemingly impervious to the risk of rebuke, the young Walker challenged the idealistic
view of Africa as an image, a beautiful artifact to be used by Afro-Americans in their pursuit of racial
pride.

BLACK WOMEN’S WRITING AND CRITICAL MOVEMENTS

● Black feminist politics has the potential of truly being an oppositional, transformational, revolutionary
discourse, but has not yet become so for a variety of reasons. Black feminist politics can only become
transformational if it is sharper in its opposition and critique of systems of domination and able to activate
its principles in more practical ways.
● It would therefore have to be more deliberately and practically located at sites of Black resistance to, and
struggle against, multiple oppression: whiteness, maleness, bourgeois culture, heterosexuality,
Anglo-centeredness and so on.
● Feminist discourse has itself been a politics directed at changing existing power relations between men and
women and in society as a whole. These are power relations which structure all areas of life: the family,
education, the household, political systems, leisure, culture, economics, sexual intercourse, sexuality and so
on. In short, feminism questions and seeks to transform what it is to be a woman in society, to understand
how the categories woman and the feminine are defined, structured and produced. The range has moved
from Kristeva’s “Woman Can Never Be Defined” to ways of understanding how gender – the normative
movements of the masculine and the feminine – is constructed in society.
● The notion that woman is constructed as living the gift or donation of herself to the fulfillment of all others’
desires and needs – i.e., to making everyone else happy – is an originary myth that is still in need of
deconstruction. For example, what does this unconditional donation of self by the woman mean in
economic terms?
● What does it mean, as Patricia Williams says, to be legally defined as the object of property? Also, how is
sexuality defined and normalized (heterosexualized)? How are Black women’s bodies seen and represented
under the Western, male, patriarchal “gaze”? What is the relationship of medical machinery and science to
(Black) women’s bodies? And, how do these constructs relate to other colonizations? What about (Black)
women’s legal status in marriage? Do Black women have rights, if so what are they? What does it mean to
be a wife in heterosexist society?
● There are still too many questions to be held open, even as answers are offered, before we accept arbitrary
closure, dismissal or postings. Feminist politics, in my understanding, is a resistance to objectification of
women in society, in literature, art and culture. It is also the articulation of a critical and an intellectual
practice which challenges all patriarchal assumptions and norms.
● It is also a politics of possible transformation. The “mythical norm” as Audre Lorde calls it, or the
“standard,” is defined as white male, monied, propertied, middle or upper class, thin, young, blonde,
Christian, heterosexual. The more one can check off in these categories the better off one is in society.
These standards are given positive value in society and the rest of us it seems must strive to emulate them
or be defined as “strange” or “mad.”
 ● Anytime we pose Black women and women of color against these, generally we note the oppositional or
negative marking inscribed So far, it has been extremely difficult to fully articulate Black feminist positions
in a racist society such as the US because the politics of race is so ubiquitous, so overt and overwhelming
that they shift and subsume all other discourses.
● Still, the combined politics of gender/race oppression are perhaps the most insidious. Thus, gender
oppression seems best overturned within the context of movements to transform various societies. Black
women (and men) everywhere can be victimized by both the system and the men, their children and others
in their lives, precisely because of their race and gender combination. Societies still have to struggle with
social reconstruction as was attempted in Eritrea and link questions of gender to new modes of being in
these societies

LETTERED BODIES AND CORPOREAL TEXTS IN THE COLOR PURPLE

● Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly describes how one ideological group establishes power by imprinting its traces on
the bodies of other people. Imprinting, she explains, often involves invading, cutting, impressing, and
Fragmenting
● In its depiction of rape, wife-beating, genital mutilation, and facial scarification, The Color Purple abounds
with instances in which the human body is made to submit to and to register the forces of authority. In the
text, a patriarchy maintains power by forcing the female body into a position of powerlessness, thus
denying the woman's ability to shape an Identity
● During the course of the novel, however, Celie learns to reshape those forces of oppression and to define
herself through her letters; these letters act as a "second body" that mediates her relationship to the power
structure in such a way as to give her a voice. Writing becomes a means for her to define herself against the
patriarchy and thus allow her to "reinscribe" those traces and wounds upon her body inflicted and imprinted
by others.
● When Mr.____ sees Sofia giving Harpo orders, he predicts, "she going to switch the traces on you." Celie's
development in the novel allows her to "switch the traces" made by others, the marks of authority that limit
and define her by circumscribing her within a fixed frame.
● Although Celie initially writes her diary letters to heal the rift that has ensued from her sexual violation and
to create an identity from fragmentation, the form of her text necessarily yokes together unity and disparity.
● The epistolary style divides as it unifies; it consists of a series of discrete entries that form a whole.
Likewise, the "self" that emerges from Celie's development is a decentered one, precariously poised against
and rift with a sense of Otherness. The novel presents a strange conflation of text and body both
thematically and formally; the form and the main character's corporeal and social existence are disjunct
entities with malleable, tenuous boundaries.
● Celie's texts are born when she is raped and silenced; the epigraph to The Color Purple consists of an
unattributed, pervasive threat against speech. These stark words initiate the entire text: "You better not tell
nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy" (p. 11). This external silencing forces a second mode of expression
to unfold, Celie's diary letters to God.
● She writes to understand the violation that has threatened her identity. "I Although Celie's letters provoke
no reciprocal communication, her lettered plea creates a means for her to determine her identity. "Letter
language" in The Color Purple is not merely, as Ian Watt suggests of the form, "the nearest record of . . .
consciousness in ordinary life," or "instantaneous experience;"3 it is more than a window into the mental
processes of the fictionalized individual (although Nettie's claim that writing allows her to release "bottled
up" emotions suggests that this function is implicit as well).Celie's naivete and brutal honesty in
self-presentation,
● however, negate the opposite critique of her letters as a series of concealments, erasures, or lies. Her
writing is neither a pure channel of communication nor a duplicitous self-misrepresentation but a complex
means of restructuring herself, an active process in which she moves toward a self-realization through the
mediation of language.
● In her letters, she may not merely convey but reshape (by articulating in a form) her private internal
experiences that remain hidden from her life of laboring acquiescence. The letters act as a second memory,
a projected body that precariously holds this hidden self.
● to mediate between herself and her oppressive environment. When she describes to Harpo how she copes
with Mr____'s abuse, she reveals her strategy for relocating and thus preserving a "self." "It all I can do not
to cry," she states. "I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree"
● She resists the impulse to rebel by becoming inanimate, a state which infects her entire world; in
ministering to Harpo, she realizes that she has lost all sentience: "Patting Harpo back not even like patting a
dog. It more like patting another piece of wood. Not a living tree, but a table . . ."
● Celie's attempt to negate her pain by desensitizing herself creates within her emotionally hollow spaces. In
one instance, she attempts to overcome this numbness by placing a static image between herself and her
world.
● While making love to her husband, she imagines the picture she has of Shug Avery "whirling and laughing"
so that she can respond. "I know what he doing to me he done to Shug Avery and maybe she like it," Celie
thinks. "I put my arm around him" (p. 21).
● The image of Shug is an anti self, someone active and able to express herself; it is by clinging to this image
that she is able to translate her feelings of inanimacy into passion. Emotion is mediated; it is vicarious. Art
becomes a second mediation that tries to counteract this first desensitizing barrier.
● the scattered letters seek a stable frame of reference outside the narrative. The novel also works toward
creating a stable frame within the text as the conclusion celebrates a unity that totalizes and recuperates all
loose strands created through the plot. The family which had been rent by incest in the opening pages is
now reconstructed, the stray sister returned. Celie's biological origins are recovered through Nettie's letters.
● Anonymity is thwarted, as Mr____ loses his elided name and becomes Albert; similarly, Mary Agnes has
regained her voice and name, and Celie is able to give her letters a signature. Time is stayed as Celie
realizes that she is growing younger in her happiness, a state founded on the communion that exists because
she and her family are safely enjoined. The traditional image of the harmonious banquet is made manifest
in the concluding barbeque.
● This form of banquet, Tashi notes, links the characters with the African community across the sea. The text
thus works to coalesce into a formal supreme order. Bound up in Walker's metaphor of quilting is the notion
of a final product as a pieced-together collage of assembled but disparate beings; this metaphor highlights
the struggle for coherence and integrity evident in the conclusion of the text.
● The unity that exists in the closure of the book, however, is a qualified one. Harpo reminds the reader that
this closely-knit tie between the black family occurs only because there is a common enemy. They band
together on the fourth of July, separate from the white people who celebrate a different history. Earlier