The Color Purple extra

critcisms and perspectives and key context

Key autobiographical context — younger years

• grew up in a small Southern town

• her work was deeply influenced by her parents experiences with the oppressive sharecropping system and racism of the South

• many blacks, like her parents, worked in the fields for a pittance + whites exerted control over practically every aspect of black life

• childhood filled with stories of past lynching

• young Walker certainly affected by the violent racist system of the South, especially the impact it had on black families

• at 8 — one of her brothers accidentally permanently blinded her in one eye with a BB gun

• eye covered by a scar until age 14 (an operation corrected her disfigurement), which made her feel ugly

• felt like an outcast, ashamed of her facial disfigurement

• isolated herself from other children, so she read and wrote to pass time

• In an interview (1970) she explained how this relationship affected her first novel

  • "I was curious to know why people in families (specifically black families) are often cruel to each other and how much of this cruelty is caused by outside forces such as various social injustices, segregation, unemployment, etc."

• Eye BB gun experience caused her to really notice relationships

⤷ began to keep a notebook for her poems

⤷ her writings influenced by these years – she focuses on relationships

• child Walker felt separate, but was also a part of a community which nurtured her

⤷ she had many excellent teachers – saved her from "feeling alone; from worrying that the world she was stretching to find might not exist." 

⤷ lent her books, for her a necessary element in her development: "Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard."

⤷ Her community knew the importance of education – the men built what the schools needed + parents raised money to keep them going

• At an early age, saw black people working together

⤷ Despite the limits imposed upon them, they felt responsible for each other

⤷ she recalls that growing up in the South, a black might be afraid of whites but not of blacks

⤷ As a little girl, walked + played with black convicts accused of murder

Key autobiographical context — later years

• 1961 — walker became active in the Civil Rights Movement

• travelled to Uganda as an exchange student

• returned and was shocked to learn that she was pregnant, and, afraid of her parents’ reaction, she considered suicide

• However, a classmate helped Walker obtain a safe abortion, and she graduated

• Walker continued her involvement with the Civil Rights movement after graduation

• In 1967, Walker married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, with whom she had one daughter before the two divorced in the mid-1970s

• Walker’s second novel, Meridian, explored the controversial issue of sexism in the civil rights movement

Key autobiographical context — after publishing TCP

• 1982 — Walker published her most famous novel, The Color Purple

  • chronicles the struggle of several Black women in rural Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century

• Upon publication, TCP unleashed a storm of controversy

  • instigated heated debates about Black cultural representation, as a number of Black American male critics complained that the novel reaffirmed old racist stereotypes about pathology in Black communities and of Black men in particular

• Critics also charged Walker with focusing heavily on sexism at the expense of addressing notions of racism in America

• Nonetheless, The Color Purple also had its ardent supporters, especially among Black women and others who praised the novel as a feminist fable

• The heated disputes surrounding The Color Purple are a testimony to the resounding effects the work has had on cultural and racial discourse in the United States.

• Walker has continued to explore the unique problems that face Black women in both in the United States and Africa

• Her novels, poetry, essays, and criticism have become an important part in a burgeoning tradition of talented Black women writers.

Key setting context

• set in Georgia 1920s

• 1960s — American civil rights movement, aimed to transform dynamics of interaction between black and white people in the US, especially the south

• Black Americans were subjected to Jim Crow Laws – reinforced segregation between Black and White Americans

• These laws dictated both the social and economic lives of Black Americans, allowing for a rich discussion on how segregation shaped the lives of the characters in the novel

• Outside of the US, Nettie describes learning about how historically Black-led civilizations thrived in Africa. 

• In her letters, she also shares how their ancestors ended up in bondage because they were surrendered to Europeans by Africans for money – transatlantic slave trade + how Nettie struggles with reconciling that fact with promoting Pan-African solidarity

common themes and tropes in her work

• the "forbidden" in society as a route to the truth

• insistence on investigating the relationships between black women and men, black parents and children, with unwavering honesty

• A womanist (her term for a black feminist), Walker has exposed the "twin afflictions" that beset black women, the sexism and racism that historically and presently restrict their lives

• develops literary forms (e.g concept of quilting, use of folk language) that are based on the creative legacy left her by her ancestors

• Her work means personal, spiritual inner change as a crucial aspect of radical social change

• In spite of problems her works expose, she is essentially optimistic – human potential and desire for change

• awareness that struggle + spirituality are primary characteristics of black Southern folk tradition

• her sense of that unknown thing in her ancestors that yearns to be articulated are not solely intellectual concepts for her, but part of her own personal history.

Different influences to her work — her mother

• shaped her the most

• Walker said that her stories are her mother's stories and that she has absorbed something of the urgency of her mother that her story be told

• Walker's writings are an example of what her mother and others like her might have created if they had the opportunity to write, paint, or carve their own expressions

• Yet, although these women did not have access to art forms, they did create in whatever forms were allowed them. 

• Although their society denied them access to most of the means of creation, these women used quilting, gardening, cooking, sewing to order their universe in the image of their personal concept of beauty

⤷ essential nature of art as a human process of illuminating and cherishing life. Walker was later to say that "if art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?"

• "Unlike many women who were told throughout their adolescence they must marry, I was never told by my mother or anyone of her sisters it was something I need even think about. It is because of them, I know women can do anything and that one's sexuality is not affected by one's work."

Influences — college + civil rights movement

• during Walker's college years, the atmosphere of the school was strongly affected by the civil rights movement

• In this period: "Everyone was beautiful, because everyone was conquering fear by holding the hands of the person next to them."

• And the archives at the oldest college for black women would be the source for her portrayal of Nettie, the Southern black woman in her novel The Color Purple (1982) who went to Africa as a missionary

• Spelman's tradition represents for Walker both positive + negative aspects of the definition of Southern black women and their role in society.

• At Spelman, she confronted the concept of the "lady," which clashed with her experience of her mother's and aunts' lives. 

• She was also absorbed in the civil rights movement, in which black women and men risked death. Meaningful struggle for more life was necessarily connected to death

Influences — sexism

• Walker was one of the first contemporary black women writers to insist that sexism existed in the black community and was not only an issue for white women

• did this at a time when most black leaders focused only on racism and considered her position to be practically heresy

• Through Nettie, Walker describes the subordination of women to men in Africa. She therefore suggests that sexism for black women does not derive from racism, though it is qualitatively affected by it. "We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a haven for black people--especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here."

Influences — pregnancy

• she had become pregnant and had traveled to Africa. She found that "I felt at the mercy of everything, including my body, which I had learned to accept as a kind of casing over which I considered my real self," and "began to understand how alone woman is, because of her body."

• decided that if she failed to find an abortionist she would kill herself (but suicide would hurt her family, and her pregnancy would bring shame to them)

Influences — Russian literature

• In her sophomore year, read every Russian writer that she could get her hands on

• Most impressive was the ability of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Turgenev, Gorki, and Gogol to render the tone of their entire society while penetrating the essential spirit of individual persons

• This marks Walker's fiction, for there is always an interrelation between the lives of the black women she portrays, the values of the entire society, and essential spiritual questions that are asked in every human society.

Influences — African writers

OKOT P BITEK

• Ugandan poet that she was also influenced by

• He wrote about pride, loss of traditional values in post-colonial society, confinement, pride of cultural heritage and importance of family and communal rituals

Some key novels

"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens", she speaks about three types of black women:

• the physically and psychologically abused black woman

• the exceptional black woman torn by "contrary instincts," who, in order to try to fulfill her creativity, is forced to repress the sources from which it comes

• the new black woman who can freely recreate herself out of the legacy of her maternal ancestors

• Throughout each of her fictional works, Walker presents glimpses of all types

• Walker insists that an understanding of the "herstory" of black women and the lives they are actually living is critical to growth and transformation.

In her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland:

•  Walker shows how the racist fabric of the American South affects the black family

• The Copeland men are thwarted by society in their drive for control of their lives--the American definition of manhood--they vent their frustrations by inflicting violence on their wives

• The Copeland women, too, are thwarted in their desire to be "women" in the society--that is, to be taken care of--one finally kills herself and the other is killed by her husband when she tries to take care of their family

• In each case, the children are not so much a source of the mother's strength as they are victims. Mothers, then, are not always respected in black society, nor are they always victorious

Walker's third novel, The Color Purple (1982):

• exemplifies her belief that history is a necessary element of depth, that nothing is a product of the immediate present

• Walker finished the novel after she and her husband divorced in 1977, and she moved to San Francisco

• But she started writing it in New York City, where she tells us her major character, a rural early twentieth-century Southern black woman, seemed to elude her

• It was not until she got a place in the country outside San Francisco that her characters' spirit, their language came rushing out

• Whatever else critics may have said about this latest of Walker's works, they all agree that the black folk speech in which most of it is written is superb and resonates with a history of feeling and experience that is specifically Afro-American.

Structure — epistolary form

• epistolary novel

  • the epistolary genre is often women centred

  • the open and fragmentary structure is seen as the readiest possibility for finding a new women’s voice

  • the form is also indicative of the culture of women, on the form of the diary, letter and journal

  • this experimental form is indicative of a narratological protest against repressive social systems

  • it also allowed Celie to express her lesbian desires, revealing the development of her sexuality

• Letter form – letters to god + Nettie because Celie can only talk about the terrible things she went through to someone she feels close with

• Confiding in someone – not complaining but she had nobody to speak with

• The letters to nettie despite not knowing if she was even alive, if she even cared – the letters are symbolic of female solidarity

• letters, along with diaries, were the dominant mode of expression allowed women in the West. In using the epistolary style, Walker is able to combine the subjective and the objective. As Celie, the main character, records the details of her life, she does so in images and in language that express the impact of oppression on her spirit as well as her resistance to it

• The written word is a form of self-expression - unadulterated truth and inner workings of the soul

Structure — Bildungsroman

• We see a coming-of-age of Celie and the characters around her as they become better people

• bildungsroman — transfers as a ‘novel of education’

• general structure of a bildungsroman:

  • emotional loss at the beginning

  • journey (little or metaphorical) — conflict and personal growth that puts them at odds with society

  • eventually the protagonist accepts ideal of society, and society accepts them

  • maturity — psychological growth and change, entering the larger world

• typically a male centred genre, but it has been transformed by women through time

• Celie’s Bildungsroman journey

  • profound loss at the beginning, losing her virginity to rape by a man he believed is her father, her mother to death, and her children taken from her

  • metaphorical journey — begins with her search for answers through letters to God

  • literal journey to maturation — she is forced to marry Albert

  • conflict — takes place in her husbands house

  • personal growth — takes place after meeting Shug and finding out that her letters from Nettie have been hidden, she is angry and goes to Memphis with Shug

  • entering the larger world — Memphis is her cosmopolitan experience where she turns her labour into profit

  • although Celie is not accepted by society, walker has Celie embrace herself, reconciling with her past and conflict

Language — Folk Language

• folk language

• African American Vernacular English – nonstandard english

• The language (like double negation) shows uneducated people

• This is an embodiment of African American identity

• Language of the uneducated African American women, but instead of feeling ashamed of it she later embraces it, showing how she is proud to be who she is, and this forms her cultural identity

• walker chose the language of her hometown community, so they can recognise themselves in her writing (especially her mother)

• coined the term ‘womanist’ from black folk expression ‘womanish’

  • referred to the black folk expression of mothers to their female children — ‘you acting womanish’, usually referring to outrageous, courageous

• a womanist — a woman who loves women (sexually or non sexually), appreciates women’s culture and emotional flexibility and strength

• intended to convey a speaker’s lack of education

• walker — the language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has happened to us

Gender Norms

• NOT a novel to hate black men

  • there were some controversies, people criticised her exposure of domestic violence and abuse, believing it to be a hatred on black men

  • no one denied that black men behaved like this, it was just forbidden to discuss

  • mirrored in Pa’s '“you better no never tell nobody but God”, but Walker told

• walker exposes examples of toxic masculinity through Harpo and Albert

• albert — many saw walker as depicting him as a brute, failing to see her deeply humanising and spiritual characterisation of him

• some say it is problematic that the men are only humanised when adopting womanist principles (feminised), believing it to be a loss of masculinity

• to be fully human — to embrace both masculinity and femininity

• for walker, the lack of sexual equality means male privilege, the same category as white privilege

• albert is oppressed by the senior patriarch also

  • follows the pattern of abuse set by his father

  • his father denied him permission to marry the woman he loves (Shug)

  • he is hurt by his father’s tyrannical behaviour, but replicates this tradition through his own son, denying him from marrying the woman he loves

• Harpo — unlike albert, he fights against the senior patriarchy by slowing down his work so he can marry Sofia

  • but, he tries to mirror his relationship with Sofia to albert’s relationship with Celie because it’s acceptable (he is actually embarrassed to admit to his dad that he had never hit Sofia)

• the men are steeped in a culture that glorifies violence

• Celie says “beat her” — she has also adopted the rules of patriarchy because it is what she is used to, and these rules are sanctioned by the Christian church

Race

• being trapped by both black and white patriarchy

• white violence on display on Sofia’s body when she is beat for hitting the mayor

• History + black heritage

  • Complicated relationship with the homeland they were taken away from

  • How all black women alike face suffering, in africa and america alike

  • Celie + nettie's letters are a powerful + symbolic way to communicate with family + ancestry

  
  

  Cyclical nature of racism + sexism

  • Almost none of the abusers in Walker’s novel are stereotypical, one-dimensional monsters whom we can dismiss as purely evil

  • Those who perpetuate violence are themselves victims, often of sexism, racism, or paternalism

  • Harpo beats Sofia only after his father implies that Sofia’s resistance makes Harpo less of a man

  • Mr. ______ is violent and mistreats his family much like his own tyrant like father treated him

  • Celie advises Harpo to beat Sofia because she is jealous of Sofia’s strength and assertiveness.

  • The characters are largely aware of the cyclical nature of harmful behavior

  • Sofia tells Eleanor Jane that societal influence makes it almost inevitable that her baby boy will grow up to be a racist. 

  • Only by forcefully talking back to the men who abuse them and showing them a new way of doing things do the women of the novel break these cycles of sexism and violence, causing the men who abused them to stop and reexamine their ways

Sex and desire

• walker added the sexual scenes between Shug and Celie to “give my family and friends an opportunity to see women-loving women in a recognisable context

• the inspiration for their romance came from Walker’s own family history

  • her grandma was brutally abused by her grandfather. after a life of obeying abusive men who raped instead of ‘making love’, she was not attracted to men. instead, she was drawn to her husband’s lover (Shug Perry), a beautiful woman who was kind to her and was the only person to notce hger creativity.

  • in giving celie the love of this woman and how love can be expressed, walker intended to demonstrate that she too (like all of us) deserved to be seen and appreciated and deeply loved by someone who saw her as whole and worthy

• some argue that lesbian desire blooms in celie, not as a result of male sexual abuse, but because it is her authentic self, it is who she is

• the narratoligical arch of the novel traces celie’s awakening in the beginning of the novel “i don’t even look at mens.. i look at women tho”

Sexual themes

• In The Color Purple she focuses on incest in a black family and portrays a lesbian relationship as natural and freeing. And like many of the protagonists in her short stories, the heroines of her third novel triumph despite the tremendous odds against them. In an interview in California Living, Walker reveals that Celie was based on the story of her great-grandmother who at twelve was raped and abused. Yet though the story ends happily, Walker does not flinch from presenting the sexual abuse, the wife-beatings, and the violence that Celie undergoes in a society that demeans her as a woman. As in all of her works, violence is a result of the unnatural ideologies of sexism and racism. And though many readers and critics would prefer to ignore it, Walker has always insisted on exposing the violence inflicted upon black women's bodies and spirits.

Celie’s conversion and spiritual transformation

• walker uses celie to expose sexism and racism embedded in western theology

• shug and celie discuss the meaning of God, as all thoughtful humans must

• the novel is not irreligious or secular, but posits a clear theology of transformation

• walker aims to dismantle the structures of society still mired in patriarchy

  • one structure of society is that churches as organised religions still promote the worship of a God who punishes evil doers and rewards those lucky enough to please him

  • a god who jusdges human actions but does not intercede

  • one who lives apart from and looks down on his creation

• Celie clearly views God as a man

• some critics — religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth

• the Church is responsible for Celie believing she must stay silent

• novel begins with “you better not tell nobody but God, it’s kill your mammy” — ironically, Celie does as she’s instructed, yet her mother still dies

• her spiritual and physical transformation begins with her attraction and interactions with shug avery

• Celie is encouraged to reexamine her image of God as a white male

  • bring in gender theology?

  • finds god in nature

Motherhood/role of women in society

• Walker criticises women who give up their development when they become mothers/wives/older sisters

• Not all women are born to be mothers, they don’t have this maternal instinct

• Motherhood is a social construct

• Not critical of motherhood itself, as it is in itself valuable, but the image and expectations of it developed by society

• Many characters in the novel break the boundaries of traditional male or female gender roles

• Sofia’s strength and sass

• Shug’s sexual assertiveness

• Harpo’s insecurity – major examples of such disparity between a character’s gender and the traits he/she displays

• This blurring of gender traits and roles sometimes involves sexual ambiguity, as we see in the sexual relationship that develops between Celie and Shug

• Disruption of gender roles sometimes causes problems

• Harpo’s insecurity about his masculinity leads to marital problems and his attempts to beat Sofia

• Likewise, Shug’s confident sexuality and resistance to male domination cause her to be labeled a tramp

• Throughout the novel, Walker wishes to emphasize that gender and sexuality are not as simple as we may believe

• Her novel subverts and defies the traditional ways in which we understand women to be women and men to be men.

Sisterhood

• the oppression black women experience in their relationship with black men and the sisterhood they must share with each other in order to liberate themselves. As a vehicle for these themes, two sisters' letters--Celie's to God, Nettie's to Celie and finally Celie's to Nettie--provide the novel's form. Form and content, then, are inseparable

• Female friendship as a way to summon courage to share personal stories

• A form of refuge against an oppressive world full of male violence

• Sofia – her ability to fight comes from her relationship with her sisters

• Netties relationship with celie anchors her through years of uncertainty + unfamiliar culture of the Olinkan people in Africa

• Samuel notes that the strong bond between olinka women allow them to bear through polygamy + sexism

• Celie’s ties to shug helps bring about her gradual redemption + attain sense of self

Love

• Walker demystifies love - its not the typical fairytale love, but it comes in different forms

• Sisterly love, romantic love, maternal love, agape, self-love

• Demystifies it, especially for women as this false image of love is toxic, a disease, and most restrictive loves are not true and lead to a total giving up of yourself

Self love + independence + identity

• affirms that the most abused of the abused can transform herself

• At first, Celie can’t resist those who abused her

• She felt the only way to persevere was to stay silent - ‘you better not tell anybody but God’

• At first, her narrative is muddled because she is so unaccustomed to articulating her experience, despite best efforts at transparency

• Through shug and netties letters to her, she is able to finally push for independence, causing mr___ to reassess his actions

• Her empowerment empowers others – community

• Walker signifies through celie the power of speech to fight for selfhood and against oppression

Religion (god)

• Celie originally sees God as a white man, later shug changes this image of God for her

• She confides in and addresses her letters to God, another male figure who has control over her life

• But her perception of god changes to a being who is more loving and creative, symbolised by the color purple

• White male god initially a symbol of patriarchy

• Celie needed god initially as a guide and helping hand, then moves on from this as she begins to learn to love herself

• She always knew the image of god as a white patriarch “did not seem quite right”

• Celie’s + other characters change over time (for mostly the better) symbolise a move towards a better image of God + religion - agape – like a pilgrimage

• At the beginning, didn’t know what god was – then reimagines god in her own terms

⤷ symbolises how Celie moves on from the object of someone else's care to an independent woman - her voice is now sufficiently empowered to create her own narrative

Purple

• Symbol of femininity + God

• Sign of the romantic love between shug and Celie

⤷ shug said God gets angry when you walk past a field of purple flowers and don’t acknowledge the beauty of it

• Purple – royalty, ambition, change, courage, independence, devotion + transformation

• Purple represents the spectrum of human experience

• Purple typically a feminine colour – female solidarity + sisterhood

quilting/sewing/cooking

• A woman, motherly thing that form the foundations of childhoods and therefore society – black women are mother’s in their communities and mammies in white society

• Her inquiry into the lives of Southern black women affected Walker's craft as well as her subject matter. During this period she paid careful attention to the "low" media--quilting, gardening, cooking--that were the only forms through which most black women were allowed to express their creativity. Her fiction of this period has, at the core of its craft, the technique of quilting--the use of recurring economical patterns to create a synthesis of the bits and pieces of life into a work of functional beauty. 

• This relationship is made clear for the reader through Walker's quilting of intersecting and recurring motifs that stress, on the one hand, the fragmentation of life caused by the unnatural ideologies of sexism and racism and, on the other, the natural unity of life as expressed in nature itself, in music, in the love of human beings for each other

• Shows the power women can gain from productively channeling their creative energy

• Patchwork quilt - diverse patterns coming together – diverse people coming together, bonding despite difference

• With Shug’s help, Celie overturns the idea that sewing is marginal + unimportant women’s labor, and she turns it into a lucrative, empowering source of economic independence – pants sewing business

SHUG AVERY

• Affects a lot of characters through her love

• Men in novel often referred to as beats + savages, yet are humanised by her

• Harpo begins to appreciate squeak, and Albert learns to cook, sew and love Celie

• Among female characters, Celie + Squeak are the best examples of Shug’s loving effect

Shug teaches squeak how to sing + makes her realise that her style of singing is more humanising that “all them funny voices you hear singing in church”

“What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That’s the reason they call what us sing the devil’s music. Devil’s love to fuck.” (Pg. 99)

• Her philosophy of life is anti-patriarchal and anti-white

• Goes by feelings + desires, not biased + gendered traditions

• This leads to her redefining God, family, motherhood + sexuality

• It is because of Shug that Celie believes in a pantheistic God

• Shug explains to Celie that God is neither He or She, but It – resides within people

• Preaches a sermon of love + caring, and her music is more powerful that the sermon of a preacher – her songs preach about God’s love + wrath, develops the soul