Alice Walker's “The Color Purple”
KRISHNA PACHEGAONKAR
Since the publication of
her first novel “Third Life of Grange Copeland” in 1970, Alice Walker has
enjoyed a long and prolific career: three books of poetry, two short story
collections, two novels and a biography of Langston Hughes for young readers –
each work impressive not only in its own right but also by virtue of its
appeal. Alice Walker occupies a significant place in the contemporary black
women writers in America, Born into a large family of sharecroppers in the Deep
South, she displays in her fictional corpus a keener interest in the plight of
the black woman than do the other members of the contemporary black women
writers quartet (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshal, Gloria Naylor),
Although she uses protagonists of both sexes, Walker reveals a strong bias in
favour of the black woman; she regards her as the bearer of enormous social,
and sexual burdens.
Though “womanist” (she
prefers “womanist” to “feminist” a word she finds limited a little weak) in
tone and character, Walker’s writings have placed her in the mainstream of
modern literature. Walker is a highly gifted writer of powerfully expressive
fiction. Her work consistently reflects her deep concern with racial, sexual,
and political issues, particularly with the black woman’s struggle for
spiritual and political survival. Her political awareness, her southern
heritage and her sense of the culture and history of her people form the
thematic base of her fictional world. Walker’s unsparing vision of black
women’s victimization in sexual love – their isolation, degradation or
grotesque defeat by despairing or aspiring black men – has been a major element
in her growing body of work, Walker’s first collection of short stories “In Love
and Trouble” (1973) won her the prestigious Rosenthal Award of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters. Her second novel “Meridian”, is often cited as
the best novel of the Civil Rights Movement; and her last novel “The Color
Purple” (1982)
is awarded both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in
1983, and Steven Speilberg made a classic film on it.
“The Color Purple” is
acclaimed as Alice Walker’s “the most impressive” (Watkins: 1982) but a
poignant tale of five women – black, battered, and ultimately triumphant over a
world that seems to have been designed to drive black women mad. Walker’s
language is incandescent, heated with love and rage, and her vision is clear
and hard as cut glass.
Celie is a 14-year old
black girl in the Jazz Age South: spunky, vulnerable, and the downest and
outest of women. Because she must survive against impossible odds, because she
has no one to talk, she picks up a pen and pours out her soul to God. Raped
repeatedly by the man who mayor may not be her real father, robbed of the two
children that result bereft her beloved sister Nettie – who fled to seek a
better life in Africa – Celie writes about her tragic life in the guise of
letters to “White God” because she is ashamed to tell any one else. Celie is
black, ugly, and not good at school work; she lives in rural Georgia. Celie has
such a low opinion of herself that, she meekly submits in marriage to an older
man named Albert (always referred to by her as Mr…) Who wants someone to take
care of his four motherless children. In the first few pages, Celie is raped by
her mother’s husband, deprived of the two children she is forced to bear and
married off to a widower. Her life seems hopeless and over. To Albert, who is
in love with a beautiful and determinedly independent blues singer named Shug
Avery. Celie becomes merely a servant and an occasional sexual convenience.
When his oldest son, Harpo asks Albert why he beats Celie, he says
indifferently:
“Cause she my wife.
Plus, she stubborn.
All women good for – he
don’t finish.
He just tuck his chin
over the paper like
he do. Remind me of Pa”
(p. 30)
For a time Celie accepts the abuse stoically:
“He beat me like he beat
the children. Cept
he don’t never hardly
beat them. He say
Celie,
get the belt …. It all I can do not
cry. I make myself wood.
I say myself,
Celie, you are a tree.
That’s how come I
know
trees fear men.” (p. 30)
She watches with
curiosity as Albert’s teenaged son Harpo falls in love with and marries Sophia,
a big strapping girl who tells Celie she is “big” with Harpo’s child. She
watches with admiration as Sophia successfully stands up to her husband and
father-in-law and moves out of the house with her children. She watches with
horror as Sophia is carried home later from prison, beaten and abused for
having talked back to the town’s white mayor. Several women come into Celie’s
life, among them Shug (Sweet as Sugar) Avery, a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold and
Albert’s former lover whom he brings back to the house one day. She is ill with
“the nasty woman disease” and no one else will take her in. Celie nurses Shug
back to health, admires her with a consuming passion, and in one of the novel’s
most tender scenes, becomes Shug’s lover. Above all, she loves to hear Shug
sing. This event which should break up any household, proves oddly restorative.
Through Shug, who is bold, passionate, and outspoken, Celie slowly learns to
stand up for herself and to resist the brutality and tyranny of men; through
Shug’s sisterly embrace, she discovers the sensual possibilities of her
hitherto unawakened body. The love that Celie feels for Shug is returned in
ways both sisterly and sensuous. Celie frees herself from her husband’s
repressive control. When she finds out that Albert has intercepted all the
letters from her younger sister Nettie – who, with Celie’s help, has fled to
Africa with a missionary group – allowing her to think that Nettie is dead.
When she discovers half way through the novel that Nettie is still alive,
Celie’s callous heart breaks open and her rage pours out:
“The God I been praying
and writing – to is a
man. And act just like
all the other mens
I know. Trifling,
forgitful, lowdown.” (p. 175)
Celie’s rage finally
breaks through her passivity. She wants to kill Albert but is restrained by
Shug. Eventually Celie discovers the laughing at him, standing up to him, and
just leaving for a while cause him to have a change of heart. Here the novel
takes a sudden swerve. While Celie has been slaving in America, Nettie has been
playing Albert Schweitzer in Africa, ministering to the needs for a primitive
tribe called Blinks. Always the scholar as a girl, her letters to Ctlie betray
her missionary education and wide travels. Her writing simply doesn’t move the
reader the way Celie’s does. She gives us decorous and pedantic travelogues
instead of raw, dramatic, and deeply felt transcriptions of experience. Celie
eventually leaves Albert and moves to Memphis, where she starts a business,
designing and making clothes. Ironically, it is Albert’s real love and
sometimes mistress, Shug Avery; and his rebellious daughter-in-law Sofia, who
provide the emotional support for Celie’s personal evolution. And in turn, it
is Celie’s new understanding of and acceptance of herself that eventually lead
to Albert’s re-evaluation of his own life and a reconciliation among the
novel’s major characters. As the novel ends, Albert and Shug sit with Celie on
Celie’s front porch “rocking and fanning files”, waiting for the arrival of
Nettie and her family.
“The Color Purple”,
according to Peter Prescott (1982), “is an American novel of permanent
importance, that rare sort of book which (in Norman Mailor’s felicitous phrase)
amounts to “a diversion in the fields of dread”; for her story begins at about
the point that most Greek tragedies reserve for the climax, then becomes by
immeasurably small steps a comedy which works its way towards acceptance,
severity and joy.” Her narrative advances entirely by means of letters that are
either never delivered or are delivered too late for a response, and most of
these are written in a black that Walker appears to have modified artfully for
general conception. In “The Color Purple” Alice Walker can be said to have
attempted a kind of encompassing imaginative empathy with the world of the
Southern black women giving due weight to the ubiquitous presence of physical
and psychic violence and its burdening effect on the human capacity for
self-expression.
One of the major
concerns of the novel is the bonding of oppressed women. What particularly
distinguishes Walker in her role as apologist and chronicler for black women is
her revolutionary treatment of black women: that is, she sees the experiences
of black women as a series of movements from women totally victimized by
society and by the men in their lives to the growing developing women whose
consciousness allows them to have control over their lives.
“The Color Purple” is
about the struggle between redemption and revenge. And the chief agency of
redemption is the strength of the relationships between women: their
friendships, their love, their shared oppression. Even the white mayor’s family
is redeemed when his daughter cares for Sofia’s sick daughter.
Africa, the land from
which free black men and women were forcibly uprooted and brought to America in
chains, has long been imagined in black American folklore and literature as a
Paradise Lost, to be returned to one day in pilgrimage. The quality of modern
black life in America has done little to diminish the need for such a myth, not
the force with which it is embraced by black culture at large. Alice Walker in
“The Color Purple” clearly wants to revise the myth – to toss it out entirely,
in fact. Africa, as pilgrim Nettie presents it in her letters, is as repressively
patriarchal as America. The Olinka men don’t believe that women should be
educated – at least not their women.
“They are like white
people at hom who
don’t whant colored
people to learn.” (p. 173)
Nettie realizes with a start. And Africa’s not much
of a paradise for Olinka males either. With the Second World War about to
erupt, British colonials descend upon the helpless tribe, bulldozing roads
through their village and ripping out their sacred roofleaf bush in order to
plant rubber trees. The resentful black men rape and treat their women like
animals. They remind Nettie, more than anything of her Pa.
If Africa is no paradise
for a black woman from America what does Walker offer in its place? Her vision
is a complex one, and she works it out artfully through the character of Celie.
The inescapable logic by which she forces Celie to see that man is the true
oppressor, the boundless rage that results these are her as much as Celie’s
and two-thirds of the way through the novel we begin to suspect that she has
given up on men altogether. Celie and Shug slam the door on Albert and move up
North to an old house in Memphis that Celie has inherited from her mother. The
two women cook, fix up the house, open a shop that sells home-made pants for
women. They weave their lives into a “common dream” in which male lovers and
kinsmen have no place. As Shug tells Celie one night before the two women drop
off to sleep in each other’s arms, “Us is each other’s people now”.
In the traditional way
Walker ends her comedy with dance, or more precisely with a barbecue. The final
mood of the novel is that of forgiveness, reconciliation and faith in the work of
God.
Alice Walker is a
remarkable novelist, sometimes compared to Toni Morrison, but with a strong,
individual voice and vision of her own, and a delicious humour that pervades in
“The Color Purple” and tempers the harshness of the lives of its people.
Opening with a dedication to the spirit, Walker ends her novel with a
postscript: “I thank everybody in this book for coming. A. W., author and
medium”.
Dinitia Smith, in her
review of the novel, quite appropriately comments, “Despite its occasional
preachiness, ‘the Color Purple marks a major advance for Walker’s art......it places her in the company of
Faulkner, from whom she appears to have learned a great deal”. Walker has not
turned her back on the Southern fictional tradition. She has absorbed it and
made it her. By infusing
the black experience into the Southern novel, she enriches both it and the
reader. It is indeed a sort of tour de force.