This article was downloaded by: [McMaster University]

On: 27 October 2014, At: 11:47

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Explicator
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Piecing the Patchwork Self: A Reading

of Walker's The Color Purple
a
Shanyn Fiske
a
Rutgers University (Camden)
Published online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Shanyn Fiske (2008) Piecing the Patchwork Self: A Reading of Walker's The
Color Purple, The Explicator, 66:3, 150-153, DOI: 10.3200/EXPL.66.3.150-153

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/EXPL.66.3.150-153

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever
as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any
opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the
authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of
the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with
primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,
actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in
relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms
& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/
terms-and-conditions
 make her an ideal candidate for a bananafish, and had Seymour killed her at
the end of the story, the case would be closed. But since he shoots himself
instead, we are forced to find another explanation.
The primary reason for arguing that Seymour is the bananafish is the fact that
he, like the bananafish, dies at the end of his story. However, this interpretation is
problematic because the cause of banana fever is unclear. He doesn’t take more
than he needs, as his wife seems to do. He has returned from war to a loveless
marriage with a woman who seems to stay with him solely to spite his parents.
If he represents the bananafish, then his case of banana fever must be caused by
the jadedness of having experienced too much of the bad that life has to offer.
Since neither of these interpretations is entirely satisfactory, a return to
Aesop sheds some new light on the story. Seymour distinguishes his story
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:47 27 October 2014

from the fable by changing the ending, perhaps because he has found that
Aesop’s moral isn’t true. His problems are numerous: aside from his marriage,
he doesn’t function well in social situations, as we see in the elevator scene
with the woman who looks at his feet. In fact, the only positive relationship he
has is with Sybil, who can’t be more than seven or eight years old, and even
that goes awry when he kisses her foot. It’s difficult to see how the passage of
time could help him. We won’t know, though, as he kills himself before time
can solve his problems. Perhaps this lack of patience is what brings on his
case of banana fever, and this is what makes him different from Aesop’s fox.

—ANTHONY FASSANO, Camden County College

Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

Aesop, bananafish, fable, morals, J. D. Salinger

WORKS CITED
Aesop. Aesop’s Fables. Trans. S.A. Handford. New York: Puffin Books, 1993.
Salinger, J. D. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Nine Stories. New York: The Modern Library,
1953. 3–26.

Piecing the Patchwork Self: A Reading of Walker’s THE COLOR PURPLE

With its epistolary structure and layered first-person narrations, Alice

Walker’s The Color Purple unfolds a symphony of voices at once discrete
and intermingled. The novel’s inclusion of so many individual stories makes it
difficult to tell whether these narratives are enclosed within Celie’s account of
her life or whether Celie’s story is part of a larger whole. This formal destabi-

150
 lization of a dominant narrative emphasizes that an individual cannot be con-
sidered apart from the matrix of his or her relationships and that it is through
integration into a collective identity that he or she defines the boundaries of
his or her own being. Thus, like the scraps of cloth sewn into Celie’s patch-
work quilt, characters’ lives in The Color Purple are stitched together into a
unity whose strength and vibrancy depend on each individual’s identification
with and distinction from the others around him or her. Quilts, as Priscilla
Leder has noted, “embody the ideal of unity in diversity which permeates
Walker’s writings” (141). What unites the characters of The Color Purple is a
shared experience of suffering and a common struggle to survive in the face
of oppression, violence, and abuse. In what follows, I suggest that Celie’s
struggles and her strengthening sense of self are contingent on her integration
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:47 27 October 2014

into a supportive network of friends constructed on the sharing of stories that

testify to the individuality of personal suffering and form the threads binding
broken lives into a stronger whole.
From its outset, The Color Purple identifies the struggle for self-preser-
vation with an instinct for storytelling that indicates the healing potential
of communicating one’s suffering to others. Celie’s first audience is God.
Despite her apparent disparagement of life (“This life soon be over. . . . Heav-
en last all ways” [44]), her letters to God suggest her simultaneous impulse
to understand her traumatic experience of rape and to gain authority over her
life. Her articulation of personal suffering through writing becomes Celie’s
chief survival tactic. Contemplating the advantages of death over life, Celie
confesses, “if I was buried, I wouldn’t have to work. But I say, Never mine,
never mine, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along” (18). Although
Celie confesses that her method of survival is emotional numbness, her writ-
ing testifies to her shame, anger, confusion, and sense of injustice, serving as
a form of release and a means of distancing herself from the past.
At first, however, Celie’s equation between her confessor (God) and her
tormentor undermines her instinctive desire to heal her emotional trauma by
articulating her experiences and understanding her suffering. Asked about her
children’s father, Celie tells her mother that they are God’s (“I don’t know
no other man” [3]). Celie’s victimization by her stepfather is reinforced by
her acceptance of her inescapable passivity in the hands of an omnipotent,
external force. Thus, even while the urge to tell of her experiences (and purge
herself of them) evidences Celie’s rejection of self-degrading submission, the
limited world of her relationships forces her to locate herself in a passive role
that reinforces her resignation to her victimization.
The novel attributes Celie’s emergence from her initial state of numbness and
self-removal to her gradual integration into a developing network of (at first)
female friends. Celie’s interaction with Sophia allows her the first opportunity
to share her experiences with someone other than “God,” and, by implication,

151
 to begin severing her ties to the vengeful, incomprehensible force associated
with Him. It is by measuring Sophia’s audacity against her own submissiveness
and by witnessing Sophia’s surprise at her attitude toward life (“You ought to
bash Mr.__ head open, she say, Think bout heaven later” [44]) that Celie begins
to question her own passivity and recognize the irrepressible force of her emo-
tions. “I’m jealous of you,” Celie tells Sophia, revealing for the first time the
emotions hidden behind her letters to God. “You do what I can’t. . . . I’m so
shame of myself, I say” (42). This startlingly candid confession prompts an
empathic counterconfession from Sophia that helps Celie begin to identify and
come to terms with her past experiences. Like Sophia, Celie has, in her own
way, “had to fight . . . all my life”(42). The two women’s common experience
of suffering allows Celie to identify with Sophia: Sophia’s story at once gives
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:47 27 October 2014

new shape to Celie’s own by allowing her to reimagine herself in the active
role of survivor and fighter. This narrative exchange validates the poignancy
of each woman’s private experience and, through that validation, binds them
in a healing bond of friendship as Celie tentatively emerges from her habitual
numbness. Thus, even as the two women begin to “make quilt pieces out of
these messed up curtains” (44), Celie begins to mend her emotional wounds
and piece together the first fragments of a more stable subjectivity. Judith Els-
ley, among others, has emphasized the unique symbolism of quilting for the
process of suffering and healing in The Color Purple: “[T]he quiltmaker begins
work on her patchwork quilt by cutting or ripping her fabrics apart. Indeed,
a patchwork quilt cannot come into existence without that rending” (164).
The quilt thus both legitimates the suffering that characters have experienced
and symbolizes the integration of broken lives with the threads of stories the
women share about their “messed up” pasts.
Celie’s growing self-awareness and assertion are accompanied by the
novel’s formal expansion as it integrates Celie’s letters to God with accounts
of other characters’ lives, which, like the patches of a quilt, are both enclosed
within the novel’s larger narrative and help to define the patch that is Celie’s
unique experience. Nettie’s letters, for example, reveal the truth of Celie’s
parentage and help her turn her passive shame into active anger against her
stepfather’s injustice. Celie’s relationship with Shug Avery helps her come
to terms with her sexual identity and further emphasizes that human beings
are not manipulated by distant, external gods but are capable of shaping
their identities through responsive interactions with others. “God is inside
you and inside everybody else,” Shug tells Celie, giving new significance to
Celie’s assertion that “I don’t write to God no more, I write to [Nettie]” (199).
Celie’s abandonment of a tyrannical, “big and old and tall and graybearded
and white” (201) God becomes a recognition of and respect for the God in
herself—a self composed of and enclosed by the patchwork lives constructed
in her and others’ stories.

152
 The color purple is continually equated with suffering and pain. Sophia’s
swollen, beaten face is described as the color of “eggplant.” Purple is the color
of Celie’s private parts: the site of her sexual violation. Nettie’s description
of Africans as “blue-black” suggests that suffering is already marked on the
flesh of a historically oppressed race. However, it is also from their scars and
bruises that the characters derive the stories that construct their solidarity and
that link them. As Thadious Davis has remarked, these marks of trauma might
also be seen as badges testifying to each character’s strength in surviving to
tell her history. Placed together, these stories are like quilted patches whose
complimentary chromatics contribute to the strength of cooperative artistry. A
patch, as Houston Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker have noted, “is a vestige
of wholeness that stands as a sign of loss and a challenge to creative design”
Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:47 27 October 2014

(706). In Walker’s novel, shades of pain are also colors of triumphant, creative
survival. Suffering, the novel suggests, is an inescapable part of human life,
but it is also the articulation and validation of that suffering that grants the
sufferer her self-transcendence.

—SHANYN FISKE, Rutgers University (Camden)

Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

collective identity, The Color Purple, quilting, recovery, storytelling, Alice

Walker

WORKS CITED
Baker, Houston, and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. “Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker’s
‘Everyday Use.’” Southern Review 21 (1985): 706–20.
Davis, Thadious. “Alice Walker’s Celebration of Self in Southern Generations.” Southern Quar-
terly 21 (1983): 39–53.
Elsley, Judy. “‘Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent’: Fragmentation in the Quilt
and The Color Purple.” Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. Ikenna Dieke. Connecticut:
Greenwood P, 1999: 163–70.
Leder, Priscilla. “Alice Walker’s American Quilt: The Color Purple and American Literary Tra-
dition.” Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. Ikenna Dieke. Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1999: 141–52.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket, 1982.

153