Celie in the Looking Glass: The Desire for Selfhood in The

Color Purple

Daniel W. Ross

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 1988, pp. 69-84
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.0045

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/242251

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CELIE IN THE LOOKING GLASS: THE DESIRE
FOR SELFHOOD IN THE COLOR PURPLE

nfr
Daniel W. Ross

For many readers the turning point of Alice Walker's The Color Purple
occurs when Celie, the principal character, asserts her freedom from her
husband and proclaims her right to exist: "I'm pore, I'm black, I may
be ugly, and can't cook. . . . But I'm here" (187). Celie's claim is star-
tling because throughout her life she has been subjected to a cruel form
of male dominance grounded in control over speech. The novel's very
first words alert us to the prohibition against speech served on Celie by
her father: "You'd better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your
mammy." Thus, Celie writes, addressing her letters to God because she
has no one else to write to and because she knows she must never tell
no "body." But even then Celie addresses her letters to die orthodox
Christian God, another version of the father. In short, Celie's language
exists through much of the book without a body or audience, just as she
exists without a self or identity.
Finding the courage to speak is a major theme of The Color Purple.
But the novel also suggests that speech cannot come from the hollow shell
of selfhood that Celie presents early on. Thus, I would like to focus on

Modem Fiction Studies, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 1988, Copyright © by Purdue Research Founda-
tion. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

69
the discovery that must necessarily precede Celie's discovery of speech:
the discovery of desire—for selfhood, for other, for community, and for
a meaningful place in the Creation. The process of discovering or develop-
ing desire begins, for Celie, with the reappropriation of her own body,
which was taken from her by men—first by her brutal stepfather and
then passed on to her husband, Albert. The repossession of her body en-
courages Celie to seek selfhood and later to assert that selfhood through
spoken language. During this process Celie learns to love herself and others
and to address even her written language to a body, her sister Nettie,
rather than to the disembodied God she has blindly inherited from white
Christian mythology. The crucial scene, I will argue, in initiating this
process is the mirror scene. In this scene Celie first comes to terms with
her own body, thus changing her life forever.

One of the primary projects of modern feminism has been to restore

women's bodies, appropriated long ago by a patriarchal culture, to them.
Because the female body is the most exploited target of male aggression,
women have learned to fear or even to hate their bodies. According to
Adrienne Rich, women must overcome these negative attitudes if they
are to achieve intellectual progress:
But fear and hatred of our bodies had often crippled our brains. Some of the most brilliant
women of our time are still trying to think from somewhere outside their female bodies—
hence they are still merely reproducing old forms of intellection. (284)

Coming to terms with the body can be, for women, a painful experience.
Alicia Ostriker, for example, notes that although among contemporary
poets females are more likely to describe the body or to use it as a source
of imagery than their male counterparts are, their images often focus on
strangulation, cutting, mutilation, or depictions of "psychic hurt in somatic
terms" (249). Consequently, women often think of their bodies as torn
or fragmented, a pattern evident in Walker's Celie. To confront the body
is to confront not only an individual's abuse but also the abuse of women's
bodies throughout history; as the external symbol of women's enslave-
ment, this abuse represents for woman a reminder of her degradation
and her consignment to an inferior status.
As the subject of repeated rapes and beatings, Celie tries alternately
to ignore and to annihilate her body. The latter is her strategy for defense
against her husband's assaults:
He beat me like he beat the children. ... It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood.
I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man. (30)
But Celie's ignorance of her body is even more shocking than her desire

70 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

to annihilate it, as her language makes clear. She describes her own
hysterectomy in the words of a child: "A girl at church say you git big
if you bleed every month. I don't bleed no more" (15). Even this
knowledge, personal as it is, comes to Celie second hand.
Celie has no desire to get to know her body until the arrival of her
husband's lover, Shug Avery. While serving Shug in the traditional female
capacity of nurse, Celie feels her first erotic stirrings and associates them
with a new spirituality: "I wash her body, it feel like I'm praying" (53).
Celie's stirrings foreshadow her discovery, under Shug's guidance, of a
new God that allows her to love sexual pleasure guiltlessly. Shug introduces
Celie to the mysteries of the body and sexual experience, making possible
both Celie's discovery of speech and her freedom from masculine brutal-
ity. But the introduction requires that Celie see her body and feel its com-
ponents first. For this a hand-held mirror is necessary, as is Shug's en-
couragement that there is something worth seeing.
When Shug urges her to look at herself, Celie reacts much like a
child who fears being caught by a parent: she giggles and feels "like us
been doing something wrong" (80). Even Shug, for all her promiscuity,
talks like a child in preparing Celie for what she will find:
Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real hot when
you do you know what with somebody. It gets hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part.
(79; my emphasis)
The simplicity of Shug's language must certainly be designed in part to
titillate Celie, but her uncharacteristic euphemism ("when you do you
know what with somebody") suggests that even the free-spirited Shug
has trouble speaking straightforwardly about sex or the body. While Celie
looks in the mirror, Shug guards the door like a naughty schoolgirl, let-
ting Celie know when the coast is clear.
Celie is astonished by what she sees in the mirror:
Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be black. Then inside look like a wet rose. (79)

After her initial revulsion Celie sees in succession three things: the hair
that shielded her vagina from view, her black lips, and, finally, her
feminine beauty, symbolized as a rose. When Shug asks her what she
thinks, Celie's immediate response abnegates her previous annihilation
and ignorance of her body: "It mine, I say" (80). In discovering and
accepting with pride her own body, Celie initiates a desire for selfhood.
Next she begins to find an identity through a network of female relation-
ships with Shug, Nettie (whose letters she soon discovers), Sofia, and Mary
Agnes. With her newfound identity, Celie is able to break free from the
masculine prohibition against speech and to join a community of women,
thus freeing herself from dependence on and subjection to male brutality.

THE COLOR PURPLE 71

 II

The hair, the lips, the rose. Each symbolizes an important aspect
of Celie's attitude toward her body, an attitude that must change if she
is ever to be free of male brutality. The hair represents Celie's old at-
titude of self-revulsion, evident in her spontaneous "Ugh." The pubic
hair no doubt arouses Celie's memories of her stepfather's raping her;
he came to her with scissors in hand, ostensibly to have her cut his hair.
But inside herself Celie finds the wet rose, a symbol of her new attitude,
which includes not only love but also an entirely different attitude toward
God and Creation. Shug teaches Celie to find God in herself, in nature,
and in her own feelings, including erotic ones: "God loves all them feel-
ings," Shug tells her (178; my emphasis). In between are the lips, repre-
senting Celie's present ambivalence. Although she is gradually learning,
under Shug's guidance, to discover her body, her lips are for the time
being dry, indicative of her virginity (in Shug's sense of the word) and
her silence. Both orifices, vagina and mouth, need moistening if Celie
is to replace sexual abuse with sexual pleasure and then to assert her
independence from Albert. When she and Shug make love for the first
time, their pleasure is purely oral. They "kiss and kiss until [they] can't
hardly kiss no more" (109). This scene culminates in an ecstasy that is
both maternal and infantile for Celie:

Then I feels something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my little lost
babies mouth.
Way after while, I act like a lost baby too. (109)'

Infantilism and maternity can provoke negative memories for Celie: her
stepfather raped her because her mother did not satisfy him, and her
mother died screaming and cursing at Celie, who, pregnant with her first
child, could not move fast enough to be an efficient nurse. But Celie does
effectively nurse Shug's ills, and Shug, in turn, plays a maternal role
by teaching Celie how to love. She sucks from Celie's breast as Celie's lost
babies were never allowed to; we must recall here that Celie's children
were taken from her before she could "nurse" them, leaving her with
"breasts full of milk running down [herjself" (13). Celie's orgasm sug-
gests a rebirth or perhaps an initial birth into a world of love, a reenact-
ment of the primal pleasure of the child at the mother's breast. In
psychoanalytic terms this scene presents the inauguration of primary nar-
cissism that, "as a psychical reality, can only be the primal myth of a
return to the maternal breast" (Laplanche 72). In essence, the story of
Celie's life begins afresh here; as Terry Eagleton puts it, the desire to
'Lesbianism is an attempt to recapture or reexperience the mother-daughter bond. Sue Silver-
marie describes the process as follows: "In loving another I discovered the deep urge to both be a mother
and to find a mother in my mother. . . . When I kiss and stroke and enter my lover, I am also a
child re-entering my mother" (quoted in Rich 232-233).

72 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

retrieve the mother's body drives "the narrative of our lives, impelling
us to pursue substitutes for this lost paradise in the endless métonymie
movement of desire" (185). I turn now to psychoanalysis to show how
theories of infantile development can help explain just how far Celie comes
in her development of an ego and love for another. Psychoanalysis
demonstrates the crucial role Shug Avery plays in her development,
especially in reconciling Celie with her own body.2
Ill

Modern psychoanalysis assigns great importance to mirror scenes.

Such scenes are crucial in the development of an ego, for, as Freud noted,
"the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to
be developed" ("On Narcissism" 77). Jacques Lacan posited the begin-
ning ofthat development in "the mirror stage," which normally occurs
between six and eighteen months of age. The mirror stage, a metaphor
for Lacan, is literally enacted by Celie and Shug in The Color Purple. Up
until this stage a child has no perception of an external world, only of
himself as, in Freud's famous phrase, "His Majesty the Baby" ("On
Narcissism" 91).
Lacan believes that the mirror stage offers the child only an illusion
of whole selfhood, when in fact the subject is always split. But Lacan's
view of the unattainableness of whole selfhood finds a more optimistic
revision in Walker's novel. The Color Purple, in fact, endorses another view
prevalent in modern thought—that such illusions are not destructive but
are positive accommodations that allow one to find meaning in life, far
preferable to the desire for self-annihilation Celie voices early in the book.
In Eagleton's words, if we analyze our situations in the world rationally,
we are bound to conclude mat we lack centering, but most of us interpret
ourselves odierwise, to assure ourselves of our life's significance. Eagleton
believes the relation of an individual to society, interpreted thus, resembles
Lacan's view of the small child's image of itself in the mirror:
In both cases, the human subject is supplied with a satisfying unified image of selfhood
by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic
circle. In both cases, too, this image involves a murecognition, since it idealizes the subject's
real situation. (173)

2The subject of the construction of selfhood or ego has a very complicated, uneven history in
psychoanalysis. Depending on the theoretical model one adopts, many views are possible. As Steven
Marcus says, "the notion of the self that we can construct out of contemporary psychoanalysis contains
a new enlarged admixture in it of archaic, pre-Oedipal, prephallic, and preverbal components, pieces
of psychic life that remain unintegrated, and of a self that is neither stable nor coherent in its earliest
vital and formative phases" (318). This being the state of things, I must draw on a wide range of theorists
whose ideas are not always compatible. In seeking to describe Celie's construction of a self, I am con-
cerned not with establishing the superiority of any school of psychoanalysis but with accurately tracing
the development of her selfhood as Alice Walker dramatizes it. The terminology of psychoanalysis is
extremely useful for this process, although the theorists I cite might not always agree with each other.

THE COLOR PURPLE 73

But this «¿¿recognition, Lacan's méconnaissance, says Eagleton, makes
selfhood possible: "Duly enthralled by the image of myself I receive, I
subject myself to it; and it is through this 'subjection' that I become a
subject" (173).3 To put it another way, the «¿¿recognition fuels the desire
to construct selfhood, because "the first Desire of any human is the ab-
solute one for recognition (the Desire to be desired), itself linked to the
Desire to be a unity" (Ragland-SuIIivan 58). Spurred by this desire, the
subject begins looking to others for validation. The self is an imaginary
construct; what the mirror offers, says Juliet Mitchell, is a chance for
a child to grasp itself "for the first time as a perfect whole, not a mess
of uncoordinated movements and feelings" (40). For Celie, the mirror
opens the door of her imagination, helping her envision a world of new
possibilities for herself.
The dangers of pursuing an illusory wholeness of selfhood are dwarfed
by those of eliding the mirror stage. The child who experiences no nor-
mal passage through a mirror stage can be arrested, trapped in a very
early stage of development. Such a child may become autistic, a sign of
extreme disturbance in one's sense of identity (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman
II).4 As I will show momentarily, this is Celie's condition early in the
novel, when she is arrested in the pre-mirror stage of development. Without
a positive sense of him/herself as a body, and without an imago to replace
the parental one, the child who does not pass through the mirror stage
is left without an awareness of externality or otherness. This lack of an
other is extremely critical, for Lacan links the discovery of the other to
our becoming social beings: without it we become overattached to early
fixations of identity, unable to adapt them as necessary to life's demands
(Ragland-Sullivan 43-44).
At least one other area of development is retarded if the mirror stage
is elided: speech. For Lacan speech presupposes the existence of "the
Other to whom it is addressed" (Sheridan viii).5 Thus, Celie's inability
to find a listening audience for herself is another sign of her autism, another
result of her arrested development.6 Only Shug Avery is able to draw
Celie out of her autism; Sofia's early attempts to get Celie to speak for
3For arguments that illusions such as the type constructed here are necessary in modern life,
see Ernest Becker and my own "Lord Jim and the Saving Illusion," forthcoming in Conradiana.
*I follow Mahler, Pine, and Bergman here in distinguishing Celie's severe autism from the "nor-
mal autism" every child evinces during the early months of life. "Normal autism," a stage of primary
narcissism, gives way to an awareness that "need satisfaction cannot be provided by oneself, but comes
from somewhere outside the self (42).
5The distinction between the other (objet petit a) and the Other (grand Autre) is very complicated
in Lacan. They represent algebraic signs that Lacan refused to translate. In particular, the Other does
not represent, as some wrongly assume, a specific person who becomes an object of desire; Ragland-
SuIIivan comes closest to a definition when she says it designates "various external forces that structure
a primary and secondary unconscious" (15-16). Because the lower case "other" more nearly represents
a single imago or object of desire, I use it to refer to Shug's relationship with Celie. See Lacan (19).
6Behind the principal neuroses people suffer from, Freud found unresolved conflicts traceable to
one's early development. Lack of resolution leads to a point where one's development becomes arrested
or fixated. See Eagleton (158).

74 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

herself fail because Celie has developed no concept of otherness. Celie
needs not only someone who will tell her how to act and what to say
but also someone who will show her. She needs a sympathetic mentor
and friend, a relationship that Sharon Hymer calls a "narcissistic friend-
ship." In the earliest stage of such a friendship, the narcissistic friend
serves as "the initiator of activities as well as the provider of a value
system and lifestyle which the patient embraces as a germinating ego ideal"
(433).7 Shug does initiate such activities for Celie, helping her through
the mirror stage to a discovery of her own body, her capacity for speech,
and her ability to love an other.
The early portions of the novel illustrate Celie's arrested develop-
ment. Many girls "regress" during adolescence, returning to preoedipal
or pre-mirror stage fantasies of fusion with the mother; a close friend
is often the key to helping them out of such regression (Dalsimer 25-26).
But Celie, fourteen and friendless at the beginning of The Color Purple,
seems trapped in this infantile stage throughout her teenage years.8 In
Lacanian psychoanalysis, says Ragland-SuIIivan, the pre-mirror stage is
"a period in which an infant experiences its body as fragmented parts
and images." These images include "castration, mutilation, dismember-
ment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, and
. . . have a formative function in composing the human subject of identi-
ty and perception" (Ragland-SuIIivan 18-19). Because of male brutality,
Celie defines herself in terms of such images: her symbolic castration tak-
ing the form of her premature hysterectomy; her mutilation evident in
her fear of the scissors her stepfather brings to her room with him; her
dislocation symbolized in her being forced to take her mother's place;
her feeling of dismemberment figured in the choking her father administers
while raping her; the "bursting open of the body" imagined when Celie's
"stomach started moving and then that little baby come out [her] pussy
chewing on it fist" (Walker 12). Celie's fragmentation is most strongly
reinforced by the way her stepfather presents her as less than a whole
woman to her future husband, convincing him to marry her because "God
done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she
ain't gonna make you feed it or clothe it" (18).
To make a desire for selfhood possible, Celie must take a new perspec-
tive on her own body. Rather than defining herself in terms of fragmen-
tation or of lack, she must learn to define herself synecdochally, seeing
part of her body, specifically her genitalia, as a sufficient symbol of herself
7Hymer finds similarities between the "narcissistic friendship" and many ancient views of friend-
ship as described by Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Zeno (423). Also relevant here is Heinz Kohut's theory
of "alter-ego transference" or "twinship" (115).
8In his forthcoming book on narcissism and the novel, Jeffrey Berman notes that developmental
arrest can be the result of "parental empathie failure." This sort of arrest can produce "feelings of
emptiness, depression, or dehumanization." 1 am grateful to Professor Berman for sharing the manuscript
of his book with me.

THE COLOR PURPLE 75

as a whole. According to Ellen Forst Lowery, girls need a sublimation
that "depends on the additional denial of the castrated state, or as some
would protest, their intuition of an equally valuable sex organ/identity" (446;
my emphasis). But such a radical réévaluation of the body is not likely
for a woman living as Celie does. What she needs is the example of a
woman who em-bodies sexual power; what she needs is Shug Avery.
Celie begins to fantasize about Shug before her own marriage. Dur-
ing the fantasy period Shug becomes Celie's ego ideal, an ideal self that
"is aggrandized and exalted in the subject's mind" (Freud, "On Nar-
cissism" 94), becoming "a model to which the subject attempts to con-
form" (Laplanche and Pontalis 144). Celie thinks of Shug while Albert
rapes her on her wedding night, and, even though his lovemaking is as
uncaring as her stepfather's, Celie begins to imagine the sexual act with
some affection: "I know what he doing to me he done to Shug Avery
and maybe she like it. I put my arm around him" (21). Even as an im-
aginary construct, Shug stirs Celie's first erotic feelings. When the real
Shug steps into Celie's life, these feelings become activated.
Although Shug arrives ill and weak, she nonetheless exudes a sexual
power that Celie has never before imagined in woman or man. Quickly,
Celie reassesses Albert in light of Shug's sexuality:
I look at his face. It tired and sad and I notice his chin weak. Not much chin there at
all. I have more chin, I think. And his clothes dirty, dirty. When he pull them off, dust
rise. (52)

Celie's three-sentence fixation on Albert's chin is revealing: by compar-

ing her chin with his, Celie gets her first inkling of an anatomical superior-
ity. Typical of "narcissistic friends," Celie and Shug take turns playing
the supporting or, in this case, maternal role, and, interestingly enough,
Celie goes first, nursing Shug through her illness. Here at last Celie is
allowed the nursing role her stepfadier deprived her of when he took away
Celie's babies and left her with milk running from her breasts. During
this nursing process Celie connects her feelings for Shug to her lost
daughter and her mother: "I work on her like she a doll or like she
Olivia—or like she mama" (57). The relation of the doll to the daughter
and mother reflects a new development for Celie; as the psychoanalytic
school of object relations would see it, the doll represents a transitional
device that helps Celie come to grips with the complicated feelings of
separation and ambivalence that characterize her thoughts of both Olivia
and her modier. Celie, in other words, has begun to employ some typical
mechanisms of psychic growth and development.
After Shug's recovery the roles shift, with Shug becoming Celie's
nurse. Celie's illness, however, is not physical but psychological: Celie
lacks an identity. Shug awakens Celie's desire for identity most explicitly
when she sings a song she has written just for Celie. As Celie gratefully
76 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
notes, "first time somebody made something and name it after me" (75).
The act of naming something after Celie assures the integrity of Celie
herself; she must be somebody to be a subject of a song. This act is also
Celie's first clue that language need not come under the jurisdiction of
male authority.
This is the background Walker gives to prepare us for the mirror
scene and, after that, the first lovemaking scene between Celie and Shug.
The mirror scene takes on particular meaning because the desire for ego-
formation has already been sparked. From the Celie who thinks of her
body as fragmented and who tries to make herself as unfeeling as a tree,
Walker has taken us to a Celie whose passions allow her to begin to think
about her body differently and to conceive of a relationship beyond the
self, with an other. The mirror scene expedites Celie's development
through the stage of primary narcissism, in which two love-objects exist—
the self and the mother (Freud, "On Narcissism" 88-89)—to the onset
of secondary narcissism, the stage in which self-love is "displaced onto
an-other" (Ragland-SuIIivan 37). In the scene, Shug teaches Celie first
to perceive her genitals as whole and beautiful and then to masturbate.9
That Celie and Shug act like children during this scene, giggling and
running off to Celie's room "like two little prankish girls" (79), emphasizes
the fact that they are engaged in an essentially juvenile drama that must
be played through in order for Celie to reach a more mature stage of
development.
This juvenile drama helps change Celie's perception of herself and
her body. Celie's new appreciation for one part of her body allows her
to revise her view of her entire body: to view her genitalia synecdochally
rather than as a fragment. Celie's new synecdochal conception of her body
allows her to regard her genitalia as "normal" symbols, appreciating the
beauty of the part as symbol of the whole without allowing it to replace
the whole completely (Laplanche 36-37). Celie's acceptance of her genitals
("It mine" [80]) clearly indicates that she no longer perceives her body
as something to deny or annihilate but as a source of pleasure. Even if,
as Lacan believes, the post-mirror stage forces the individual to confront
again the fragmentation of the body and the self, this synecdochal pro-
cess helps Celie adapt to that threat to her totality.
As part of the mirror-stage experience, the child should identify its
unified image of self widi die modier's body; this identification foregrounds
the child's, especially the girl's, acceptance or nonacceptance of its sexual
organs (Ragland-SuIIivan 277-278). At the end of the mirror stage the
father intervenes in the mother-child relationship, preventing total iden-
9Freud believed that clitoral masturbation was a necessary response to penis envy. Without it
the girl is likely to remain dissatisfied "with her inferior clitoris" ("Femininity" 127). Whether or not
one thinks Freud is right, it seems clear that in The Color Purple Celie must come to accept her body
as it is before she can share it with another. Masturbation is a natural means of coming to this acceptance.

THE COLOR PURPLE 77

tification or fusion with the mother and thus establishing boundaries
necessary to the child's individuation (Ragland-SuIIivan 42, 55). This pro-
cess seems clearly to have been aborted in Celie's childhood, leaving an
important gap in her development that Shug Avery fills. Shug, then, not
only plays the role of Celie's "narcissistic friend," but first and foremost
she represents a mother-surrogate or, in Lacanian terms, a (m)Other.
Under this formulation "a subject first becomes aware of itself by iden-
tification with a person (object), usually the mother," although the figure
may be "any constant nurturer" (Ragland-SuIIivan 16).
As (m)Other, Shug also plays a crucial role in resolving Celie's Oedipal
conflict. All such conflicts are grounded in ambivalence, Celie's especial-
ly so, as Nettie's narrative of their early life reveals (160-162). Celie's
father was hanged when she was two and her mother's health ruined.
Celie's stepfather (whom she assumes to be her real "pa") married her
mother when Celie was three to four years old, the age when the Oedipal
phase begins. Every year thereafter, Celie's mother was pregnant, and
her mental state gradually deteriorated. Celie's stepfather turned his lust
on her when she had just passed puberty, at a time when the Oedipal
drama is "internally staged for a second time," its outcome crucial in
determining "adult sexuality and other vital activities and functions in
later existence" (Marcus 313). Thus, Celie's early life proves to be a
perverse rewriting of the Oedipal script, with Celie aware of her mother's
ambivalence about yielding her wifely role to her daughter: "My mama
fuss at me an look at me. She happy, cause he good to her now" (11).
Celie's guilt is augmented by her mother's questioning her pregnancy
and her cursing Celie on her deathbed. Given the profound guilt and
confusion that Celie must have felt about replacing her mother, in addi-
tion to the disruption of her own psychic growth and the continued
brutalization to follow, it is little wonder that Celie would seek to an-
nihilate self. But the intervention of Shug as (m)Other and of Nettie's
revelation that "pa is not our pa!" (162) allows Celie to reimagine the
possibilities of selfhood. By taking her back to the mirror stage, Shug
helps Celie identify with her more positive perceptions of selfhood, sex-
uality, and body.
Furthermore, as (m)Other, Shug gives Celie an unusual form of iden-
tification, at least for a woman. One of Freud's most controversial ideas
is his suggestion that women tend to develop inferior object-choices to
men's: where men transfer their narcissism to an other, women tend to
rechannel love back into the self.10 Such women love themselves more
than anyone else, and they seek not to love but to be loved ("On Nar-
cissism" 89). Man's "superior" object-choice is "anaclytic," in other
words, based on the mother-imago; but, as we have seen, Celie also

'»For a harsh critique of this view, see Kate Millett (196-197).

78 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

grounds her attachment in an other—Shug—who represents for her a
mother-imago. As Laplanche notes, "even if one [anaclytic object-choice]
is alleged to be more characteristic of men and the other [narcissistic object-
choice] of women, they in fact represent two possibilities open to every
human being" (77). Furthermore, if Celie's choice (both because it is
based on the anaclytic model and because it is the choice of a woman)
seems masculine, it is the first of several such choices she makes that
help her to rise from passive submission and to develop independence
and identity. Ultimately, Celie derives from her growth the power of speech
that is crucial to her victory over male brutality.

IV

One sign of the mirror stage's end, for Lacan, is the coherent use
of language (Ragland-SuIIivan 29); another is the development of ag-
gressivity (Lacan 19-20). Celie's progress toward gaining that coherent
language in the form of speech is guided by Shug. As Elizabeth Fifer
puts it, "each piece of Shug's advice changes Celie's language and becomes
part of Celie's progress" (162). But aggressivity poses more sinister
possibilities because Celie, once she develops her ego, cannot help but
be driven to revenge against Albert. This drive peaks when she and Shug
discover that Albert has been hiding Nettie's letters. Now sickened by
Albert's cruelty to her, Celie believes she will feel better if she kills him.
Celie gets her chance when Albert commands her to shave him, a com-
mand reminiscent of her stepfather's pretended desire for a haircut.
Sharpening the razor, Celie contemplates murder, but Shug holds her
back. Even after Shug takes the razor from her, Celie continues to fan-
tasize her revenge:
All day long I act just like Sofia. I stutter. I mutter to myself. I stumble bout the house
crazy for Mr. _________ blood. In my mind, he falling dead every which a way. By time
night come I can't even speak. Every time I open my mouth nothing come out but a little
burp. (1 15)

What meager powers of speech Celie has at this time are overpowered
by her desire for revenge.
Celie learns to take control over her aggressive desires by two means
of sublimation: assertive speech and the substitution of one cutting in-
strument, the razor, for another, a needle." Lowery believes that the pro-
cess of acquiring language may be an early form of sublimation for
children, the word standing for the desired object (443). By telling Albert
"The latter strategy has also been identified by Teresa M. Tavormina (222). Her article promises
intriguing parallels between language and sewing, but it finally says rather little about language. Tavor-
mina's best point is that The Color Purple is itself a kind of quilt, a mosaic of patches from everyday
life and memory "brought together so as to make a whole meaning from Celie's and Nettie's seemingly
separate lives" (225).

THE COLOR PURPLE 79

that she, Nettie, and her children will "whup [his] ass" (181), Celie deflects
the need to do so; speaking daggers, she need use none. Sofia has provided
the lesson that only defeat can result from an attempt to quit violence
with violence. Celie, in contrast, gains victory with speech. When she
declares her independence from Albert, she feels almost possessed by a
mysterious power: "Look like when I open my mouth the air rush in
and shape words" (187). Through speech Celie establishes her freedom,
breaking Albert's hold on her. She further recognizes the power of speech
when her curse on Albert sinks him into a life-threatening depression.
That curse is lifted and Albert's regeneration begun only when he does
what Celie has demanded—return Nettie's letters to her.
Celie has previously seen the power a woman's voice has to break
male domination in the example of Mary Agnes. Here too is an example
of the kind of sacrifice women must make in order to bind themselves
together in a community that resists the pressure of male domination.
Mary Agnes, once beaten up by Sofia, her rival for Harpo, helps free
Sofia from prison by submitting to rape by the warden, her illegitimate
father. This act of submission gives Mary Agnes a power of guilt over
the warden that expedites Sofia's release. Ironically, Mary Agnes the vic-
tim emerges from this encounter with a new power over men in general.
Though she comes home with a limp, her dress torn, a heel from her
shoe missing, she repudiates her derogatory nickname ("Squeak") and
demands that she be called by her real name (95). Not only does Mary
Agnes no longer "squeak," but she also begins to sing. Although Celie
reports that "she got the kind of voice you never think of trying to sing
a song" (96), Mary Agnes soon emulates Shug's success, using her voice
to give her a new freedom from, and power over, men. She begins to
travel, choosing when to move in and out of Harpo's life. Thus her story
foreshadows the story of Celie's freedom, bodi stories validating die Ãœieme
that strength can come from enduring oppression with as much dignity
as possible and then rising to denounce it. Ultimately, the victim gains
moral power over the oppressor.
Celie's aggressivity is further sublimated in the development of her
own form of art: sewing. Freud of course maintained that artistic crea-
tion was a major source of sublimation. It is no small irony that Celie
adopts a traditionally feminine form of art to complete her separation
from the violent masculine world. By sewing, Celie narrows the gap be-
tween the sexes, making pants for both men and women. More impor-
tant, sewing links Celie to woman's primordial power tiiat predates patriar-
chy. As Adrienne Rich describes it, sewing or weaving emphasizes
woman's "transformative power":12
I2The ultimate symbol of such power, of course, is menstrual blood, "which was believed to be
transformed into the infant" (Rich 101). In this light it is interesting that Walker parallels Celie's develop-
ment with the story of her daughter's coming of age in Africa. In the latter story Nettie recounts how
80 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
the conversion of raw fibers into thread was connected with the power over life and death;
the spider who spins thread out of her own body, Ariadne providing the clue to the labyrinth,
the figures of the Fates or Norns or old spinning-women who cut the thread of life or spin
it further, are all associated with this process. (101)

Freud's interpretation of this process is more fantastical and more sex-

ist,13 but it also can be instructive. He regarded sewing or weaving as
evidence of woman's shame, caused by her castrated genitals. Weaving,
thus, is motivated by a desire to follow the pattern of Nature, who
would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth
at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken
lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the
skin and are only matted together. ("Femininity" 132)

For Celie sewing represents not a means of covering up her castrated

genitals but of binding together the sexes so that both male and female
can "wear the pants." Furthermore, Celie's sewing associates her with
a select group of female characters in American literature who use their
art not to reveal their shame, as Freud suggests, but to transplant it,
placing it where it really belongs—on their male oppressors. The most
prominent member of this set is Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. Forced by
the patriarchs of Salem to wear the scarlet letter as an emblem of shame,
Hester uses her art to create a letter that represents, to the narrator who
discovers it two centuries later, a "mystic symbol" (28), giving evidence
"of a now forgotten art" (27). Inspired by this symbol, Hawthorne creates
a story in which the bearers of shame are the Puritan patriarchs who
try to dehumanize and defeminize Hester for her refusal to submit to
their code. Celie's art has a similar, although more immediate, effect.
Rather than revealing the source of shame to a later generation, Celie's
success in sewing helps Albert face his own shame and even begin a pro-
cess of self-regeneration. At the end of the book Albert is a new man,
capable of loving and sharing. The change in him is symbolized by his
partaking, with Celie, in the traditionally feminine activity, sewing. Hav-
ing had his lifelong view that "men spose to wear the pants" (238) cor-
rected, Albert joins Celie in a communal act that, as Celie describes it,
helps eradicate the differences that make for sexual domination: "Now
us sit sewing and talking and smoking our pipes" (238).

Very late in The Color Purple Celie stands before a mirror, full-length

the Olinka patriarchs make menstruating women stay out of sight and how they initiate girls undergoing
menarche with a ritual "so bloody and painful, I forbid Olivia to even think about it" (172).
nTfu Color Purple strongly reinforces the feminist complaint against Freud's belief that girls resolve
their Oedipal crises through a fantasy of having the father's child. Celie lives out this fantasy (until
her rapist's true identity is revealed), and it proves to be a nightmare.

THE COLOR PURPLE 81

this time, again. At this time Shug has left her for a nineteen-year-old
fling. This scene provides the test that proves Celie's psychic growth has
continued unchecked, that she will not regress in a crisis. Standing naked
before the glass, Celie asks herself, "What would she love? . . . Nothing
special here for nobody to love" (229). That Celie comes through this
depression signifies that she has broken free of Shug, further establishing
her independence and identity. Ultimately, says Hymer, a person who
relies on a narcissistic friend must "develop an identity apart from the
friend" (433), just as one must split oneself from the (m)Other. Celie
does develop her identity and, in the process, finds a network of friends
"matrifocal" in structure but open to men who can put aside their desire
to dominate.1*
Matrifocality dissolves the hierarchies that perpetuate dominance and
oppression. The loss of such hierarchies changes one's perception of the
self in society and even in relation to God. Thus, it is only a short step
from a belief in woman's independence from man to Shug's concept of
a nonracial, genderless God: "People think pleasing God is all God care
about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please
us back" (178). Shug carefully notes here that one must live in the world
to get to know God; merely surviving and waiting for a reward in heaven,
as Celie did earlier, is the patriarchal way. Shug's version of God
deconstructs the fountainhead of patriarchy, the Lacanian Name-of-the-
Father who is the source of law and power, replacing it with a belief
that one must become engaged in the Creation as Celie does, creating
one's own self, art, and community. Demonstrating a parallel commit-
ment to matrifocality, Sofia and Mary Agnes, former rivals, learn to share
Harpo and the responsibility of raising each other's children as a means
of maintaining freedom while avoiding the permanent dependence on one
man that perpetuates masculine power. And, in Africa, Nettie first assists
Corinne in raising Adam and Olivia and, after Corrine's death, replaces
her as wife and mother before yielding the children to their true mother,
Celie.15

14Dianne Sadoff, who calls such matrifocal structures "adaptive strategies," gives a superb ac-
count of how they grew out of slavery (10-11). Nancy Tanner explains that although matrifocal struc-
tures tend to center on the mother, they also promote sexual egalitarianism: in matrifocal societies men
and women share important economic and emotional roles. Flexibility, which is assured by the "net-
work" of kinships, is the great advantage of matrifocality, allowing its members to live together and
take turns caring for each others' children (Tanner 131, 151). Although less happy with the term
"matrifocality," Carol B. Stack describes the structure similarly, adding that the network may be com-
posed of kin or non-kin, as Celie's are. Because of great social, economic, and other hardships, Stack
notes, black women turn to such networks to strengthen the family, even if they threaten "any par-
ticular male-female tie" (115).
15Corinne's suspicions of Nettie indicate her own inability to accept matrifocality. Besides reflect-
ing her guilt for not having borne her own children, this suspiciousness seems to be a critique of Cor·
rinne's education at Spelman, which has indoctrinated her in the white, patriarchal set of mind. Walker
further exploits this theme by portraying the limitations of the patriarchal perspective in Africa.
82 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
 As I have shown, one of the climaxes in the novel is Celie's first
lovemaking scene, when she and Shug reexperience the primal pleasure
of the child at the mother's breast. The Color Purple suggests that for one
who develops a sense of self and then of other, similar kinds of primal
experiences can be recaptured at points throughout life and not just in
sexual encounters. One kind is recaptured again at novel's end when Celie
and Nettie are reunited (with Celie's children) in a fairy-tale ending:16
Then us both start to moan and cry. Us totter toward one nother like us use to do when
us was babies. Then us feel so weak when we touch, us knock each other down. But what
us care? Us sit and lay there on the porch inside each other's arms. (250)

Such childlike joy depends on staying alive, constructing one's ego, and
learning to invest love in the other. Only after that process has been com-
pleted can we, in the words of Harpo (a man), "spend the day celebrating
each other" (250).

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16On the Cinderella parallels to The Color Purple see Margaret Walsh's article. The weakness of
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THE COLOR PURPLE 83
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84