THE COLOR PURPLE (1982)

Alice Walker (1944 -)

Pulitzer Prize - 1983

Themes
 Christianity
Celie transitions from her belief in an old white patriarchal God to a God that exists
all around – “Dear God. Dear Stars. Dear trees. Dear sky...” For Celie God moves
from being a person to something (not someone) inside Celie, a goodness that
inspires. For most of the novel, Celie’s letters are addressed to God. Even in the most
excruciating of circumstances, her faith sustains her – through rape, physical abuse at
the hands of her husband, and more than thirty years of separation from her sister. At
her church, Celie works hard to help the preacher keep it clean and make wine. The
preacher calls her “Sister Celie”. Further on, Celie tells Shug that God is like all the
other men she has known – “Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.” It is Shug who points
out that Celie was mistaken to have worshipped the God found in the “white folks;
white bible”.
It is apparent that Shug is a mouthpiece for Alice Walker, who believed that Nature is
the “essence of Paganism.” There is a pagan transformation of God from the
patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, winds and everything else. Writing
letters to Nettie, instead of God is the first step in her spiritual growth.
Nettie worked as a Christian missionary for the Olinka people. Like her sister Nettie
realizes that God is more pervasive and more bound up in nature than some rigid
Christian teachings. Nettie too learns to look for God within. When Samuel, Corrine,
and Nettie travel to Africa they believe in the sanctity of their mission – to take Christ
and good medical advice to the Africans. Towards the end of the novel, Mr____ too
starts to marvel the wonder of God’s creation making him a better human.
“God is inside you and inside everybody else.” – Shug Avery. One does not find God
in a church but through oneself. “I believe that God is everything … Everything that
is or ever was or ever will be.” Shug refers to God as “It”.
In many interviews, Alice Walker has spoken of a return to Nature as the path to
Salvation.
 Racism
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple takes place in two settings – rural Georgia and a
remote village in Africa – both these places are entrenched in problems of racial
superiority and violence. The cyclical nature of violence that is associates with racism
is present throughout the novel. 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 racism, sexism and
paternalism.
Celie believes herself to be ugly because of her skin. Celie’s father and uncles are
lynched for being successful businessmen. Sofia is made to go to jail for standing her
ground against the mayor’s family. Sofia is forced work as a maid for the mayor’s
family and as a surrogate mother for Eleanor Jane, who fails to realize the extent of
the sacrifices made by Sofia.
In the novel, man is primum mobile, the one by whom and through whom evil enters
the world. Alice Walker initially faced a lot of criticism for representing the already
down trodden black society in a bad light by depicting the violence and abuse of
characters like Alfonso and Mr. ____. Many dissented against the overly negative
portrayal of black men that played into racial stereotypes. However, she feels that the
cause of women can be best served if she focuses on the violent reality of what can be
termed as the inhumane condition of woman. Walker highlights the reality that blacks
too oppress each other. Black Women’s writing is a tradition of trying to fight all the
oppression.
For Alice Walker, racism does not fully explain the oppression of black women by
black men. For whether it is an oppressive society (America) in which the
emasculated black male needs to recapture his masculinity through the oppression of
the female, or in a much “freer” society like the Olinkas (Africa) before the arrival of
the British, the end result is similar: the male always oppresses the female. The
element to which the writer accords greater importance is not race but power, the
power to be, to concretize one’s self, or to mold others. The relationship between
Harpo and Sofia is based on power, between Celie and Mr____ on power, and
between the English settlers and the Olinkas on power, and between whites and blacks
in America on power. It can be argued that in a multiracial society like the United
States, the dominant races use its power to dictate the existential modalities of the
minority races.
In Celie’s world, almost all problematic relationships have their source not in
personalities and ambitions that clash, but in prejudice based on gender and race.
In a strongly worder rejection of the novel as “revolutionary literature,” bell hooks
charges that the focus upon Celie’s sexual oppression ultimately deemphasizes the
“collective plight of black people” and “invalidates… the racial agenda” of the slave
narrative tradition that it draws upon. For many readers of this novel, the text’s ability
to expose sexual oppression seems to come at the expense of its ability to analyse
issues of race and class.
“She says an African daisy and an English daisy are both flowers, but totally different
kinds.”
Two family groupings – the white missionary Doris Baines and her black African
grandchild in Africa, and Sophia and her white charge Miss Eleanor Jane in America
– serve to expose and critique the larger pattern of racial integrations found in
their respective countries. Nettie meets Doris and her adopted grandson on a trip
from Africa to seek help for the recently displaced Olinka in England, a trip Nettie
called “incredible” precisely because of the presence of an integrated family on board
ship. It was “impossible to ignore the presence of an aging white woman accompanied
by a small black child.” Compared to the overtly racist actions of the other whites
who ostracize Doris and her grandson, the English missionary’s relationship with the
boy at first seems in keeping with the ethic of treating of all people as “one mother’s
children.” Indeed, Doris describes her years as the boy’s “grandmama” as “the
happies” years of her life. Furthermore, Doris’s relationship with the African villagers
also seems preferable to that of other white missionaries because, rather than wanting
to convert “the heathen,” she sees “nothing wrong with them” in the first place (this
can stem from her indifference and selfishness).
But the relationship between the white woman and her African grandson is actually
far from ideal, and Nettie’s letters subtly question the quality of their “kinship.” If the
boy seems “fond of his grandmother” – and “used to her” – he is also strangely
reticent in her presence and reacts to Doris’s conversation with “soberly observant
speechlessness.” In contrast, the boy opens up around Adam and Olivia, suggesting
that he may feel more at home with the transplanted black Americans than with his
white grandmother. The boy’s subdued behaviour around his grandmother raises
questions about the possibility of kinship across racial lines. The nature of Doris’s
honorary “kinship” with the Akwee villagers is questioned more seriously still,
beginning with her reasons for taking up missionary work in the first place, As a
young woman Doris decided to become a missionary not out of a desire to help others
but in order to escape the rarefied atmosphere of upper-class England and the
possibility of her eventual marriage to one of her many “milkfed” suitors ”each one
more boring than the last.” Although Doris describes her decision to go to Africa as an
attempt to escape the stultifying roles available to women in English society, it is
important to note that Nettie does not take Doris’s hardships very seriously and draws
upon fairytale rhetoric to parody the woman’s upper-class tribulations. From Nettie’s
perspective as a black woman familiar with the trias of the displaced Olinka, Doris’s
aristocratic troubles seem small indeed. Nettie further trivialises the white woman’s
decision to become a missionary by emphasizing that the idea struck Doris one
evening when she “was getting ready for yet another tedious date.”
The self-interest that prompts Doris to become a missionary also characterises the
relationship she establishes with the Akwee upon her arrival in Africa. There she uses
her wealth to set up an ostensibly reciprocal arrangement that in fact reflects her
imperial power to buy whatever she wants. Described as a mechanism that runs "like
clockwork," Doris's relationship to the Akwee clearly falls short of the maternal ideal
for race relations expressed in the Olinka myths. In fact, Doris's relationship to the
villagers is decidedly paternal from the outset, since her formal kinship with the
Akwee begins when she is presented with "a couple of wives" in recognition for her
contributions to the village. The fact that she continues to refer to the Olinka as "the
heathen" in her discussions with Nettie implies that, in spite of her fondness for her
grandson, Doris never over- comes a belief in the essential "difference" of the
Africans attributed to her by the Missionary Society in England: "She thinks they are
an entirely different species from what she calls Europeans.... She says an African
daisy and an English daisy are both flowers, but totally different kinds.” By
promoting a theory of polygenesis opposed to the Olinkan account of racial
origins, Doris calls into question her own ability to treat Akwee as kin. The true
nature of her “reciprocal” relationship with the Akwee is revealed when she
unselfconsciously tells Nettie that she believes she can save her villagers from the
displacement the Olinka suffered: “I am a very wealthy woman … and I own the
village of Akwee.”
Stripped of both religious motivation of the other missionaries and the overt racism of
the other whites, Doris Baines through her relationship with the Akwee lays bare the
hierarchy of self-interest and paternalism that sets the pattern for race relations in
larger Africa.
Nettie's description of Monrovia is suggestive of the hegemony of race and class
perpetuated by the white folk. There she sees “bunches” of whites and a presidential
palace that “looks like the American white house.” There Nettie also discovers that
whites sit on the country’s cabinet, that black cabinet members’ wives dress like white
women, and that the black president himself refers to his people as “natives.”

The relationship between Miss Sophia and her white charge Miss Eleanor Jane
exposes the false kinship which denies the legitimacy of kinship bonds across racial
lines. Sophia’s domestic relationship with Miss Eleanor Jane and the other members
of the mayor's family offers a more finely nuanced and extended critique of racial
integration, albeit one that has often been overlooked. Like Doris Baines and her
black grandson, Sophia and Miss Eleanor Jane appear to have some genuine family
feelings for one another. Since Sophia practically raised Miss Eleanor Jane and is the
one sympathetic person in her house, it is not surprising that the young girl dotes on
Sophia and is always sticking up for her. When Sophia leaves the mayor's household
(after fifteen years of service), Miss Eleanor Jane continues to seek out her approval
and her help with the "mess back at the house". Sophia's feelings for Miss Eleanor are
of course more ambivalent. When Sophia leaves the mayor's household (after
fifteen years of service), Miss Eleanor Jane continues to seek out her approval
and her help with the "mess back at the house". Sophia's feelings for Miss Eleanor
are of course more ambivalent. After rejoining her own family, Sophia resents Miss
Eleanor Jane's continuing intrusions into her family life and suggests that the only
reason she helps the white girl is because she's "on parole.... Got to act nice. Whatever
affection exists between the two women, however, has been shaped by the perverted
"kinship" relation within which it grew - a relationship the narrative uses to explode
the myth of the black mammy. Separated from her own family and forced to join the
mayor's household against her will, living in a room under the house and assigned the
housekeeping and child raising duties, Sophia carries out a role in the mayor's
household which clearly recalls that of the stereotypical mammy on the Southern
plantation. Descriptions of the black mammy were used by apologists for slavery to
argue that the plantation system benefited the people whom it enslaved by
incorporating supposedly inferior blacks into productive white families However, as
someone who prefers to build a roof on the house while her husband tends the
children, Sophia seems particularly unsuited for that role. And that is precisely the
narrative's point: Sophia is entirely unsuited for the role of mammy, but whites
including and perhaps especially Miss Eleanor Jane-continually expect her to behave
according to their cultural representations of the black mother.

When Miss Millie happens upon Sophia's family and sees her children so "clean", she
assumes that Sophia would make a perfect maid and that Sophia would like to come
and work in her household. Similarly, Miss Eleanor Jane assumes that Sophia must
return her feelings of kinship in kind, without considering Sophia's true position in her
household. The young white woman's stereotypical projections become clear when
she can't understand why Sophia doesn't "just love" her new son, since, in her
words, "all other colored women I know love children." From the time her son is
born, Miss Eleanor Jane continually tests out Sophia's maternal feelings for him,
"shoving Reynolds Stanley Earl in her face" almost "every time Sofia tum[s]
around". When an exasperated Sophia finally admits that she doesn't love the baby,
Miss Eleanor Jane accuses her of being "unnatural" and implies that Sophia should
accept her son because he is "just a little baby!" -an innocent who, presumably, should
not be blamed for the racist sins of his fathers. From Sophia's vantage point as a
persecuted black woman, however, Reynolds Stanley is not "just a sweet, smart, cute,
innocent little baby boy." He is in fact the grandson and name-sake of the man who
beat her brutally in the street, a man whom he also resembles physically. A "white
some- thing without much hair" with "big stuck open eyes.” To Sophia, Reynolds
Stanley is both the living embodiment of and literal heir to the system that oppresses
her: "He can't even walk and already he in my house messing it up. Did I ast him to
come? Do I care whether he sweet or not? Will it make any difference in the way he
grow up to treat me what I think?" The personal point of view of The Color Purple is
central to its political message: It is precisely the African American woman's
subjectivity that gives the lie to cultural attempts to reduce her-like Sophia-to the role
of the contented worker in a privileged
white society.
 After their falling out over Reynolds Stanley, Sophia and Miss Eleanor Jane are
reunited when the mayor's daughter finally learns from her family why Sophia came
to work for them in the first place. Miss Eleanor Jane subsequently comes to work in
Sophia's home, helping with the housework and taking care of Sophia's daughter
Henrietta. Clearly an improvement in the domestic relationship between the two
women, this new arrangement expresses Miss Eleanor Jane's new understanding of
their domestic history together.
The tragic history of Celie’s Pa compels readers to reinterpret Celie’s family history
in terms of the historical lack of access of African Americans to the “American
Dream.” Celie's real father, in the tradition of the American success story, works
hard, buys his own store, and hires two of his bothers to work it for him. Ironically,
his model of industry and enterprise fails, since the store's very success leads "white
merchants ... [to] complain that this store was taking all the black business away from
them.” Refusing to tolerate free competition from a black-owned and black-operated
business, whites eventually burn the store and lynch Celie's Pa and his two brothers.

 Womanism
Womanism provided a political framework for colored women and gave them tools in
their struggle with patriarchy which imposed restrictive norms and negative
stereotypes on them. It also tackled the restrictiveness of feminism which was
especially evident in the field of literary scholarship. In Walker’s more metaphorical
definition of womanism: “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender”. She
distinctly extols womanism and sets it apart by comparing it to the strong colour of
purple which is often described as the royal colour. Feminism pales in comparison by
being associated to weaker lavender. Lavender as a pale colour is also associated to
the notion that feminism is related more to white women than coloured. As Montelaro
aptly notices – “the semantic analogue she (Walker) constructs, an exclusively white,
bourgeoise feminism literally pales in comparison to the more wide-ranging, non-
exclusive womanist concerns represented by the rich and undiluted color purple.”
In her famous 1851 speech “Ain’t I Woman” Sojourner Truth questioned the policies
of white women who refused to acknowledge the basic rights of black women and
demanded equal rights for all women. In catering to the needs and goals of white First
World women and operating from the premise of exclusivity, feminism did not
include the needs and goals of colored women. Walker especially begrudged feminists
 for not perceiving colored women as women but as a completely different species.
Similar to Doris Baines opinion on the natives of Africa – “she thinks they are an
entirely different species from what she calls Europeans.” “…an African daisy and
English daisy are both flowers, but totally different kinds.”
Womanism thus grew from a reaction to the exclusionary practices of feminism
into a larger form of political activism and became a tool for colored women with
which they could challenge policies which marginalized them. Walker found
inspiration for womanism in the matrilinear culture of African American foremothers
which is largely based on the tradition of building networks among women. In Search
of Our Mother’s Gardens.

 Sisterhood
Friendship becomes a vehicle for people to change and grow out of their original
selves. Together, the females of the novel free each other. Shug teaches Mary Agnes to
sing, Albert’s sister takes Celie shopping when no one else does, Sofia’s sisters look
after her children while she is in jail, Nettie writes to Celie and looks after her
children for thirty years. Eleanor Jane cooks food for Henrietta and Celie nurses Shug
back to health and inspires her songwriting.

 Quest for Identity

The novel is ultimately, a journey of self-discovery for Celie. One can trace Celie’s
moral, ethical and emotional development as the letter progresses. Celie begins the
novel as a passive, quiet young girl perplexed by her pregnancy, by her rape at the
hands of her Pa, and her ill-treatment by Mr. ___. With Mr. ____, Celie exists only by
and for him, not for herself. Celie’s subservience to Mr.___ was so complete that she
could not bring herself to pronounce his name, for to name is to take possession, to
project one’s own perception on the Other. Celie could not call out Mr. ___’s name
until she regained control of her own existence. Celie concretizes herself by revolting
against Mr. ____’s rule and determinism. In this most revealing quest, she is helped
and supported by Sophia and Shug, two independent women who become Celie’s
doors into a world of self-definition and self-fulfilment.
Gradually, as the novel unfolds, we witness Celie’s metamorphosis – from a wretched
woman who accepts her condition – into a free being who decides to take charge of
 her life. While threatening Mr. ____ with a knife, Celie declares: “It’s time to leave
you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need.”
Lesbianism in The Color Purple is for Celie and Shug the expression of a self
directly in conflict with a man-made, man-dominated society. The relationship
between Shug and Celie is in direct opposition to the one between Celie and Mr.___,
for whereas Shug is bent on helping Celie discover her true self, Mr.__ thinks only
about power, control and self-realization through the oppression of others. Alice
Walker’s own quest as well as her characters’ in The Color Purple is a quest for
authenticity. Her character’s lesbianism is not an end in itself but an expression of
being.
Refer page 9 of existential TCP

This redefinition of human relationships, of human values as found in The Color

Purple, is also encountered elsewhere in Alice Walker’s work. In In Search of Our
Mother’s Garden (1983), she defines the term womanist. Womanist is to feminist as
purple is to lavender. This definition is echoed in The Color Purple in a conversation
between Celie and Mr.__ in reference to Shug’s and Sophia’s abnormal selves. They
are indeed a new breed of women. They are in complete control of their lives and
destiny.
The womanist philosophy within its parameters, encompasses love, joy, music artistic
pleasure, and above all, the reattachment of humankind to a cosmogenic worldview
where everything is part of everything else, a world that would give importance to all
living creatures, big and small, for they are expressions of the divine.

It is Celie’s conviction that she herself is part of God’s design and forms one with all
beings. This conviction will carry her in the final stage of her voyage of self-
discovery. She has found her own place in the great chain of being and is able to
marvel at the creation, at life itself. The true meaning of The Color Purple is that it a
quest and a celebration, a song of sorrow and of joy, of birth, rebirth and the
redeeming power of love.

Epistolary Style
The letters function as a narrative voice. The letter narrative is often read as the direct
and unfiltered thoughts of a character, as a view into their minds without the
 interfering presence of the narrator. The Color Purple is written mostly in a
distinctive rural black dialect that is so close to the speech of the narrator that her
letters read like spoken language. The major development that happens in the novel is
Celie finding a voice outside of her letters, but when the story is over, the letters
remain as evidence of this growth. The oral flavour of the narrative voice foregrounds
the major theme of the story, mainly that of Celie speaking. Celie does not only speak,
she defiantly speaks her dialect, and writes her dialect in what later comes out as a
refusal to use standard English or speak “properly”.
An important juncture in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is reached when Celie first
recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie. This discover not only
signals the introduction of a new narrator to this epistolary novel but also begins the
transformation of Celie from writer to reader. Elliot Bulter-Evans argues that Celie’s
personal letters serve precisely as a “textual strategy by which the larger African-
American history, focused on racial conflict and struggle, can be marginalized by its
absence from the narration.”
Walker foregrounds the personal histories of Celie and Nettie through their letters
while placing those histories firmly within a wider context of race and class.

Colonialism
The overt presence of European colonialism in Nettie’s tale.
It is a minor character named Edward Du Boyce who makes a scathing attack on the
nexus between imperial powers and missionaries. At a get-together organized by Aunt
Theodosia, who had served as a missionary in the Belgian Congo, she was telling people
about the medal she received from King Leopold for her “service as an exemplary
missionary” in the colony, when Du Boyce reacted with impatience. Samuel and Corrine fail
to see the strong economic and political agenda underlying their religious mission. Nettie
doesn’t understand the incongruity of the material wealth acquired by people who set out to
do God’s work in the museums of London – jewels, furniture, fur and even tombs.
For where Celie sees only a “fat little queen of England” the attentive reader is able to
historicize the passage by recognizing Queen Victoria. And if the juxtaposition of the two
stamps on the envelope – England’s showcasing royalty, Africa’s complete with rubber trees
– suggests to Celie nothing but her own ignorance, to other readers the two images serve as a
clear reminder of imperialism. The Color Purple is embedded with narrative features with
clear political and historical associations, which invite a post-colonial perspective. From
her eventual vantage point within the Olinka's domestic sphere, Nettie becomes a first-hand
witness to this process of colonization-a process in which she and the other black
missionaries unwittingly participate. For although Nettie's reasons for going to Africa differ
from Doris Baines's in that she has a concern for the "people from whom [she] sprang", she is
trained by a missionary society that is "run by white people" who "didn't say a thing about
caring about Africa, but only about duty". Indeed, missionary work is tied to national interest
from the time Nettie arrives in England to prepare for the trip to Africa. Walker charts the
course of empire through a catalogue of the material culture appropriated by missionaries
from “all the countries they have been” (and, chillingly from people who no longer exist) –
“jewels, furniture, fur, carpets, swords, clothing, even tombs..”
The narrative levies its harshest criticism of missionary work not against the white
missionary Doris Baines but against Aunt Theodosia – and particularly against the foolish
pride she takes in a medal given to her by King Leopold for “service as an exemplary
missionary in the King’s colony.” The criticism is levied by a young “DuBoyce” who attends
one of Aunt Theodosia’s “at homes” and exposes her medal as the emblem of the Victorian
woman’s “unwitting complicity with this depot who worked to death and brutalized and
eventually exterminated thousands and thousands of African peoples.” Like other political
allusions embedded in Walker’s narrative, the appearance of Du Boyce in Aunt Theodosia’s
domestic sphere recontextualises Nettie’s narrative, and his comments serve as an
authoritative final judgement upon the entire missionary effort in Africa.

The Title

Alice Walker uses the color purple as an example of God's creativity. The pink walls of
Shug's house, the purple walls and yellow floors of Celie's home, the red and purple pants
Celie wants to make for Sofia: all these are expressions of Black women's creative spirit. In
her essay, “In Search of Our Mother's Gardens,” Alice Walker writes about the uncelebrated
creative spirit of Black women like her mother who, in spite of spending the whole day
toiling in the fields, could find the energy and the time to grow lush plants in her garden. It is
this creative spirit that finds expression in the colourful quilts, pants, and walls of their
homes. Walker’s poems, essays and stories burst with lively, vibrant characters, much like
the flowers in her mother’s blooming gardens. It is only after her spiritual awakening that
Celie begins to notice the vibrant colors and rich foliage around her.
Walker explores creativity and political identity through foremothers in her essay In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Motherhood is seen as a site of power by Walker and
Morrison as opposed to powerlessness. In the essay, Walkers contemplates the answer to the
question “What is literary tradition, who are the black woman artists who preceded me?”
There is a tracing of lineage through the memory of the mother. The essay discusses the black
women writers’ struggle for freedom of self-expression. Walker tries to search for the root of
their creativity that has been lost due to slavery and a forced way of life. Alice Walker says
that her foremothers were “exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey”, who led their lives
unacknowledged except as the “mule of the world”. Their creativity remained unknown and
uncelebrated.

Themes
Racism, religion, womanism.
Nettie’s African experience.
Sofia and Eleanor Jane.
Doris Baine as a missionary.
Kinship between black and white people.
Harpo and Sofia’s relationship.
Patriarchy.
The title of the novel – the colour purple, purple flowers, god’s creation, purple room, purple
frog.
The question of identity.
Sisterhood between woman.
Celie’s journey.
What does a diary represent in the novel? An inner space, the reader is privy to the details of
the diary, creativity, pants.