Color Purple, The

The protagonist of The Color Purple is Celie, a woman whose life is traced over a thirty-year period, from the age of fourteen on a poor sharecropper's farm to success as a middle-aged pants manufacturer. More than half of the novel consists of her letters, addressed first to God and then her missionary sister Nettie. The epistolary (letter-writing) format guarantees that readers see the story entirely from Celie's point of view, and it affords them the opportunity to trace her growth from ignorant child, to abused and despairing wife, to lesbian lover, to independent and self-assured businesswoman. The reader tends to sympathize with Celie, who is based on Walker's great-grandmother, a slave raped by her owner when she was twelve years old. And perhaps part of the power of the presentation Celie is due to the fact that another proto-type for her was Alice Walker herself: Having been blinded in one eye with a BB gun at age eight and raised on a poor Georgia farm, Walker felt she was ugly as a child: "I felt old, and because I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame." As Celie's self-image improves dramatically in the course of novel, she never resorts to physical or verbal aggression and she never indulges in self-pity. Even so, there are serious problems with her characterization. As Trudier Harris points out, Celie's growth "is frequently incredible and inconsistent"; a more blunt commentator, Maria K. Mootry-Ikerionwu, believes that Celie "comes across as a bit stupid and elemental." True, Walker is trying to make the point that Celie's unfortunate situation is largely the result of her stultifying environment, but Nettie, the product of the same environment, seems vastly more intelligent and assertive than Celie. This discrepancy is partly the result of Nettie's escape from that milieu at an early age and it is magnified by the differences in the sisters' speech (black folk dialect versus standard English); but there still seems to be some justice in Mootry-Ikerionwu's remark that "after 200 pages the reader suspects [Celie is] a case of arrested mental development."

A deeper, more memorable character is Shug Avery. With her mannish directness and low-cut dresses, Shug (short for "Sugar") comes across as a tough but tender bisexual with a special passion for weak, physically attractive men. Immune to guilt, she fully enjoys the material goods and sexual favors which her musical ability and unorthodox attitudes have brought her, and of all the characters in The Color Purple she seems to be the most physically whole. Some parts of her characterization do seem untenable, however. How can she be so loving with Celie, but so callous about her illegitimate children? And how are readers to respond to a woman who enters into sexual liaisons with no thought for the feelings of anyone else? Challenging sex-role stereotyping is one thing; amorality is quite another. Shug is a more interesting character than Celie, but she is also more problematic.

The least successful major character in The Color Purple is Nettie. Although it is clear that her growth into a missionary is meant to parallel and illuminate Celie's growth into a successful designer and manufacturer, the fact is that Nettie is too remote from Celie—intellectually, experientially, and geographically—to have any sort of relevance for her. Worse, she means nothing to the reader. Her letters from Africa, which constitute almost half the novel, reveal little about her except for an unappealing pedantry: The reader tires quickly of her lectures on European colonialism in Africa and the condition of British teeth, and even her religious faith seems cloying and naive at times. Far from being an enriching "foil" character for Celie, Nettie is simply a "flat" one.

The plethora of other characters in The Color Purple also suffer from varying degrees of flatness. Celie's daughter-in-law Sofia seemed to have potential as a fascinating character early in the novel, but after her prison term she seems pallid. The various male characters barely come to life; and although that is understandable for a book written by someone whose admitted career-long interest is black women, it becomes a problem when Walker attempts to drive home her identity theme by transforming Mr. from a sex-crazed brute to a tender-hearted seamstress. This is worse than unconvincing; it is ludicrous. The flurry of characters who suddenly emerge at the end of The Color Purple (e.g., Henrietta, Miss Eleanor Jane) transparently exist for the sole purpose of conveying particular themes. Although Walker's handling of characterization is said to be better in this novel than in her previous two efforts, it is still not a strong element of her fictional art.

In tracing the life of one woman, Celie, from the early 1900s to the mid-1940s, The Color Purple reveals the harsh emotional, social, and economic difficulties facing blacks (especially women) in the rural South during the first half of the twentieth century. Just as important, it traces how these difficulties can be at least partly resolved by hard work, faith (in oneself, if not in God), and education. As these remarks suggest, the novel veers dangerously close to the platitudes which marred Walker's earlier writings, but the incisiveness with which she presents her material tends to rescue it from sentimentality.

Particularly striking is her uncompromising treatment of black males early in the novel. Both Celie's stepfather Alphonso (usually called simply "he") and her husband Albert ("Mr.") are vicious, amoral men who regard their wives and daughters as ignorant live-in maids and sex objects. As Walker points out, though, their mistreatment of women reflects black men's sense of impotence in a white-dominated society and, concomitantly, the inheritance of social practices: Albert's son Harpo tries to beat his wife Sofia because that is how Albert treated his own wives. More than this, as the series of letters from Celie's sister Nettie, an African missionary, reveal, the systematic mistreatment of women is common among the Olinka tribe: Abuse is in part an African phenomenon unrelated to white oppression in America. On the topic of violence, then, The Color Purple is an illuminating document which approaches this social concern from a variety of angles.

Closely aligned with this is Walker's probing of the dynamics of sexual behavior. The Color Purple opens with fourteen-year-old Celie being raped by her "Pa," and Walker's rendering of how fornication appears to an ill-informed little girl is unforgettable. Equally powerful is the callousness with which Pa takes Celie's two babies away from her, and then arranges to have her married to a neighbor his own age (a cow is included to sweeten the deal: after all, Celie "ain't fresh … She spoiled. Twice.") It will be 200 pages before Celie learns that "Pa" is not her biological father, but nonetheless the apparent incest which opens The Color Purple sets the aura of sexual laxity which permeates the novel. In light of this, it is surprising that Celie's lesbian relationship with her husband's lover, Shug Avery, is quite touching. Primarily because Celie herself seems so innocent about sexual matters (Shug repeatedly calls her a virgin) and so in need of the acceptance which Shug amply provides, the lesbian relationship is one of the few examples of genuine love in the novel. Indeed, the lack of love in society—and the importance of accepting it, in whatever form it appears—are twin concerns to which Walker returns time and again.

Likewise, Walker is deeply concerned with the status of religion in modern American society. Approximately half the novel consists of Celie's confiding letters to God, whom she envisions as "some stout white man work at the bank." But when she finds out the truth about her family—that her biological father was lynched, that her mother was insane, that "Pa not pa"—her conclusion is that God is not omnipotent: "You must be sleep." From that point on, her letters are addressed to her sister Nettie, with whom she maintains a correspondence for thirty years despite the fact that neither knows if the other is alive. Sisterly love, rather than organized religion, can be one's "faith," the element which enables one to overcome the worst circumstances and to endure. But as Shug points out, even sisters are not necessary for faith: "God is inside you and inside everybody else," and to find God all one need do is "lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time." Walker herself identifies this attitude as "animism," a legacy of the African past; students of Transcendentalism will recognize it as the Emersonian "Oversoul"; but whatever one labels it, Walker does recognize the need for some sort of faith in modern society.

Interestingly, one social concern which Walker does not probe in The Color Purple is black/white relations. Except for brief glimpses of a redneck prison warden and a rather dubious lady missionary, there are no whites in this novel. Their omission suggests the insularity of rural black life, but it may also help explain why The Color Purple is so popular among white readers: Walker has studiously rendered it nonoffensive to them.

As may be surmised from the discussion of social concerns, while Walker writes of the sources (and possible modes of resolution) of black violence, the paucity of love, and the loss of faith, she also addresses more specific themes which are related to these concerns.

First, she probes the whole issue of personal identity. Celie's last name is never given; Pa's true identity is not revealed until late in the book; Albert remains the anonymous "Mr." until he develops into a secure, caring man; and Celie's children, raised as virtual Africans, do not even realize they were adopted until they reach adulthood. The deliberate confusion which Walker generates points to the tenuousness of personal identity in a world where little girls are forced to marry strangers, where men derive their sense of virility from sexual abuse and violence, and where work is a harsh, hopeless activity necessary purely for physical survival. For Walker, a major step in the achievement of personal identity is the emergence and nurturing of one's creativity. In Alice Walker's own life, it was her ancestors' quilts and her mother's gardens which served as outlets for creativity and enabled them to leave their marks on an otherwise hostile world. In The Color Purple, it is not until she receives Shug's support in establishing "Folkspants Unlimited" that Celie finds her own identity as a successful designer and manufacturer of pants. But creativity is not the only source of personal identity: The brutal Mr. is humanized into "Albert" when he openly accepts the fact that he loves to sew, a "womanish" activity. The degree to which Albert's transformation is credible is a moot point: Walker simply is arguing that one must reject sex-role stereotyping in one's quest for identity.

A less obvious theme is the need to assume responsibility for one's actions. For example, although black men's violence against women can be understood in terms of sociology, economics, or whatever, it cannot be excused on those grounds. Celie is scarred for life, emotionally and physically (the second rape-induced pregnancy left her barren), by her stepfather Alphonso's sexual abuse, while the high-spirited Sofia's attack on the mayor results in an eleven-and-a-half-year prison sentence that turns her innocent children into virtual strangers. In short, isolated personal acts can hurt oneself and others, and the "bad" characters (such as Alphonso) either die or are converted to goodness by the end of the novel. In Walker's fictional world, people are punished or rewarded for their actions: The Color Purple is an insistently moral book, its violence and sexuality notwithstanding.

More subtle is one of the most important themes of the novel: the need to look to the future. This is not to say that Walker denies the importance of one's ethnic, racial, or familial past; in fact, in her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" (1983), she confirms her belief that one's heritage is to be recovered and revered. But Walker perceives an orientation towards the past as counterproductive. Celie becomes a secure, attractive woman precisely because she is willing to embark on a new relationship (with Shug), move to Memphis, and begin a pantma king business; even her former husband Albert literally does not recognize Celie when she returns to town. Likewise, Nettie—who could have been just one more sexual victim of Alphonso—becomes an articulate, happily-married missionary in Africa. Granted, sometimes these transformations strain credulity (Walker relies heavily on coincidence for the development of character and plot), but in general she points to courage, education (formal or otherwise), and faith in the future as the keys to happiness.

Clearly Walker's themes tend to be platitudinous, and too often she has the articulate Nettie state them outright (e.g., "… unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly"). But the themes nevertheless are timeless and universal, and Walker injects them with new life by virtue of her frequently memorable characters and imaginative techniques.

Barbara Christian points out that Alice Walker writes in a way that is "organically spare rather than elaborate, ascetic rather than lush," and in fact the letters which constitute book (especially Celie's early letters to God) rarely fill a page. The literal physical barrenness of the book reflects the painful limitations of Celie's life and, perhaps, her fear of expressing herself—a manifestation of low self-esteem. It is an imaginative technique, but in so short a book it provides too limited a canvas on which the author can work. In the case of The Color Purple, the physical limitations are partly responsible for the many underdeveloped characters. On a more practical level, it is difficult for the reader to accept the notion that thirty years pass when the book itself consists of approximately 250 partly blank pages. Fictional time demands an appropriately weighty text.

And yet Walker tries to have those letters—to God, to Nettie, to Celie—convey the entire story. The epistolary format is not new (Samuel Richardson utilized it in his 1740 novel Pamela), but it is quite unusual for black literature, and critics have had mixed reactions to Walker's handling of it. Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek found the parallel Celie/Nettie correspondence "deeply moving"; Frank W. Shelton believes that Celie's writing to God is a way simply for her to assert that "she is still alive"; and Mel Watkins in the New York Times Book Review finds Nettie's letters "lackluster and intrusive." What seems less debatable, however, is that the shift from (a) Celie writing to God to (b) Celie and Nettie writing each other effectively splits The Color Purple in half. Some readers find this technique to be brilliant; others find it jarring.

Part of what makes the split so blatant is the striking shift in language. The Color Purple has been much praised for Walker's utilization of black folk speech, and Gloria Steinem is especially impressed that "there are no self-conscious apostrophes and contractions to assure us that the writer, of course, really knows what the proper spelling and grammar should be." The rural, idiomatic speech used by Celie contrasts dramatically with the standard English used by Nettie, and it illustrates graphically how a change in environment can affect something as fundamental as language.

Whereas most commentators are impressed with Walker's handling of dialect, there is more debate over the conclusion of the novel. The Color Purple features Walker's first "happy ending," and as much as the Fourth of July family reunion delights Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek, it appalls most other critics, who regard it as shamelessly contrived and sentimental. Perhaps, however, Trudier Harris is correct in characterizing The Color Purple as a type of fairy tale, complete with an ugly duckling and a nasty stepfather, which requires a happy ending to maintain the fairy-tale formula. On a less abstract level, the ending can be defended as emotionally satisfying: Two people who have struggled and suffered as much Celie and Nettie deserve to be reunited. It would counter everything Walker has presented for over 200 pages if those German mines had indeed sunk Nettie's ship off Gibraltar.

As noted above, the epistolary format owes much to the example of English novelist Samuel Richardson. Further, as various critics have pointed out, it is their letters and diaries which have enabled contemporary historians to reconstruct the private lives of women before the late nineteenth century when, for the first time, the literary marketplace became receptive to "female scribblers." These most intimate of literary genres are thus often identified as the forté of women, and in particular of women who, like Celie, have no other outlets for their emotions and creativity.

Walker's focus on rural Southern blacks may well show her indebtedness to the example of William Faulkner (e.g., Light in August 1932, Go Down, Moses, 1942), although she has indicated that a more important Southern influence on her work is the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. It should be noted, however, that O'Connor exhibits little interest in racial matters, and that her strong Roman Catholic orientation is quite antithetical to Walker's "animism."

Walker's deepest literary interest is in such black writers as Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937). Hurston is credited with being an early recorder of rural black speech, and it seems likely that Walker was influenced by Hurston's example. There also is some indication that Langston Hughes's folk philosopher "Jesse B. Semple" is evident in Celie's passive satisfaction in being alive. In short, despite Walker's widely-acknowledged love of Russian novelists, the Brontës, and Kate Chopin, most of the literary precedents for The Color Purple would appear to be found in black literature.

Most of the social concerns and themes of The Color Purple are also evident in Walker's two earlier novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and Meridian (1976), although the three books are not part of a sequence or otherwise related. The Third Life of Grange Copeland traces the history of the Copelands, a poor rural black family, from 1920 to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. As with The Color Purple, Walker posits the fortunes of the Copeland family (and in particular of the patriarchal Grange) as emblematic of the black experience in United States for that forty-year period. Walker's second novel Meridian, generally felt to be the best book emerge from the Civil Rights Movement, is a more ambitious work which features a nonchronological format and a poetic, almost impressionistic style. Both books have been criticized, however, for excessive violence, uneven characterization, and blatant, pretentious symbolism.

Characters introduced in The Color Purple appear in Walker's next two novels. Tashi, Olivia, Adam, Celie and Shug have small parts in The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Tashi, Olivia, and Adam are the central characters in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Walker has said that she has used her authorial prerogative to change the characters slightly, but those novels should not be viewed as sequels. And indeed, they are not.

Warner Brothers purchased the movie rights of The Color Purple for $350,000; filming began in June of 1985, and the film was released at Christmas. It proved to be an enormous box office success, but it was criticized heavily for the banal and sentimental treatment of some of its most powerful issues and scenes. David Ansen of Newsweek, for example, said that it was like "watching the first Disney movie about incest." Part of the blame went to the Dutch screenwriter, Menno Meyjes, but for the most part critics held director Steven Spielberg responsible for creating a beautiful but superficial "white man's version" of The Color Purple.

The Color Purple is a novel that invites group discussion. Its construction is such that the absence of an omniscient narrator forces readers to piece together the gaps in the narrative. In a sense, reading this novel is a little like quilt making. And group discussion of the novel's narrative should enrich the individual's reading.

This novel could be viewed as a set of instructions on how to build a self starting at the bottom of American society with no self-esteem and with no advantages. (Could a character have fewer advantages being black, female, poor, and lesbian?) Celie ends up financially independent, psychologically healthy, and a fully realized human being. Certainly the importance and possibility of Walker's prescription calls for discussion.

There are few places, if any, in literature where so many strong female characters are assembled in one novel. It is as though Walker wanted to present as many different, powerful role models for women as possible. These strong characters' individual responses to patriarchal society's domination of them should stimulate discussion of appropriate reactions to violence and oppression.

Discussion groups will inevitably confront the war between sexes at center stage in the novel. Walker has set forth strong views and a dramatically compelling case for them. The black American male characters seem driven by their desire to dominate the women around them. Their world does not seem right to them unless they are in control. Through Nettie's letters, African men seem much the same. Ditto for white men. Nettie writes, for example, "I think Africans are very much like White people back home." A question perhaps to begin with is, if the novel is to be used as a lens with which to view society, does this lens seem be a clear and accurate one?

1. In what ways are sex roles often inverted in The Color Purple?
2. Although love triangles usually spell trouble in most novels, that does not seem to be the case in this one. How are love triangles different in this novel?
3. Albert seems to despise Celie as his wife from the start. Is his sexism the only reason?
4. What is the significance of quilt making in the novel?
5. Why does Celie tell Harpo to beat Sofia?
6. This novel is about male/female relationships, but Nettie's letters are about African and black American relationships. How are they at odds?
7. Sofia and Tashi are two women continents and cultures apart. How are their fates alike?
8. What allows Albert to change?
9. Each of the central female characters in the novel is a fighter. In what ways is each a different fighter from the others?
10. Celie struggles through the novel creating her concept of god. How does her concept of god evolve?
11. What is it about Shug that makes her a role model for Celie?
12. What is the significance of the title, The Color Purple?