Higher Institute of Human SciencesDepartment of English3rd Year American NovelLecturer: Asma Hichri

Course DescriptionAlice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

Course Objectives

The Color Purple is an epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. In 1983, the novel won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.

The book is composed of ninety letters that evoke the theme of self-love through the life story of Celie, Walker’s protagonist. A poor young woman living in the Deep South of the United States (rural Georgia), Celie is a black girl born in the 1900s in a sharecropper family and reared under the oppressive conditions of racism, sexism, and poverty. In the book, Celie starts to express herself at the age of fourteen, through letters she has written to God about the pain of being repeatedly raped by a man she thinks is her father.

It is undeniable that The Color Purple is a multilayered narrative that lends itself to a plurality of readings. In addition to its rootedness in the epistolary tradition, Walker’s protagonist’s letter to God and to her sister has also been read as a postmodern romance and a narrative of self-(re)creation where Celie, the letter writer, protagonist and narrator writes herself both literally and metaphorically into being.1

Course Requirements

The course will be conducted through seminars. In a first phase, a textual analysis approach will be adopted. Students will focus on a selection of texts from The Color Purple as indicated in the course outline. In a further phase, students are expected to study certain themes in relation to American society. Students will be given reading assignments and required to do oral presentations on a weekly basis, followed by written work.

Continuous Assessment

Attendance is compulsory. It is strongly recommended that students read, analyze and study the texts assigned before class. Students are required to have an oral grade based either on oral participation, oral presentation, or written work. Students are also expected to sit for a mid-term exam in the subject of literature.

Course Outline

Week 1: General Introduction:

- Alice Walker: A Biography.

1 Harold bloom, ed. Alice Walker. (Chelsea House, New York: Infobase, 2007) 4.

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- The Color Purple as an Epistolary Novel.

Week 2: Race, Violence and Community in The Color Purple.

Week 3: Patching the Fragmented self: Knitting, Quilting and Writing in The Color Purple.

Week 4: Speaking the Unspeakable: Orality and the Art of Listening.

Week 5: Rejecting Patriarchal Authority: Nettie’s Letters and Celie’s Psychological Emancipation.

Week 6: Religion and Pantheism in The Color Purple.

Week 7: Intersecting Narratives of Race and Gender: Black Women and the (Ab)use of Power.

Week 8: Women, Words, and Letters: Articulating the Self in The Color Purple.

Week 9: The Closing Scene: Celie’s Journey towards Self-Knowledge.

Further Reading:

Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. Chelsea House, New York: Infobase, 2007. Print.

Hsiao, Pi-Li. “Language, Gender, and Power in The Color Purple: Theories and Approaches.” Feng Chia Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. 17 (Dec. 2008): 93-120. Print.

LaGrone, Kheven, ed. Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2009. Print.

Leder, Priscilla. “Alice Walker’s American Quilt: The Color Purple and American Literary Tradition.” Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. Ikenna Dieke. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999: 141–52. Print.

Ross, Daniel W. “The Making of Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays. Eds. John R. Maitino and David R. Peck, Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P. (1996): 159-74. Print.

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Preface

Whatever else The Color Purple has been taken for during the years since its publication, it remains for me the theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual that I spent much of my adult life, prior to writing it, seeking to avoid. Having recognized myself as a worshiper of Nature by the age of eleven, because my spirit resolutely wandered out the window to find trees and wind during Sunday sermons, I saw no reason why, once free, I should bother with religious matters at all.

I would have thought that a book that begins “Dear God” would immediately have been identified as a book about the desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that this was infrequently the case. Or perhaps it is the pagan transformation of God from patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, wind, and everything else, that camouflaged for many readers the book’s intent: to explore the difficult path of someone who starts out in life already a spiritual captive, but who, through her own courage and the help of others, breaks free into the realization that she, like Nature itself, is a radiant expression of the heretofore perceived as quite distant Divine.

If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple (this colour that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature) is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field. Without the Great Mystery’s word coming from any Sunday sermon or through any human mouth, there I heard and saw it moving in beauty across the grassy hills.

No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is. Not the poor. Not the suffering. Not the writer sitting in the open field. This is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child; a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving and to say: I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am, which is the right place.

Living History1. Celie’s life sets the stage for the civil rights movement, giving context to the years before Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington (where, in 1963, Alice Walker was able to hear his “I have a dream” speech while perched on a tree limb). What facts about American history are captured in The Color Purple, such as those represented by the lynching and burning of Celie and Nettie’s father?4. On a map, trace two voyages: the typical route of European slave ships through the Middle Passage, and the route Nettie takes to Liberia. Next, research Liberia’s fascinating history, beginning with the question of why the country is called Liberia.2

2 Liberia was founded by the United States while occupied by local Africans. Beginning in 1820, the area was settled by African Americans, most of whom were freed slaves. African captives freed from slave ships by the British and Americans were sent to Liberia instead of being repatriated to their various African countries of origin. The colonists established a new country with the help of the American Colonization Society, a private organization whose leaders thought former slaves would have greater opportunity in Africa and that the Black population in the United States would remain a permanent racial underclass.

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Alice WalkerA Biography

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. Alice grew up in an environment of violent racism which, along with her family’s poverty, left a permanent impression on her writing. In the summer of 1952, Alice Walker was blinded in her right eye by a gun pellet while playing “cowboys and Indians” with her brother. She suffered permanent eye damage and slight facial disfigurement. When she was 14, her brother Bill had the cataract removed by a Boston doctor, but her vision in that eye never returned.

After graduating from high school in 1961, Walker entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, on a scholarship. At Spelman she participated in civil rights demonstrations. She was invited to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home in 1962 at the end of her freshman year, in recognition of another invitation she had received to attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She attended the conference and then travelled throughout Europe over the summer. In August 1963, Walker participated in “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where she heard King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

After two years at Spelman, Walker received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and became one of very few young black students to attend the prestigious school. Walker received mentoring from poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper. Her mentors helped stimulate her interest and talent in writing, inspiring her to write poems that eventually appeared in her first volume of poetry, Once (1968).

Always an activist, she participated in the civil rights movement following her graduation in 1965. She first went door-to-door in Georgia and encouraged voter registration, but she soon moved to New York City and worked in the city’s welfare department. In the summer of 1966 she returned to Mississippi, where she met a Jewish civil rights law student named Mel Leventhal. They soon married and moved back to Mississippi. They were probably the first interracial couple in Mississippi and, as a result, had to deal with constant streams of violence and murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Even while pursuing civil rights, Alice found time to write. Her essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” won first place in the annual essay contest of The American Scholar.

Walker subsequently accepted a teaching position at Jackson State University. While there she published her collection of poems Once. Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), was published the same week that her daughter Rebecca Grant was born. The novel received great literary praise. It also received criticism from many African-American critics, who claimed that her book dealt too harshly with the black male characters. Walker disputed such claims, but her subsequent writing continued to dramatize the oppression of women.

Walker’s career took off when she accepted a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute. In 1972 she accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College, where she created one of the first women’s studies courses in the nation, a women’s literature course. In 1976 she published her

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second novel, Meridian, which chronicles a young woman’s struggles during the civil rights movement. Around the same time, she divorced Leventhal. Reflecting on the divorce in 2000, her daughter Rebecca published a frank memoir criticizing the self-absorption of both of her parents at that time.

Meridian received such acclaim that Walker accepted a Guggenheim Fellowship to concentrate full-time on her writing. In 1982 she completed The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about the life of a poor black woman named Celie. For this book, easily her most popular novel, Walker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and the American Book Award. Critics again accused her of portraying black men too harshly. The Color Purple was soon made into a motion picture produced by Quincy Jones and directed by Steven Spielberg. When the film premiered in her hometown of Eatonton, Walker received a parade in her honour. Her sister Ruth even created The Color Purple Foundation to promote charitable work for education.

In 1984 Walker published her third volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. In 1988, her second book of essays, Living by the Word, was published, and in 1989 she published her epic novel The Temple of My Familiar.

A significant feature of Alice Walker’s writing is her openness to exposing personal experiences. Many connections can be made between Walker’s own life and her characters, and her emotional intimacy with her creations breathes life into her work for each new reader.

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The Color Purple and the Question of Genre

The Epistolary Novel: A form of sentimental novel popular in the eighteenth century. The epistolary novel is composed of letters or documents and usually represents female experience. It dramatizes a desire for communication and exchange and enables the writer to set down a character’s thoughts and give the (external) reader access to the psychology of the protagonist without authorial framing or interference.

The isolation of the characters is essential to the epistolary formula because it throws the characters back into themselves, enabling them to probe their own thoughts, their own feelings [...]. What the characters enact in their seclusion is a self-conscious process of emotional self-examination which gains momentum and ultimately becomes more important than any other direct form of communication in which the character can engage.

The Role of the Reader: 3

The external reader’s experience is partially governed by the presence of his internal counterpart; we read any given letter from at least three points of view—that of the intended or actual recipient as well as that of the writer and our own. Even when only implied, the interpretation that the addressee would give to a letter enters into our own reading (Altman 111).

Epistolary discourse dislocates the authority of the reader in the figure of the voyeur (the reader’s disappearance or concealment is befitting here) who is both victor and victim, usurper and usurped, just as it subverts its auhtor’s authority by usurping her mastery over the fictional universe of the novel. For the extradiegetic reader, reading an epistolary novel is like reading over the shoulder of another character whose own readings—and misreadings—must enter into our experience of the work. The epistolary novel’s tendency to narrativize reading can also be construed as a self-reflexive practice whereby the text (the letter) flaunts not only its narrativity but also its readability.

Epistolary Discourse

The language of the letter belongs to the larger linguistic system of “discourse,” that is, utterances that suppose a speaker or writer (I) and a hearer or reader (you). Epistolary narrative is thus distinguished from both memoir and diary, where there is no obvious addressee. In letter language, moreover, the addressee plays a role; he is able, and is expected, to initiate his own utterance. Such reciprocity whereby the original “you” becomes the ‘I/eye’ of a new utterance is essential to the maintenance of the epistolary exchange.

The I of epistolary discourse always situates himself/herself vis-à-vis another […]. To write a letter is to map one’s coordinates— temporal, spatial, emotional, intellectual —in order to tell someone else where one is located at a particular time and how far one has travelled since the last writing. Reference points on that map are particular to the shared world of writer and addressee: underlying the epistolary dialogue are common memories and often common experiences that take place between the letters… Epistolary discourse is thus a coded—although not necessarily an obscure—language, whose code is determined by the specific 3 Janet Gurkin Altman. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1945), 111-141.

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relationship of the I-you (120). The status of epistolary discourse as both first-person and second-person narrative derives from the reversibility of the I-you pronouns. The ‘you’ of any I-you statement can, and is expected to, become the I of a new text (121).

Epistolary Dialogue

As written dialogue, epistolary language is preoccupied with immediacy, with presence, because it is a product of absence. Since both the temporal and the spatial breaks and disruptions are so much a part of epistolary discourse, the word present in the letter is charged with both its temporal and its spatial meanings; it signifies “now” as opposed to the “then” of past and future events, and it means “here” as opposed to the “there” where the addressee always is. The letter writer is engaged in the impossible task of making his reader present; epistolary dialogue attempts to approximate the conversation of the “here” and the “now” (135-6).

Epistolary discourse is a discourse marked by hiatuses of all sorts: time lags between event and recording, between message transmission and reception; spatial separation between writer and addressee; blank spaces and lacunae in the manuscript. Yet it is also a language of gap closing, of speaking to the addressee as if he were present (140-41).

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Epistolizing TraumaThe Epistolary and the Traumatic in The Color Purple

True history or true fiction has always required an extraordinary act of the sympathetic imagination: an identification with experiences or stories not our own.

Geoffrey Hartman

Epistolary structure, with its reliance on both absence and presence, suits well Walker’s portrayal of female self-actualization, a process that involves finding and asserting an independent voice while maintaining connections. Walker’s choice of the epistolary style is not innocent: as a form that always seeks a response, this style quenches Celie’s need to overcome isolation and alienation as well as her need for agency. The letter format is also conducive to the creation of a narration characterized by immediacy, intimacy, and candour. By conveying the impression that Celie’s letters are written shortly after the described experiences, Walker shows Celie’s development as being propelled by the act of “writing through” her experiences and reactions. Thus, narrative immediacy allows Walker to recreate the process of Celie’s development and consequently to stay true to the complexities of her experience and the “authenticity” of her voice.

Walker creates an impression of immediacy through several techniques, most of which convey the “speakerly” quality that characterizes Celie’s written narration. In portraying Celie’s vernacular, Walker employs present tense verbs, a practice which creates an impression that what is being narrated is happening in the here and now. Walker’s practice of re-creating dialogue also adds to the sense of immediacy. Furthermore, Celie’s narration contains a minimal amount of interpretation of experiences, as one typically finds in reflectively narrated works. Walker’s use of dialect in Celie’s letters, while lending immediacy to the narrative, also creates the impression that the reader is privy to Celie’s rather than Walker’s voice.

Walker’s decision to impart Celie’s and Nettie’s narration in a written form is purposeful. By mastering and modifying writing, Celie and Nettie change it into an enterprise that is no longer solely the property of white men. The novel also works to overturn the hierarchy that places the written form over orality. However, despite her unique and subversive voice, Celie writes out of desperation, as a means of survival, in an overwhelmingly oppressive environment. The letters are seemingly written in response to Celie’s stepfather’s injunction that “you better not never tell nobody but God” (11). Walker portrays the fourteen-year-old Celie’s conscious purposes for writing as being an anxious need to understand the horrible experience she has endured: “Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me” (11). In this request, one also finds Celie seeking external (spiritual) agency, aspiring to receive a response from God. Celie is prompted by the desire to have a distinctive voice and subjectivity which are constantly undermined and repressed by male presence. Despite this repression, even in the earliest letters, writing serves as a means of self-assertion, if not consciously on Celie’s part. Allowing her the safety of complying with

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her “pa’s” admonition while also serving as an outlet for documenting and acknowledging her pain, letters provide Celie with a needed place to “preserve a ‘real’ self’. The immediacy that Walker evokes through her chosen narrative techniques allows Celie’s preserved self to maintain vitality.

Celie’s mindful claiming of her emotions and eventually her inner, private self is a long process given the extent of the domination under which she lives. The men in Celie’s life view her as property, and as such she is expected to act in full compliance with their demands, and in her outward actions, she does. Celie’s stepfather and her husband attempt to control her by denying her human presence, basing her worth on her ability to serve them. Celie witnesses this reification of her individuality when she is offered as a replacement for Mr. ______’s dead wife and as a substitute for Nettie. Celie is allowed no say in the decision that she marries Albert, a man who proves to be as abusive and oppressive as her “father.” In “selling” her to Albert, Alphonso describes his daughter in terms of the services that she can provide: “She ain’t no stranger to hard work. And she clean. And God done fixed her (3). Celie is thus denied any subjectivity in her life; rather than being considered for her human value, she is reified and estimated for her use-value.

Celie’s life with Albert is more like that of a slave than a wife, and her physically demanding environment is certainly not conducive to writing, especially not about oneself. Addressing letters to God, as opposed to participating in the overtly self-indulgent act of writing in a diary, offers Celie a more socially acceptable outlet for self-exploration. In God, Celie seeks a replacement for her lack of female confidantes. Along with demonstrating her desperate need for connection, Celie’s correspondence with God reveals her external rather than internal focus. A young, naïve girl, repressed by her circumstances, Celie has no faith in her own abilities or knowledge nor a sense of her own worth. Therefore, she seeks answers from an external source, more specifically to a version of God created by white society.

Given the highly oppressive, restrictive circumstances within which Celie writes, the simple act of picking up a pen in the process of self-expression is an autonomous and defiant venture. As many have convincingly argued, Celie’s development is impeded as long as she writes to God, but close consideration of Celie’s narrative voice uncovers how even her minimalist early letters provide her with autonomy. Because Celie reveals her secrets only to God, she seemingly follows Alphonso’s admonition. However, Celie does not tell God what happens to her, she writes it. In this context, Anne Bower observes, “Celie writes to God as an act of rebellion against her ‘pa’ who gave her permission to ‘tell’ God, but never would imagine she would write to Him” (64). After all, Alphonso believes she is “too dumb to keep going to school” (19) and believes she will do exactly as she is told. Thus, merely by the act of recording in writing what happens to her, Celie rejects the view that her only worth is found in what she can do for the men in her life. Indeed, the fact that Celie writes letters to God holds significance because her audience is one to whom someone cannot mail letters.

In epistolary writing the letter is often regarded as a substitute for the absent sender and therefore the material reality of the letter has importance. Even though Celie’s letters to God are not sent or received, their physicality is important in several ways. That which is written has permanence over the spoken word: “Even words spoken to another... seem transient.

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Letters document” (Bower 66). The letters are tangible entities that Celie creates and can claim as her own. Second, the letters act as a crucially important vessel, or as Wendy Wall argues, “they become the surrogate body for Celie, an inanimate form that both fends off pain… and allows her to express the intensity of her emotions” (85). Since Celie has been denied her humanity and worth in such pervasive ways, the tangible quality of the letters, which act as representatives of her, is vitally important. Carolyn Williams observes, “Writing—as opposed to speech—seems safe, seems even the sign of ongoing life” (276). Indeed, because writing results in a tangible product, it provides confirmation of the presence of the writer, and writing signifies the continuation of life because one is immortalized in it. Moreover, the “ongoingness” of one’s existence is more powerfully highlighted in writing that is characterized by immediacy.

Yet what ultimately matters in Celie’s writing act is, to use Dori Laub’s statement with regard to the role of testimony in trauma narratives, “not simply the information, the establishment of the facts, but the experience itself of living through testimony, of giving testimony.” Celie’s letters to God represent the process by which she (the survivor) “reclaims her position as a witness: reconstitutes the internal “thou”-and thus the possibility of a witness or a listener inside [her]self.” Celie’s repossession of her life story through giving written testimony is itself a form of action, of change (85-86).

Ultimately, the epistolary form makes it possible for Walker to stress the importance of both process and product in the novel. The material reality of letters draws attention to the creation of a product. Additionally, the letter novel stresses the writing process because the perception is that the letters are written progressively over time. Although writing to a conventional God eventually becomes unsatisfactory for Celie, in her letters to Him, she does succeed in enacting resistance to patriarchal control. At the time that Celie writes to God, he represents to her an all-powerful figure who holds the means for her eventual salvation and freedom. It is to this prevailing figure that Celie relays incriminating evidence regarding the men in her life (who are ironically associated with God in Celie’s mind). Additionally, Celie shares openly with God her private thoughts, even those that go against traditional Christianity, often without the guilt or fear of judgment that one would expect from someone with her beliefs. Yet when Celie addresses God with the genuine hope of receiving a response, Walker portrays her as writing ultimately for herself. Writing to God functions for Celie as a self-protective guise so that she may achieve self-expression, even if she does not consciously set out to do so. In situations of terror, Judith Herman argues:

People spontaneously seek their first source of comfort and protection. Raped women cry for their mothers, or for God. Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds

to the most abstract affiliations of community...4

Walker portrays Celie as genuinely seeking God in her letters; however, Walker also conveys spontaneity in Celie’s writing. Celie writes her thoughts with minimal self-editing and this

4 Judith Herman. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) 52.

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immediacy allows her a significant degree of freedom from the restraints of audience. Although the God that she believes in for much of her life is a patriarchal figure who is distant, aloof, and silent, Celie writes to him things that one would share only with a trusted confidante. In her life outside of her letters, Celie must quietly accept mistreatment. However in her writing, directed significantly to an authority more powerful than the men in her life, she exposes their abuse as well as their rigorous undervaluing of her. Her unspoken or unheard testimonies therefore become powerful indictments on the page.

Another early instance in which Walker utilizes Celie’s understated, minimal narration to reveal her indictments of men is found in the description of Alphonso and Albert’s “business” discussion regarding the marriage of Albert and Celie. Here, the reader perceives Celie’s awareness, even if limited, that she has more worth than what is acknowledged by these two men. Celie does not make any overt statements in opposition to her mistreatment in the scene, which to the reader is reminiscent of the slave auction, but she does point out Alphonso’s callousness: “Pa call me. Celie, he say. Like it wasn’t nothing. Mr. _____ want another look at you (20). Celie’s description of her mistreatment and abuse is largely characterized by detachment. As Herman argues, “the damage to the trauma survivor’s faith and sense of community is particularly severe when the traumatic events themselves involve the betrayal of important relationships.” Yet Celie’s minor comment “Like it wasn’t nothing” suggests that she understands that she does not deserve to be dehumanized. Although Celie’s faith in family ties is severely impaired, Walker certainly indicts Alphonso and Albert in this scene, and the immediacy of the narration allows her to do so while staying true to Celie’s voice.

Epistolary Narration and Trauma: Celie as the Author of Her-story:

The listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself. The relation of the victim to the event of the trauma, therefore, impacts on the relation of the listener to it, and the latter comes to feel the bewilderment, injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels. He has to address all these, if he is to carry out his function as a listener, and if trauma is to emerge, so that its henceforth impossible witnessing can indeed take place. The listener, therefore, by definition partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past. The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony.5

Through her letters, Walker’s protagonist finds a witness for her trauma, incriminates the men who have been at the source of her traumatic experiences, and comes to terms with her struggle with an unspeakable past. Celie thus turns the narrative of male action and male agency into a testimony co-authored by women and written for women whose voices cannot otherwise be heard.

5 Dori Laub. “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony, Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, eds. (New York, Routledge, 1992) 57-58.

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Violence and Community in The Color Purple

Walker’s Womanism, Definitions:

1. “Womanist” encompasses “feminist” as it is defined in Webster’s, but also means instinctively pro-woman… An advantage of using “womanist” is that, because it is from my own culture, I needn’t preface it with the work “Black” (an awkward necessity and a problem I have with the word “feminist”), since Blackness is implicit in the term; just as for white women there is apparently no felt need to preface “feminist” with the word “white”, since the word “feminist” is accepted as coming out of white women’s culture.6

2. A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counter-balance of laughter), and women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.

3. The word “lesbian” may not, in any case, be suitable —or comfortable— for black women… Indeed, I can imagine black women who love women (sexually or not) hardly thinking of what Greeks were doing; but, instead, referring to themselves as “whole” women, from “wholly” or “holy”. Or as “round” women, women who loved other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all back people (and this would go back very far), for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as Males. My own term for such women would be “womanist”. At any rate, the word they chose would have to be both spiritual and concrete and it would have to be organic, characteristic, not simply applied, a word that said more than that they choose women over men. More than that they choose to live separate from men. In fact, to be consistent with black cultural values (which, whatever their shortcomings, still have considerable worth) it would have to be a word that affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world.7

Seeds of Female Transgression: Celie vs. Sophia:

Meeting Sophia, a bold woman unlike any that she has known, has a profound effect on Celie. When Sophia first enters Celie’s life, she is at a point at which her actions indicate full compliance with Mr. ---’s abuse. In her letters about Sophia, however, Celie admits her admiration of daughter-in-law’s independence. These letters clearly show the growing distinction between Celie’s outward image and her inward thoughts. In her narrator’s private, written expressions, Walker reveals the ambivalence of Celie’s views of other women. Celie admits her respect for Sophia, but her admiration is hindered by her shame for the complacency that characterizes her own life. Although Celie must overcome the split between her outward persona and inner self in order to gain autonomy in her life, such division demonstrates progress in Celie’s self-actualization. In her first letter about Sophia, Walker reveals that Celie has inner strength and a desire for subjectivity, even though she is the model of compliance and long suffering in her life.

By confirming Albert’s advice that Harpo should beat Sophia, Celie publicly upholds the view that women need to be controlled, thereby internalising the patriarchal order established

6 Alice Walker, “Coming Apart.” Take Back the Night. Laura Lederer, ed. (New York: Morrow, 1980) 100.7 Alice Walker. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. 81.

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and maintained by the abusive men who rule her world. What she shares in the letter, however, is that shame and jealousy are what prompt her to tell Harpo to beat his wife: “I think bout how every time I jump when Mr. --- call me, she look surprise. And like she pity me” (43). Celie’s feeling of shame indicates awareness on her part that Mr.---’s treatment of her is wrong. Walker thus insinuates that Celie’s complacency is the result of a will to survive, not true acceptance. That Celie’s tremendous guilt lasts until she makes things right with Sophia suggests her early sense of female loyalty.

The Journey towards Self-Knowledge: Celie and Shug:

Celie’s relationship with Shug is undoubtedly crucial in her developing sense of self. Walker reveals Celie’s progression from displaced dependence on Shug to the development of her own independence and the achievement of a mutually satisfying and respectful relationship. In Shug, Celie finds a confidante who listens and responds, acknowledging her worth.

Celie’s journey toward fully confident self-acceptance and self-assertion in her writing and in her life moves toward completion when she rejects the patriarchal God to whom she has written so many letters. The ultimately independent act of finding a “new” God is brought about thanks to her relationship with Shug and her reconnection with Nettie. Learning from Nettie that her “pa” is actually her stepfather, she becomes completely disillusioned with God: “Come to find out, he don’t think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon “(176). At this point, Celie recognizes that the God to whom she has been writing fails to be the type of confidante that is now available to her in Shug and Nettie.

At this stage, however, Celie begins the process of finding a new version of God. Writing, not only for self-expression and self-examination but also as a means of making connections, remains essential in Celie’s development. And it is through the process of writing that Celie moves from feeling nothing, to struggling to “chase that white man out of [her] head” (179), and to eventually having an internalized, individualized view of God.

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Shoring up the Fragments of a Ruined SelfQuilting8 and the Celebration of Communal Identity

With its epistolary structure and layered first-person narrations, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple unfolds a symphony of voices at once discrete and intermingled. The novel’s inclusion of many individual stories makes it difficult to tell whether these narratives are enclosed within Celie’s account of her life or whether Celie’s story is part of a larger whole. This formal destabilization of a dominant narrative emphasizes that an individual cannot be considered apart from the matrix of his or her relationships and that it is through integration into a collective identity that he or she defines the boundaries of his or her own being. Like the scraps of cloth sewn into Celie’s patchwork quilt, characters’ lives in The Color Purple are woven together into a unity whose strength and vitality depend on each individual’s identification with and distinction from the others around him or her. Embodying unity in diversity, quilts epitomise the female characters’ shared experience of suffering and their common struggle to survive in the face of oppression, violence, and abuse. Throughout the novel, Celie’s struggles and her strengthening sense of self are contingent on her integration into a supportive network of friends constructed on the sharing of stories that testify to the individuality of personal suffering and form the threads binding their broken lives into a stronger whole.

Celie’s interaction with Sophia allows her the first opportunity to share her experiences with someone other than “God,” and, by implication, to begin severing her ties to the vengeful, incomprehensible force associated with Him. It is by measuring Sophia’s audacity against her own submissiveness and by witnessing Sophia’s surprise at her attitude toward life that Celie begins to question her own passivity and recognize the irrepressible force of her emotions. “I’m jealous of you,” Celie tells Sophia, revealing for the first time the emotions hidden behind her letters to God. “You do what I can’t […]. I’m so shame of myself, I say” (42). This candid confession prompts an empathic counter-confession from Sophia that helps Celie identify and come to terms with her past experiences. Like Sophia, Celie has, in her own way, “had to fight […] all my life” (42). The two women’s common experience of suffering allows Celie to identify with Sophia: Sophia’s story at once gives new shape to Celie’s own by allowing her to re-imagine herself in the active role of survivor and

8 The history of African American quilts is nearly as old as the history of America. Long-ignored and conspicuously absent from many early accounts of American quilt history, African American quilting has become a growing area of study. Skilled black slave women on plantations and in other wealthy households did the spinning, weaving, sewing and quilting in addition to many household duties. Their surviving quilts provide a unique history of their lives and culture. Research has shown that slave quilters not only made quilts for the owner’s family, they also made quilts for their personal use. Made from scraps, and heavily used, relatively few of those personal quilts have survived to be studied today. The inner layer of quilts could be filled with old blankets, worn clothes that could no longer be mended, or bits and pieces of wool or raw cotton. Quilting parties were important social events on the plantations and were enjoyed by men, women, and children. In addition to the sewing, common activities at the parties were eating, drinking, singing, dancing, and storytelling. Quilts were still made for everyday use out of necessity. After the Civil War, many freed female slaves went to work in households as domestics or continued working on farms. It was still a difficult life of long days working from dawn to dusk. Those who were skilled in quilting were able to continue making warm bedcovers for their family members as well as supplementing the family income by making quilts to sell. (“African American Quilts, Creativity and Improvisations.” From http://www.quilting-in-america.com/African-American-Quilts.html. retrieved 21 Feb. 2014 )

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fighter. This narrative exchange validates the poignancy of each woman’s private experience and, through that validation, binds them in a healing bond of friendship as Celie tentatively emerges from her habitual numbness. Thus, even as the two women begin to “make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains” (25), Celie begins to mend her emotional wounds and piece together the first fragments of a more stable subjectivity.

Feminist critic, Elaine Showalter, underlines this connection between piecing, sewing and writing in the following terms: “A knowledge of piecing, the technique of assembling fragments into an intricate design, can provide the contexts in which we can interpret and understand the forms, meanings, and narrative traditions of American women’s writing.”9 Whether she uses old clothes or new cottons, the quilt-maker begins work on her patchwork quilt by cutting or ripping the fabrics apart. Indeed, a patchwork quilt cannot come into existence without that rending. This deconstructive act is, paradoxically, also one of the most creative acts of courage, necessity and faith. Tearing seems a singularly appropriate place to begin because being torn is so familiar an experience for women, as illustrated by the character of Celie.

Celie’s growing self-awareness and assertion are accompanied by the novel’s formal expansion as it integrates Celie’s letters to God with accounts of other characters’ lives, which, like the patches of a quilt, are both enclosed within the novel’s larger narrative and help to define the patch that represents Celie’s unique experience. Nettie’s letters, for example, reveal the truth of Celie’s parentage and help her turn her passive shame into active anger against her stepfather’s injustice. Celie’s relationship with Shug Avery helps her come to terms with her sexual identity and further emphasizes that human beings are not manipulated by distant, external gods but are capable of shaping their identities through responsive interactions with others. “God is inside you and inside everybody else,” Shug tells Celie, giving new significance to Celie’s assertion that “I don’t write to God no more, I write to [Nettie]” (199). Celie’s abandonment of a tyrannical, “big and old and tall and gray-bearded and white” (201) God becomes a recognition of and respect for the God in herself—a self composed of and enclosed by the patchwork lives constructed in her and others’ stories.

Celie sees herself, physically and emotionally, as living in irreconcilable fragments. She begins her narrative by writing “I am” which she then negates by crossing out (1), indicating her lack of self-confidence. We learn in the first few letters that her experience of life has been a series of tearings. She has been torn from childhood by her stepfather’s incestuous rapes; torn from the two children she bears him when he takes them from her; and torn from the one person she loves, her sister Nettie, when she is forced into marriage.

When Sofia discovers Celie’s betrayal, the reader witnesses a scene set in rupture and violence, that between Harpo and Sofia, that between the two women, and that within Celie herself as she thinks with shame of the advice she gave Harpo. The honest communication that ensues, as Celie admits her guilt and asks Sofia’s forgiveness, is the setting for the two of them to begin their quilt-making. Putting together the fragments of “messed up curtains,” torn in a fight between Sofia and Harpo, the two women reconfigure their bond. Guilt is

9 “Piecing and Writing.” The Poetics of Gender (New York, Columbia UP, 1987) 227.

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transformed into quilt as discarded fabric and rejected women are sewn into a more valuable, enduring and long-living friendship (31).

Significantly, Celie starts with curtains that function through their ability to both separate and come together, for the wholeness of curtains lies in their ability to also be fragments. The curtains come to her already torn in a fight between Sofia and Harpo (21), which makes a second layer of fragments. The fabric is further cut to make up the patchwork pattern, so that the quilt she makes is composed of at least three layers of fragments. Celie’s quilt becomes a celebration of fragments, a recognition and reverence for pieces. The self she creates, like the patchwork quilt she makes, is not so much an integrated whole as it is a vindication of fragments, a celebration of multiplicity and diversity.

Quilting and cloth working are tools Celie uses to achieve the discovery, definition, and expression of self, and the connections between self and other. When she begins quilting with Sofia Celie asserts her identity through asserting the right to choose, for the first time. She chooses a quilt pattern, the two women choose to be sisters, and they choose to work together. Those choices are signified in the quilt design Celie selects, a pattern called “Sister’s Choice” (31).

Celie and Sofia’s quiltmaking also operates as a process of healing since the two characters are no longer passive victims who are torn. Quiltmaking turns being torn into tearing, turns object into subject. Active creation replaces passive victimization and traumatisation as the two women, their sisterhood reaffirmed, construct a pattern of their choice out of the fragments of their lives. Celie’s decision to make the quilt is thus the turning point in her life because it is the first step to her own empowerment via connection with other women.

Fragmentation is also an acknowledgement of that common condition of women’s lives: interruption. Celie’s life, her quilt, and her writing are all made up of discontinuous pieces. Her chosen form of self-expression, letter writing, consists of short, discrete units of discontinuous prose, broken off and interrupted by the demands on her life. Yet Walker makes that discontinuity into a shapely narrative. Celie works with fragments of text as well as textiles. In this respect, it is also significant that each writer in Celie’s narrative writes the missing parts to the other writer’s story, thereby confirming the communal character of Celie’s artistic creation.

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Gender, Language, and PowerFusing Binary Oppositions in The Color Purple

Describing herself as a womanist, a “black feminist or feminist of color,” Walker strives to explore “the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women.” Walker not only attacks patriarchal oppression and claims the submerged voice of women; she also calls into question the polarity between femininity and masculinity. Walker expresses her concern about gender roles and gender dynamics in her characterization and plot development. Walker experiments with the reversal of gender and proposes a blend of masculinity and femininity for both men and women. Since for black people race is closely related to gender, Walker also attempts to deconstruct the white/black binary opposition to subvert the hierarchal gender structure which is further complicated by skin colour.10

The Olinka as a Patriarchal Society

Nettie’s picture of Olinka women enlarges on the construction of gender roles. The Olinka women live in a male–dominated world. Men use language to define their power and women’s subordination. Power only goes to “A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew” (88). Men have a monopoly of education because there is no place for educated women. Consequently, Tashi’s parents forbid her to study with Olivia.

Marriage is the only goal for a woman, for “only to her husband can she become something” (155). A woman’s identity comes from her husband; as a result, to be the chief’s wife is “as high as they can think.” If a woman dares to rebel, she will be labeled a lunatic and sold to traders, of which Tashi’s aunt is living proof. Nettie’s observations about the Olinka men and women reveal the hierarchical structure of the community:

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face’ as they say. To “look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees… Again, it is our own behavior around Pa. (89)

Letter Writing: the Political and the Personal

Through epistolary narration, Walker makes the silenced women heard. Celie and Nettie are empowered by letter writing; in so doing, they acquire not only their voice but also their subjectivity. Walker also creates a double–voiced narrative by contrasting Nettie’s formal English with Celie’s vernacular. In addition to their languages, the two sisters’ subject matters also differ. Celie’s narrative deals with private affairs, whereas Nettie’s primarily brings into focus African culture. Although Nettie’s letters are of great significance to Celie, Celie’s personal matters subversively overshadow Nettie’s historical and geographical overview of Africa. As an illustration of the feminist slogan “personal is political,” Celie’s journey for autonomy and assertiveness constitutes the main plot of the novel. Nettie’s

10 “Womanist” encompasses “feminist” as it is defined in Webster’s, but also means instinctively pro-woman… An advantage of using “womanist” is that, because it is from my own culture, I needn’t preface it with the work “Black” (an awkward necessity and a problem I have with the word “feminist”), since Blackness is implicit in the term; just as for white women there is apparently no felt need to preface “feminist” with the word “white”, since the word “feminist” is accepted as coming out of white women’s culture.

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African experience, on the other hand, is a perfect foil to the plight of Celie and her women comrades.

Celie’s Bildung’s Journey and Walker’s Womanist Ethics:

Like Celie’s letters, sisterhood bonds, which are integral to Walker’s womanist ideology and to the successful Bildung of the female protagonist, also pose a direct challenge to patriarchal proscriptions of the female self. Women friends often serve as guides and rescuers for the protagonist, modelling the attributes and providing the emotional support that the protagonist needs to persevere and succeed in her quest.

Nettie is the first woman to serve as guide for Celie. She provides Celie much needed emotional support and serves as her teacher. However, Nettie has yet to embark on her own Bildung and lacks the life experience necessary to serve as an effective model of female resistance.

It is Sofia, Harpo’s wife, who sets Celie firmly on the path of Bildung. Sofia is the first woman to model active resistance in a way that captures Celie’s attention. Sofia possesses a physical presence— Celie describes her as being “Solid. Like if she sit down on something, it be mash” (34). Sofia also possesses a strong inner resolve. She directly confronts and challenges all attempts to force her into passivity and submission; she doggedly defends her right to freely exist. Although Celie remains silent about her victimization by Pa and merely laughs at the sheer audacity of Sofia’s advice to “bash Mr.____ head open” (42), Celie shares, for the first time, a connection with someone other than Nettie and receives, in return, a new perspective on her situation. Sofia sows the seed of possibilities in Celie’s consciousness; her voice is the first voice to penetrate the shell of Celie’s repressed emotions.

While Sofia sets Celie on the path of Bildung, it is Shug Avery who facilitates Celie’s journey to heroic selfhood. At this stage of her quest, Celie’s relationship with Shug provides her the means through which to confront, challenge and transform the stereotypical myths of female selfhood and to ultimately integrate the outer and inner aspects of her identity. Celie knows instinctively that Shug exists beyond the limitations and constraints under which she struggles. However, she also perceives that Shug has dealt with her own suffering: “Her eyes serious tho. Sad some” (6); and the perception of common suffering forges an immediate bond with Shug in Celie’s growing consciousness. As guide and rescue figure, Shug nurtures and protects Celie and teaches Celie a new language through which she is able to create an alternate context for her developing self.

To accomplish this goal, Walker situates Celie and Shug’s sexual relationship within the context of her womanist ideology— “Womanist… A woman who loves women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture” (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens xi)—casting the relationship as the ultimate expression of sisterhood. As Celie records in her letters to God, she and Shug eventually interact “like sisters” (146). By privileging sororal love as the primary emotional bond in the novel, Walker subverts marriage as the telos of the female protagonist’s quest and facilitates the success of Celie’s journey to heroic selfhood.

As Celie is increasingly able to reclaim and affirm essential aspects of herself, she is finally able to voice the traumatic experiences to which she has been subjected. She tells Shug about

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her rape. As Celie expresses and allows herself to feel the pain of this experience, she moves beyond the need to “make [her]self wood” in order to survive; she reconnects with her emotions and learns to channel them in service to her successful Bildung. When she and Shug discover that Nettie has been writing to Celie for years and that Mr.____ has been intercepting and hiding Nettie’s letters, Celie has such a rush of emotion that her instinct is to slit Mr.____’s throat (67). Shug however helps Celie to realize that revenge is the ultimate capitulation to patriarchal codes of behaviour; giving in to her violent impulses will only chain Celie to the very social order from which she is struggling to free herself. Through Shug’s guidance, Celie replaces the razor with a sewing needle, diverting her destructive impulse into a creative one.

It is also quite significant that Celie’s enterprise, a domestic enterprise par excellence, is also a gendered one. Like quiltmaking, Celie’s pants business originates from Shug’s ideas that pants should not be exclusive to men since women need comfortable pants at work. In the scene in which Celie and Mr. ______ sew pants together, Walker depicts a joint effort made by a man and a woman doing a gendered job, their products being clothes which used to have only masculine attributes. The scene, pretentious as it is, is a manifestation of Walker’s ideals of gender dynamics. Sewing is as integral to Celie’s Bildung as writing. Not only does it serve as a mechanism for Celie’s economic and emotional independence, but it is—as is writing—a vehicle for Celie’s self-expression and for her creation of an alternate socio-cultural context within which to exist. Celie’s decision to sew pants directly challenges gender-role stereotypes and reinscribes Walker’s womanist ideology in Celie’s Bildung process.

Besides her contribution to Celie’s awakening, Shug also assists in deconstructing Celie’s imaginary addressee–a silent God. In one of her letters, Celie informs Nettie: “I don’t write to God no more. I write to you” (192). At Celie’s delineation of God as an old white man, Shug explains that Celie’s God is white men’s construction––”that’s the one that’s in the white folk’s white bible” (194). Shug rather refers to God as “it” and believes God is everywhere, even in “the color purple in a field” (196). In so doing, Shug deconstructs God’s patriarchal image and teaches Celie to praise God by enjoying nature. In the novel’s denouement, Celie claims her freedom from linguistic constraints by addressing her letter to “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear people. Dear Everything. Dear God” (165). Celie’s God has been transformed from a father figure to Mother Earth.

Throughout her Bildung, Celie’s sense of self has been inextricably connected to Shug’s feelings for her. It is no wonder then that Shug’s affair with a young musician in her band threatens to emotionally destroy Celie (147-8). However, rather than attempt to repress the pain as she did at the beginning of her Bildung, she acknowledges her ability to feel and express that pain as a sign of her vitality, in order to ultimately overcome it. She writes to Nettie, “My heart broke;” but in a later letter she says, “My heart must be young and fresh though, it feel like blooming blood” (147). Through her separation from Shug, Celie ultimately comes to an awareness of herself as an autonomous being. In the salutation of Celie’s final letter, she addresses the cosmos (165). Her salutation is not only a legitimization of self but also an affirmation of unity with all of creation.

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Religion and Pantheism in The Color Purple

In the preface to The Colour Purple Walker identifies her religious development as the inspiration for her novel and labels religion and spirituality as the principle themes in the book. Although she dedicates The Color Purple “To the Spirit,” careful not to attach herself to any particular form of religion, Walker states that this novel remains for her the “theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual.” The novel thus demonstrates how African-American women have redefined religion (traditional Christianity) to empower themselves beyond their double minority status in America. It is undeniable that religion, specifically Christianity, has traditionally been conceived of, by some, as a sexist and delimiting institution for women. Celie, the protagonist of Walker’s novel, spends the majority of her life engaging in a peculiar monologue with a male God who renders her neither empowerment, nor self-esteem. Alice Walker’s novel serves as a commentary on the survival and transformation of religion in the lives of African-American women as they are forced to renegotiate previously established religious discourse. Celie, Nettie, Sofia, and Shug must rethink the way they feel about God, gender, and religion if they hope to triumph over their double minority status. This transformation is most evident in the protagonist, Celie’s journey towards self-knowledge. Once she takes individual ownership of God, she becomes empowered through her new understanding of religion.

When Celie decides not to write to God, she is essentially rejecting institutionalized religion because it does not work for her. The “maleness” of God precipitates her rejection. She says, “The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know” (192). Celie’s sister, Nettie, is also instrumental in transforming Celie’s thoughts about God. She tells Celie that:

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone—a roofleaf—or Christ—but he don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.

Nettie understands what Celie later accepts as a new form of spirituality. Such an understanding forces Celie to tap into her inner strength rather than rely upon external support. As such, Celie becomes receptive to other interpretations, such as the one offered by Shug, of God. Shug further challenges Celie’s concept of God when she tells Celie that “God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.” The ability to accept and internalize this understanding of God is crucial to Celie’s metamorphosis.

This form of theology negates the presence of gender in one’s conceptualization of God. Shug opens up Celie’s understanding to an entirely different God. Celie comes to understand that worshipping God consists of more than cleaning the church and praying. Worship involves appreciating the beautiful things in nature like the colour purple and communion with everything that God created. Now, however, Celie knows that in order to please God, she must learn to love herself since God created her. Loving herself also means leaving Albert, accepting the house that she inherited from her mother, and enjoying everything that life has to offer. She says, “I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time.” Leaving Mr.___ and his male dominance is central to Celie’s new sense of

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independence. With the help of Shug, Celie enhances her creative sewing skills so well that she is able to become self-sufficient by selling popular pants.

Once she breaks her dependency, Celie is no longer bound to anyone or anything, but nature, and nature is God. When Shug promises to come back home, Celie thinks, “if she come, I be happy. If she don’t, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn” (283). Celie learns that inner contentment is the key to a happy life. Celie’s transformation extends beyond her own redemption. Through their love for Shug, Albert and Celie eventually develop a relationship of mutual respect and compassion. Albert also gains a sense of self awareness. He says, “I’m satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man.” Celie’s spiritual rebirth comes full circle in her last letter. The letter reveals a reordered perspective toward God, who is no longer a male deity, but a depersonalized God who reveals divinity through nature. In her salutation, “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God,” it becomes clear that Celie no longer views God as the once “trifling, forgitful, and lowdown” man that once yielded her little, if any, reason to live. By the end of Celie’s transformation, she has become a triumphant, independent, happy, lively woman. She is no longer the victim of men; she depends only on God for emotional stability; she understands that the only thing that God requires of people is the appreciation of everything “It” creates, and in return, God and humanity become inseparable; her livelihood stems from inner strength and determination.

Alice Walker presents Celie, Sofia, Nettie, and Shug’s appropriation of a gender-neutral God, who understands the trials of women, as an empowering and coping mechanism that ultimately renders them a “true” sense of freedom—freedom from victimization, silence, and unhappiness. Walker’s female characters become more complete by the end of the novel. When Walker introduces Mr.___ into this new fold, she taps into that all-inclusive womanist ideology, which suggests that perhaps African-American women are not the only ones in need of a new perception of God. Walker’s reworking and rethinking of God reaches far beyond gender concerns; these are human concerns.

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Higher Institute of Human Sciences, Tunis Academic Year 2013-2014

1st Semester Exam (Main/ Re-sit/ Remedial)

Licence Fondamentale d’Anglais 3rd year

Module: Literature Subject: Fiction

Duration: 2 hours

Choose ONE of the following topics:

1. “The response of the community has a powerful influence on the ultimate resolution of trauma. Restoration of the breach between the traumatized person and the community depends upon community action. […] The community must take action to assign responsibility for the harm and to repair the injury. These two responses, recognition and restitution – are necessary to rebuild the survivor’s sense of order and justice.”11

To what extent does Celie’s recovery form trauma depend on the intervention of the community?

1. “Celie’s conversion from a monotheistic view of God (or traditional Christianity) to a more pantheistic outlook represents and parallels her movement from feelings of oppression under the domination of patriarchy into a sense of connectedness with others and self-acceptance at which she ultimately arrives by the novel’s end.”12

Comment on the following statement with reference to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

2. In The Color Purple, “the heroines demand that patriarchal sanctions collapse upon themselves when they use handcrafts to free themselves from restrictions and take strength from female influence.”13

Discuss this statement with reference to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

11 Judith Herman. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence— from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. (New York: Basic Books, 1997) 70.12 Stacie Lynn Hankinson. “From Monotheism to Pantheism: Liberation from Patriarchy in Alice Walker's The Color Purple.” The Midwest Quarterly 38.3 (Spring 1997): 320-321.13 Catherine E. Lewis. “Sewing, Quilting, Knitting: Handicraft and Freedom in The Color Purple and A Women’s Story.” Film/Literature Quarterly 29:3 (2001): 237.

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