In her 1982 novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker skillfully erases, withholds, or supplies surnames for her characters in order to develop an alternative perspective that challenges, overturns, and regenerates the patriarchal society of the novel. Walker's erasure or withholding of surnames draws attention to her examination of male dominance; on the other hand, in the few cases when she supplies a surname for a character, Walker indicates an alternative to such domination. Namelessness and naming become a significant pattern as the novel unfolds.

Molly Hite has given an insightful reading of the most obvious instance of namelessness through erasure when she notes that “the most important agent of suffering is also a (relatively) powerful male figure, Celie's husband Mr. ———, whose unarticulated name, in the manner of epistolary fictions since Richardson's Pamela, suggests fearful effacement of an identity too dangerous to reveal, and whose transformation is signaled by a renaming [as Albert] that at once diminishes and humanizes” (437). However, this is only one instance of Walker's use of the ——— to erase a male surname. “Reverend Mr. ———”—the minister who brings Nettie into his home, takes her to Africa, and eventually marries her—is a representative of patriarchal religious and cultural power and becomes a person, “Samuel,” much more quickly than Albert as, in Africa, his concept of God becomes less Eurocentric. The namelessness of Albert and Samuel is highlighted because the ——— draws attention to Walker's erasure of their surnames.

Closely related to erasure, withholding surnames occurs when characters are identified only by a first name or by kinship. In these cases, Walker does not even use the ———. Celie, Harpo, Corrine, Nettie, and other relatives by blood or marriage have their surnames withheld because of the erasure of Albert's and Samuel's surnames; thus, Celie and Nettie, for example, do not have married surnames because of the ——— for both Albert and Samuel. Withholding is also notable in Nettie's account of her and Celie's true origins; rather than identifying their parents by name, Nettie emphasizes their familial relationship. As Lauren Berlant points out, “Rather than naming names—her own father's, her mother's, her stepfather's—Nettie emphasized abstract kinship terms like ‘the man and his two brothers,’ ‘the wife,’ ‘the widow,’ ‘the stranger’ to describe their positions in the tale” (217). Because Nettie and Celie's stepfather is only identified as “Pa” or “Alfonso” and because their father is also presented without a surname, the sisters' maiden name is withheld. This pattern of withholding is further elaborated with Grady and Germaine, Shug Avery's two husbands, who are given no surnames, while their wife continues to be identified as “Shug Avery.” Similarly, Sofia's sister's husband is only identified as “Odessa's husband” or “Jack” (191). In a minor key, Squeak—“a little nickname” given by Harpo (83)—claims a name, but not a surname, through her aid in paroling Sofia.

In The Color Purple, erasing and withholding men's surnames diminishes their patriarchal authority as, in contrast, supplying women's surnames establishes an alternative to male domination. This is especially important for Celie and Nettie. Critics have given deserved attention to Shug Avery and Sofia Butler as models for Celie's evolution, though not to the fact that they are surnamed; for instance, bell hooks writes of “black women … like Shug and Sofia [who] rebelliously place themselves outside the context of patriarchal family norms …” (294). The major trait of these alternatives to male domination is their ability to break through imposed stereotypes and boundaries to provide models for others, both male and female, to follow. These alternatives are clearly androgynous. Albert and Celie argue but cannot decide whether Shug and Sofia are better characterized as “manly” or “womanly” (236). In the end they agree that “Sofia and Shug not like men … but they not like women either” (236). However, Walker only presents this androgynous alternative in the form of female characters with surnames.

Shug Avery and Sophia Butler provide the major alternative influences that allow Celie to grow and develop. However, Miss Addie Beasley, while a minor character in the subplot of Nettie's development, is important in revealing the extent of Walker's larger pattern of surnames. Although critics have explored the roles of Avery and Butler, they have ignored Beasley. Miss Addie Beasley is the teacher who serves as Nettie's model in her effort to become an educated woman. As Celie points out, “Nettie dote on Miss Beasley. Think nobody like her in the world” (19). Significantly, with a shift of perspective, Celie's statement could as easily describe her own later relationship to Shug Avery. Like Shug Avery and Sofia Butler, Addie Beasley stands outside of and threatens the patriarchal system of the novel. Alfonso describes the school teacher with disdain for, and fear of, her androgynous power: “She run off at the mouth so much no man would have her. That how come she have to teach school” (19). Beasley even attempts to intervene when Alphonso takes Celie out of school until she realizes that Celie is pregnant.

Although Beasley cannot help Celie, her influence on Nettie is important and lasting, even after Nettie, as a missionary in Africa, has outgrown Beasley's uninformed view of Africa as a “place overrun with savages who didn't wear clothes” (123). In one of her letters to Celie, Nettie describes Beasley's influence: “one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn myself by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know” (123-24). Knowing as a process rather than a set of received facts allows Nettie to grow beyond the limits of a religious and cultural missionary and to arrive at ideas of God parallel to those Celie reaches with the aid of Shug Avery. Furthermore, both Nettie's “desire to know” and her “clear hand” are instrumental in freeing Celie: Nettie discovers their family history and writes to inform her sister of their true origins. This subtle, but important, development places Nettie's intellectual growth in direct contrast to the static development posited by Linda Abbandonato, who sees Nettie in “the preposterous role of a black missionary who attempts to impose the ideology of her oppressors onto a culturally self-sufficient people” (299).

It is tempting to see Walker's pattern of surnames as a feminization of the world of the novel. In such a reading, Sofia Butler, Shug Avery, and Addie Beasley would function as mother figures who allow not only Celie and Nettie but also Albert, Harpo, and other responsive male characters to enter a fuller, feminized life. However, given the matronly, but maidenly, status of Miss Beasley and the disruptions in Shug Avery's and Sofia Butler's mothering of their children, it is more accurate to see Walker supplying a surname to these characters as a movement away from matriarchy that complements her rejection of patriarchy. For men, Walker uses ——— as a sign of the ultimate powerlessness of patriarchal conceptions; for women, she reverses the traditional signification and gives surnames as a sign of their power as nonmatriarchal alternatives to transform the patriarchal system.

Works Cited

Abbandonato, Linda. “Rewriting the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistead, 1993. 296-308.

Berlant, Lauren. “Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistead, 1993. 211-38.

Hite, Molly. “Romance, Marginality, and Matrilineage: The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 431-53.

hooks, bell. “Reading and Resistance: The Color Purple.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistead, 1993. 284-95.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square, 1982.