on the step."

When Shug comes to Celie's life (she has seen the singer before in a photograph and has turned her into another God to contemplate from far away), Celie is prepared. Shug does not help her, as Sofia did. Celie has to conquer her with the only tools she has: the feminine activities. She cooks for her, helps her to take a bath, combs her. No words are spoken, Celie cannot face language communication (the order forbids it) but even in silence, she communicates. She gives life. And Shug does what men did not do: she thanks Celie. She dedicates her new song to her, shows her she is important.

In this second period, Celie changes radically. For instance, instead of telling a man he must beat a woman, she starts advising women to defend themselves. She tells Squeak she must make Harpo call her by her real name, Mary Agnes. She even begins to see Mr. in a new light. When Mr.'s father comes to the house and attacks Shug, Mr. and Celie feel united for the first time, and that scene will be developed at the end of the novel when they start talking to each other. Celie is beginning to communicate, but at this moment of her development, she can do so only with women. She has not broken the silence about her father and children yet, but she is beginning to combine non-linguistic communication with words: "Me and Shug cook, talk, clean the house, talk, fix up the tree, talk, wake up in the morning, talk."

The last period of Celie's education starts when she discovers Nettie had not deserted her. She finds out the first small "we" she had with her sister was a reality. At the beginning of the novel, when Sofia told her she should be furious, Celie could not feel rage. Now, with Nettie's letters in her hands, she is so angry only a creative activity (sewing pants) can keep her from killing Mr. This rage is healthy for her. It makes her stop writing to a God that does not answer: "I don't write to God no more, I write to you," she says. "You" is a real person, who will answer her. The God she was writing to before was a man, and a white man, she realizes suddenly. He was the oppressor: "The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown."

Yet, Celie does not abandon the idea of God. She needs to replace it by a less oppressive figure. The new God, provided by Shug, is completely different from the "white old man": "God ain't a he or a she, but a It . I believe God is everything ... Everything that is or ever was or ever will be ... one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed ... I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." What is important in this presentation of God is the radical contrast of this idea with the American Dream. Celie is discovering something she had already seen in the groups women formed around her, in the solidarity between Squeak and Sofia, between she herself and Shug. She is discovering the interdependence of the world around her ("not separate at all," says Shug), the need to "belong." This discovery explains her words to her husband: "Anything you do to me, already done to you." Until Mr. starts looking around and belonging to the world and caring for it, he is condemned to be Mr. and not Albert. The same can be said of his father, and Harpo and Pa. The legacy of what feminists call patriarchal education (the American Dream) is loneliness.

Now that she can communicate, Celie gets what she needed: company, community, a "we." She gets answers, not only from people, but from God also (unlike the first one, this God speaks). In a very important scene in which she is sitting in the house smoking with Harpo and Sofia to communicate with God, they hear a sound:

UMMMMMMMM I think I know what it is, I say. They say, What? I say, Everything Yeah, they say. That make a lots of sense.

Once Celie learns to listen to this God—Everything—she can help others do the same. She helps Mary Agnes, she helps Shug, and what is even more impressive, she helps Mr. Mr. has been a role, a puppet of his father's patriarchal ideas. These ideas stopped him from marrying Shug, the woman he loved. He has repeated his father all his life but at the end of the novel, he discovers himself again. He had always loved sewing, but as everyone laughed at him when he said so (a man does not sew), he had to stop. Patriarchal society forbids him to sew and love, and turns him into Mr. the Man. He needs Celie to become Albert again.

When they become themselves, Celie, Mr., and Squeak become visible to others as they really are. They fight stereotype. Not just one stereotype but many: the stereotype of what a man should be, of what a woman should do, of what a black person is entitled to. This fight has to start with oneself: "Well, we all have to start somewhere if us want to do better and our own self is what us have to hand."

This fight for the self appears in many texts by minority authors. Native, Asian, Latin and Black Americans have felt the pressure of stereotype in their lives and have talked about it in art. In this novel, the pressure of stereotypes is enormous. The episode of Sofia and the mayor's wife describes one of the fronts of this battle. Nettie's letters about missionaries in Africa describe another. In all these fronts, the battle is in favor of the need to accept the difference in Others and in oneself.

In The Color Purple, this fight is presented through a myth, the African version of the biblical Adam and Eve story. According to this version, black people were the first human beings, and their sin was to hate the Other, the different. They killed all albino children because they were different. Adam and Eve were the first whites they threw out of town, instead of killing. The rejected whites were furious and started destroying black peoples. After crushing colored peoples as if they were serpents, it was predicted, "they [whites] gon kill each other off, they still so mad bout being unwanted. Gon kill off a lot of other folk too who got some color. In fact, they go kill off so much of the earth and the colored that everybody gon hate them just like they hate us today. Then they will become the new serpent. And wherever a white person is found he'll be crush by somebody not white, just like they do us today."

According to the African myth, there is a way to cut this horror, and that is to stop inventing serpents and "accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother's children, no matter what they look like or how they act." That is why Ohnkas worship serpents in Africa. This is the novel's central idea about prejudice and stereotype and difference, three important themes in twentieth century literature. And the only way to bring about the change is to communicate. The Color Purple's conclusion is that first we must communicate with ourselves (our real "I"), then with the rest of the human beings (with whom we will achieve a "we," a community), and then with God (It)—this different God who appears in the opening of the last letter: "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything, Dear God." The travel towards communication is dangerous, especially if one starts it as a prisoner of eternal silence, as Celie does. Nettie's travel is parallel but less complex. The final scene, that of the meeting of the two sisters, represents the recovery of Celie's and Nettie's "we," their home. In The Color Purple, home is something one must fight to find. Celie does not move from her birthplace but she has traveled as much as her sister.

Source: Margara Averbach, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple depicts a black woman who is sexually abused, verbally dominated, and physically beaten for almost thirty years. As an adolescent, Celie is repeatedly raped and twice impregnated by the man she believes to be her father. That unscrupulous violator sells her children, destroys her reputation while keeping his own untarnished, and barters her off to an older man who uses her as a surrogate mother for his four horrible children and as a receptacle for his passion. After twenty years of enduring abuse after marriage, Celie finds the strength to engage in a lesbian relationship with her husband's former lover, to leave the church and her home, and to start a pant-making business. This brief scenario of the novel traces a remarkable transformation from victimization to entrepreneurship, and it all seems wonderfully affirming. Yet the novel raises many questions about Walker's [portrayal] of black female character and about where it fits in the schema of development she had outlined for her works early in her career. Walker maintained in a 1973 interview that some of her earlier victimized women characters were at a sort of "cave woman" level of a process that would take them beyond destruction and into positive images of themselves. Her characters in future works, she said, would no longer go crazy, as Myrna does in "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?" or burn themselves up, as Mrs. Jerome Washington does in "Her Sweet Jerome"; rather, they would become the black-eyed Susans who would have found the soil most suitable not only to their survival but to their active nurturing.

A look at some of the women in Walker's earlier works, who, like Celie, are victims of sexual and communal abuse, and who are sometimes victims of their own minds, reveals that Celie is not substantially different from them and that the culmination may be the reaffirmation of many old stereotypes rather than the assertion of a new identity. In Walker's early fiction, to be a victim is to give one's labor for the benefit of others, often to the detriment of one's serf. To be a victim is to be the quintessential caring mother, self-effacing under all circumstances where the welfare of children is concerned....

The world of Walker's early fiction is one in which black people make victims of other black people because of white people. Grange cannot see an end to the life he is forced to lead under the sharecropping system in Georgia, so he destroys his marriage and indirectly destroys Margaret and her child. Brownfield bows and scrapes to the white men for whom he works, but he beats his wife unmercifully. The progression in Walker's world is from external to internal, from male control of female lives to women controlling their own lives. Such a progression, however, is at the expense of realistic portrayal of black female character, a change that culminates in the character of Celie in The Color Purple ...

Celie may evolve within the scheme Walker has set up for her black women characters, but she does so at the price of reliving many portions of the lives of women in Walker's earlier fiction. She is sexually brutalized by her stepfather and exploited as a commodity by him and the man she marries. She becomes more of a sexual object than Mem or Margaret [in The Third Life of Grange Copeland], and she responds to her environment as an object would. Numbed into allowing her stepfather to take her body, she rather feebly rejects the act in her mind. She takes his advice and tells "nobody but God" by writing the letters that provide the form for the novel.

Her initial victimization at fourteen is only the beginning of a series of uglinesses that characterize Celie's life and that show that she shares much with the women who have gone before her. Her status as a sexual object is initially problematic. Celie's sexual passivity, even if it could be stretched into a form of defiance, may suggest some iota of resistance to her situation, but the fact remains that she shares with Mem the sexual violation of her body, which amounts to an obvious lack of control over the most personal, private parts of herself. And she shares with many of the other Walker women the subservience to men. To her stepfather, who might as well be a descendant of plantation owners and other historical and literary males who view women as "chattel," Celie has little value as a human being and, beyond the sexual, none as a woman. She is like the one-eyed mule who is traded off to the buyer who believes that he has at least purchased sound flesh. The attitudes of others toward her, and the attitude of Celie toward herself, suggest that her place in the evolutionary development is not far beyond the level of Margaret and may, in some ways, be below Mem Copeland.

Walker emphasized in her comments on the future progression of black women characters that they would learn to make room for themselves, that they would carve out "a new place to move." That is perhaps the only thing about Celie that seems to fit with Walker's blueprint. Celie, by her own estimation and that of others, is a survivor. How she overcomes victimization to survive is the problem. Anyone can use her, or say anything to her, or commit violence against her, and she will placidly say something to the effect that she is still here. One vivid example of this occurs at the point where Celie's sister Nettie, having run away from home, visits the newly married Celie. To Nettie's insistence that Celie resist the mean children, that she fight back, Celie can only respond: "But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive." There is a contradiction in a survival that permits these kinds of suppressions of the serf as well as a contradiction in how this kind of survival represents a remotely healthy progression for the fictional black woman character.

Celie survives by being a victim, by recognizing that fighting back causes one more problems than not. After Nettie has been forced to leave and Celie thinks she is dead, one of Albert's sisters suggests that Celie fight him as well as his children. In response, Celie thinks: "I don't say nothing. I think bout Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don't fight, I stay where I'm told. But I'm alive." Her passivity rivals that of many slave women. She will take any abuse to her body and mind as long as she is allowed to stay alive. The emphasis is on allowed because Celie continues to believe that others are responsible for her destiny, that she can have only as much space as they will grant.

Celie's self-effacing stance is given ironic reinforcement in the novel in the character of her daughter-in-law, Sofia, a black woman who does fight back. For cursing the mayor's wife and fighting back when slapped, Sofia is carted off to jail, then to prison for twelve years; released after eleven and a half years with six months off for good behavior, she has lost her husband, her children, and a portion of her sanity. When the family had visited her in the prison laundry and asked how she was doing, she had said: "Every time they ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I act like I'm you. I jump up and do just what they say." Sofia must eventually suppress most of the traits that make her an interesting character, turning from vibrancy to somnambulism, and Celie's formula for survival is mirrored back to her with a vengeance. Still, it is not enough to make her change her behavior.

Celie's notion of woman's place is as old as the history of black women in America. She stays in the home, no matter how ugly and unlivable it may be for her, and she finds comfort in the church and in the preparations, such as sweeping and washing the wine glasses, that she performs for church services. Albert brought her into his home to be wife and mother in the tradition of the mail-order bride—she should take care of his house and his children, be available to him sexually, and be seen but not heard. Although he chases Shug, he does not want Celie to appear in the local juke-joint because wives are not supposed to be seen in such places. Celie accepts her place and submits to the beatings that go along with it; she even tells Albert's son, Harpo, that he should beat his wife Sofia. Somewhere in her feelings, she knows she has given ill advice, but her experience prompts her in that moment to give the advice. When Sofia thinks of leaving Harpo because he will not accept the fact that she refuses to be beaten, Celie says, "He your husband ... Got to stay with him. Else, what you gon do?" Celie knows that Sofia is a good wife, just as she knows that Harpo is happier with her (when he did not try to beat her) than he has ever been, yet she advises Sofia to stay even after the attempted beatings. At this stage, the place in the home is all that Celie can envision for women like herself and Sofia.

The only permissible diversion from the home is God and the church. Celie's situation with Albert is so bad that Nettie describes it as a burial. "It's worse than that," Celie thinks. "If I was buried, I wouldn't have to work. But I just say, Never mine, never mine, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along." Celie has grown up in the church and has attended during both of her pregnancies, so she continues that tradition during the years she is with Albert. In a conversation with Sofia, Celie makes her religious position clear; in the face of her stepfather's abuse, she forces herself beyond anger to feel "nothing at all" because the Bible teaches that one should "honor father and mother no matter what." She does not dwell on Albert's misuse of her because "he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say Heaven last all ways." It is all very familiar. When the life here gets too difficult and one lacks the strength to change it, one turns to Jesus and heaven. Celie tries to effect a transcendence of her earthly situation that dissolves each time she must undergo another beating from Albert.

Of her role in the church, where the women who have seen her twice pregnant before marriage are sometimes nice to her and sometimes not, Celie comments:

I keep my head up, best I can I do a right smart for the preacher. Clean the floor and the windows, make the wine, wash the alter linen. Make sure there's wood for the stove in wintertime. He call me Sister Celie. Sister Celie, he say, You faithful as the day is long. Then he talk to the other ladies and they mens.

I scurry bout, doing this, doing that. Mr. sit back by the door gazing here and there. The womens smile in his direction every chance they git. He never look at me or even notice.

In the institution that has traditionally allowed even the most rejected and victimized in the black community an opportunity to serve, Celie is a model of Christian behavior. She accepts those spaces in which she can operate without offending and without calling undue attention to herself.

The most vivid instance of the place to which Celie has been assigned and which she accepts without outright complaint occurs upon Shug's arrival at their house. Shug, an entertainer who was in love with Albert years before, and who has three children by him, is brought to their house to recover from a lingering illness. Her mean and condescending treatment of Celie during the nursing she provides is only matched by her behavior once she is well enough to move around. She and Albert go about as if they are courting, leaving Celie to think whatever she pleases. The two become lovers again under Celie's own roof. Ridiculous in its conception, the situation becomes more so when Shug asks and is granted permission from Celie to continue sleeping with Albert. The visual layout is itself preposterous. On one side of a wall, Celie lies regretting the fact that she has had no proper sexual initiation and is hardly aroused even by caressing the clitoris Shug has newly pointed out to her. On the other side of the wall, Albert makes passionate love to a woman he has been in love with all his life. The situation is only mildly regrettable to Celie. She does not object to the violation of her home (at times, it seems as if she is pleased that Shug can take care of Albert in ways she cannot). She holds no malice toward Shug for being a luscious slut (one with whom Celie will also fall in love), and she seems to have little sense of the usual decorum involved in human relationships.

Walker can certainly be developing the case that the usual does not apply to Celie and the environment in which she lives, but there must be some kind of logic at work in the novel, no matter how vehemently the reader may disapprove of it. When the characters themselves do not seem to respond to that internal logic, then serious questions arise about the meaning of the work as a whole. For Celie is not merely an animal, she thinks, whether or not she is able to articulate those thoughts, and, though her ability to feel may sometimes appear incongruous, there are certainly things that make her angry, happy, or sad.

So often treated as an object, Celie is put into the position of responding favorably to the first person other than her sister who treats her with the humanity she deserves. That person is Shug Avery. After treating Celie so harshly, and being forced to admire the quiet resignation Celie has in responding to such treatment, Shug's bad treatment turns to good. She comes to view Celie as the survivor she is—in spite of Albert and the rest of the world—and she comes to believe that there must be something special about Celie (Miss Celie, she respectfully calls her).

It is a testament to the good things that Shug evokes in Celie that she is able to enter the lesbian relationship so easily. She thinks only that here is someone who cares about her, not that she is doing something that might be objectionable. She has shown evidence of a traditional moral sense; after all, she had objected, in a way, to the "unnatural" relationship her stepfather had with her. No such value judgment is allowed to enter the relationship with Shug. Celie is allowed to bask in the discovery of the good feelings emotionally and the pleasure of the body she experiences with Shug, for this woman is able to bring out things in her that neither her stepfather nor Albert could. Walker embues the relationship with a forgiving aura of innocence; there can be nothing wrong with this wide-eyed discovery of what it means not only to be human, but to be a woman.

The beauty of this relationship stands in sharp contrast to the ugliness present in Celie's early life and the ugliness she felt was hers. The issue of physical beauty, in fact, is another problem in consideration of the presumably progressive character Walker has created. Black women throughout their history in the United States have been victimized by a standard of beauty alien and inapplicable to them. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and others have all written of the consequences for the dark-skinned black woman, the one who was not light and did not have "good" hair. That woman suffered from color prejudices originating within the black community as well as from without. Many contemporary writers have written of the need to find identity and value in sources other than a narrow-minded conception of physical beauty. It is somewhat anachronistic, therefore, that Celie judges herself so harshly, by the standards of those around her, for her lack of physical attractiveness. She does not object to her stepfather's evaluation of her because she believes she is ugly. Objective analysis of one's physical features is one thing, but belief that one is ugly is quite another. Celie sees nothing in her environment to contradict her basic feeling of ugliness; she therefore accepts it as gospel. Her response is that ugly people should be seen and not heard; they should work and keep silent and try to make an inconspicuous space for themselves in the grimy little worlds they must inhabit.

From the time that they are children, Celie believes that she is neither as pretty nor as smart as Nettie. Although Nettie encourages Celie toward a more positive self-conception, Nettie soon leaves, and Celie is left with those whose harsh judgments of her looks mirror her own beliefs. Shug's initial reaction to Celie is perhaps what Celie feels is the world's reaction to her. "She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain't believed it." What Shug verbalizes is what Celie has felt about her general appearance a few minutes before when she saw the wagon approaching. She puts on, then takes off, a new dress because it "won't help none with my notty head and dusty headrag, my old everyday shoes and the way I smell." Her effort to change is inspired in part by the fact that she knows Shug Avery is a glamorous woman (Celie has worshipped her photograph for years), but it also grows out of a basic inferiority complex about looks. On another occasion when company comes, Celie says she stands "in front the glass trying to make something out my hair. It too short to be long, too long to be short. Too nappy to be kinky, too kinky to be nappy. No set color to it either. I give up, tie on a headrag." Her looks are used to keep her in her place, to keep her from dreaming of being anything other than a mule. Albert learns of her desire to go to Memphis with Shug and is brutal in his comparison of the two women:

Shug got talent, he say. She can sing. She got spunk, he say. She can talk to anybody. Shug got looks, he say. She can stand up and be notice. But what you got? You ugly. You skinny. You shape funny. You too scared to open your mouth to people. All you fit to do in Memphis is be Shug's maid. Take out her slop-jar and maybe cook her food. You not that good a cook neither. And this house ain't been clean good since my first wife died. And nobody crazy or backward enough to want to many you, neither. What you gon do? Hire yourself out to farm? He laugh. Maybe somebody let you work on they railroad.

Partly inspired by jealousy, Albert's outburst shows his regret that it is Celie, not himself, who is going to Memphis with Shug; still, the ugliness directed at Celie overshadows everything else. Even in a calmer mood later in the novel, when he and Celie are somewhat reconciled, he offers essentially the same evaluation of her looks. Celie's whole life is a negation of Albert's evaluation of her domestic talents, yet her response to all of his comments is a lapsing into her usual rationale: "I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here." Even the trip to Memphis does not change her evaluation of her looks. After the wonderful times with Shug, after she sees that things can be different for a woman like herself, she is still overly critical of herself when Shug is unfaithful to her:

Sometimes I think Shug never love me. I stand looking at my naked self in the looking glass. What would she love? I ast myself. My hair is short and kinky because I don't straighten it anymore. Once Shug say she love it no need to. My skin dark. My nose just a nose. My lips just lips. My body just any woman's body going through the changes of age. Nothing special here for nobody to love. No honey colored curly hair, no cuteness. Nothing young and fresh.

Celie's catalog reads as if she had adopted all the stereotyped notions of looks that black women have been unwarranted heir to for centuries in America. She will eventually reach contentment, but that contentment will represent no softening of her attitude toward her physical features. In this area of her life so very vital to self-conception, Celie reflects no evolved state of mind, no substantial change from the majority of her dark-skinned black sisters of the 1930s and 1940s and perhaps a few of those who still devalued themselves early in the 1980s, when Walker published the novel.

Through Shug, Celie does gain a confidence that moves her toward independence. Her confidence increases once she discovers that Nettie, believed to be dead, is still alive. She changes her attitude toward God when she realizes that He has allowed Albert to keep Nettie's letters from her. Resolving to leave Albert, Celie's stance becomes a refusal to be victimized by God or Albert. Her declaration of independence achieves great stature when it is measured against her former, passive existence. That this thing, this object that could be shunted around by almost everyone, finds the strength to extricate herself from her circumstances is truly remarkable. Not only has she been mentally bound, but she has probably never before been more than twenty-five miles away from home. Contemplating a new life, and moving geographically to achieve it, adds a new dimension to the consideration of Celie as stifled character. One of her last conversations with Albert shows the extent to which she has changed and illustrates the effect of that change upon the people who have been closest to Celie; their shock emphasizes how initially incredible Celie's new stance really is. This usually inarticulate woman (verbally, that is) is able to command words that undercut Albert in ways comparable to that of Janie with Jody Starks in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Shug maintains that Celie is going to Memphis with her:

Over my dead body, Mr. _

You satisfied that what you want, Shug say, cool as clabber.

Mr. start up from his seat, look at Shug, plop back down again. He look over at me. I thought you was finally happy, he say, What wrong now?

You a lowdown dog is what's wrong, I say It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation And your dead body just the welcome mat I need

Say what? he ast Shock.

All round the table folkses mouths be dropping open

You took my sister Nettie away from me, I say. And she was the only person love me in the world Mr. start to sputter ButButButButBut. Sound like some kind of motor.

But Nettie and my children coming home soon, I say. And when she do, all us together gon whup your ass.

Nettie and your children' say Mr. You talking crazy.

I got children, I say. Being brought up in Africa Good schools, lots of fresh air and exercise. Turning out a heap better than the fools you didn't even try to raise.

Hold on, say Harpo.

Oh, hold on hell, I say If you hadn't tried to rule over Sofia the white folks never would have caught her. Sofia so surprise to hear me speak up she ain't chewed for ten minutes.

You was all rotten children, I say. You made my life a hell on earth. And your daddy here ain't dead horse's shit.

Mr. reach over to slap me. I jab my case knife in his hand.

Adding a physical articulateness to the longest and the most significant conversation she has had with Albert, Celie goes another step in shedding off the authority that has been placed over her (she still is unable to call Albert by his name). She rejects the role of wife when Albert asks what people will say about her leaving and laughs when Grady, Shug's husband, responds that "a woman can't git a man if peoples talk." It is clearly not a man that Celie wants, a factor that further strengthens her decision to leave.

Surprisingly, Celie's home-bound sojourn in Memphis as companion and lover to Shug seems unliberating, but, taken in its context, it gives Celie a new lease on life. The tasks she has performed for so many years simply because she was expected and forced to do them now become a measure of her love for Shug. Through making pants for Shug, Celie discovers her final declaration of independence. She turns pant-making into a full time occupation and rather quickly becomes a competent, highly patronized seamstress. She establishes Folkspants, Unlimited, and hires a couple of helpers in the business. She even makes pants for the folks back down home, and they in turn spread the word of her good work. The ultimate transformation is complete; she has effaced herself into free enterprise.

Within the context of a consideration of growth and liberation, Celie's pants making is an appropriate and effective symbol. When she wore the first pair of pants, it was a sign that she was breaking out of the role the men in her life had assigned to her. Albert thought it scandalous for his wife to wear pants; Celie defied him and destroyed the power of his attitude over her. Since men have been her most cruel oppressors, it is ironically appropriate that she take something traditionally assigned to them in shaking off the power they have over her. And not only does she shake off that power, she turns it against them by getting them to like the pants she sews. Therefore, they can no longer object to what she wears or how she makes her living.

Celie's survival, without the blare of trumpets, is presented as the progression in the novel. From a used and abused woman, Celie emerges as an independent, creative businesswoman. She moves from being ugly duckling to a figuratively beautiful swan. She moves from being Hurston's mule, the beast of burden, to physical and mental declarations of independence, to a reunion with her children and her sister. She moves from seeing God as the center of her universe to redefining the concept of the supernatural as an "It" that dwells in everyone. She moves from being beaten and used by others to establishing her own business. She moves from being a strait-laced church woman to being a reefer smoker. She moves from the back room of the house in which her stepfather has violated her to sharing a huge house in Memphis with her lover to returning to a house, property, and a store she has inherited. She moves from being Albert's footstool to demanding his respect and teaching him how to sew.

Celie is almost archetypal in the transformations she undergoes. In her, black women are visible at various stages in their history and in their representations in literature. As a representative character, Celie presents fewer problems than those that arise in considering her individual case. As a character in evolution, some of the things that happen to her tax credibility; to go from being object to being self-determined is certainly not impossible, but Celie's case raises questions about that process as well as about the evolved state of black womanhood she is portrayed as representing. Despite the fact that Celie "is based on Walker's great-grandmother, a slave who was raped at 12 by the man who owned her," Walker's assertion that she "liberated" Celie "from her own history" because she "wanted her to be happy" crystallizes the conflicts at work in portraying Celie as a progressive character.

While it was never suggested that black women had to be dignified in their struggles, it was also never suggested that survival demanded the harshest struggles the imagination can conceive. Celie survives, unlike Mrs. Jerome Washington, HI, and Mem, but other Walker characters, such as Myrna, Imani, and the unnamed lawyer killer, also survive.... Celie's path of extrication might be more dramatic than the other three, but ultimately all the women find a new sense of serf and act upon that discovery—no matter how unrealistic it may seem.

What makes Celie different is the sensational quality surrounding her life. Walker uses the subjects of incest and lesbianism to add an aura to a story that might otherwise have been rather ordinary. And she uses the rather strained device of Nettie's trip to and letters from Africa to point out African connections between behavior in the Olinka village and behavior among African-Americans in Celie's home town. Incest does perhaps serve to explain why Celie prefers women lovers to men, but the reader must infer that purpose. Celie goes through the somnambulism of her days without consideration of it in any special way; her emotional state is such that few things draw her far out of her passive existence. Her state might just as well have been caused by a lover who was especially brutal to her at an early age. The issue of incest, therefore, is really not as convincingly relevant to the formation of Celie's personality or to the understanding of her situation as it might initially seem. And Walker apparently agrees to an extent with that position by having the "incest" be revealed in a "father" figure rather than a biological father; she inadvertently suggests that this is somehow less startling or that Celie is more prone to transcend the abuse of a stepfather.

The epistolary form of the novel also contributes to what makes Celie different from the other Walker women. As one reviewer of the novel suggests [Gloria Steinem in Ms.], Celie can affirm herself through the act of writing; while others would deny her humanity, she can assert it through the process of creation in the letters. The actual language of the letters, which are written in Celie's folk speech without any attempt at editorializing on Walker's part, is similarly reaffirming; something essential to her personality is given shape on the page. Unfortunately, these very things that make the novel so affirming, from such a perspective, are also in part what make it problematic. Writing may save in the abstract, but it does not prevent Albert from going upside Celie's head. It is a personal, quiet comfort that reiterates isolation and Celie's inability to act in more tangible ways to extricate herself from or change her situation.

While the reader is inclined to feel good that Celie does survive, and to appreciate the good qualities she has, she or he is still equally skeptical about accepting the logic of a novel that posits so many changes as a credible progression for a character. Such a total change of lifestyle, attitudes, and beliefs for a character well settled in her ways as she approaches fifty and the last third of her life asks more of the reader than can be reasonably expected. Readers are constantly torn between then-desire to believe and the experience and history that suggest that even a single individual like Celie (even if her representative qualities are ignored) would have more difficulty and more serious wrestling with the spirit to effect the kinds of changes Walker presents, just as they have difficulty accepting the extremity of the abuses in her life. Celie, though interesting, provocative, and unlike many other black women characters in black literature and in Walker's fiction, is nonetheless so like many of them that that kinship overshadows other statements Walker may wish to make in The Color Purple.

Source: Trudier Harris, "From Victimization to Free Enterprise Alice Walker's The Color Purple," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol 14, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 1-17.

As admirers of The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian already know, to read an Alice Walker novel is to enter the country of surprise. It is to be admitted to the world of rural black women, a world long neglected by most whites, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of willed indifference. The loss is ours, for the lives of these women are so extraordinary in their tragedy, their culture, their humor and their courage that we are immediately gripped by them.

Witness the opening passage of The Color Purple, a tale of violence, incest and redemption that starts out in Georgia in the 1900s and goes on for about thirty years. Beginning when her mother is laid up in childbirth, skinny, "ugly" 14-year-old Celie is repeatedly raped by the man she believes to be her father:

Dear God, I am fourteen years old I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

Celie, who retreats into an emotional numbness that will last for years, has two babies by her "father"; he gives them away. They end up in Africa with Celie's sister Nettie, who works for the missionary family that adopted them. (The novel is a series of letters, first from Celie to God, and then back and forth between Celie and Nettie.)

Celie is married off to Mr., a downtrodden farmer who beats her. At night, she parts her legs for him and forces all thought and feeling from her body: "I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man."

Along comes Shug Avery, a blues singer of legendary beauty. Mr. has been in love with her for years, and when she falls sick, he brings her home to Celie to nurse. Celie and Shug become friends and then lovers. Through Shug, Celie discovers that Mr. has been intercepting Nettie's letters for several years. And from the letters, which Shug helps her obtain, she learns that the man who raped her wasn't her real father. Her real father had been lynched. With the stigma of incest removed, Celie finally stands up to Mr.:

You lowdown dog.... It's time to leave you and enter into Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need.

I wanted to cheer.

Celie goes with Shug to Memphis, and there she learns to live and love. When her "father" dies, she inherits his farm and returns to Georgia, where she sleeps in a room painted purple—for Walker, the color of radiance and majesty (and also the emblematic color of lesbianism). She is reunited with her children and Nettie, and, surprisingly, she be friends Mr., who has been broken and humbled by Shug and Celie's joint departure. The end of the book finds Celie and her erstwhile tormentor sitting compamonably on the front porch smoking their pipes, "two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars."

Walker can be a pungent writer. When Celie's father-in-law, Old Mr., criticizes Shug, Celie, who has been sent to get the man a glass of water, overhears him:

I drop little spit in Old Mr. water. I twirl the spit round with my finger. Next time he come I put a little Shug Avery pee in his glass. See how he like that.

And sometimes she can break our hearts. When the aging Shug wants to have one last fling with a young man, Celie is so devastated she cannot speak. She can only talk to Shug in writing: He's nineteen. A baby. How long can it last [Shug says].

He's a man I write on the paper Yeah, she say ... but some mens can be lots of fun. Spare me, I write.

No writer has made the intimate hurt of racism more palpable than Walker. In one of the novel's most rending scenes, Celie's step-daughter-in-law, Sofia, is sentenced to work as a maid in the white mayor's house for "sassing" the mayor's wife. In a fit of magnanimity, the mayor's wife offers to drive Sofia home to see her children, whom she hasn't laid eyes on in five years. The reunion lasts only fifteen minutes—then the mayor's wife insists that Sofia drive her home.

The Color Purple is about the struggle between redemption and revenge. And the chief agency of redemption, Walker is saying, is the strength of the relationships between women: their friendships, their love, their shared oppression. Even the white mayor's family is redeemed when his daughter cares for Sofia's sick daughter.

There is a note of tendentiousness here, though. The men in this book change only when their women join together and rebel—and then, the change is so complete as to be unrealistic. It was hard for me to believe that a person as violent, brooding and just plain nasty as Mr. could ever become that sweet, quiet man smoking and chatting on the porch.

Walker's didacticism is especially evident in Nettie's letters from Africa, which make up a large portion of the book. Nettie relates the story of the Olinka tribe, particularly of one girl, Tashi, as a kind of feminist fable:

The Olinka do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother what she thought of this, she said, A girl is nothing to herself, only to her husband can she become something.

What can she become? I asked.

Why, she said, the mother of his children.

But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

Later, Nettie tells Tashi's parents that "the world is changing.... It is no longer a world just for boys and men," and we wince at the ponder-ousness, the obviousness of the message. At times the message is confusing, too. The white rubber planters who disrupt Olinka society also destroy the old (and presumably bad) tribal patriarchy. Does this mean the white man's coming is a good thing? I doubt it, but I was puzzled.

Walker's politics are not the problem—of course sexism and racism are terrible, of course women should band together to help each other. But the politics have to be incarnated in complex, contradictory characters—characters to whom the novelist grants the freedom to act, as it were, on their own.

I wish Walker had let herself be carried along more by her language, with all its vivid figures of speech, Biblical cadences, distinctive grammar and true-to-life starts and stops. The pithy, direct black folk idiom of The Color Purple is in the end its greatest strength, reminding us that if Walker is sometimes an ideologue, she is also a poet.

Despite its occasional preachiness, The Color Purple marks a major advance for Walker's art. At its best, and at least half the book is superb, it places her in the company of Faulkner, from whom she appears to have learned a great deal: the use of a shifting first-person narrator, for instance, and the presentation of a complex story from a naive point of view, like that of 14-year-old Celie. Walker has not turned her back on the southern fictional tradition. She has absorbed it and made it her own. By infusing the black experience into the southern novel, she enriches both it and us.

Source Dinitia Smith, "Celie, You a Tree," in The Nation, Vol. 235, No. 6, September 4, 1982, pp. 181-83.