The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Review by: Adam Gussow

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Summer, 1983), pp. 124-126
Published by: Chicago Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25305234
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Adam Gussow
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker

You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down,

the title of Alice Walker's most
recent collection of short stories, might equally well have served as the
title of her new novel, The Color Purple. The Color Purple is the story
of five women?black,
battered, and ultimately
triumphant over a
to drive a black woman mad.
world that seems to have been designed
heated with love and rage, and her
Walker's
language is incandescent,
vision
is clear and hard as cut glass.
is a 14-year old black girl in the Jazz Age South: spunky,
Celie
and almost
illiterate. Raped repeatedly by
vulnerable,
may or may not be her real father, robbed of the two
sister Nettie?who
fled to
result, bereft of her beloved
a
out
to
and
her
soul
God.
life?she
pen
pours
up
picks

the man who

children
that
seek a better
Her letters to

Him make up the first half of the novel. Like Huckleberry

Finn, Celie is
a naif, able to describe her emotional
trauma with an innocent's clear
the full horror of it. Like
sight even as she is unable to understand
her

Huck,

language?a

broken

deep

South

vernacular?is

supple

and expressive
idiom, charged with native poetry.
paints
Through Celie's naked and rambling confessions, Walker
an unsparing picture of black society, such as it is, in a small southern
town. That picture is painfully vivid, yet without period color, and for a
reason. Unlike Meridian,
the civil rights activist whose
struggles were
same
has little
recent
Celie
of
Walker's
novel
the
the focus
name,
by
sense of participating
in the history of her time; we observe her town
from a spot directly above her heart. The men in that town, kept down
insecurity, take out their
by white society and their own deep-rooted
frustrations on their wives and daughters. They rape, hunt game, and
like draft horses when
them. The
trade women
the spirit moves
in each other. Happy
take solace
cynical and bewildered,
sex
scarce
if indeed itever
in
is
this
heterosexual
monogamous
world,
existed. All the fathers are unloved, all the children
illegitimate.
is twenty her Pa tosses her like some misbegotten
When
Celie
out of his house and into the motherless
Cinderella
family next door.
small resentful man
She submits to the desires of the father there?a

women,

named Albert?but
she refuses to name him in her letters; he becomes
"Mr.
."
She watches with curiosity as Albert's teenaged
simply
son Harpo falls in love with and marries Sophia, a big strapping girl

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with
who
tells Celie she is "big" with Harpo's child. She watches
as Sophia successfully
and
stands up to her husband
admiration
out of the house with her children.
She
and moves
father-in-law
watches with horror as Sophia is carried home later from prison, be
aten and abused for having talked back to the town's white mayor.
is about female friendship, about the myriad
The Color Purple
inwhich beaten women
bear up each other's life. Several
unsung ways
come
women
into Celie's
life, among them Shug ("sweet as sugar")
and Albert's former lover whom
Avery, a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold
he brings back to the house one day. She's sick as a dog and no one
else will take her in. Celie nurses Shug back to health, admires her with
a consuming
passion, and in one of the novel's most tender scenes,
becomes
Shug's lover. Above all, she loves to hear Shug sing.
into her own true voice, of
is a process of coming
Life for Celie
thrust upon her by the
saying no to the corrupt and violent world
in this is the power to rename, a
fathers. Her most potent weapon
power her sister Nettie had conferred upon her when they were school
girls. "The way you know who discover America, Nettie say, is think
That what Columbus
about cucumbers.
sound like." When Celia dis
covers halfway through the novel that Nettie
is still alive, that Nettie
to
has been writing
her for twenty-five years and that Albert has
letters
heart breaks open
kept those letters from her out of spite, her calloused
I been praying and writing to is a
and her rage pours out. "The God
man. And act just like all the other mens Iknow. Trifling, forgitful, and
lowdown." She refuses to call God's name again and begins instead to
write to her new-found
sister.
Here the novel takes a sudden swerve. Nettie, as it turns out, had
in with

fallen

a group

of

black

missionaries

soon

after

leaving

home.

in America,
While
Celie has been slaving
Nettie has been playing
inAfrica, ministering
to the needs of a primitive tribe
Albert Schweitzer
called the Olinka.
the scholar as a girl, her letters to Celie
Always
her
and wide
travels. Yet?and
here is
education
betray
missionary
one of the novel's few weaknesses?her
move
doesn't
writing simply
us the way Celie's does. She gives us decorous
instead
of
travelogues
It's as if the
raw, dramatic, and deeply felt transcriptions of experience.
Finn were narrated by Aunt Polly instead of
last half of Huckleberry
Huck. I'm not being entirely fair toWalker
here, since she does inter
cut Celie's new letters with Nettie's old ones in brilliant fashion, forc
of Celie's
shattered personal history.
ing us to rethink the meaning
More
to rethink the
important, she forces us with Nettie's dispatches
as a group.
history of black Americans
were
the land from which
free black men and women
in chains, has long been
uprooted and brought to America
in black American
folklore and literature as a Paradise Lost, to

Africa,
forcibly
imaged

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be returned to one day in pilgrimage. The quality of modern black life

inAmerica has done little to diminish the need for such a myth, nor the
it is embraced
force with which
by our black culture at large. Alice
in fact.
toss itout entirely,
Walker clearly wants to revise the myth?to
as
as
in
it
is
Nettie
her
Africa,
presents
letters,
pilgrim
repressively
that women
The Olinka men don't believe
patriarchal as America.
should be educated?at
like white
least not their women.
"They're
re
at
want
to
Nettie
home
who
don't
colored
learn,"
people
people
alizes with a start. And Africa's not much of a paradise for Olinka
males either. With the Second World War about to erupt, British colo
nials descend
roads through their
upon the helpless tribe, bulldozing
in order to plant
out
and
their
bush
sacred
roofleaf
ripping
village
rubber trees. The resentful black men rape, hunt game, and treat their
women
like animals. They remind Nettie, more than anything, of her
Pa.

IfAfrica
is no paradise for a black woman
from America, what
does Walker offer in its place? Her vision is a complex one, and she
it out artfully through the character of Celie. The inescapable
works
she forces Celie to see that Man is the true oppressor,
logic by which
are hers as much as Celie's, and
the boundless
rage that results?these
two-thirds of the way through the novel we begin to suspect that she
has given up on men altogether. Celie and Shug slam the door on
that Celie has
Albert and move up North to an old house inMemphis
fix
inherited from her mother. The two women
up the house,
cook,
their
open a shop that sells homemade
pants for women;
they weave
lives into a common dream inwhich male lovers and kinsmen have no
drop off to
place. As Shug tells Celie one night before the two women
sleep in each other's arms, "Us is each other's peoples now."
Walker could have ended the story with this radical feminist idyll,
but she doesn't.
Instead, as if to dramatize her own inner struggle, she
has the older black woman
teach the younger one to live life still more
can
hate the white-haired
old white man they call God,
radically. You
in the goodness of His world.
Shug tells Celie, but only if you believe
"It pisses God off ifyou walk by the color purple in a field somewhere
this pantheist
and don't notice it," she insists. Once Celie has accepted
more
task of
is
difficult
the considerably
she
faced with
principle,
seem
women
two
finally
accepting who she is. But then, just when the
a
in their own
to have remade paradise
image, Shug runs off?with
in
male
In
Walker's,
clearly?the
19-year old boy.
Shug's eyes?and
sex can't be dispensed with entirely. Black men are a part of Creation,
too.

The story ends with

aren't hard won. There's
find.

that
but no affirmations
lots of homecomings
a high, clear note here that most writers never

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