In psychoanalytic terms this scene presents the inauguration of primary narcissism that, as a psychical reality, can only be the primal myth of a return to the maternal breast (Laplanche 72). Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Literature. Both an intensely personal and highly political act, Squeak's rape exposes the denial of kinship at the heart of race relations in the South and underscores the individual and institutional power of whites to control the terms of kinshipand whatever power those definitions conveyfor their own interests.13. Vol. Albert press me on the arm. Cixous, Hlne, and Catherine Clment. One is left thinking that Walker wishes to thwart her own ideological ends or that she simply does not know how to write novels. Making is living, destroying is death and nothingness. Barnet, Sylvan, Morton Berman, and William Burto. In this passage, sewing and conversation are allied and inseparable, part of the alternative methodology of speech Walker is explicating. When Celie discovers the long-obscured truth about her familythat her real father was lynched, her mother was crazy, and Pa was not really her fathershe declares to God: You must be sleep (183). For me and for many of my students and fellow readers over the past fifteen years, the last letter in Walker's epistolary novel functions to invoke a good cry that is identical to the impact of the classics of the feminine good-cry genre, from the climatic moments of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to the end of It's a Wonderful Life.2 I will argue that the source of the novel's affective impact is not individual readers' personal (or somehow essentially feminine) ability to identify with the characters but, rather, the novel's narrative technique, particularly the ways it uses focalization and address to underscore the novel's affirmation of what contemporary U.S. culture understands as feminine mythologies. African genital mutilation labeled in the text as female initiation rites and a bit of bloody cutting similarly divides and constricts the body. This life soon be over. This bedroom scene is the beginning of Celie's working through her rape trauma with abreaction and reconstruction of the traumatic events. It remains theoretically impossible for letters to compose an unbroken stream. 3. On the Development of Female Identity: Issues of Mother-Daughter Interaction during the Separation-Individuation Process. Symposium on The Many Faces of Eve. University of California at Los Angeles, Feb. 1984. Masternarratives is, of course, Fredric Jameson's term, though he uses it more generally to denote the hegemonic discourse of the ruling class and intends no specific reference to gender. Therefore, I would suggest that The Color Purple is a parodic inversion of the comedy of manners,1 and so undercuts the form at the same time that it ironically adheres to its intentionsto improve and to open the closed social order it dramatizes. She do what she want, don't pay me no mind at all. 1 (spring 1988): 69-84. The New Yorker December 30, 1985: 69-71. Bergren, Ann L. T. Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought. Arethusa 16 (1983): 69-95. [In the following essay, Weisenburger examines the temporal inconsistencies in The Color Purple, noting the popular and critical reception of the novel's errors and themes. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Peter Brook's Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative discusses the reader's drive to work through and thus plot a text in terms of the desire for satiation (New York: Vintage Books, 1985). Thus, when she suddenly decides to drive Sophia home for a visit, Miss Millie stalls the car and ruins the transmission, the mistress unable to master driving in reverse. This focalization invites the reader to participate emotionally from the subject-position of the oppressed, in the diegetic good times and the bad. 155-78. It is a style that mirrors Celie's traumatized cognitive processes and depressed emotional state. Although I don't see identification as the only analogical link between characters with fluid identities and implied reading processes, I do attempt here to respond to her suggestion. Black Feminist Criticism. Instead she kills her young son Itys, roasts and grills Itys's flesh, and serves this feast to her husband. The first fifty letters in the novel are addressed by Celie to Dear God. Up to that point, the narrative form more closely resembles a diary than an epistolary fiction; the letters to God are a chronicle of Celie's isolation, inspired by her supposed-father's injunction against her reporting his repeated, incestuous rapes: You better not never tell nobody but God (11). Ed. One could argue that if Celie symbolically returns to a preoedipal state, her subversive language, with its poetic pulsions and absences, can be connected with Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora. Cheung, King-Kok. Shengold discusses the effects of soul murder upon artistic creativity in the works of three literary survivors: Dickens, Chekhov, and Kipling (181-208; 209-32; 233-83). Saunders, James Robert. The Color Purple. After he through, I say, he make me finish trimming his hair. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Think bout heaven later. And they laugh. Nettie traveled with them to Africa, where they tried to Christianize the people of the Olinka tribe. Finally, in Celie's last letter, written in her early fifties, she describes herself and Albert and Shug sitting out on the porch after dinner. It is a continually interrupted text, a paradox of patterned disorder: spatial design against temporal,8 and one that continually straddles the gulf between presence and absence. Through speech Celie establishes her freedom, breaking Albert's hold on her. Mitchell, Juliet. Importantly, the folks that Harpo refers to now include Celie's African daughter-in-law, Tashi. 167. And this epistolary mythos can be closed in one of two essential ways (Altman 150-1). Vol. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., gen. ed. 167. After unburdening herself with words and tears, and unable consciously to recall the love of her preoedipal parents, Celie angrily says, Nobody ever love me. Shug immediately responds: I love you, Miss Celie. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Terrible feeling. Yvonne Freccero. New York: International Universities, 1965. Otherwise, the reader's sense of order mainly depends on a strained, erroneous network of internal determinants such as births, the given ages of characters and other references. Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Celie learns that she should focus on the creation, not the person of God, as Shug directs: My first step from the old white man was trees. How is she enabled to take pleasureher own pleasurein creative work and unselfish love as an adult? Ed. Then other people (203). The rules, it seems clear, have changed, and this shift is linked to Nettie's tie to Celie. It is no accident that the word habit can refer to behavior or to dress. It'd kill your mammy. Thus, Celie writes, addressing her letters to God because she has no one else to write to and because she knows she must never tell no body. But even then Celie addresses her letters to the orthodox Christian God, another version of the father. Trans. Worse still, that God is gray bearded and white (201). Subsequent invocations of humor cumulatively emphasize that relations of unequal power make humorous interaction impossible. SOURCE: Tavormina, M. Teresa. Celie, too, is repeatedly raped by her Pa, who impregnates her twice and then gives away her children. This external silencing forces a second mode of expression to unfold, Celie's diary letters to God. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976. By letter seven, when Pa offers Celie to Mr. in marriage, Celie is near twenty (9). These letters are poised against self-destruction; they are an attempt to preserve a real self by burying it within a diary. 3; Black Writers, Eds. Jean Fagan Yellin. While disagreeing with hooks about the genre of slave narratives in general and with her assessment of Walker's use of that tradition in particular, I want to acknowledge my debt to her work elsewhere on plantation family structures (as discussed in n14, below). Ed. This may seem an overrehearsed, even an outdated argument, but the problems are still acute for women of color. Shug convinces Celie that it is better to create than to destroy, and Celie subsequently takes up sewing pants as a creative outlet. Yet even within this context, it might seem anomalous to call Alice Walker's 1982 work, The Color Purple, a comedy. The male-bullying and domination begin for Celie at fourteen when the man she thinks is Pa rapes her on at least two occasions, rendering her unable to ever again bear children. Albert makes comfortable shirts to go with Celie's pants; Corrine and Samuel and Nettie make a school. Not surprisingly, the book lacks any real intellectual or theological rigor or coherence, and the fusing of social protest and utopia is really nothing more than confounding and blundering, each seeming to subvert the reader's attention from the other. Indeed, the publication of her latest novel, The Temple of My Familiar, has heightened criticism that Walker has adopted a mushy New Age philosophy to confront a historical Christianity that has misled and misplaced black women. Spielberg has the whiskey-soaked, bluesy, dionysian crowd wind its way out of Harpo's juke and bring the field into Reverend Avery's pulpit while the entire cast sings the verses of a gospel lyric (God Is Trying to Tell You Something). Finally, what is meant by that richly allusive symbol, the color purple? New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. At the beginning of The Color Purple, Alice Walker addresses her book: To the spirit: Without whose assistance Neither this book Nor I would have been written. These words imply a self that is written, a body formed by an external authority. Because the lower case other more nearly represents a single imago or object of desire, I use it to refer to Shug's relationship with Celie. Ed. (Indeed, it even slipped past movie director Stephen Spielberg and his scriptwriter Menno Meyjes, who sleepily translated every one of these errors to the screen at the same time thatincredible as it seemsthey called our attention to them by using on-screen dates, fixing the opening scene in 1909, and so on.) He threaten lightening, floods, and earthquakes. Almost exactly contemporaneous with the novel, If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like poses the two questions of blackness and femininity as they intersect in the problematic figure of that lighter-skinned, straighter-haired black woman who is a stock figure in many American fictions. Rather than revealing the source of shame to a later generation, Celie's success in sewing helps Albert face his own shame and even begin a process of self-regeneration. Including among their number one colored man from Alabama, the mbeles represent a form of kinship that is defined by racial rather than national identity. In epistolary narrative this common problem is usually handled by having the correspondent acknowledge her repetition of already-told detail, usually by an I told him about what you told me. Yet there are related moments like this, as when Celie informs Nettie I don't write to God no more (199), when in fact Nettie can have no idea what writing Celie is speaking of. Charting the course of empire through a catalogue of the material culture appropriated by missionaries from all the countries they have been (and, chillingly, from peoples who no longer exist), this passage brilliantly underscores Walker's ability to maintain the integrity of the narrative's personal perspectivehere that of a young girl's wonder at her first glimpse into the riches of her African heritageeven as she simultaneously invites readers to resituate that perspective in a wider context of race and class. Harris also provides an excellent summary of these polarized reviews. 167. It is quite striking that Squeak, Harpo's lover, is willing to be raped by the white deputy so that Harpo's wife can be released from prison, a gesture even more unusual because the family expects this sacrifice. The pharmakos generally appears in comedy in one of two ways and can be regarded as a fool or worse by the fictional society, and yet impresses the real audience as having something more valuable than his [or her] society has (48); or the pharmakos may choose to repudiate the society, and in doing so become a kind of pharmakos in reverse (48). Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. For an important discussion of the treatment of rape as an archetype in contemporary women's writing, see Froula. Revolution in Poetic Language. By sewing, Celie narrows the gap between the sexes, making pants for both men and women. Then my pussy lips be black. Ed. Clearly, in part, it represents the wonder of the natural world, to which Celie's eyes have been newly awakened: I been so busy thinking about him I never truly notice nothing God make. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. The terminology of psychoanalysis is extremely useful for this process, although the theorists I cite might not always agree with each other. The Color Purple might thus be read according to the way it appears to naturally occupy its cultural landscape. During Nettie's adolescent years, first at home with Alphonso and later with Celie and Albert, Celie encourages Nettie to keep at her books (14) in order to escape her older sister's fateand Nettie complies. Maybe a grandson. Time and again, the incest taboo is symbolically dissolved as the different categories of social relations, family and sexual, are intertwined. While my purpose here is to focus primarily upon the representation of racial integration rather than gender, I should also note that this domestic ideal is expressed specifically in terms of matrilineal bonds. Maybe so. : I, 13. Having a Good Cry. Boundary and Space: An Introduction to the Work of D. W. Winnicott. Indeed, the later displacement of the Olinka villagers by the English roadbuildersthe main action in the African sections of The Color Purplesimply recapitulates the colonial process of integration already embedded in Nettie's narrative of her travels through the less remote areas of Africa. That passage gets me every time; for me, no other good-cry moment can surpass it. Taking one's place within a patriarchal text leads to the obliteration of feminine subjectivity. Hopeful that she will be able to gain Sophia's release from the warden on the basis of their kinship, the others dress Squeak up like she a white woman with instructions to make the warden see the Hodges in you (82). Gale Cengage Disrupting generic boundaries is connected with disrupting gender boundaries: feminist writers use subversive narrative strategies to infiltrate and reshape ideological fictions of femininity. But it is not only through such narrative indirection and recontextualization that the novel engages issues of race and class. By writing about her rape, Celie also externalizes her experiences so that they do not destroy her. Think of representations of sexuality in popular films, for example. Taught by Shug, whose religious practice is to admire, Celie metamorphoses into a Miranda, taking childlike delight in the brave new world to which her latent sensory responses have been awakened. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock (p. 179). Took me long enough to notice you such good company, he say. Therefore, while it may seem incongruous to classify The Color Purple as a comedy, it cannot truly be called anything else, for it seeks to improve society by eliminating the limitations prescribed by the societal norms. If I was buried, I wouldn't have to work (18). And we don't, in any event, always get to choose our contexts or our adversaries. Still more inconsistencies begin to mount up. One of Freud's most controversial ideas is his suggestion that women tend to develop inferior object-choices to men's: where men transfer their narcissism to an other, women tend to rechannel love back into the self.10 Such women love themselves more than anyone else, and they seek not to love but to be loved (On Narcissism 89). Tavormina's best point is that The Color Purple is itself a kind of quilt, a mosaic of patches from everyday life and memory brought together so as to make a whole meaning from Celie's and Nettie's seemingly separate lives (225). And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more. She can't talk. Celie's reason to survive is positive, although her vision is limited. Still, he begged off the larger question of mimetic fidelity by noting that these might all be explainable in the context of current male-female antagonisms within the black community, to which Walker was presumably the better witness (Towers 36). Us totter toward one nother like us use to do when us was babies. Celie's letters create this mediation implicitly throughout the text, as she attempts both to preserve herself from and recreate herself into sentience. Shug tells Celie that she should make herself a pair of pants because they would suit (another bivalent term) her better, given the work she does, even if they are not traditional for a woman: What I need pants for? I ast. The first word he likely to speak won't be nothing he learn from you (p. 234). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this epistolary novel but also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to reader. To take needle or pen in hand, for man or woman, is to place oneself on a spectrum of creative possibility that stretches ultimately to the splendid art of experienced and inspired weavers, writers, web-workers of all kinds. I suggest that the reverse is the case: that is, that Celie, often against overwhelming odds, works toward and achieves a stable and authentic sense of self, a True Self, and that Nettie, who is cared for and protected by Celie until she joins the black missionaries Corrine and Samuel, the adoptive parents of Celie's two children, develops in infancy the beginning of a False Self that is strengthened and formed by her immediate family environment and the educational system. Sekora, John. It'd kill your mammy (p. 11). In fact, Doris's relationship to the villagers is decidedly paternal from the outset, since her formal kinship with the Akwee begins when she is presented with a couple of wives (195) in recognition for her contributions to the village.10 The fact that she continues to refer to the Olinka as the heathen in her discussions with Nettie implies that, in spite of her fondness for her grandson, Doris never overcomes a belief in the essential difference of the Africans attributed to her by the Missionary Society in England: She thinks they are an entirely different species from what she calls Europeans.