Two Observations on the Structure and Voice of The Color Purple
First Note:
Since its publication in 1982, Alice Walker's The Color Purple has attracted a good
deal of critical commentary in addition to a wide general audience. The MLA International Bibliography lists
better than half a hundred journal articles and contributions to books, and
there have, in addition, been a number of significant extended discussions in
books devoted to Afro-American literature, among them The Afro-American Novel and its Traditions, by Bernard Bell, The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis
Gates, and Inspiriting Influences by
Michael Awkward.
Commentators have focused on several themes, including, most
notably, Walker's relation to Zora Neale Hurston in general and Their Eyes Were Watching God in
particular, on Walker's use of vernacular speech, and on the themes of
lesbianism, male violence toward females, and the refiguring of Christian
religiosity. But although several
commentators have discussed Walker's use of the epistolary genre, almost no
attention has been paid to the purely formal and structural aspects of The Color Purple. The purpose of these brief observations is to
call attention to certain striking formal or structural features of Walker's
novel, in an effort to complicate somewhat our reading of it.
The Color Purple
consists of a single line of direct discourse, uttered, we assume, by the man whom
the main character, Celie, knows as Pa, followed by a series of ninety-two
letters, several of which are embedded within other letters, and five of which
are somewhat ambiguously introduced by a comment from Celie, italicized. Fifty-five of the letters are written by
Celie to God [or "G-o-d" in one case]; twenty-two are written by Celie's sister,
Nettie, to Celie; fourteen are written
by Celie to Nettie; and the last letter is addressed by Celie "Dear
God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky,
dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God."
[The opening line of direct discourse, for those who do not
recall or have not read the novel, is:
"You better not never tell
nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.]
The first fifty-five of Celie's letters to God are unsigned. Now, a letter to God is, in the Christian
tradition in which Celie is situated, a prayer.
And the appropriate ending for a prayer is the expression of
affirmation, "Amen." So the
absence of the word "amen" from these fifty-five letters can be taken
by us, I think, as Walker's formal expression of Celie's inability to affirm or
accept or consent to the God in whom she has been told by Pa to confide. She writes the prayers, but she is unable to
bring them to a satisfactory, and satisfied, closure.
In Celie's forty-ninth letter to God is embedded Nettie's
first letter to her. There follow
fourteen more letters from Nettie to Celie, interspersed with Celie's letters
to God, until, in her fifty-fifth letter, Celie packs it in with God. "You must be sleep," she writes
abruptly. Now she turns her epistolary
attentions to Nettie. Her first letter
to Nettie is unsigned, but Nettie's sixteenth letter to Celie, which comes next
in the series, ends with the injunction "Pray for us." Celie's very next letter, her second to
Nettie, begins with the flat, dramatic announcement, "I don't write to God
no more, I write to you." And this
letter, in which Celie reports an extended conversation with Shug in which her
conception of God is radically called into question, is signed "Amen"!
Celie is finally able to utter this word, though only as an affirmation
of her relationship with her sister, not as an affirmation of God's presence.
Celie now writes six more letters to Nettie signed
"Amen," [including the fourth in the series, in which we get the
characteristic call-and-response of the Black church, "Amen, say
Shug. Amen, amen."] In the ninth letter to Nettie, Celie announces
that Pa is dead, and this letter is
not signed "Amen," nor are any of the subsequent letters to Nettie.
At the very end of the novel, after Celie has written
herself into existence as a sexually, morally, and socially complete
woman; after she has gathered about her
the whole extended family of players in her complex, self-assured psycho-drama;
after her proper sister Nettie has returned from her brush with Spelman
College, W. E. B. DuBois, President Tubman, Africa, missionary work, New York,
and all the other icons and symbols of socially acceptable Negro upward
mobility -- in short, after Walker has established dramatically that true
self-discovery requires the courageous taking possession of an authentic
authorial voice, and after Celie has
successfully recreated God in a form suitable to be the object and recipient of
prayer, NOW Celie can finally undertake and complete the act of
prayer. And so we get the final letter
of the novel, which is indeed a prayer to God, concluded by the word
"Amen."
A few words about this analysis before I move on to the
second Note. The Color Purple is an epistolary novel, which is to say a novel
consisting of a series of letters. Every
doctoral student in any English Literature program learns that the epistolary
form was the first form of the novel, exemplified by the classic eighteenth
century novels of Samuel Richardson, Pamela,
Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison.
[I never studied English Literature, but I was married for twenty-three
years to a distinguished scholar of the subject, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, whose
doctoral dissertation was on Samuel Richardson, later published as Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century
Puritan Character, so I absorbed all of this as pillow talk, as it
were.] Now, for as long as I can recall,
scholars of literature have been alerted to the significance of the formal
structural features of works of fiction or poetry, and they are forever
explaining to naive readers that one cannot really understand what a novel is
about unless one pays attention to narrative voice and all the rest of that
stuff. For a late twentieth century
author to adopt the form of the epistolary novel is a clear signal to any
sophisticated reader that something
important is happening here to which attention must be paid. It is simply astonishing that not one of the
extremely sophisticated critics I have cited even so much as asks the question,
"Why did Walker choose to write an epistolary novel?" These critics would never make the mistake of
failing to examine the form of Joyce's Ulysses
or Finnegan's Wake. Indeed, they would not even make the mistake of
failing to ask such questions about Invisible
Man. So why on earth did they not
ask it about The Color Purple?
I really do think there is only one possible answer. The
Color Purple is a novel by a Black woman in which themes of lesbianism and
abusive treatment of Black women by Black men come up. It just never occurs to the critics, including
such sophisticated writers as Henry Louis Gates, that Walker might actually be
a thoughtful, self-aware, intelligent author whose authorial choices are made
deliberately for some deliberate artistic purpose.
Second Note:
A number of commentators on The Color Purple have written critically or disparagingly about the
contrast between the power and immediacy of Celie's narration and the stilted
formality of Nettie's letters, with their implausibly proper English and
lengthy, tedious, quasi-Ethnographic accounts of the African people in whose
midst she spends so many years as a missionary.
Once again, in this day of super-sophistication about matters of
literary voice, none of the commentators has thought to ask why Walker, who
clearly has the authorial skill to create the compelling voice of Celie,
chooses to conjure so unappealing a voice as that of Nettie. Walker's choice may, of course, be a literary
mistake, but it is manifestly impossible that it is a mere accident or oversight.
There are some clues in Nettie's letters to which we ought
to pay attention in our attempt to discover Walker's aims. Consider first of all the contrast in diction
and grammar of the two sets of letters.
These are sisters, after all, raised in the same household and educated,
such as may be, in the same school. Yet
one writes in a direct, forceful, compelling, semi-literate dialect, and the
other writes in stilted, educated, boring correct English. Later on, I will suggest that this is one of
the clues to what the novel is about, what its message is, but for the moment,
let us simply note that since Walker wrote both sets of letters, she could
perfectly well have made Nettie's letters as compelling as Celie's, had she
chosen to do so.
The letters written by Celie exhibit a subtle progressive
development, whereas those written by Nettie might all have been written at the
same time. One example will
suffice. Celie always refers to the man
to whom she has been married as "Mr. -----." In the earlier letters, she consistently
misuses the possessive case, writing "Mr. ----- children" on page 25
or "Mr. ---- daddy" on page 58.
Then, in the dramatic and pivotal letter to Nettie, in which she
announces that she is not writing to God any longer, she uses it correctly. --
"Mr. ----'s evil" on page 179, thereby signifying linguistically a
growth in self-command and assurance.
Nettie, on the other hand, uses the possessive correctly from the very
beginning -- see her second letter, p. 119 -- "the Reverend Mr. ----'s
place."
Nettie follows a path in the novel that is stereotypically
the correct path -- what today we would call, in a different context, P.C. She leaves the rural South, goes North,
becomes involved with Christian missionaries off to do good works in Africa. The couple she joins are virtually a
caricature -- the woman, Corinne, went to Spelman Institute [later Spelman
College]; her husband, Samuel, met the
young W. E. B. DuBois. The two of them
met President Tubman in Liberia [which, as it happens, is historically
impossible. Tubman did not become
president of Liberia until much later.]
Nettie's letters are filled with pseudo-anthropological accounts of
African customs -- in which, incidentally, can be found striking parallels to
Celie's life, marked by direct and unmistakable verbal echoes. [One example:
Nettie says of the Olinka:
"There is a way that men speak to women that reminds me too much of
Pa. They listen just long enough to
issue instructions." Celie, in one
of her letters, says "I know white people never listen to coloured,
period, If they do, they only listen
long enough to be able to tell you what to do."]
One would expect
Nettie, who has escaped from the degradation of her childhood, to return and
take Celie away to Harlem at the end of the novel. Instead, Walker inverts the expected
conclusion by having Celie gather Nettie and the rest of her extended
"family" about her at the end of the novel. It is Celie, not Nettie, who has actually
taken the longest and most productive journey.
Surely, it seems to me, this central structural feature of the novel
must signal Walker's rejection of [or, as they say in literary circles,
revision of] the dominant literary tradition and dominant theses of the Harlem
literary renaissance. I am not simply
calling attention to Walker's reversal or revision of the representation of
male and female roles within the Afro-American literary tradition. At stake here too is the role of the rural
South versus the urban North, etc. What
is especially interesting is that Walker, the person, followed Nettie's path,
but she has written a novel in which Celie is the compelling central figure.
In short, a great deal is going on in the Color Purple, as in any novel.
But it seems clear from these elementary facts about the formal
structure of the work that Walker has chosen to write a story about the process
by which a Black woman can achieve the possibility of successful prayer, and at
the same time, to call into question standard evaluative assumptions within the
Afro-American literary tradition about the centrality of the Southern rural
experience and the Northern flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. It is also possible that attention to these
formal features of the novel will help readers to resist the temptation to
construe it as a naive expression of Walker's unmediated attitudes toward
Lesbianism or the mistreatment of Black women by Black men.
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