Celie's process of finding a voice and self-fulfillment In Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple'

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Female Relationships and Gender Roles Sexuality and God Letters Works cited

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Celie’s process of finding a voice and self-fulfillment In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

For just over two hundred years, the concern to depict the quest of the black speaking subject to find his or her voice has been a repeated topos of the black tradition, and perhaps has been its most central trope. As theme, as revised trope, as a double-voiced narrative strategy, the representation of characters and texts finding a voice has functioned as a sign both of the formal unity of the Afro-American literary tradition and of the integrity of the black subjects depicted in this literature (Gates 29-30).

In his article “Color me Zora: Alice Walker’s (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text”, Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks about The Color Purple in connection with other novels by black authors (especially Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston) whose characters are all looking for a voice throughout the story. The theme of finding a voice seems to be very characteristic of African-American writing. Tamar Katz points out that “The Color Purple remains, above all, [...] a novel about the instruction of Celie and her coming into consciousness (69). And, speaking of The Color Purple, Diane Gabrielsen Scholl also clarifies that [t]he novel is [...] the story of Celie’s changing fortunes [...] as Celie gradually overcomes the oppressive conditions of her despised situation, achieving in the end the prosperity and family security she has longed for (109).

Walker emphasizes throughout the novel that the ability to express one’s thoughts and feelings is crucial to developing a sense of self. According to Carla Kaplan, Celie “in some way hinges on her ability to narrate her life story and to find an audience fit to hear and understand it (181). She argues that Celie does not exactly need to find a voice but rather learn how to use it:

Walker, in fact, does not really represent Celie as “finding” a voice. Even in her most oppressed state she is able to express herself by writing. It is the process of developing that voice, orienting it toward her different audiences, that is really at stake. Above all, Celie needs

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to learn to use her voice to resist oppression. She must be convinced that resistance and contestation are not incompatible with fulfillment and satisfaction. Making this convincing, [...], proves a very difficult task (Kaplan 185).

In the course of this paper I would like to show how Celie gradually overcomes her situation as an oppressed and finds and uses the voice that brings her freedom and happiness.

Initially, Celie is completely unable to resist those who abuse her. As a young girl, she is constantly subjected to abuse and told that she is ugly. Celie does little to fight back against her stepfather, Alphonso. Later in life, when her husband, Mr. ______, abuses her, she reacts in a similarly passive manner. Remembering Alphonso’s warning that she “better not never tell nobody but God” (Walker 11) about his abuse of her, Celie feels that the only way to persevere is to remain silent and invisible. She decides that this is the best way ensure her survival. Celie is essentially an object, an entirely passive party who has no power to assert herself through action or words. Her letters to God, in which she begins to pour out her story, become her only outlet and means of self-expression. However, God is a distant figure, who she doubts cares about her concerns. Celie writes in her first letter to God: Dear God,

I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl.

(Walker 11) Henry Louis Gates Jr. recounts for the fact that Celie places her present self (“I am”) under erasure by saying that it is a “device that reminds us that she is writing, and searching for her voice by selecting, then rejecting, word choice or word order [...]” (39). Because Celie is so unaccustomed to articulating her experience, her narrative is initially muddled despite her best efforts at transparency.

Female Relationships and Gender Roles

Numerous times, other women tell Celie that she must learn to fight back and therefore encourage her to use her voice. “You got to fight. You got to fight”, Nettie tells Celie when she sees how Mr. _____’s children ride roughshod over her. “You’ve got to fight”, Nettie writes. “I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is how to stay alive”, Celie replies. Mr. ____’s sister Kate also tells Celie to fight: “I can’t do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself.” But Celie sees no sense in fighting: “I think about Nettie, dead. She

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