Re-reading The Color Purple: Alice Walker's Extended Critique of Racial Integration in the Novel

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik
HS: History, Myth, Fiction : African-American Novels Since 1970
Sommersemester 2003, am: 20.11.2003

Re-reading The Color Purple
Alice Walker’s Extended Critique of Racial Integration in the Novel

by

Franziska Böttcher

1 Introduction  3

2 Alice Walker’s Concept of African American Writing 5

3 The Role of Nettie’s Letters for the Critique of Racial Integration  8

3.1 Nettie’s First African Experiences in Monrovia  9

4 The Domestic Ideal of Racial Integration – The Construction of Kinship  11

4.1 The Olinka Adam-Myth 11
4.2 The White Missionary Doris Baines  12
4.3 Sofia and Miss Eleanor Jane – The Black Mammy Plantation Stereotype  14
4.4 Squeak and the Problem of White Uncles  16

5 The Critique of Missionary Work  17

6 A Fairy-Tale Ending?  19

7 Conclusion 21

8 Literature  23

1 Introduction

“ I am impressed by people who claim they can see every person and event in strict terms of black and white, but generally their work is not, in my long-contemplated and earnestly considered opinion, either black or white, but dull, uniform gray. It is boring because it is easy and requires only that the reader be a lazy reader and a prejudiced one. Each story or poem has a formula, usually two-thirds “hate whiteys guts” and one-third “I am black, beautiful, strong and almost always right.” Art is not flattery, necessarily, and the work of any artist must be more difficult than that. A man’s life can rarely be summed up in one word; even if that word is black or white. And it is the duty of the artist to present the man as he is.”¹

In 1982, Alice Walker published her most famous novel, The Color Purple. For this epistolary tale of sexual oppression and strong female relationships, Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. The Color Purple is a feminist novel about an abused and uneducated black woman’s struggle for empowerment and has been praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of black English vernacular.² In 1985, a Steven Spielberg film based on the novel was released and reached an even wider audience all over the world.
However, the publication of the novel also unleashed a storm of controversy and criticism. It became a catalyst for heated debates about black cultural representation, as a number of male African-American critics and writers complained that the novel reaffirmed old racist stereotypes about pathology in black communities and of black men in particular. They charged Walker with focusing too heavily on sexism at the expense of addressing notions of racism in America and accused her of attacking black men in general.
One of the main problems was in all probability Walker’s portrayal of a different, not at all flattering side of the black community – first of all different from “I am black, beautiful, strong and almost always right.”. Another problem was detected in the novel’s restricted domestic perspective. One of the book’s critics, Elliot Butler-Evans ³, according to Linda Selzer’s essay Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple ⁴, criticized the novel’s epistolary form as “ a strategy by which the larger African-American history, focused on racial conflict and struggle, can be marginalized because of its absence from the narration”.⁵ The restricted viewpoint of the novel’s main character, Celie, is seen as constricting the novel’s ability to analyze racial issues. “Celie’s private life pre-empts the exploration of the public lives of blacks.” ⁶ The critic bell hooks ⁷ even strongly rejected The Color Purple as “revolutionary literature” because for her the novel’s focus on the sexual oppression of women deemphasizes the “collective plight of black people” and “invali-dates…the racial agenda” of the slave narrative tradition that it draws upon.⁸
Academic discussions about the problems created by Celie’s very personal point of view were at the time paralleled by a controversy in the popular media in America, concerning the general representation of black men in novel and film. At the beginning of the 1980s there was an increasingly felt need for positive images of black people in the media that coincided with the growing recognition of the authenticity of black women writers.

The intention of this paper is to show and to analyze Walker’s often underestimated critique of racial relations in the novel The Color Purple. This analysis will be based primarily on a closer look at Nettie’s letters – the narrative’s embedded text that has been neglected by most of the early critical works on the novel.
It will be shown that one of the novel’s central questions is: Is a progress in race relations possible? And furthermore, that Walker’s answer to that question is not at all as fairy-tale-like as many critics have claimed the ending of the novel to be. The main sources for my line of argumentation will be, of course, the novel The Color Purple ⁹ itself, Alice Walker’s essay collection In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and Linda Selzer’s essay Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple.

2 Alice Walker’s Concept of African American Writing

The quotation at the beginning of this text, taken from In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens, illustrates that already in 1971 Walker held a rather precise view concerning the qualities African American writing should have and which it should not have. She criticised especially the, in her opinion, superficial structures that close their eyes towards social realities other than racism. Walker has stressed this viewpoint in several essays and speeches before writing The Color Purple and proved her point with the novel.

Many of her critics’ arguments can be brought down to one main characteristic: Walker’s novel has no clear-cut white antagonists and instead concentrates on the manifold struggles of African American women in the American south - with black males playing a major role in their problems.

[...]

1 Alice Walker,“The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist, or of the Black Writer Who Simply Works and Writes,“ In Search Of Our Mothers‘ Gardens (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1984) 137

2 www. amazon.com

3 PhD Elliot Butler-Evans, Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz

4 Linda Selzer,“Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple“ African American Review 29.1. (1995)

5 Selzer 2

6 Selzer 2

7 aka Gloria Watkins, Professor of English at City College, City University of New York

8 bell hooks, „Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple.“ Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990) 465

9 Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Tenth Anniversary Edition (London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1992)