The Color Purple

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading

The Color Purple - Alice Walker (1982) Analysis

Struggle for Identity in Modern Literature Wider Reading

The story is told through a series of letters from Celie to God, from Celie to her sister Nettie and from Nettie to Celie. They are written in a stream of consciousness - though Celie is writing  to us - not using punctuation or speech marks and spelling words in accented tones causing her voice to come alive as we read. Her simple, southern drawl aids the reader's intimate relationship with the main character "He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon Fonso, I ain't well..". This style of writing allows us to delve into the mind of Celie - how she relates to her world - a changing world of unfair customs, where males and whites are seen as superior. Celie is an uneducated black woman living in changing 1930s America - a sufferer of rape and abuse, we follow her on her journey of finding true happiness. 


Published in 1982, it's obvious that Walker laced a modern message through the story, set between the wars, relevant as much to the time of writing as to today. 

Walker herself is a black woman who grew up in a poor family in the state of Georgia in the South - a destination of extreme racial prejudice in the 1930s. Her family lived in the grasp of the Jim Crow Laws, and despite the view at the time that Black children didn't need an education and should be put to work in the fields, Walker's parents made sure that she attended school, an issue Walker explores in the novel "'sides I want her get more schoolin'". 

Walker was heavily involved in the civil rights movement which accounts for the complexities of racial identity in the novel. "Miss Millie finger the children some more, finally look at Sofia and the prizefighter. She look at the prizefighter car. She look at Sofia wristwatch. She say to Sofia, All your children so clean, she say, would you like to work for me, be my maid? Sofia say, Hell no." "He slap her." But this is contrasted against the odd moments in the text where racism appears to be almost a formality - "Well, say Sofia, I was so use to sitting up there next to her teaching her how to drive, that I just naturally clammed into the front seat. She stood outside on her side the car clearing her throat. Finally she say, Sofia, with a little laugh, This is the South. Yes ma'am, I say."

The 80s saw the major publicity of the African crisis. The novel follows Celie's sister Nettie as she works as a Missionary with a tiny tribe in Africa whose very existence is threatened by the impending doom of the capitalist white man's expansionist movement.
Religion is a major theme throughout the novel. Celie questions her loyalty to God and her views on what God actually is: 
 "Well, us talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head." " I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?)"

"What God do for me? I ast." "he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won't ever see again"

Shug (a beautiful singer of blues that Celie seeks comfort in) believes she has the wrong view of God "Nettie say somewhere in the bible it say Jesus’ hair was like lamb’s wool, I say. Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he’d have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think about they God is that his hair kinky." 
Shug recognises that the White man's view of who God is is just another way for them to suppress the coloured. This is juxtaposed against Nettie's experience of African religion where the tribe uses its ancient religious traditions of sacrificial scarring young pubescent girls and female circumcision to display opposition to the white man's influence. In doing this Walker exposes how religion can sometimes be used as a weapon or method of control which is a stark contrast to Celie's take on "religion" in admiration of delicate beauty in nature "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it". This is a theme similarly mirrored in "The Handmaid's Tale" where religion is used as a tool fundamental to control.  
Walker recognises the need for religion to be personal and not something that becomes "cult-ish" and therefore distorted - as embodied in the African tribe and the White people's church. "...have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show." " The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it"