Dr. Dara Sudhakara
Rao M.A.,M.Phil.,Ph.D.,
Senior Lecturer in
English, Vivekananda Degree College,Nellore, Andhra Pradesh.
Email:
rinkusudhakar@gmail.com
Abstract:
Alice Walker is the first major writer to
make a full-fledged attack on patriarchal domination within the black community
itself and her revolutionary writing emerges as unique decolonization of
traditional love. Walker has worked for civil rights in Liberty County, Georgia
and a number of civil rights projects in Mississippi. Walker, with her writing
of The Color Purple, gets placed among the most influential contemporary
American Writers and is almost universally recognized as a spokeswoman for
black people. Alice Walker is awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her
epistolary novel The Color Purple
(1982) which advocates women-bonding and their association leads to the self
reliance to survive the manifold oppression and humiliation suffered by the
Afro-American women. This paper projects the plethora of oppression suffered by
the potaganist, Celie in the novel. It also explores the effects of male
domination upon Celie’s spirit.
Keywords:
oppression, sexual oppression, rape, incest, humiliation.
Alice
Walker was born to sharecropper parents in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944. She grew
up to become a highly acclaimed novelist, essayist and poet. She is best known
for her novel The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction and the National Book
Award for Fiction in
1983. Walker is also known for her work as an activist. She is credited with coining the term ‘womanism’. Alice Walker's career as a writer took flight with the
publication of her third novel, The Color Purple, in 1982. The
novel is set in the early 1900s, and explores the struggles in the life of the
protagonist, Celie who passes through oppression at the hands of her father,
and later, her husband.
Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple is
written in an epistolary form. The entire novel is written in series of the
letters by Celie, the protagonist of the novel and her sister Nettie. Celie’s
letters reflect her internal conflict, her silent suffering, and the impact of
oppression and humiliation on her spirit. The
Color Purple is a novel that begins with Celie, is a poor, uneducated and
very plain looking fourteen-year-old girl’s cry for help. Celie has suffered
repeated rapes and brutal beatings by the man she believes to be her father,
Alphonso, who tells her, in the novel’s opening line, “You better not never
tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” (p.1) It is a warning
or rather a threat from the stepfather of Celie which silences her, thereby
depriving her right to even speak of herself with anybody. She is not even
allowed to share her feelings of joy or sorrow with anyone except God. Celie writes about the misery of
childhood incest, physical abuse, and loneliness in her letters to God.
Celie's letters are written in non-standard English
dialect, what Walker has called black folk language. In fact, Celie writes as
many as 50 letters to God in a simple broken language which symbolizes the
broken heart of Celie. Her communication with
God through her letters confirms her very existence and asserts that she is
still alive. “The actual language of the letters, which are written in Celie’s
folk speech without any attempt at editorializing on Walker’s part, is
similarly reaffirming; something essential to her personality.”(Trudier Harris
p.16)
Celie has been raped twice and impregnated by her
stepfather whom she thought was her real father. She suffers from an
overpowering sense of incest. She feels scared and ashamed to tell her mother
what has happened to her, and she thinks she deserves it. Adrienne Rich in Of
Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution remarks, “But fear and
hatred of our bodies often crippled our brains, some of the most brilliant
women of our time are still trying to think from somewhere outside their female
bodies hence they are still merely reproducing old form of
intellection”(p.284).
Oppression has
become the order of the day in the life of Celie. Having lost faith in man for
her rescue, she addresses her letters to God who alone understands her miserable
plight and predicament. After being repeatedly raped by her stepfather, Celie
is forced to marry a widowed farmer, Mr. __ (later called Albert), with three
children. Celie’s marriage with
him is another kind of oppression in her life .Celie is convinced that the
patriarchal society, particularly the African American society, gives the right
to a husband that he can use his wife as he wants and he can abuse and oppress her
in any way he wishes. This is seen in her husband’s answer to his son Harpo’s
question why he beats Celie. She realizes the futility of her existence with
Albert and his children. Celie submits to his ill-treatment and accepts everything
he does. The ceaseless psychic oppression and humiliation on a regular basis
results in Celie’s sense of loss of identify and individuality.
Celie is constantly humiliated by making mention of her
physical ugliness which makes her feel inferior in her own eyes and she ignores
her own body which has been put to repeated sexual and physical assaults. Celie
is forced to accept that she is ugly in the society standards because her step
father stresses on this. “She ugly, don’t even look like she kin to Nettie” (The Color
Purple P.8). Time and again Celie is called ugly and worthless by both her
Pa and her husband, and eventually she comes to accept their judgment. She
simply endures the humiliation and drastically curtails her emotional life.
Celie
becomes a sexual servant to Albert and a step mother to his children: ‘an
occasional sexual convenience’ she could escape from Alphonso who has forced
Nettie to come for living with Celie. She believes that marriage as an avenue
of escape and takes mainly to look after his unruly, children and to keep house
neat and tidy, as well as to satisfy himself sexually. Celie is convinced that
a woman has to serve and obey men in all respects and aspects and she is made a
victim of patriarchy.
Celie
physical body has exposed to untold series of rape and brutality by her
victimizers. As Gabriele Griffin observes we can see that “the body constitutes
the site of oppression and become the source of permanent anxiety. The body
dominates the novel. The central character has no control over her body and her
physical environment. Victimized from an early age she is the object of
perpetual abuse”(p.21). A similar comment is voiced by Deborah Mc Dowell in her
essay “Regarding Family Matters” in which she cautions the ways in which black
women’s bodies are reduced to the terrain upon which white and black men enact
a struggle for power and control over literary landscape.
Celie’s
life continues to be miserable. She is beaten, abused, oppressed, and
humiliated by her husband, Mr._ .To be wife means to be obedient, submissive,
and Celie describes how her husband treats her. He beats me like he beats the
children. He says, Celie, get the belt. The children are outside the room peeping
through the cracks. “All I can do is not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself,
Celie you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear man” (The Color Purple P.22). Celie's attitude of resisting the oppression
of all kinds’ is worth quoting. — To pretend that she is wood, a tree bending
but not breaking. In times of extreme physical pain Celie transforms
herself into a tree is a telling example of “a black woman’s proximity to the
passive suffering and agony of nature”. ( Badode p.38).
A black woman, by name, Sofia has also experienced the
experience of oppression and humiliation for a petty act of hitting a white
man. The white Mayor and police beat Sofia black and blue in order to reassert
their patriarchal dominance and Sofia is put in prison and she is sent to work
as a maid in the mayor’s house for twenty years. She is not even allowed to see
her children for twelve years which make her bury her sentiments deep. Sofia
protests against the racial and sexual exploitation.
Sofia is able to escape oppression and humiliation by
leaving her house and her husband, but she is unable to fight against the oppression
and humiliation which is an evil force. Sofia struggles for a meaningful
existence and shows her strong power to transcend the racist and sexist
society. She struggles for redemption and deliverance from the clutches of
manmade dungeon of oppression and humiliation in the patriarchal society.
The thought of leaving her helpless sister at the
mercy of Mr.__ troubles her deeply. But Celie sends her to the only person she
thinks would be able to help Nettie, the minister’s wife, whom she had met once
in town and seen her, accompanied by a little girl, whom Celie instinctively
knows to be her own child, Olivia. Thus, Celie is separated from her sister Nettie,
who is taken in by Samuel, the minister, and his wife, Corinne to look after
their adopted children Olivia and Adam who are in fact Celie’s children by her
stepfather.
Celie’s only confirmation of existence to herself is
the letters initially written to God both in hope and hopelessness. And the
little ray of hope left in her is lost when she discovers that Mr. __ has been
intercepting Nettie’s letters addressed to her. Then she makes her strongest
religious statement addressing God, “You must be sleep” (The Color Purple p.183). When Celie discovers the
letters from Nettie the life of Celie undergoes a transformation and finds the
truth about Pa that he is not her real father. In reality, her real father is
killed by the white merchants.
The liberation
of Celie comes through Shug Avery, the blues singer the mistress of Mr._ Celie’s
transformation is brought about by her journey along with Shug to the big city,
Memphis, where a new life of independence and happiness with the establishment
of her own business. Celie practices the ideologies of Marxist feminism and
radical feminism to break the male supremacy. Celie tries to replace
heterosexual love by lesbian association with Shug Avery in which she advocates
the radical feminists’ ideology that a woman’s primary relationships are with
other women.
Celie leaves Mr._ and lives with Shug and establishes
a female centered household where there is beauty, love and laughter. She moves
to the path of self-sufficiency not by the means of wage labour but by means of
a trade that is both artistic and necessary. She attains her liberation when
she is able to break the male dictated stereotype. Shug is the only reason of
physical and psychological development of Celie. The Color Purple is a
novel which highlights the oppression of women and it is also a saga of the
black woman’s fight with oppression and humiliation to gain her identity. Celie
is a representative of all women in general and African American in particular who
suffers from the oppression and become a victim to social tyrannies.
The title of the novel is an important symbol and has its own
relevance. In the western standards, Purple symbolizes elegance, authority and
dignity. At the outset, Celie does not wear purple clothes, which suggests that
she has not got self reliance and self- identity. With Shug's help, Celie
begins to make a living by herself, gets self reliance in terms of economy. Towards
the end of the novel, Albert, the husband of Celie, has carved a purple frog to
her as a gift which denotes the recognition for Celie.
References:
1. Badode, Ram.
Contemporary American Literature, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors,
2000
2.
Griffin Gabriele. “Writing the Body: Reading Joan Riley, Grace Nicholas,
NtozakeShanghe”.
Black Women’s writing. Ed. Gina
Wisher, Hong Kong: Lumiere Press Ltd., 1993.
3.
Rich, Adrienne Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution W. W.
Norton & Company; Norton Publication.
Ed edition 1995
4. Trudier Harris,
“From Victimization to Free Enterprise”: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,”
Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 14
(Spring 1986)
