Language as object
In various ways, the discursive strategies of Walker’s novel accentuate the power embedded in language and communication. Most instances of communication, oral as well as written, are related to issues of oppression or liberation as well as to issues of gender and race. It could thus be argued that the novel’s literary form and narrative strategies underscore its basic themes. In this context the genre of the epistolary novel, its formal features as well at its history, is essential. As writes Ann Bower: “Examining a genre that presents its protagonists in the midst of discourse also enables us to understand the ways language and writing encode power” (1997, 8).
The epistolary novel could be described as the textual cradle of the modern novel in the English language. In Janet Altman’s words, “epistolary narrative is primarily a product of that formative era in which the novel staked out its claim to status as a major genre” (1982, 5). It initiated a modern literature focussed on character psychology but became outmoded as narrative discourse developed and grew more refined and complex.67 However, the structure of an epistolary novel can be an intricate affair. Epistolary discourse frequently involves issues of deceit, manipulation or persuasion, with potential to oppress as well as to liberate.
Most obviously, letters can be vehicles of verbal manipulation in the sense that their writer seeks to sway or deceive his or her addressee with words. For instance, in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons (1782) there is an intricate web of epistolary plotting, deceit and
67 When Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility as early as in 1811 she made letters carry an important part of the story, the novel contains 21 letters, but did not make them the narrative mode of the text. It is, however, speculated that the first version of the novel, Elinor and Marianne, was in the epistolary form (Bray 2003, 1).
Seen in a historical perspective it could be argued that the letter was gradually “phased out.”
seduction68 where the most cunning characters abuse their power and position as well as their way with words. However, in an epistolary novel the letter is not only of significance as message but also as object:“The interest of much epistolary fiction derives neither from the letter’s suitability as a vehicle for narrative, nor from its ability to mirror the soul; instead, the letter ‘exceeds’ its role as narrative vehicle and becomes itself the object of interest. Letters are kissed, wept upon, eaten, beaten, held to the bosom, and caressed in place of the lovers who sent them” (Beebee 1999, 50). Letters in an epistolary novel, as well as the diary in a diary novel, play a dual textual role: they are synonymous with the novel’s form and
language; they are the novel, but they are also language as narrative objects;69 physical pieces of communication that can be possessed, passed on, stolen or held back. As Helen
Constantine sums it up in her introduction to Dangerous Liaisons:
A letter is a chameleon-like entity. It may in turn be an auto-portrait, a weapon against an enemy, an instrument of mediation or manipulation, an internal monologue, a personal diary, an unconscious revelation of character, a threat or an instrument of ridicule […] They [letters] can be hidden, torn up, kissed, enclosed with other letters, copied out, returned, dictated or left unread. (Constantine 2007, xvii-xviii)
The letter is, in other words, a versatile and highly meaningful narrative building block.
In Walker’s novel the letter as object and potential as narrative building block is exploited to the full. Nevertheless, epistolary form as it appears in The Color Purple has received a lot of critical attention and has thrown some critics off balance. Marjorie Pryse argues that Walker merely pays lip-service to the epistolary tradition and its early, formative texts,70 and, although acknowledging the importance of epistolarity, Michael Awkward comments that “a significant portion of Celie’s text resembles a diary novel more than it does an epistolary novel” (1989, 148). Partly because of Celie’s lack of an epistolary interlocutor the argument has been made that The Color Purple could be seen as a diary novel. Michael Awkward, for instance, argues that Celie “is writing not in order to illicit a response from a reader but, rather, simply to record the events of her life” (1989, 148). It cannot be denied that Celie’s letters to God resemble diary entries, because they are read by no one and written to no person, and it could even be argued that writing to no one represents an effacement of self.
However, they are not written as diary entries; they are addressed to someone, although not to a person. Diaries are not written with the desire to communicate with someone; their author
68 That is, plotting, deceit and seduction take place via the letters. In other epistolary novels the acts of writing and reading letters as such do not contribute significantly to the plot; letter writing is merely a means to report what has taken place outside the letters. This is the case in, for instance, Tobias Smollet’s The Expeditions of Humphry Clinker (1771) and, mostly, in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778).
69 It can thus be said that the letter is an object within its own discourse.
70 Marjorie Pryse, quoted in Linda Kauffman (1992, 188).
does not intend them to be read.71 Letters are written with a desire to communicate, and the absence of a recipient in an epistolary situation emphasizes the writer’s loneliness and isolation. In the words of Linda Kauffman, “[t]he letter is thus a tangible measure both of the heroine’s isolation and of her desperate need to communicate” (1992, 186). Writing her letters to God, Celie desires to communicate but has no person with whom she can communicate – neither orally nor in writing.
In The Color Purple the presence, or absence, of letters as physical objects reflects patriarchal oppression of women but also their self-emancipation. Mister___ does not himself contribute to the epistolary exchange, he is not himself a writer, but he nevertheless
conditions it by oppressing Celie and keeping her in domestic confinement. He thus
perpetuates her father’s order that she speak to no one, which is what causes Celie’s letters to God in the first place. The only sentence in the novel that is not framed by a letter is the opening line spoken by Celie’s father: “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” The sentence hovers over the text and sets it in motion, thematically as well as formally, demanding obeisance but also representing a potential challenge. Secondly, epistolary exchange between Celie and her sister is disrupted because Nettie’s letters to Celie are intercepted, stolen and hidden by Mister___, who keeps them as spoils in his secret place under the floorboards. Mister__’s intrusion is an exercise of patriarchal control. As a result, the natural epistolary sequence is broken, something which is reflected in the structure of the novel: the first half of the novel consists of Celie’s letters to God, letters she is permitted to write but which can be read by no one; the second half consists of letters from Nettie to Celie, letters Mister__ intercepts but which Celie still reads long after they have been received; and Celie’s letters of response to Nettie, letters she is not allowed to write and that remain unread.
The Color Purple illustrates that in epistolary novels there is often little distance between form and content since the very act of writing the letters can form a central part of the plot and the novel’s structure reflects the rhythm of epistolary exchange. Absent letters or letters out of sequence can be meaningful components in the novel. The normal progress of epistolary exchange is that letters follow each other alternately, but in epistolary novels this order of events is more often than not broken and complicated, thus reflecting the novel’s central conflict. For instance, Mariana in Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) never receives
71 At least, this is typically the case. In the cases of well-known people, diaries are sometimes composed with a view to future publication. However, in a diary novel, it is most often the diary as a private and intimate form that is in focus.
an answer to her amorous letters to her cavalier,72 so that her letters become an account of the rise and fall of her unrequited passion; in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa “the unopened letter, the intercepted letter, the forged letter, the deceitful letter, letters that arrive too late ... letters to parents written while still in their house” (Altman 1982, 25–26) make the novel “a tragedy of indirect communication” (25). In The Color Purple, as in many canonical epistolary novels, the intercepted letters as well as the consequences of this interception in a very concrete way illustrate how communication can be controlled and manipulated, and how language can be used to control and manipulate. The letters are amenable to representations of language and power since they, literally, illustrate who owns the word and who allots the right to speak and write. In The Color Purple, Celie’s father and Mister__ regulate communication and thus also interhuman relationships, and subversion of this regulation is necessary in order for Celie to become free.
The reason for Mister__’s interception could be two-fold. He was attracted to Nettie, made passes at her, but was rejected. In this context, her letters can represent extensions of her person; they could be seen as erotic substitutes, and the stealing of them are attempts at possessing her against her consent. In other words, Nettie’s letters could represent her presence metonymically.73 This metonymic presence of the letter is quite common in epistolary novels where the letter as object often takes on a symbolic significance that far exceeds its message74 and functions almost like an extension of its author – primarily in the sense that it contains his or her thoughts but also in the sense that it can bear the physical imprint of its author in a sensorial way. In The Rape of Clarissa Terry Eagleton writes that
“[t]he letter is that part of the body which is detachable: torn from the very depths of the subject, it can equally be torn from her physical possession, opened by meddling fingers, triumphantly blazoned across a master-text, hijacked as trophy or stashed away as spoils”
(1982, 54–55). In Clarissa the letters are literally speaking attached to her body as she is
72 The authorship of this book is a curious history. It was first published anonymously in Paris in 1669 as Les Lettres Portugaises. It was for a while assumed that the author was the Portuguese nun Mariana Alcoforada and that the letters were written to her French lover, Noël Bouton, Marquis de Chamilly, which means they were assumed to be actual letters and not works of fiction, translated into French. Later, the letters have come to be attributed to Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne Guilleragues and read as fictional(Kauffman 1986, 94). However, Myriam Cyr’s Letters of a Portuguese Nun (2006) attempts to reestablish Mariana Alcoforada as their author.
The true history of the letters remains uncertain.
73 Altman sees the letter as functioning on two figurative levels, metaphoric and metonymic, where metonymic means that the letter as such as a physical entity stands for the person who wrote it (1982, 19).
74 For instance, when Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons returns his bundled-up letters to the présidente de Tourvel, at her request, pretending to end their relationship, “it is less the content of the letter than its physical aspect (the letter as object rather than the letter as message) that serves as catalyst” (Altman 1982, 18). The actual physical and visual appearance of the letters makes her unable to consider them a termination of their relationship.
keeping them under her belt, but this can also be understood metaphorically. The letter thus, potentially, has erotic undertones and a purloined letter can be seen as an acquisition of something intimate and private.75 Another interpretation of Mister__’s interception of the letters is that he withholds them out of jealousy in order to put an end to the relationship between Nettie and Celie; Nettie rejects him but lavishes her affection on Celie, a person whom Mister regards as inferior to himself. By preventing them from communicating he punishes Nettie for rejecting him and could also be seen as scorning Celie contemptuously for not having the power to reject him.
The disrupted communication in Walker’s novel should not be seen as the result of an unfortunate engagement with the epistolary genre, but rather as an exploitation of the genre’s narrative potential. It is used to show how men silence women, but also how they attempt to prevent female bonding. The latter is a revision of a common feature of epistolary narratives.
Joe Bray writes that “epistolary narrative of course depends on the separation of its correspondents, and the theme of the public world keeping lovers apart is a commonplace trope” (2003, 44). The purloined letters in Walker’s novel are not love letters; it is not the love of lovers that is kept apart, it is sisterly love. Female relationships are pivotal in The Color Purple and Mae G. Henderson sees the epistolary genre as suitable in Walker’s novel because it enhances the role of women’s friendship. She quotes Janet Todd, who argues that
“the fictional friendship between women grew out of the idea of the confidant – the correspondent in the epistolary novel” (Henderson 1989, 68.) However, it could also be argued that the epistolary novel is a suitable form in The Color Purple because the disruption of the role of the epistolary confidante is put at the service of showing patriarchal oppression;
Celie lacks a correspondent. In Walker’s novel, female relationships do not grow from epistolary discourse but from social interaction between Celie, Shug and the other female characters. This community of women has an empowering and liberating potential, which is illustrated in a concrete way in the retrieval of Nettie’s letters. The letters are never
voluntarily returned to Celie; with the help of Shug she steals them back. The withholding of the letters and stealing them back are among the novel’s most important events, symbolically as well as literally.
It is not only the absence of an actual flesh and blood reader that reveals Celie’s predicament but also the non-dialogic quality of her discourse. It is difficult to feel the presence of the addressee in them. According to Altman, “[w]hat distinguishes epistolary
75The power embedded in a piece of intimate writing is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter.” In this story the letter is at the centre of the plot.
narrative from these diary novels, is the desire for exchange. In epistolary writing the reader is called upon to respond as a writer and to contribute as such to the narrative” (1982, 89). The personal letter is a dialogic genre where the writer of letters responds to someone else’s words, and in this response also tries to predict the ensuing words of the other: “The I of epistolary discourse always situates himself vis-à-vis another; his locus, his ‘address,’ is always relative to that of his addressee” (Altman 1982, 119). Terry Eagleton further underscores the dialogic nature of the letter:
In the very heart of anguish or confession, the letter can never forget that it is turned outwards towards another, that its discourse is ineradicably social. Such sociality is not just contingent, a mere matter of its destination; it is the very material condition of its existence. The other to whom the letter is addressed is included within it, an absent recipient present within each phrase. As speech-for-another, the letter must reckon that recipient’s likely response into its very gesture. (1982, 52)
Celie asks God for help in her first letter but otherwise her letters to God do not reveal awareness of an interlocutor. Celie’s discourse could not be described as dialogic. However, this does not disqualify her letters as letters. Rather, the genre of the epistolary novel is employed creatively in Walker’s novel to enhance its thematic issues: Celie is unable to predict the words and response of an other in her letters to God because she is forced by circumstance to write to an other whom she does not know.
Epistolary communication could not only be seen as an example of dialogic discourse but also as a reflection of the antiphonal structure of call and response found in African American cultural expressions, such as the blues. In The Color Purple, however, epistolary exchange becomes a curious series of monologues, and the call and response mechanism is broken. The democratic and communal potential of these communicative forms are thus curtailed. This has been seen as a flaw, for instance by Michael Awkward who argues that
“[d]espite their various merits, however, Celie’s early letters do prove problematic from an Afro-American expressive cultural standpoint. Instead of corresponding to the communal inclinations of Afro-American expressivity, these letters represent an individual’s attempts at self-help” (1989, 144). However, Celie’s early letters are only problematic if one wishes to read the novel as an unequivocal affirmation of black communal forms. More importantly, the collapse of what Awkward calls a communally inclined expressivity establishes black men’s oppression of black women as a central theme from the very opening of the novel. At the same time Celie’s early letters show how she manages to wrest something usable from this oppressive situation; namely written self-expression, which will eventually contribute to her liberation.
Silencing and its discontents
Celie’s first reaction when she discovers that Mister___ has been withholding the letters is silent rage: “Every time I open my mouth nothing come out but a little burp” ([1982] 1993, 103). This silence symbolically reflects the intention behind the silencing and the interception, but the discovery of the letters also fuels a rage in Celie that makes her able to overcome both her own silence and Mister___’s scheming. In The Color Purple, silencing and the ensuing writing are double-voiced dialogic tropes that convey the novel’s cultural and aesthetic double-consciousness. This is the situation that forms the starting point for the novel, and it is a situation that evokes issues pertaining to gender as well as race. Celie as a poor black southern woman is oppressed and silenced by patriarchal sexism grounded in racism. In this silencing and consequential writing, the epistolary novel and the slave narrative sound simultaneously: Celie as a silenced and oppressed African American who nevertheless brings to mind the presence of the slave narrative whereas Celie as an oppressed and publicly silenced woman as writer echoes the epistolary novel. Again, the novel’s genre polyphony facilitates references to race as well as gender; to the history of African Americans as well as
Celie’s first reaction when she discovers that Mister___ has been withholding the letters is silent rage: “Every time I open my mouth nothing come out but a little burp” ([1982] 1993, 103). This silence symbolically reflects the intention behind the silencing and the interception, but the discovery of the letters also fuels a rage in Celie that makes her able to overcome both her own silence and Mister___’s scheming. In The Color Purple, silencing and the ensuing writing are double-voiced dialogic tropes that convey the novel’s cultural and aesthetic double-consciousness. This is the situation that forms the starting point for the novel, and it is a situation that evokes issues pertaining to gender as well as race. Celie as a poor black southern woman is oppressed and silenced by patriarchal sexism grounded in racism. In this silencing and consequential writing, the epistolary novel and the slave narrative sound simultaneously: Celie as a silenced and oppressed African American who nevertheless brings to mind the presence of the slave narrative whereas Celie as an oppressed and publicly silenced woman as writer echoes the epistolary novel. Again, the novel’s genre polyphony facilitates references to race as well as gender; to the history of African Americans as well as