Alice Walker is by no means alone in revisiting the slave narrative. Since the 1960s many African American authors have turned to slavery and the slave narrative in their writing, and scholars of African American literature have done the same in their work. Ashraf Rushdy defines what he calls the neo-slave narrative as “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the ante-bellum slave narrative”
(1999, 3). The neo-slave narrative, Rushdy argues, has become a new novelistic sub-genre resulting from the meeting between the slave narrative and the modern novel. Due to its epistolarity, however, The Color Purple represents a different type of first-person voice than the slave narrative and it could not be said to assume its form, but it adopts some of the conventions of the slave narrative, and is in many ways certainly inspired and informed by these. The neo-slave narrative is a label that applies to The Color Purple, at least if modified slightly.
Rushdy sees the first three novels in the neo-slave narrative tradition as defining the three major forms that later works would adopt or expand: the third-person historical novel of slavery (Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966)); the pseudo-autobiographical slave narrative (Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)); and the novel of remembered generations (Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975)) (Rushdy 2004, 95). The Color Purple could not be said to fit smoothly into any of these main categories, and Rushdy never mentions it in the context of the neo-slave narrative. What he calls the novel of remembered generations is the category that comes closest to the concerns of The Color Purple, but it is questionable that the problems facing the characters in The Color Purple are attributable to slavery in a similar way that the hardships of the characters in Gayle Jones’s Corregidora represent “the continuing traumatic legacy of slavery on later generations” (Rushdy 2004, 95).
However, history plays an important role in Walker’s novel as well, and its discursive and thematic affinities with slavery and the slave narrative are hard to ignore. The most salient difference between The Color Purple and the slave narrative, as well as most neo-slave narratives, is that its main focus is not the institution of American slavery. The mechanisms and logic of slavery, as these have been revealed to us in, for instance, slave narratives, are put at the service of portraying the oppression of black southern women. Calvin C. Hernton
argues that “Alice Walker utilizes the slave narrative to reveal the enslavement that black men level against black women” (1987, 6). The slave narrative as a genre was associated with a specific time and a specific place but Walker’s appropriation of the genre’s conventions accentuates its universal validity as an account of oppression and dehumanization.
In her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” Alice Walker writes about the lives of her female ancestors, like her mother and grandmother. In her words, these southern black women are the muted and unrecognized subjects of art and history. They had no formal, public arena for their creativity and expressive needs but found artistic release in their private daily activities, like gardening and quilting. They were, however, not considered artists, a view that Walker tries to revise: “For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release” (1984a, 233). They are also the silent and agonizing women that Toomer writes about in Cane, and Walker wants to give a voice to these women through her writing. She acknowledges the affinities between her literature and their lives:
“Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories” (1984a, 240), and she thus seeks to diminish the distinction between the world of art and the everyday concerns of her female ancestors. Rushdy expresses similar concerns in his discussion of the neo-slave narrative, but his muted subjects are African American slaves: “I have attended to the forms employed by these authors of contemporary narratives of slavery because they themselves draw attention to their struggle to find a respectful way to give voice to the historically muted subjects of slavery” (2004, 97). The women Alice Walker writes about in The Color Purple are not slaves but lead lives that resemble conditions of servitude. It is therefore tempting to add one category to Rushdy’s list of neo-slave narratives, i.e. novels that draw on the conventions of the slave narrative in order to tell a story of servitude different from but still similar to slavery in the US. Walker’s novel participates in the genre of the neo-slave narrative on the margins of its definition, thus redefining it.
The literary memory of The Color Purple is double-voiced and spans several genres and includes numerous intertexts. Kauffman writes that “the effect of Walker’s juxtaposition of the epistolary genre with slave narratives is to undermine traditional literary history and to reconstruct it, too” (1992, 204). Walker does not so much undermine as rewrite chapters of literary history by adding to and detracting from fairly established genres like the Gothic, the epistolary novel and the slave narrative – formally, through its use of narrative form and language, but also thematically by repetition, yet turning tables. An important part of this process of rewriting and redefining is the inclusion of vernacular traditions, like the blues,
into her text. It is, however, problematic to argue that she undermines traditional literary history. She does not use these genres ironically or in order to expose their shortcomings;
rather she shows how a genre like for instance the epistolary novel, which at first sight may appear as irrelevant to her, is relevant and usable in the context of a poor, uneducated black woman like Celie. In Derridean terms Walker participates in all these genres simultaneously, thus moving boundaries.
The multigeneric composition of Walker’s novel where different genres, recycled and put to new use, relate dialogically to each other reflects what Bakhtin writes about polyphony in Dostoevsky’s novels: “[t]he fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. […] For him, to get one’s bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment” (1984b, 28). The different planes and consicousnesses of the novel “by virtue of the novel’s very structure, lie side by side on a plane of coexistence […] and of interaction (Bakhtin 1984b, 31). This description of
interrelated elements distributed in relation to each other as on a plane brings to mind a quilt.
The Color Purple resembles a literary quilt in two ways. Firstly, its many letters can be seen as narrative patches coming together to form a pattern in an epistolary quilt. These letters, all written by women, form a womanist Sister’s Choice, Sister’s Choice being the name of the pattern quilted by some of the characters in the novel. The different genres can also be seen metaphorically as pieces stitched together by the novel’s narrative. The past is thus brought into the novel’s present. Walker’s novel is a truly double-voiced, hybrid novel that privileges neither its white nor its black traditions.
However, whereas the text considered in the previous chapter, Jean Toomer’s Cane, came across as circular and consequently inconclusive and open-ended, The Color Purple seems to tie up all loose ends in an ending heading determinedly for a utopian resolution. As writes Wendy Hall, “[t]he novel ends with an attempt to celebrate a unity that totalizes and recuperates all loose strands created through the plot” (1993, 269). The Color Purple ends for the same reason that epistolary novels commonly end: There is no reason to write anymore.
There is no longer a distance to be bridged by letters as Celie is reunited with her children and her sister Nettie. Nor does she need to write to God anymore as she has found a voice and a self as well as a community, and is free to communicate with whomever she likes in whatever form she prefers. In fact, the last letter almost appears somewhat contrived, written
consistently in the present tense, an extreme case of “writing to the moment,” as a closing
thank you note addressed to “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God.”
The ending is also in compliance with the slave narrative since it ends with freedom;
Celie has developed from an abused, silenced, dehumanized young girl with little or no perspective on herself and her situation in the world into a vocal, self-assertive, independent mature woman. It is quite remarkable how all problems are solved and happiness (re)gained:
The person Celie thought was her father is not her biological father after all and her children thus not the result of incest; her children and her sister return to her; she is happily divorced from her previously brutal husband, now a sensitive and reformed man; she has Shug in her life and a house of her own where she can gather all her loved ones around her. Walker’s novel takes the ending of the slave narrative one step further; no slave narrative ends with a reformed slave owner but Celie’s husband is barely recognizable from the person he is in the beginning; he, too, has been set free from the chains of discrimination and oppression. Also, the reunion of lost family members is not commonly found in a slave narrative, as the narrative was written while slavery was still making such events difficult.97 The ending is therefore not in accordance with the blues. One of the most significant features of the blues is that it does not provide answers to the singer’s problems and presents no solution. A blues with a happy ending would be a contradiction in terms. A blues is an expression of pain, and it is merely the expressive, performative aspect of it that has the potential to ease the feeling of pain – somewhat like Celie’s letters; they are not read by any living person and do not directly contribute to solving any problems but are acts of self-expression that ameliorate the feeling of loneliness and pain. Rather, the musical echo we hear in the end is the Negro Spiritual “Free at Last”: “Free at last, free at last / I thank God I’m free at last.”
It is still necessary to consider what Celie’s freedom means in light of the different genres put in motion by the text. “Reader, I married him,” Jane Eyre triumphantly states in the last chapter of her Gothicized sentimental narrative, seemingly implying that her marriage to the semi-crippled Mister Rochester is the apotheosis and the crowning achievement of her attainment of personal and economic independence. In the classic epistolary novels as well as in many of the classic Gothic texts, and other genres that could be described as sentimental, marriage or, often, death, are the two alternatives available for the heroine. There is no place for the heroine to realize herself outside the circle of family and marriage. In contrast, most male slave narrators avoided drawing much attention to their family situation at the end of
97 The somewhat miraculous return of her sister Nettie and her children is quite similar to such reunions found in Frances Watkins Harper’s post-bellum novel Iola Leroy (1892).
their narratives, and rather chose to emphasise their own progress and accomplishments as an individualistic achievement, something which places female slave narrators, like Harriet Jacobs, in an interesting position. The following comment on Harriet Jacobs reads like a comment on The Color Purple: “While Douglass’s narrative emphasizes his acquisition and development of written language, Jacobs depicts a network of relationships on which she depends and to which she contributes; her most important relationships devolve from bonds of love” (Morgan 1994, 84). She emphasizes family and people rather than individual accomplishments. Towards the end of her narrative Jacobs says: “Reader, my story ends with freedom, not in the usual way, with marriage” ([1861] 2001, 156). Niemtzow argues that caught between the genres of the domestic novel and the slave narrative Jacobs disparages the former for the latter when she at the end of her story “apologizes for having only freedom”
(Niemtzow 1982, 107), by lamenting that “[t]he dream of my life is yet not realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own” (Jacobs, 156). According to Niemtzow, the requirements for a contented self are thus trivialized by the fictive forms offered the female slave, that is, the domestic, or the sentimental, novel (107), but she does not mention marriage and romance. Instead of concluding that the domestic novel “swallows Linda Brent’s voice”
(Niemtzow, 105) it could rather be seen as a sign of sophistication that Jacobs is not content being “only” free but also has visions for how her freedom should be; she wants to be free and a woman.
The ending of Jacobs’ narrative seems like a gauntlet cast down and picked up by Walker. At the end of the novel, Celie has her own house with her own porch to sit on. The patrilineal line of succession has been broken as she has inherited her father’s house. She is liberated in a modern sense of the word: she has financial independence and does not depend on anyone. She is the owner of a store and hires people to work for her, white as well as black, male as well as female. She receives her ex-husband as well as their mutual female lover into her house together with her children and her sister. Thus the novel rejects conventional endings, those of the Gothic novel, the epistolary novel and, looking at it more closely, even those of the slave narrative.
The Color Purple is often read as representing what could be called “a view from elsewhere” (Abbandonato 1991), or a construction of otherness (Kauffman 1992). In Walker’s novel, freedom means the ability to choose love and sex without marriage; religion without church, children without the nuclear family – and oral over written language. Even more radically, it means the freedom to choose same-sex love over heterosexual love. “Celie’s sexual orientation provides an alternative to the heterosexual paradigm of the conventional
marriage plot” (Abbandonato, 1108), something which helps her break free from patriarchal oppression. Lewis argues that “Walker offers black lesbian shamelessness as this ‘other way to live’” (2012, 170). Yet, lesbianism never becomes a major issue in the novel simply because it is not noticed by the characters as a subversive phenomenon. It shocks or surprises no one that Shug and Celie are having a sexual relationship.
Freedom in The Color Purple is achieved in a more general sense through appreciation of women’s culture and through a deconstruction of binaries and boundaries. Keith Byerman argues that “[o]ne of the things that mark Walker’s text as womanist is her insistence that these female capacities [love and magic] are a superior way of bringing about change” (1989, 60). The novel problematizes the very foundation of terms like feminine and masculine, male and female. Towards the end of the book, Celie, who was under Shug’s tutelage, acts as Albert’s mentor.
In many ways it appears like the ending does not embrace traditional American ideals.
When they get together at the end of the novel on the 4th of July it is not for patriotic reasons:
“White people busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don’t have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other” ([1982] 1993, 243). Despite their attempt to find an alternative mode of living, or perhaps because of it, Celie and her close-knit community of family and friends seem like a utopian “City Upon a Hill,” only a very different version than the one envisioned by John Winthrop in 1630. Celie and her family are an exemplum for others to see; they form a kind of model community. In spite of the novel’s emphasis on pleasure there is even a note of Thoreau in the end. Thoreau went into the woods in pursuit of individual freedom and because he wanted to live life deliberately. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,”
Michael Meyer writes:
Thoreau followed Emerson in locating God within one’s soul and in nature. Because absolute values and authority could be discovered within one’s self rather than in the pulpit, the tract, the stature book, or the marketplace, a person could be totally independent and free if this divinity was developed and given expression. (1983, 13) This is similar to the anti-institutional religion, or spirituality, that Shug teaches Celie. They find religion, though not in church, they find love and desire, though not in marriage. The characters in The Color Purple are able to liberate themselves despite their dire situation because they discover their inner spirituality and creativity and somehow seem to be able to live in isolation from social institutions. In this manner the novel celebrates the human potential for development, emancipation and love, but offers no vision for how to change oppressive structures in society. In fact, it is quite curious how the group of characters
presented in Walker’s novel seems cut off from society. This illustrates the profoundly double-voiced nature of Walker’s novel that simultaneously challenges and perpetuates old forms.