Content warning: Mentions of rape and abuse.
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker is an epistolary novel that follows two young Black sisters, Celie and Nettie, who were separated by the men of their own family while living in rural Georgia.
We are first introduced to Celie, a young, barely-educated Black woman who has been taught by her stepfather, Alphonso, to be submissive to men. At the beginning of the novel, she writes letters to God because she has no one to help her bear the horrifying experiences she got from Alphonso, who abused and raped her. “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman…” she was told.
While Celie is writing letters to God about her struggle in the abusive marriage, Nettie ends up on the other side of the world with her missionary friends in Africa and writes letters to Celie about how different the people and the culture are from what she expected. Their separation is conducted by Albert and Alphonso –– but later in the book, with the help of Shug and God’s Providence, Celie and Nettie are able to find their way back to each other again.
There are a lot of minor characters that bring bright colors to Celie’s life, such as Harpo –– Albert’s eldest child –– and Sofia. Sofia shows Celie how women shouldn’t be passive and should try to punch back, literally. Shug, the self-assertive, confident singer, is a very playful and meaningful character who plays a big part in Celie’s life.
This shows that sometimes, the truth is harder to bear than the violence and suffering of the past.
Celie’s narrative changes after she learns a number of secrets about her family from Nettie’s letters. Learning about these secrets leads to Celie no longer addressing letters to God. Instead, she starts writing to Nettie. This is a big change in the narrative because Celie never stopped writing letters to God, even when she was abused by the men closest to her. This shows that sometimes, the truth is harder to bear than the violence and suffering of the past.
As I read the first pages of this book, I was shocked by the bluntness and the graphic depictions of abuse and sex in the story. These scenes made me realize that the book would be hard to read. The way Celie writes her letters also adds a challenge for some readers because Celie was 14 and uneducated when she started writing letters. Also, dialectal differences in Walker’s writing style, which includes 1900s African American English (AAE), may prove challenging. Regardless, Celie wrote her letters with weak grammar and spelling errors because she wasn’t as educated as her sister Nettie, who wrote her letters to be longer and more comprehensible.
Although there are not many settings and character descriptions throughout this kind of narrative, the reader still feels very present with the main character. Perhaps Walker chose this kind of narrative to allow the reader to take it in as a group of letters and not a novel. Readers can feel the closeness between each character and how our main characters feel without having to know their surroundings because they can focus instead on their internal being, emotion, and faith.
The theme of religion, as Alice Walker herself has mentioned in the preface, is visible as the book starts with “Dear God…” Even though the reader does not know anything more about Celie’s relationship with God other than her letters addressed to him, the reader can see that God’s Providence is always present in her journey. God gave her hope through Shug, braveness through Sofia and reconciliation with her sister Nettie.
I think it is God’s Providence that the color purple grows in the middle of the fields, because it is only in that place that people can notice it.
Many writings about women start with the main character intelligently knowing that they should get out of a bad situation, but Walker writes this trope differently. Walker portrays Celie as a girl who leans into submissiveness rather than her own authority. Even when Harpo, Albert’s eldest son, asks Celie how to tame his lover Sofia, who wouldn’t hesitate to lay a fist on a man’s face first, Celie answers with what she was taught by his stepfather and her husband: “Beat her,” she answered Harpo. As the story goes on, we can see how her knowledge of marriage is a doctrine from the generations before her.
With the help of friends like Shug, Sofia and Nettie, Celie finally could stand her ground and become noticed by the people passing around her. As Shug mentions in the book, “I think it pisses God off when you walk past the color purple in a field and don’t notice.” I think it is God’s Providence that the color purple grows in the middle of the fields, because it is only in that place that people can notice it.