Themes in the Colour Purple
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The theme of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is very straightforward and simple. Like many other novels devoted to the mistreatment of blacks and black women especially, The Color Purple is dedicated to black women’s rights.
Much of the narrative in Walker’s novel is derived from her own personal experience, growing up in the rural South as an uneducated and abused child. In short, the goal of this book and indeed all her writing is to inspire and motivate black women to stand up for their rights. Celie, the main character, undergoes an inner transformation, from a submissive, abused wife to an unabashedly confident and independent black woman and businesswoman.
There are other more secondary themes, such as the rejection of the traditional, Christian, “white-mans” God. Thanks to the influence of Shug Avery and Nettie, a new age kind of God is developed and is a great comfort to all three women. Even Celies last letter is written to this vague kind of god– a god of nature and stars and people
Race and domesticity in The Color Purple.
An important juncture in Alice Walkers The Color Purple is reached when
Celie first recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie.
This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this
epistolary novel but also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to
reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie struggles to puzzle out the
markings on her first envelope from Nettie provides a concrete illustration
of both Celies particular horizon of interpretation and Walkers chosen
approach to the epistolary form:
Saturday morning Shug put Nettie letter in my lap. Little fat queen of
England stamps on it, plus stamps that got peanuts, coconuts, rubber trees
and say Africa. I dont know where England at. Dont know where Africa at
either. So I stir dont know where Nettie at. (102)
Revealing Celies ignorance of even the most rudimentary outlines of the
larger world, this passage clearly defines the “domestic” site she occupies
as the novels main narrator.(1) In particular, the difficulty Celie has
interpreting this envelope underscores her tendency to understand events in
terms of personal consequences rather than political categories. What
matters about not knowing “where Africa at” – according to Celie – is not
knowing “where Nettie at.” By clarifying Celies characteristic angle of
vision, this passage highlights the intensely personal perspective that
Walker brings to her tale of sexual oppression – a perspective that accounts
in large part for the emotional power of the text.
But Walkers privileging of the domestic perspective of her narrators has
also been judged to have other effects on the text. Indeed, critics from
various aesthetic and political camps have commented on what they perceive
as a tension between public and private discourse in the novel.(2) Thus, in
analyzing Celies representation of national identity, Lauren Berlant
identifies a separation of “aesthetic” and “political” discourses in the
novel and concludes that Celies narrative ultimately emphasizes “individual
essence in false opposition to institutional history” (868). Revealing a
very different political agenda in his attacks on the novels womanist
stance, George Stade also points to a tension between personal and public
elements in the text when he criticizes the novels “narcissism” and its
“championing of domesticity over