The Color Purple
Bartelme, Elizabeth
Victory over bitterness THE COLOR PURPLE Alice Walker Harcourt Brace Jaovanovich, $11.95, 245 pp. Elizabeth Bartelme IN THIS arresting and touching novel, Alice Walker creates a woman so...
...Then Shug Avery turns up, the only woman Albert had ever wanted to marry, blues singer of some presence and a warm heart...
...Elizabeth Bartelme IN THIS arresting and touching novel, Alice Walker creates a woman so believable, so lovable, that Celie, the downtrodden, semi-literate, rural black woman joins a select company of fictional women whom it is impossible to forget...
...With her arrival, Celie begins to thaw and to know what it is like to love another person...
...and Celie sit sewing on the front porch, old now and calm together, and talking about the lessons life has taught them...
...Albert tells her he has learned to wonder', to wonder about all the things that happen and "the more I wonder, he say, the more I love...
...She stands up to Albert and tells him what's what...
...But Alice Walker is too much of an artist to write a purely political novel, and so her feminist impulse does not prevent her from allowing her characters, women and men, to grow and change...
...Harpo seem to love me...
...Only Nettie (who turns up first in letters that Albert has hidden from Celie...
...may she call up hosts in the future...
...They do, he say, surprise...
...This reader's thanks to the medium...
...Nettie disappears and is lost to Celie...
...Sophia and the children They go on sewing and talking and waiting for Shug to come home, and Celie says to herself, "If she come, I be happy...
...Albert beats her, forces himself upon her, refuses even to buy her a decent dress...
...Shug takes the place of Celie's mother, sister, lover, and she gets the onus of Albert's presence off Celie, opening her own bed to him once again...
...Her letters, by comparison with Celie's, are pedantic, her nature prim...
...The men in her story lead miserable lives, too, but like their women they begin to come to terms with what life doles out to them, and accept it...
...as she calls him...
...And then I figure this the lesson I was supposed to learn...
...She persuades him to buy Celie a new dress and to let Celie come and hear her sing...
...And the women turn from rage to acceptance as well...
...then in person with her missionary husband and Celie's lost children) seems to have escaped the general mayhem, and she is a curiously colorless character...
...If she don't, I be content...
...Taking along her pretty little sister Nettie, Celie becomes a household slave...
...Her gallery of women are Jiving examples of man's inhumanity to women: Sophia, wife of Harpo, Albert's eldest son, who only wanting to be herself and not the fantasy woman Harpo thinks she ought to be, changes from a warm, happy woman to a bitter paranoic who only wants to get through her life without killing anyone...
...When he begins to look appreciatively at Nettie, Celie panics and persuades the younger girl to run away...
...Shug is wild and wicked and delightful...
...And people start to love you back, I bet, I say...
...Even Shug, the indomitable, has her share of suffering at men's hands...
...Opening with a dedication to the Spirit, the novel ends with a postscript: "I thank everybody in this book for coming...
...Mary Alice, "Squeak," who takes Sophia's place with Harpo when the latter is jailed for sassing the mayor's wife (white), and who allows her uncle, the warden to rape her in exchange for Sophia's freedom...
...Raped at fourteen by the man she believes to be her father and to whom she eventually bears two children who are taken from her, Celie is married off to Albert, Mr...
...And so bitterness leaches out into a hard-won wisdom, and the lively characters of Alice Walker's invention become human beings with a life of their own...
...One of the best scenes in the book occurs as Mr...
...The other women leap out of the book, Nettie stays safely within its confines, as does her husband, Samuel...
...A. W., author and medium...
...In the absence of human warmth, Celie turns to God, pouring out her heart in one letter after another, the difficult form in which the book is written...
...Because of Shug, Celie begins to take tentative steps toward self-realization, and even discovers a talent for making pants, fancy pants, that enables her to start her own business...
...Alice Walker is, of course, a feminist and she understands well the circumstances that force a woman into an anti-man stance...
...She is a remarkable novelist, sometimes compared to Toni Morrison, but with a strong, individual voice and vision of her own, and a delicious humor that pervades the book and tempers the harshness of the lives of its people...
...Everything that happens to her is recorded and commented on, Albert's cruelty, the hopelessness of Celie's life...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
