The Color Purple

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-56

Pages 57-112

Pages 113-161

Pages 162-206

Pages 207-286

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Womanism

Walker is associated with womanism, a term she coined in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1984). Developed over Walker’s years of creative work and activism, womanism is a useful lens for understanding Walker’s notion of Black female identity.

Walker offers various definitions of what it means to be a womanist, including “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior,” a “woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually,” a woman who “[l]oves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless,” and (finally and famously) “[w]omanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (xi-xii; see the 2004 Harcourt print edition for all references).

Womanism is certainly a counter to mainstream American feminism, which from its founding had obvious failings when it came to acknowledging the way that categories of race, class, and gender intersected differently for Black women. More than a corrective, however, womanism is about centering Black women and their experiences for the sake of nurturing Black women, their families, and their communities. In The Color Purple, we see various characters (not all of them women) struggling to define their identities on terms that allow for them to move beyond simple survival and on to thriving.

Celie and Shug represent two extreme ends on the spectrum of how Black women can choose to respond to threats to themselves and their communities. Celie starts out as a woman whose ability to be willful, creative, and sexual are crushed by traditional gender norms, racism, and poverty. Her frequent isolation from other women and her community means that she struggles to find any means of nurturing herself beyond the very barren and rigid Christianity she learns from her stepfather. Celie’s arc in the novel is from being a girl and woman who embraces traditional gender norms to one who rejects them and achieves some degree of liberation as a result.

Shug is the character who most exemplifies a womanist ethos. Although Walker doesn’t represent much of Shug’s girlhood, we do know that she early on committed bold violations of gender norms and embraced her blues singing as the most important part of her life. Within the narrative, we see her evolve as well as a result of her decision to center her experiences with other Black women in her life, especially with Celie. Her presence in the novel creates incalculable ripples throughout her community and, on the whole, creates better lives for all those she encounters.

Neither Shug nor Celie make the journey to a more authentic and nurturing life alone. Their challenges to the men in their lives and their commitment to each other force the men around them to change. Celie and Shug’s rejection of Albert after he insists on damaging them forces Albert to become a better ally and a better man. Harpo’s initial unwillingness to accept that freedom for the women in his life results in his loss of Sofia and Mary Agnes.

The community that Shug, Celie, and other Black women in the novel build around them also creates safe havens for traumatized women like Sofia, orphans like the children who get left behind when their mothers and fathers cannot be there, and even for people like Eleanor Jane, whose recognition of her emotional poverty and dependence on Sofia eventually allow her to be something like a friend. The last image in the novel is of all the disparate parts of Celie’s community and family relationships converging on her. That vision of home, food, nurturing, safety, and love represents the ideal outcome for a woman who has fully realized an identity as a womanist.

Black Women’s Spirituality

In her preface to The Color Purple, Alice Walker describes the novel as a “theological work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual” (xi). This theme is apparent in the lives of the female characters in the novel, who start out as good Christian women who use faith to navigate oppressive circumstances but, under pressure from the realities of their lives, come to see God and faith in a much more expansive, liberating way.

Celie is aware early in life that God and institutional Black Christianity are her salvation and the source of what it means to be good. At 14, Celie is a churchgoing girl who respects authority and is obedient. Celie is in a painful bind, however: The Christianity she believes in is patriarchal, meaning that she is under the authority of the man she believes to be her father, but her father, by raping her, fails to be the protective patriarch Celie imagines he should be. Celie cries out to God in her letters in order to document the pain and trauma she experiences as a result of this abuse, but help comes neither from the church nor God.

When help does finally come, it is from another woman, Shug Avery, whose notion of faith and God relies on connection with other women, nature, pleasure, and the body. Shug explains to Celie that “more than anything else, God love admiration” and believes that “it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” (195). The God Shug draws for Celie is neither a patriarch, nor a white man writ large. Shug is far from a churchgoing, upright woman Celie strives to be: She is, however, a spiritual woman and an artist who sees pleasure and aesthetic experiences as pathways to spirituality.

The shift from dogmatism to liberated spirituality frees Celie from institutional Christianity and its explicit support for a status quo that oppresses Celie and reinforces conservative notions of gender and sexuality. The Celie who emerges by the end of the novel is one with an ability to speak up for herself, set boundaries with people, and live in the moment.

Colonialism and Imperialism in Africa

This same movement from a faith rooted in an institution to spirituality rooted in connection to self and others is also apparent in Nettie’s life. In Nettie’s development, Walker chooses to use the cultural and historical context of colonialism and imperialism in Africa to indict institutionalized Christianity for its complicity in crushing the Olinka.

Nettie is also a woman whose uprightness and faith are no protection from sexual violation (or at least the threat of it). Nettie, set adrift after Albert forces her to leave her sister’s house, finds purpose and a direction when she embraces Samuel and Corrine’s missionary aspirations. Like the couple, she embraces the so-called Ethiopian prophecy, a common reading of Psalm 68:31—"Princes shall come forth out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God” (King James version).

Black missionaries such as Samuel and Corrine took this prophecy to mean that Black Americans would find redemption for both themselves and colonial Africa by returning to an Africa they imagined as a homeland for members of the African diaspora. Nettie does indeed experience redemption, but that only comes as she understands the role of Christianity in oppressive, imperialistic power structures in Africa.

Before she leaves, Nettie envisions herself, Samuel, and Corrine as bearers of a westernized, Christian faith they can use to guide people like the Olinka out of spiritual darkness. There is early foreshadowing that this mission is doomed due to the white supremacist and Eurocentric underpinnings of the mission. Nettie notes, for example, that most missionaries are white. She feels disheartened by this circumstance, even as she engages in self-education about African history and learns that the narrative as Africa as being devoid of civilization is far from accurate.

As Nettie arrives in Africa and becomes more enmeshed in Olinka culture, she is forced into constant comparative cultural analysis that reveals just how arbitrary the mores she has been taught are. She is also forced to confront how frequently faith and traditions are used to force oppressive gender roles on women, whether those women are Celie in Georgia or the chief’s many wives among the Olinka. Lonely and finally able to see that her religion is completely ineffectual when it comes to protecting the Olinka, Nettie surrenders to the reality of her life on the ground. She has sex with Samuel before marriage and marries him after the snide remarks of an English bishop, who seems more concerned with the possibility of fornication than protecting the Olinka.

Nettie also comes to understand that it is the Olinka who have something to teach her and her niece and nephew. This recognition forces her to give up her notion that her Christian mission makes her somehow superior to the Olinka. Nettie comes to appreciate the story of the roofleaf as a testimony to the power of spirituality to shape culture and worldview. When the Olinka flee to the mbeles and Adam decides to undergo scarification, Nettie’s notion of morality and the western, Christian notion of the world has flexed enough that she sees the wisdom in acceding to circumstances and the culture in which she finds herself.

Having come to some deeper knowledge of Olinka culture and the destructive force of colonialism, which her mission in part supported, Nettie is ready for some other notion of faith and identity not encompassed by institutional religion. She writes to Celie that “God is different to [her and Samuel] after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal” (255). Nettie’s God is no longer a white patriarch who demands worship bound by worldly racial and gender hierarchies. Nettie envisions her new faith community upon returning home s one in which “each person’s spirit is encouraged to seek God directly” (255).

Although Nettie arrives at a more spiritual notion of God by a different path than Celie, her destination is one that also frees her as a Black woman. The difference between these evolutions of faith is that Nettie’s occurs in the more explicitly political context of colonialism and imperialism, thus adding a more international dimension to the importance of Black women’s spirituality.

Stories of Black Women’s Survival

The Black women in the novel frequently call on their religious and spiritual practices because their lives are constantly disrupted by violence and trauma. With the exception of Shug, these characters are poor, Black, Southern women who face multiple and overlapping forms of oppression that make their struggles different from those faced by their Black male partners and white women in the novel. Shug starts out life in much the same position but manages to avoid some of the class-based oppression because of her talent. The lives of Celie, Sofia, and Shug reflect the many threats to Black women’s survival but also their use of creativity and relations with other women to survive and even thrive in some instances.

Celie’s life is fraught even when she is a girl. Alphonso, Albert, and even Harpo have no problem labeling her as poor, Black, and ugly—a girl and then a woman whose main value is her body and labor. Although the boys and men in her life experience racism, they are part of the oppressive power structure when it comes to the violence and trauma Celie survives. Celie initially confronts this oppression in her own home by silently accepting violation because she has few other options and because the conservative faith in which she was raised demands obedience to authority figures. She is clear early on that submitting to patriarchal Black men is a matter of survival. Her only aspiration is to stay alive. She watches as women like Sofia buck these norms and suffer for it.

Sofia is a cautionary tale that dissuades Celie from would-be rebellion. Sofia is physically strong, sexually vibrant, and aggressively opposed to accepting oppression inside and outside her community. She is the figure of the strong Black woman. The violent beating she experiences after cursing Millie and the imprisonment and servitude she experiences afterward show the grave costs of refusing to conform to racial and gender norms in the white supremacist South of the 1930s and 1940s.

Sofia is fortunate to be alive, but the life she lives after this survival is one that alienates her from her children and leaves her vulnerable to even the lowliest of white people—Eleanor Jane and Junior, the children who are supposed to be her charges. Sofia’s survival in the end depends on the actions of her friends and family, mostly women, who use subterfuge to help her escape an imprisonment that she would not have survived. Her life shows that that white supremacist ideology is such a potent force that individual will and defiance are often overwhelmed by it.

Shug Avery is the figure who is most able to navigate around racial and gender norms in order to forge a path to some degree of liberation as a Black woman. The secrets to her ability to survive and even thrive are manifold. The first is that she is an artist and embraces a spirituality rooted in an aesthetic appreciation of the world and experience. Shug is a blues woman. As an artist, Shug has the ability to examine her experiences as a woman outside of oppressive norms that would silence her voice. Importantly, she is also financially independent, so she is never reliant on a man or father to support her after she leaves her father and mother’s home. Finally, Shug embraces a fluid sexual identity. Her flexibility about the objects of her love and desire means she is never fully bound by patriarchal norms around relationships and her own body.

Her liberation from traditional gender roles is not without risk and cost. The assumption that the Black female artist is not quite so bound by sexual mores is a double-edged sword that means she experiences social disapproval from others. Part of life on the road and liberation from traditional norms is that her parents raise her children, not her.

Nevertheless, Shug’s upending of gender norms serves her and the people in her life well. She is able to do more than survive. Unlike the other women in the novel, Shug early on recognizes that one of her most important relationships is with herself and her body, which is one that is capable of pleasure and is the instrument she uses to produce her art. Shug also prioritizes relationships with other women over relationships with men. She has an intense relationship with Albert but eventually prioritizes her relationship with Celie and brings Mary Agnes with her when she finally goes to Memphis. As her character develops over the novel, she makes decisions that empower other women in her life.

Her influence on the women in relationship with her is incalculable, with her insistence on the importance self-determination, beauty, and creativity in the lives as Black women as the most important tool she hands to Celie and Mary Agnes. Celie’s pants-making allows her to be self-supporting and to escape Albert. She begins making pants at the suggestion of Shug, who sees it as a therapeutic pursuit that will allow her not to do violence against Albert. Shug also later suggest to Celie that she might monetize her creations, another step in Celie’s road to self-sufficiency. The greatest gift Shug gives to Celie comes ironically when Shug exercises her sexual self-determination by leaving Celie for a fling with a very young man. Celie learns to express her own needs, to live in the moment, and to love unconditionally, lessons she holds tight to even after Shug returns.

The ultimate lesson of these survival stories is that Black women may suffer, but they also survive and thrive when they love each other, embrace spirituality, and find their own creative forms of self-expression.