The Color Purple by Alice Walker - Research Paper Example

? The Color Purple Women's potential transformation from victim to heroine, from object to author, finds a model in the hysteric: a woman who struggles against the existing paradigms of sexual and linguistic oppression to find her voice. Alice Walker creates such a woman in her text The Color Purple, where Celie's journey of self-realization follows the hysteric's pattern of silence to liberated voice. In the opening lines of her text, Walker identifies the paradigm responsible for Celie's descent into her private dialogue with God, the paternal interdiction: "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy" (1). What Celie is forbidden to articulate publicly is her repeated rape by the man she believes to be her father; this violation of both Celie's body and her voice speaks of an underlying socio-linguistic censorship that relegates the female subject to an objectified position, as passive, absent, and silent. In this paradigm the maternal must be sacrificed if the subject is to speak. The relationship between Celie and Alphonso illustrates this phenomenon, as the paternal interdiction relies upon the premise that if Celie speaks, she is forsaking her "mammy" (1). Celie comes to represent this forced contract between a woman and the Law of the Father, where a female's body, spirit, and speech are sacrificed in an act of socio-symbolic rape; however, as Celie's subversive authorship suggests, it is a sacrifice she is unwilling to make. In her article "Women's Time," Julia Kristeva speaks of the role language plays in violating female subjectivity; she states, "a new generation of women is showing that its major social concern has become the socio-symbolic contract as a sacrificial contract, …that they are forced to experience this sacrificial contract against their will" (Kristeva’ ‘Women’s Time’ 25). Language is shown to be part of a sacrificial relationship based on separation and difference. In this linguistic configuration of subject and language, women have been excluded from the socio-symbolic contract. Kristeva identifies a movement in feminism towards a repudiation of this symbolic exclusion: "A therefore difficult, if not impossible, identification with the sacrificial logic of separation and syntactical sequence at the foundation of language and the social code leads to the rejection of the symbolic--lived as the rejection of the paternal function and ultimately generating psychoses" (Kristeva’ ‘Women’s Time’ 25). The psychoses that Kristeva identifies can be seen as reflecting hysterical discontent, as a conflict of gender that is realized through linguistic disruption. Kristeva posits two possible strategies to counter the exclusion and silence experienced by women: the first, to attempt to possess the symbolic by adopting the dominant ideology; the second, to approach language as a "personal affect experienced when facing it as subject and as a woman" (Kristeva’ ‘Women’s Time’ 24). Such an approach suggests a need to "break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract" (Kristeva’ ‘Women’s Time’ 24-25). Kristeva's perspective of language posits a revolt against the exclusion of the symbolic contract. In About Chinese Women, Kristeva identifies women as able "to give a name" to the repressed, as able to restore the body back to a place of significance (Kristeva ‘About Chinese Women’ 30-35). In this context, the body becomes intertwined with Kristeva's notion of the semiotic, as a sort of expression that exists outside of the symbolic, preceding language while simultaneously existing within language, albeit in a repressed form. Semiotic discourse moves beyond the symbolic by opposing structures of exclusion. The mother-child bond becomes the definitive relationship of semiotic discourse, as it exists beyond binary differences of gender and sexuality. When viewed in this context, Walker's text becomes a narrative of this revolution in language, subjectivity and sexuality, where the body is resurrected in significance after it has been silenced by violation. In Walker's text, the experience of rape has a twofold effect on Celie: the silencing of her public voice and the emergence of a private, inner voice. As Wendy Wall states in her essay "Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts," Celie's "texts are born when she is raped" (83); Martha J. Cutter reinforces this idea, illustrating how Celie's rape becomes "the catalyst to [her] search for voice" (164). From the start of Walker's narrative, Celie is shown to be divided; however, by the novel's end, Celie's internal division is translated into a public expression of a body, voice, and soul that defies categorization. Early in the narrative, Celie writes that the only social position that "feel[s] just right" (60) to her is "sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr. _______" (60). Like Shug, Celie desires and identifies with being in between the social polarities of masculine and feminine. Sexually, Celie's relationship with Shug defies the narrow socio-cultural limits of gender roles, as their sexual relationship undermines the phallocentricity of the social order. Even the career path which Celie begins with Shug's encouragement, reflects her unwillingness to remain caught by the self-abnegating social code; by designing and sewing pants, Celie creates clothing that is "designed for individuals," as critic Teresa Tavormina suggests (221). Folkspants, Celie's business venture, is built upon a creativity that unifies the socially constructed gender divide. When she inherits her father's drygoods store, Celie takes on the traditionally male role as a breadwinner and property owner; this shift of gender roles speaks of Celie's liberation from the oppressive male economy. Celie not only makes pants for women and men, she also partakes in the creative act of sewing with both men and women. Coming full circle, it is Celie who becomes the teacher, as Albert confesses to her that "when I was growing up … I use to try to sew along with mama cause that's what she was always doing. But everybody laughed at me. But you know, I liked it" (279). After this point, the gendered separation is collapsed, as Celie and Albert begin "sitting and talking and smoking [their] pipes" (279). The barriers of the symbolic are dismantled as Celie engages in a dialogue which is inclusive to both genders. She is able to converse with Albert without feeling the restraints of a social-sexual order; of Albert, she states, "He ain't Shug, but he begin to be somebody I can talk to" (283). As the boundaries of sexual difference collapse through an open dialogue, both Celie and Albert engage in a subversive, even revolutionary discourse. The creation of an inclusive discourse dismantles the structures of gender exclusion, positing a possible genderless state where expression is limitless and liberating. By embracing bisexuality, Celie revolutionizes her world. In finding her place between each side of the dominant gender duality, Celie exposes it as inherently unstable. The breakdown in the hierarchical social dynamic between Albert and herself illustrates how the boundaries of gender are neither fixed nor stable, but fluid. Indeed, by the end of the novel, the seemingly fixed institutions of family, religion, and economy are redefined to embrace Celie's transformation of her world. Throughout Celie's narrative, nowhere has the battle for self-avowal been more desperately fought than in Celie's right to voice. Her movement into language marks a transformation from a patriarchal paradigm to a bisexual one, where her participation in the symbolic neither dismisses the female body, nor forsakes the maternal communion of the semiotic. Walker reinforces Celie's transformation into language by creating parallel narratives using other female characters in her text. Mary Agnes's experience of rape by her uncle, the warden, a personification of the Law, initiates her transformation out of silence. In sharing her story with Celie and Shug, Mary Agnes is able to assert an authority that she had not previously known. The transition of Squeak to Mary Agnes marks a movement into expression, as she reclaims her original name and begins a singing career. Through these transformations of silence to expression, Walker illustrates a central struggle which unifies female experience in her text, as each character attempts to overcome constraints on speaking subjectivity. In her letters, Celie's expression has its origin in, and draws from, her corporeal experience. From Celie's initial rape to the restorative experience of jouissance, Walker foregrounds Celie's body as central to her identity. Celie's poetic language interweaves both body and language. When describing herself, Celie draws from natural imagery as a source of poetic inspiration; she states, "my heart must be young and fresh though, it feel like it blooming with blood" (266). The repetition of flowers as a motif is used by Walker to connote Celie's sexuality. When Celie views her genitals, she states, "inside look like a wet rose" (82). Walker brings together Celie's renewed sexuality with the innate spirituality of the natural world, fusing the body and spirit together through a poetic sensuality. Celie's spirituality is found in the natural world: "Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers" (204). The novel's title reinforces the unity of sexual, spiritual, and poetic forces. As Abbandonato suggests, the "most daringly significant… use of the color purple [is] to encode the specifically feminine jouissance experienced by Celie" (1113). In particular, Abbandonato reflects upon Walker's description in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, of "a black woman's vagina as 'the color of raspberries and blackberries'" (qtd. in Abbandonato 1113). In this sense, the spiritual significance Walker places on the colour purple is analogous to the importance of the female body, a body so often censured and censored in society. Walker restores the female body to a place of value, giving it spiritual as well as linguistic significance. Like Celie's revolutionary emergence into a new sexual-spiritual realm, her language also becomes a source of gender revolution. Specifically, Celie's dialect incorporates the bisexual inclusivity which guides the rest of her life; Celie uses the pronoun "us" instead of the singular "I," and repeatedly describes her biological children as being "our children" (222), referring to Nettie and herself as the parents. Within this linguistic creation, Celie dismantles the patriarchal familial structure by disrupting the parental dyad of mother and father. In the context of hysteria, the breakdown of the Oedipal triangle indicates a subversion of and liberation from the oppressive prohibitions of gender roles responsible for the hysteric's internal conflict. Celie's language reflects her transcendence of prohibitive and limiting social roles, dismantling the social framework of phallocentrism. When her manner of speech is ridiculed, Celie defends her right to a self- affirming language; she states, "look like to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind" (223). The bisexual inclusivity which Celie creates in her life is not only part of her reinvented relationships, but is ingrained in the very manner in which she communicates. Abbandonato has noted the subversiveness of Celie's dialect, in particular, by looking at the similarities between Walker's text and the innovative linguistics of contemporary feminist theory; Abbandonato writes, We might compare Walker's techniques with Irigaray's linguistic playfulness, fragmented phrases, and poetic cadences, which are similar in purpose, though not in style, to the suppleness, the sharp wit, and the compression of the black vernacular: each mode of expression represents both resistance to the hegemonic discourse and the deliberate use of linguistic non-conformity to position the self outside the dominant system. (1109) Abbandonato points directly to the subversive position of linguistic subjectivity from which Walker's narrator speaks. Celie identifies how her speech does not conform: "Darlene trying to teach me how to talk. She say US not so hot. A dead country give- away. You say US where most people say WE … and peoples thinks you dumb. Colored peoples think you a hick and white folks be amuse" (222). While acknowledging how her language may be outside of the social norms, Celie defends her right to personal expression, stating, "What I care? I ast. I'm happy" (222). Specifically, Celie's language engages in a liberation from linguistic constraint, deviating from convention to embrace a language that is uniquely hers. Taking Abbandonato's insight one step further, we can see Walker's protagonist speaking from the position that is repressed from the dominant linguistic system: specifically, Walker's text recognizes and celebrates the semiotic. In the structure of phallogocentrism, the emergence into language is marked by a castration from and degradation of the maternal body. However, as recent theorists have suggested, it is possible for the speaking subject to reopen this primary connection to what Kristeva calls the maternal chora. Specifically, Kristeva posits the existence of a revolutionary language that bridges the symbolic and semiotic, allowing for a free ­flowing expression that does not alienate the speaking subject from the maternal. When this bond is not broken, when language does not necessitate a severing of the maternal union, the result is a poetic language attuned to the pleasures, desires, and drives of the body. Kristeva attests to this phenomenon by pointing to the disruptions of syntax, grammar, and unity that the semiotic produces in symbolic language. Using Kristeva's paradigm of the semiotic, one can see how Walker's use of language disrupts the hegemonic economy of phallocentric sexual and linguistic discourses. Stylistically, Celie's language is divergent from the dominant system as exemplified by her disruptions of the formalities of grammar and syntax. Although this poetic voice exists on the margins of discourse, it is the readers who must adjust their ear to Celie's vernacular, as she never compromises her personal expression. Readers must shift to the margins of discourse to follow Celie's narrative. Once it occurs, this shift exposes the framework of linguistic formalities that work only to impinge and prohibit self-expression. Thus, once Nettie's anglicized letters are read, it is not Celie's voice that seems out of place, but Nettie's formal prose. As Wall suggests, Celie's "marginalized position" ultimately becomes "her stronghold … [by] giv[ing] her ground for resituating power" (93). For Kristeva, the semiotic is a realm beyond gender; it is a place where the mother-infant bond transcends the social structures of gender delineation. Although the semiotic is often associated with the feminine, it speaks more directly for what is socially repressed from phallogocentrism. Within the context of Walker's novel, it becomes clear that what is being socially repressed is the maternal bond, which is violated from the onset of the paternal interdiction; it is this bond that is the origin of desire, of pleasure, of liberation and of limitless expression. The censorship of the maternal union creates a system of further censorships, as the body is relegated to silence. Walker undermines this paradigm of prohibited voice by giving Celie authorship over her own story. Through letters, Celie is able to piece together the fragments of her censored and censured life, mending the gendered divide of language by giving voice to the body and soul that had been stripped from her. Celie's journey from object to author speaks of woman's potential transformation of consciousness, where both mind and body are brought together through a revolutionary poetic language. This language which Celie evokes in the aftermath of her sexual violation becomes her means of restoring her voice and her body. In more general terms, Celie's restoration speaks of the possibility for women to take back that has been taken from them: physically, by restoring their experience of pleasure; socially, by gaining access to roles that have been denied them; linguistically, by overcoming a prohibitive silence; and psychologically, by renewing the maternal bond. As Celie's emergence into authority illustrates, the restoration of a self-fulfilling sexuality and the dismantling of prohibitive processes are connected to a woman's ability to speak her own story. Reclaiming linguistic authority enables the female experience to be affirmed rather than degraded: a direct subversion of the occasion of sexual violation. With The Color Purple, Alice Walker counters the history of women's sexual, social, and linguistic degradation by creating a narrative of liberation. Her novel provides a model for women's potential movement into an existence that is at once both a personal affirmation and a proclamation for socio-cultural revolution. To initiate this revolution, Walker posits a return of the repressed, of the body, of pleasure, and of the maternal into discourse. Work Cited Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women. Trans. Anita Barrows. New York: Urizen Books, 1974. Kristeva, Julia. "Women's Time." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7.1 (1981): 13- 35. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square, 1982. Wall, Wendy. "Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple. " Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988): 83-97. Tavormina, Teresa. "Dressing the Spirit: Clothworking and Language in The Color Purple." The Journal of Narrative Technique 16 (1986): 220-30. Abbandonato, Linda. "A View from 'Elsewhere: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple. " PMLA 106 (1991): 1106-115. Read More