Alice Walker's The Color Purple, published in 1982, tells the story of Celie, a Black woman in the South. Celie writes letters to God in which she tells about her life--her roles as daughter, wife, sister, and mother. In the course of her story, Celie meets a series of other Black women who shape her life: Nettie, Celie's sister, who becomes a missionary teacher in Africa; Shug Avery, the Blues singer her husband Mr. ______ is in love with, and who becomes Celie's salvation; Sofia, the strong-willed daughter-in-law whose strength and courage inspire Celie; and Squeak, who goes through awakenings of her own. Throughout the story, though, Celie is the center of this community of women, the one who knows how to survive.

Click here for a brief biography of Alice Walker.

Questions to Think About:

1) Alice Walker's The Color Purple is an example of a "woman's novel." This means not just that it was written by a woman, but that it carries on an identified tradition of women's writing, in terms of narrative strategies, themes addressed, and voice. This is not to say that all women write about the same things; but there is a tradition known as women's literature, which has developed with a consciousness of women's traditions of writing as distinct from mens' ways of writing. With that in mind, consider the following questions:

a) What other novels by women have you read as literature? Who are the women authors you have seen included in your reading lists in literature courses in high school or college courses?

b) What can you identify about the traditions of women's writing from those authors, as well as other women writers with whom you are familiar?

c) What other African-American women writers have you read--such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, or Gwendolyn Brooks--and what are the traditions in which they write? To what extent do these writers fit into the traditions of women writers, and to what extent do they also draw on an important tradition of African-American writing and speech (such things as slave narratives and charismatic Christian writing, of which Patricia Raybon's forgiving tone in My First White Friend is an example)?

2) The African-American theorist and writer bell hooks (Gloria Watkins) has argued in an essay, "Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple" (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist, 1990), that The Color Purple is a parody of the tradition of the "slave narrative"--stories written by male and female former slaves about their experiences under slavery. Some slave narratives were collected among exslaves in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal project in the Southern United States. This powerful literary tradition is characterized by Frederick Douglass's The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Linda Brent's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and many others. Drawing on in-class discussion of slave narratives, consider the following questions:

a) hooks argues that slave narratives connect the plight of the individual slave to that of other slaves as a plea and demand for political and social change. How does Walker do this with Celie's story in The Color Purple?

b) Even while Walker shows Celie as part of a community which shares struggles, how does she show that the particular elements of Celie's life are not uniform and universal? For example, compare Celie's experiences with males to Shug's. Compare the degree to which Celie's sense of self is shaped in the early parts of the novel by what patriarchs and men say she is to Sofia's sense of self; how does Sofia define herself? What makes for the differences between Celie's, Shug's, and Sofia's experiences with men?

c) hooks says that the essential part of a slave narrative is that it tells as truthful--meaning factually proveable--a story as is possible. Does Alice Walker do this when she reconstructs Celie's story? Where are "fictions" employed in her novel?

d) hooks argues that a slave narrative emphasizes racial oppression. Does Walker emphasize racial oppression? Or does she emphasize other reasons that Celie is oppressed? To what do you attribute this difference?

e) hooks argues that slave narratives use the fact of their authors' literacy to prove the narrators' worth as intellectual and human souls. Why does Celie write? Are there other ways Celie tells her story than in writing? What is the effect of her telling her story, as opposed to writing it?

4) Compare Walker's representations of rape in this book--especially Celie's rape by a Black man, and Squeak (Mary Agnes)'s rape by a white man. What is going on here? What is Walker saying about sexual violence and womens' reactions to it?

5) Celie's writing letters to God is known as an "epistolary form," because letters to God or in a religious context are called "epistles." Why does Celie write to God? What sorts of things can she tell God that she cannot tell others? What sorts of things does she learn to tell Shug that she is afraid to tell God? Does God ever listen to Celie?

6) Drawing on both Walker's stories about interactions between white and Black women in The Color Purple and Raybon's My First White Friend, discuss where Black and white feminists have parted company. Given the many differing interests women of differing backgrounds have, imagine what would have to take place to build a coalition between feminists of differing races, ethnicities, classes, and sexualities. What would it take?

Further resources for studying The Color Purple:

Alice Walker Information Links:

A list of information about Alice Walker
Biography of Walker
Background Research on Walker
An English Class at the University of Texas created this page for Alice Walker
Anniina's Alice Walker Page
Read an article from the Detroit News about Alice Walker's book, The Same River Twice--Honoring the Difficult about the experience of the making of The Color Purple into a film and Walker's response to charges that the book unfairly attacks Black men. You can also read David Templeton's review of the book and Julie Mills's article about the book.
Listen in on a student discussion of The Color Purple at the University of Virginia.
The Women's Press site about Walker has lots of good stuff.

Walker Placed in Context--Women's Writing/African-American Writing:

Brown University's Women Writers Project covers women's writing before 1830
Emory Women Writers Resource Project provides texts from the 1500s through the 1800s.
Perry Willett's Victorian Women Writers Project at the University of Indiana provides transcriptions of literary works by British women writers of the late 19th century.
The Orlando Project is a project aimed at creating "An Integrated History of Women's Writing in the British Isles."
Elizabeth Fay's Belle Assemblee: The Bluestocking Archive provides information about Romantic women writers.
Bonnie Duncan's Women Writers Of The Middle Ages contains information about the rich tradition of women's literature, including Christine de Pizan and Hildegard von Bingen.
Paula DiTallo's Literary Women of the Left Bank allows you to visit a Salon attended by the literary and artistic lights of 1919 Paris--Josephine Baker, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Colette, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, and others.
Alexandria North's Isle of Lesbos: Lesbian Poetry site provides texts and information about lesbian writers.
Danuta Bois's Distinguished Women of Past and Present allows you to see what other women writers were writing when Walker's work was published.
A syllabus for Scarlett Bowen's course, Autobiography and the Slave Narratives, taught at the University of Texas.
Information, including readings for Heather Hathaway's course, Black Women's Narratives from Slavery to Harlem Renaissance, taught at Harvard University.
Andrew L.Graham of the University of Keele, in the United Kingdom, has a collection of resources on Writing Black.

Walker Placed in Context--Other African American women writers to study:

Several resources for womanist studies
The Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Georgia's Womanist Homepage
Resources for womanist studies at the University of Illinois Chicago is at the And Still We Rise site.
Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
For an essay about Alice Walker and Hurston, see Leslie Odil's "In Search of Our Mother's Garden."
Toni Morrison, author of Beloved.
Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
Information on several other authors, including Gwendolyn Brooks, can be found here.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for History 182 (Women's History and Feminist Theory), The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Friday 29 May 1998