Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter VI

“I have Always Been a Good Girl”

(Re)Lettering the Body-Text in Alice Walker’s

The Color Purple

“Pa Is Not Our Pa:” Subversions of Religious/Patriarchal Authority

In depicting Celie’s quest for independence, Walker’s innovative technique no longer draws upon Christianity as a source of authority, but critically revises its patriarchal ideological body enlarging it with new possibilities of a more flexible religion. If nineteenth century female writers lay stress on the protagonists’ strong religious faith in God’s justice, Walker reconsiders the traditional meaning of the Judeo-Christian God.

Celie’s spiritual awakening triggers the moment when she changes her perspective upon the white male God. When she finds out from Nettie’s letter that “Pa is not our Pa” (150), she rethinks her whole genealogy (realizing the removal of the stigma of incest) and also reconsiders her relationship to God. Her awareness is recounted in the last letter she writes to God, in short sentences that concentrate her fragmented thoughts focused on disturbed intra-family relations: the lynching of her real father, the madness of her mother, the lack of biological connections between herself and her brothers and sisters.

The destabilization of the patriarchal system takes place simultaneously with the subversion of the religious authority. There is a striking parallelism between Celie’s discovery that she does not have a real father and her awareness that God is not a fatherly, benevolent figure. In her confession to Shug, Celie juxtaposes the image of a deaf God upon the image of an insensitive man: “I say, the God I been praying and writing is a man. And act just like all the other men I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown” (164). Even more than that, Celie repeatedly associates the representation of God with that of a white man. “Big and old and tall and graybearded,” God must either look “like some stout white man working at the bank” (80), or “wear white robes and go barefooted” (165).

It is Shug who draws Celie’s attention to her stereotypical depiction of God as a white man and to the fact that the Bible was written by the white people. To the conventional divinity described by Celie, Shug opposes the animistic idea of a Supreme Being whose presence is felt everywhere. In Shug’s confession, God resembles Emerson’s Over-Soul, an almighty presence that assists each individual in discovering himself or herself: “God is inside you and inside everybody else… One day, while I was sitting quiet and like a motherless child, which I was, it came to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all” (166-7).

In her preface to the tenth anniversary edition of The Color Purple, Walker sees her novel as a theological work, which may contain the message of “the pagan transformation of God from patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, wind, and everything else” (1). This message encompasses Celie’s spiritual journey from an imprisoning condition to her self-realization of being part of a universal divine power.²⁶ This idea is closely related to Celie’s last letter, which clearly underlines her movement from writing to a patriarchal God to writing to an omnipresent divinity: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (242).

Walker therefore reconsiders Christian religion from the standpoint of an African American woman.²⁷ Using Shug as a promoter of her womanist ideas in the process of “decolonizing the spirit” (Walker 1997, 33), the author suggests the necessity to revise the Judeo-Christianity in its strict understanding as an inhibiting religion and reaffirm its more tolerant belief in the free will of each being. Shug’s warning to Celie that it is dangerous to totally reject any form of divinity opens new perspectives toward a fresh religious perception in relationship to black woman’s identity. Shug teaches Celie that she need neither associate God with an institutional church, nor ascribe to Him anthropomorphic features.²⁸