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

Revising 19^th Century Female Models: “She Ain’t Fresh Tho”

By creating an independent female protagonist, one of Walker’s main strategies was to revise the nineteenth century model of black womanhood. Deborah McDowell stresses Walker’s and other contemporary authors’ endeavor to rethink the black female ideal inherited from their African American literary precursors:

Although these recent writers have preserved the revisionist mission that inspired that ideal, they have liberated their own characters from the burden of being exemplary standard bearers in an enterprise to uplift the race. The result is not only greater complexity and possibility for their heroines, but also greater complexity and artistic possibility for themselves as writers (1995, 41).

The Color Purple undertakes a thorough reworking of such past models as Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy. Focusing on women’s situation during slavery, all these texts are representative for what Robert Stepto calls “the pregeneric myth” or leitmotif of African American literature, the quest for literacy and freedom” (1979 a, ix). The heroines struggle to get over physical or moral enslavement, as their spiritual growth is strongly connected with their acquisition of a literate voice.

One may first notice that “the trope of the talking book” (Gates 1988, 240) has different figurations in the nineteenth century female tradition.²⁰ Wilson’s Frado achieves psychological freedom through her reading of religious books that become “constant companions” for “her soul’s refreshment” (115-16).²¹ In the same direction, Jacobs’ Linda Brent uses her newly acquired skills to read and write as an instrument of outwitting her master and finally obtaining her own and her children’s liberation.²² In a broader context, Harper’s Iola places her education on the altar of social uplift and advancement of her race, transforming her life into a symbol of Christian virtue.²³ Similarly to her precursors, Walker’s Celie learns that writing letters represents a means of resistance to the unaccountable events she is forced to pass through.

Significantly, Walker uses “the quest for literacy and freedom” for a different purpose than her precursors. While nineteenth century authors focus on an abolitionist goal as they intend to awaken the predominantly white audience’s consciousness against slavery, Walker’s aim is mainly feminist (or womanist) as she strives to enlighten both her black and white audience’s consciousness for the emancipation of the women of color. Whereas Wilson’s, Jacobs’, and Harper’s major goal is racial and social (the fight against the institution of slavery), Walker’s main concern is psychological and sexual (the fight against gender prejudices). This is why the first authors strive to generalize the experience of their characters whose portraits attain the quality of static abstractions, while Walker focuses on the private details of Celie’s inner life disclosing her dynamic personality.²⁴ Walker’s use of the epistolary genre allows the reader to concentrate on Celie’s most intimate reflections that are narrated in the first person and directly convey the stages of her psychological development. Unlike Jacobs or Harper, Walker writes about a real act of rape. If Jacobs’ Linda manages to avoid the sexual innuendoes of her white master, if Harper’s Iola escapes an attempted rape, Walker’s Celie is repeatedly raped by her father (“Pa” or Alphonso) and by her husband (Mr.______ or Albert)—two men who transform her into a sexual object and a hardworking housekeeper.

Walker’s novel thus presents an obvious parallelism between woman’s situation during slavery and Celie’s treatment by her father and husband. Not only is Celie raped by her putative father, but also her two children (Adam and Olivia) are given away by her father, her existence being similar to that of female slaves whose children were sold as a commodity. The scene of the marriage proposal is suggestive for the way in which men see Celie as an object of sexual fulfillment. Celie becomes part of a commercial exchange and is “bargained” by her future husband who looks at her in the same way as slave women used to be examined before being bought. Her father’s words addressed to her future husband point to her loss of virtue—an inferior status that is counterbalanced by her ability for hard work:

I can’t let you have Nettie. She too young. Don’t know nothing but what you tell her. Sides, I want her to git some more schooling. Make a schoolteacher out of her. But I can let you have Celie. She the oldest anyway. She ought to marry first. She ain’t fresh tho, but I spect you know that. She spoiled. Twice. But you don’t need a fresh woman no how. I got a fresh one in there myself and she sick all the time (9).

On this background, Celie’s phrase—“Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl” (3)—is a significant pre-text to the novel. Her almost simultaneous self-affirmation and self-erasure point to her confusion, her inability to represent herself in writing as a virtuous persona. Writing to God becomes a means of clarifying her consciousness: “Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me” (3). Ironically, her phrase that presupposes the rhetorical questioning of the patriarchal context is addressed to a white male God.

With its social and sexual undertones, the haunting image of the “good girl” can be traced in most of the writings of nineteenth century African American women who strove to defy the representation of the black woman as an epitome for insatiable sexual appetite. Wilson’s Nig, Jacobs’ Linda, and Harper’s Iola are instances of virtuous heroines attempting to demystify negative clichés of femininity. Their writings deconstruct nineteenth century polarized representations of femininity that used to contrast the pure image of Madonna (associated with white womanhood) with the debauched image of Jezebel (associated with black womanhood).

Walker revises this tradition, shedding an ironic light over woman’s so called “virtue,” which in an abusive system is equivalent to silence. This is why Celie’s remark “I don’t never git used to it” indicates her first sign of unconstrained behavior and resistance to male will (3). In her case, rape is no longer “an instrument of silencing, but the catalyst to Celie’s search of voice” (Cutter 2000, 166). Her narratological act of internal resistance is in consonance with her passive attitude toward her male aggressor:

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don’t never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you are a tree. That’s how come I know tress fear man (22).

Celie is exploited and beaten by her husband in the same way the salve Frado in Wilson’s Our Nig is abused by her white mistress. Both are seen as property, yet both find empowering ways of undermining their oppressors’ authority. Like Frado who is “the only moving power in the house,” Celie takes seriously her role of a housekeeper, able to look after her four stepchildren.²⁵ At this stage, Celie strikes back through her attitude of stubborn resistance—the only way to defy the misogynistic attitude of her husband.

Walker demonstrates accordingly the negative effects of patriarchy that chokes woman’s genuine voice and leaves her alone without a true interlocutor in an authentic dialogue. There is no “shared” discourse between Celie and her husband, but just a simulacrum of communication between the male and female spheres—the monologic aspect of a false dialogue. As further suggested by the next part, in such a patriarchal regime where women have to put on either the sugar-coated dress of true womanhood or the scabby coat of debauched womanhood, female characters have to develop various means of survival that make room for the dynamic expression of their personality.

NOTES