“Show Me How to Do It:” From Zora Hurston to Stevie Wonder

Corina Crisu

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

“Show Me How to Do It:” From Zora Hurston to Stevie Wonder

Addressing the essential role of a broader perspective in writing, Walker underlines that “models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect—even if rejected—enrich and enlarge one’s view of existence” (1983, 4). In her symbolically entitled essay, “Saving the Life that Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” she states her indebtedness to several literary precursors: Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Jean Toomer, and others.⁸ One could argue that Walker’s relationship with these authors has a double significance: while she strives to rescue their work from oblivion or misreading, they provide her with valuable sources of inspiration for her own literary survival. The most powerful example is Zora Neale Hurston, the writer whom Walker “saved” from being just a footnote in the white literary canon and whose work left its deep imprint on Walker’s creativity.⁹

Walker has no anxiety of influence in considering Hurston as one of her literary precursors.¹⁰ Henry Louis Gates cogently argues that Walker’s The Color Purple “Signifies upon” Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God “by troping the concept of voice” (1988, 243). In the same direction, Michael Awkward affirms that Walker transforms Hurston’s text into a “matrix” for her novel (1989 a, 135).¹¹ Even though Hurston belongs to the Harlem Renaissance generation of the 1930s,¹² and Walker to the postmodern period of the 1980s,¹³ the same thematic concern for women’s identity development is central to their texts.

Indeed, both novels celebrate women’s achievement of an autonomous identity, the importance of women’s bonds, and their relationship to the black community. Several similarities should be established between Hurston’s Janie and Walker’s Celie: both heroines are Southern black women who live in the 1920s and 1930s; both of them are orphans (their mother is absent or dies); for both of them attaining womanhood through marriage means psychological death; both of them have two men in their lives who treat them either as “mules” only good for hard work or as objects of desire; both of them experience self-awakening through a nonconformist relationship to either a pariah protagonist (Tea Cake in Janie’s case) or a woman singer (Shug in Celie’s case); last but not least, floral imagery and symbolic colors acquire a primordial role in their lives, expressing the stages of their inner quest. Hence, Hurston’s and Walker’s texts propose “a new gynocentric culture in which the originally abused and marginalized becomes the new loci for order and spirituality” (Brogan 1999, 187).¹⁴

Walker’s relation to Hurston (and other literary precursors) can be implicitly traced in the novel’s two line epigraph, as well as in its final note, its dedication and its very title—all of them making reference to the intertextual quality of the novel. The epigraph of Walker’s novel, “Show me how to do like you/Show me how to do it,” belonging to Stevie Wonder, brings into attention a vernacular song with sexual and textual implications. While this ambivalent song can be read against the Western literary tradition as a signifying mockery of the Eurocentric grand narratives, it may also refer to the African American tradition, whose assistance the author invokes and whose vacant spaces she rewrites. In this light, the final note in the novel, with its metafictional input, places Walker’s authorial alter-ego in the position of a mediator between her characters, the spirits of her literary precursors, and the contemporary reader: “I thank everybody in this book for coming. A. W., author and medium” (245).

The same intertextual polysemy is present in the dedication prefacing her novel:

To the Spirit:

Without whose assistance

Neither this book

Nor I

Would have been

Written.

The dedication to the Spirit not only deconstructs the classic tradition in which the Muse was invoked at the beginning of a literary work, but also prefigures the later replacement in the novel of the Christian God with the more flexible notion of the divine Spirit. Mostly, the dedication draws our attention to the deep interconnection between Walker’s novel and her authorial self as constructed body-texts that are “written” with the “assistance” of a whole cultural context.¹⁵

The scriptural connotations of the dedication resonate with the metaphor of gazing in Hurston’s title, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Reconsidering Hurston, Walker’s character does not look up at God, (or ask for His mercy as in the slave narrative tradition), but tries to establish a way of communication by writing to Him, in order to make God symbolically gaze down upon her. Unlike in Hurston’s novel, where the point of view switches from the first person at the beginning to the third person narrator throughout most of the novel,¹⁶ Walker lets her character speak in the first person, so that the narrator’s sufferance of being raped at age fourteen by her step father should become more arresting.¹⁷ The novel is conceived as a series of letters/monologues¹⁸ addressed by Celie to God and later to her sister, Nettie. The triangular pattern Celie-Nettie-God can be also identified in Hurston, where Janie tells her story to her bosom friend, Pheoby, whose function is to retell it to the community.

Hurston and Walker employ different strategies to narrate their characters’ search of an autonomous identity—an empowering trope in their texts. While Hurston’s technique is to make Janie tell her story through the agency of a narrator, relying on the oral African American tradition of storytelling, Walker’s device is to allow Celie write down what is happening to her, in order to develop a textually constructed identity. Implicitly, Celie’s letters also speak to a community of readers, so that the domestic sphere is brought to public attention, with its most intimate implications. From a reader response perspective, Celie’s letters and Janie’s speech have the function of captatio benevolentia, of appealing to the reader’s sympathetic understanding.

In Walker’s epistolary novel, Celie’s letters initiate a process of self-examination, in which she learns how to decipher her body as a text imprinted with racial, social, and sexual relations. For Celie, writing becomes a therapeutic act of healing, of rendering visible her invisible trauma, of preventing her from becoming a dead, silenced subject in language.¹⁹ From this perspective, the epigraph “Show me how to do it” points to her desire to acquire and develop her own polytropic identity throughout the novel and her search for models who would help her awaken her conscience. Certainly, Celie’s journey from object to subject reconsiders woman’s position in patriarchy and the departure from predetermined female roles.

NOTES

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