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

Stitching Dichotomies: “The Conversation of Sewing”

Making use of Celie’s technique of writing, Walker underlines such dichotomies as speech vs. writing, mind vs. body, and masculine vs. feminine.⁴¹ From a Derridian perspective, her text functions as a substitute for speech through the mode of supplementarity, in which writing is both an addition and a substitute for speech (1976).⁴² In a context in which speaking is denied to her, Celie transforms her “speakerly,”⁴³ “oral”⁴⁴ writing into a vehicle of truth and self-expression that deconstructs the opposition between writing and speaking. Celie’s complex text resembles African American quilts that incorporate various materials in a distinctive whole.⁴⁵ Her polytropic character is achieved through authorial autonomy in a dialogic text that unifies a multitude of female voices. In this sense, Nettie’s writing is incorporated into Celie’s text and turned into speech when her letters are read by Celie to the others. As in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, where Janie’s speech merges her own and the others’ discourses, in Walker’s novel there is a mixture of familiar and official “conversations” that melt into Celie’s distinct narrative voice.

As the opposition between writing and speech is effaced, so is that between the body and the mind. Through a schizophrenic self-representation, Celie initially detaches herself from her body. Drawing our attention to Celie’s remark, (“I git it and laugh. It feel like to split my face” (16)), McDowell compares this symbolic rupture that engenders “the character’s tenuous sense of self” to the gap between the inner and outer representation of herself (1995, 44). While Celie’s effacement is obvious in her letters addressed to God that are left unsigned, her process of self-discovery is visible in her letters to Nettie that she starts signing. By reshaping her body-text in a narrative mirror, Celie’s self-awareness is validated in writing so that she can acknowledge the intrinsic value of both her spirituality and physicality.

One should compare here Celie’s affirmation of her obliterated identity with Morrison’s Pecola in The Bluest Eye, the young girl whose inner development is hindered by her assimilation of racist stereotypes imposed on women’s bodies.⁴⁶ Both Morrison’s and Walker’s novels criticize “the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze” (Morrison, Afterword 1999, 167-68). Both novels portray images of young girls who are rejected by their racial and patriarchal environment, are raped by their (step)fathers, but still find support in female relationships. In spite of these common points, the antithesis between characters is evident. If in Morrison’s gloomy text Pecola is not “saved,” but driven into madness as her child dies, in Walker’s optimistic novel Celie is able to survive the traumatic events and find the inner strength not to collapse psychologically. Finally, there is a striking contrast between Pecola’s maimed self, wondering at the outskirts of the society, and Celie’s renewed self, blooming happily in the middle of her reunited family. While Morrison consciously “gives voice to the unspeakable condition of a girl whose inner growth is silenced by society,” Walker intentionally lets her character express herself surpassing her former somatophobia and subverting male authority (Crišu 2003, 17).

What saves Celie from turning into Pecola is the newly achieved autonomy that manifests both from an authorial and sexual point of view. As Lauren Berlant states, “sexual knowledge derives from private experiences on the body and yet operates as a register for systematic relations of power” (2003, 100). Berlant’s perspective sustains the idea of female empowerment—a recurrent trope in the novel. In order to assert her freedom, Celie moves away from her husband’s house and starts a business with pants. Paradoxically, her creative impulse is based on a destructive one, manifested in her intention to kill her husband after discovering that he hid her sister’s correspondence. The “razor” is replaced accordingly by the “needle:”

I sit in the dining room making pants after pants. I got pants now in every color and size under the sun. Since us started making pants down home, I ain’t been able to stop. I change the cloth, I change the print, I change the waist, I change the pocket… Then finally one day I make the perfect pair of pants… (180).

By reflecting “the relationship between struggle and change” (Christian 1989, 39), Celie’s work becomes an instrument of self-expression, of proving her self-worth and abnegation to the others. As trousers point out strong connotations of masculinity, Celie passes through a process of virilization that allows her to become more self-confident and self-sufficient.⁴⁷ In an ironic key that turns the initial situation upside down, Celie starts to be assisted in her work by her husband, Mr. ______. Notice that Celie and Mr. ______ do not change their roles so that Celie could become Mr. ______’s suppressor. The end of the novel does not offer the easy solution of a world turned upside down, of feminine independence and masculine subservience, but places the two protagonists on equal positions and they start “sewing” their conversation in the same way they do their needlework.

This brings us to our last dichotomy: the conflict between the masculine site of power and the feminine powerlessness. This opposition is mediated in Celie’s final letters. Celie’s and Albert’s “conversation of sewing” takes place at the meeting point where Celie’s virility is counterbalanced by Albert’s femininity (Cutter 2000, 175). Their dialogue sends us back to the epigraph of the novel, “Show me how to do like you/Show me how to do it” that can be reconsidered through Celie’s perspective as an initiator abiding by an African model:

And men sew in Africa, too, I say.

They do? He ast.

Yeah, I say. They not so backward as mens here.

When I was growing up, he said, 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.

Well, nobody gon laugh at you now, I said. Here, help me stitch in these pockets.

But I don’t know how, he say.

But I show you, I said. And I did (230).

The scene brings along the reconfiguration of the domestic space, which is no longer a feminine area. As the interaction between individuals is a significant component in the production of space, the novel negotiates a symbolic terrain for the masculine and the feminine spheres to meet. In this way, Celie’s character becomes autonomous only when she manages to come to terms with her past and overcome her feelings of hatred toward her former oppressor.

This reconciliation is encoded in Celie’s usage of names. Since she no longer calls her husband Mr.______, but Albert, she humanizes and transforms him into a person who understands her: “I mean when you talk to him now he really listen” (221) and “look to me rather thoughtful” (231). Molly Hite explains here that Mr.______’s initial lack of name justifies the narrator’s “effacement of an identity too dangerous to reveal, and whose transformation is signaled by a renaming [as Albert] that at once diminishes and humanizes” (1989, 107).

If Walker’s pen functions as a microphone, Celie’s pen serves as a needle—an instrument that stitches together various dichotomies in intricate textual embroidery. In the end, Celie is reconciled with Albert and her father, Sofia with Harpo and Squeak, the white family (represented by Miss Eleanor Jane) with Sofia. As in a quilt pattern, the characters’ voices blend in a harmonious chorus, which transcends former literary representations that used to maintain Manichean positions.⁴⁸