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

“The Writer’s Microphone:” Self-Definition as a Womanist

In a palimpsestic view on literature, reading proves to be an inspiriting¹ process that leads to rewriting, so that authors become “creative readers” who fill in the previous texts’ “vacant spaces” and give voice to their unsayability (Iser 1978, 210). The silences and gaps of the earlier African American fiction are revisited by Alice Walker, who does not only reconfigure the leitmotif of the female quest for self-revelation, but also chooses to reflect upon it from a new narrative perspective. The writer herself shows her awareness of the deep interconnection between her own writing and other writers’ works: “I learn that the writer’s pen is a microphone help up to the mouth of ancestors and even stones of long ago” (Walker 1988, 144).

Walker’s fiction—The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), In Love and Trouble (1973), Meridian (1977), You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart (2000)—centers upon the black characters’ personal development and inner fulfillment in relationship to their African American community and their specific Southern psychogeography.² Like other black authors, Walker repeatedly explains that she is preoccupied with the spiritual survival of her own people, especially with women’s process of artistic creation. Her work draws the reader’s attention to the huge potential of black women’s creativity, which “expands traditional Western notions of art to include such artifacts of “everyday use” as gardens and quilts” (Walker 1983, 137). For Walker, the process of writing itself turns out to be similar to the art of quilting, that presupposes the assemblage of various patches belonging to different text(ure)s, or to the work of gardening, in which diverse plants are transferred from one (narrative) space into another.

Centered upon Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple,³ the aim of the present chapter is twofold. On the one hand, Walker’s novel is significantly placed in an inter-textual framework given by the body of other African American women’s texts. In this way, the process of rewriting becomes a useful tool for offering cross-cultural and cross-temporal representations of female identity. Walker’s novel consciously revises Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), as well as texts belonging to the nineteenth century African American women writers, such as Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), and Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892). One of my main points regards the way the identity of the main character, Celie, is constructed by revising the nineteenth century cult of “true womanhood,” as well as the image of a patriarchal white male God.

On the other hand, special attention is paid to Celie’s polytropic character that is developed through the act of writing letters—an intra-textual strategy for physical and spiritual self-expression, documenting her movement from a subaltern into an independent position. Celie’s writing stages an escape from a patriarchal system, where her initial state of marginalization points to women’s subordinated role from a sexual and literary point of view. Her auctorial authority, which is also strengthened with the help of female bonding, reflects her ability to transform her objectified self into a powerful subject. This textual self-assertion reveals her mastery of her own words and her claiming ownership of her freed person.⁴ From a poststructuralist perspective, Celie’s body-text points to the deconstruction of the patriarchal view on the male-female relationship, so that her ex-centric writing offers a black woman’s version of events.⁵