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

“Tuh de Horizon and Back:” Opening Perspectives

Keith Byerman interprets The Color Purple as “a ‘womanist’ fairy tale.” His idea circles back to the first part of this chapter, where it is argued that Walker’s perspective upon character and genre has its roots in her womanist credo. Byerman takes into consideration how Walker’s novel rethinks and combines several fairy tale motifs, while focusing on women’s emancipation:

Like Snow White, Celie is poisoned (psychologically in the novel) by an evil step-parent; like Cinderella, she is the ugly, abused daughter who ultimately becomes the princess; like Sleeping Beauty, she is awakened from her death-in-life by the kiss of the beloved; and like them all, she and her companions, after great travails, live happily ever after (1989, 59).

In Walker’s fairy tale it is not the man, but the woman who embarks on a quest for an autonomous self. Celie moves geographically (from an incarcerating Southern home to a liberating Northern space), psychologically (from a subordinate to an independent position), and imaginatively (from America to Africa by accompanying her sister).

Through Celie, Walker thus allows us to metaphorically hear those women whose existence has been “muzzled.” In this contemporary version of Snow White, Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty, it is the “princess” who is in search of an inner adventure ⁴⁹—that point of arrival to self-realization. Celie’s process of (re)lettering herself inscribes her body as a text, and her scripta as a corpus. As argued in this chapter, not only the boundary between speech/writing, mind/body, masculine/feminine collapses, but also that between the text and the body. Celie’s letters help her surpass the physical stereotype of the “good girl,” in a dialectical novel, in which the beginning is the thesis (where Celie exposes her female condition), the middle is the antithesis (where she comes to contradict the masculine model), and the ending is the synthesis (where the male and female voices blend).