Review: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

So I finally got round to reading ‘The Color Purple’ but I’m not really sure what I think of it. The story of a young black girl, Celie, in the American south in the first half of the twentieth century, it concentrates on her domestic and personal life with little consideration of the larger, segregated America still coming to terms with the abolition of slavery.

Celie’s early life is for the most part wretched. If blacks were at the bottom of the American social ladder, then black women were its lowest rung.  It was a world in which violence, rape and even incest were an ever-present feature of women’s lives. Most of the men portrayed are ignorant, feckless bullies. Marriage is for the convenience of the man with most women contracted essentially into a life of drudgery. They are worn down by constant pregnancies and old before their time.

Celie suffers all these indignities, including being raped and made pregnant by the  man, Alphonso, she believes to be her father. Worse, the resulting two children are casually disposed of by Alphonso. She is then married off to a man who doesn’t love her and regularly beats her. Celie could easily be forgiven, then, for simply giving up on life..but that is not what she does.

She is sustained by the love for her absent sister Nettie who she never gives up expecting to see again – despite the fact that for many years there is no evidence that she is still alive. She is equally sustained by her relationship with a flamboyant  singer, Shug, who shows her there can be more to life than the daily drudgery she is used to. With Shug’s support she starts a little business of her own making trousers (‘pants’ as the Americans like to call them). The business is a success and gives Celie a degree of both self-worth and independence.

Meanwhile we are given an insight into Nettie’s life through the letters she continually writes to her sister, even though there is no evidence that any ever arrive. Nettie finds work with a missionary couple who have adopted Celie’s two discarded children. She ends up in Africa trying to convert a native tribe – the natives are hospitable but see the missionaries as an irrelevance to their lives.  This view is borne out when the villagers’ land is destroyed by white colonists over whom the missionaries have no sway. 

Over the years Celie becomes reconciled to her husband who comes to recognize his failures as a husband and father and belatedly starts to reform, so enabling bittersweet reconciliation. Despite reports that she had been drowned, when German U-boats torpedoed the ship bringing her home, Nettie appears at the end, complete with Celie’s adopted children, to provide us with a happy ending.

What to make of all of this? In some ways it is an uplifting story. Celie’s journey from downtrodden poverty to contented independence is obviously a story that many readers find inspiring. It is consoling to know that even under the direst of situations the human spirit can still triumph. But it rather seems to me to be a small victory in a big bad world. The younger generation at the end of the book seems no better than the one that made Celie’s early life such a misery. And no one in Celie’s world directs their rage against the unjust society in which they live.

Perhaps we can get a glimpse of Walker’s attitude to societal change from Nettie’s story. Her life as part of a missionary family is a frustrating failure. The Olinka tribe are set in their ways and resent the missionaries attempts to change their culture. They are particularly resistant to the attempts to educate their girls. In the Olinka world women have a tightly defined but clearly subservient role – but even the grown women cleave to this role and simply want their daughters to follow in their footsteps. Conformity is the watchword of this society – as it is of many others.

Change only comes to the Olinka when external forces in the form of colonialism sweep away their way of life. Future generations will live a marginalised existence, either retreating further into the forest or making a precarious living in a white-man’s world. So much for progress.

Most of us, I suppose, are more like Celie than Nettie – we find ourselves in a world we didn’t ask to be born into and simply get on with it. We recognise social injustice but it is too big a problem to solve. And there are many more immediate concerns. The world is full of quietly heroic people  for whom making life bearable on a daily basis is enough. Perhaps it is their recognition, in Celie, of  a fellow-spirit that made this book such a success.