AMERICAN STUDIES
Vol. XX
Maria Lysik
"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave;
you shall see how a slave was made a [wojrnan":
Alice Walker's The Color Purple as a Neo-Slave Narrative
The nineteenth century popularized the art of the slave narrative—the
"pioneer of the Afro-American novel" (Bell 29). According to James OIney, each
slave narrative was "a unique production" as an autobiography, and "is not every
autobiography the unique tale, uniquely told, of a unique life?" (148). Despite
its uniqueness, however, each slave narrative is also predictable insofar as it
represents its genre: it tells the story of a black slave's struggle for literacy and
freedom, while testifying against the "peculiar institution/' which in practice
meant human bondage and humiliation (Gates, "Introduction" ix). For many years
slave narratives were overlooked and deemed of little importance to the American
literary tradition. Their credibility and authenticity were questioned until black
scholars initiated meticulous research into, and analysis of, the genre.
In the 1920s and 1930s the Federal Writers' Project commenced, amassing
testimonies of bondage, thus providing painful and graphic illustrations of North
America's chattel slavery and helping establish a legitimate African-American
literary tradition. It was, however, the mid-twentieth century, especially the civil
rights era, that brought about a formal rebirth of the slave narrative tradition. This
literary form has inspired twentieth-century black writers' imagination and
creativity, and induced them, in the words of Bernard Bell, to "experiment with
modern forms of slave narratives/ which led to the birth of the "neo-slave
narrative" (245). This generic transformation, according to Beaulieu, is "one of
the most powerful'developments in the twentieth-century American literature" (4).
Contemporary African-American writers recognize the vitality of the genre, and in
their fictional or partly-fictional novels they make overt references to slavery and
the slaves' lot. Toni Morrison's Beloved, Margaret Walker's Jubilee, Ernest J.
Games' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and Octavia E. Butler's Kindred
are but a few examples of the growing sub-genre. Its modern-day continuation is
evident in works such as Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Alice Walker's The Color
Purple. This last case, however, requires a more detailed analysis.
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Maria Lysik
"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
While the slave narrative was "presented as nonfiction," the neo-slave narrative,
its contemporary offspring, was "autobiographical fiction" (Foster x). The latter
form was readily employed by black postmodernist writers in the process of
rediscovering the beauty and vitality of their own folklore tradition: black English,
music and religion (Bell 284). Neo-slave narratives depicted practices of "a vital
slave culture" as means of coping with a hostile reality and an antidote to
"becoming the docile or absolutely servile automatons found in the stereotypes
of the plantation romance tradition," refusing to have their spirits broken down
(Rushdy 533). Slaves cherished their folk culture by telling folk tales, by singing,
and dancing. Women especially took to artistic expression, for example quilting.
The protagonist of The Color Purple—Celie—lives in oppressive conditions in her
own household and initially her method of sustenance is writing to God. Then she
begins to make a quilt: "Me and Sofia work on the quilt. Got it frame up on the
porch. Shug Avery donate her old yellow dress for scrap, and I work in a piece
every chance I get" (The Color Purple 61). This quilt-making can be interpreted as
a subconscious attempt to piece herself together and endure her joyless lot. She
does not plan an escape or any personal uprising, as many slaves had in the
past.
Rushdy maintains that neo-slave narratives were characterized by "the use
and celebration of 'oral' modes of representation" (533). Orality was a feature
dating back to the times of slavery when many tales were told and re-told in
the slave cabins. Because it was inherent in the slave culture, slave writers
attempted to instill this verbal quality into their written narratives and oral
performances—tools of the antislavery crusade. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
argues, the "black speaking subject" strove for more than two centuries "to find
his or her voice," and this ambition and hope for some articulateness constitutes
the "most central trope" in the African-American literary tradition (Signifying 239).
According to Butler-Evans, in The Color Purple Walker employs this trope of
oraiity and weaves it into the narrative strategy (163). This "interjection of verbal
discourse" (163) manifests itself in Celie's precious and unique gift—she
possesses a lively command of black English, which has been a hallmark of the
African-American oral tradition and its vivid expression (163). Butler-Evans argues
that Celie's first-person narration does not attest to the fact that she is writing,
but that she is in fact speaking or, as Gates asserts, "she writes her speaking
voice and that of everyone who speaks to her" ("Color..." 243). Celie's language
is marked by black English grammar, colloquialisms, characteristic spelling,
ordinary speech-like qualities of sentences, and is more reminiscent of informal
dialogue than of a written form (Butler-Evans 163-164). Gates remarks that we as
readers have an impression of "overhearing people speak," for Celie's written
narration is "identical in diction and idiom to the supposedly spoken words that
pepper her letters" (Signifying 249).
Ashraf Rushdy describes neo-slave narratives as "modern or contemporary
fictional works substantially concerned with depicting the experience or the
effects of New World slavery" (533). Furthermore, he points out that they
feature "fictional slave characters as narrators, subjects, or ancestral presences"
(533). As Walker once said in an interview, Celie is vaguely reminiscent of her
grandmother raped by her white master, so an echo of an "ancestral presence"
was transferred into The Color Purple.
Alice Walker admits to being a "part of a black tradition of artists, particularly
that strain stemming from Southern slave narrators, folk tellers of tales, and
literary artists," among whom she distinguishes the writer Margaret Walker, and
her greatest literary authority figure, Zora Neale Hurston (Davis, T. 32-33).
Similarly to Gates, Bell claims that The Color Purple is "a contemporary rewriting
of Janie Crawford's [a protagonist of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God\
dreams of what a black woman ought to be and do, but rather than heterosexual
love, lesbianism is the rite of passage to selfhood, sisterhood, and brotherhood
for Celie" (263). Marva Furman claims "there is no record of the [black] novelists'
having publicly acknowledged the [slave] narratives' literary influence on their
art," but "there is evidence which suggests that the novelists read these personal
histories" (122). Toni Morrison's intimations slightly contradict Furman's claims,
as the Nobel Prize laureate overtly admits to being inspired by the literary
tradition of the slave narratives (Morrison 299). Alice Walker, on the other hand,
only vaguely hints at her own works' immediate connection with the slave
testimonies. In various essays Walker acknowledges the African-American literary
tradition and names the black writers (several of whom wrote or dictated slave
narratives) and activists whose life and works have been an inspiration to her,
including Lucy Terry, Phyllis Wheatley, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner
Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nella Larsen.
She writes in her essay "Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of
Models in the Artist's Life":
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...black writers seem always involved in a moral and/or physical struggle, the result
of which is expected to be some kind of larger freedom. Perhaps this is because our
literary tradition is based on the slave narratives, where escape for the body and
freedom for the soul went together. (In Search 5, emphasis mine)
It is worth pointing out that at first Rushdy discerns only two kinds of neo-slave
narratives: "historical novels set in the antebellum South," of which Margaret
Walker's Jubilee is a spectacular example, and "social realist or magical realist
novels set in post-Reconstruction or twentieth-century America but dealing with
the demonstrable effects of slavery on contemporary African American subjects"
(Rushdy 534). Rushdy acknowledges that the neo-slave narrative has its primary
inspirational source in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works, such as
"slave narratives, postbellum slave narratives, and abolitionist fiction" (534). He
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Maria Lysik
briefly outlines the history of the genre and divides it into two time periods:
"before and after 1966" (534). The Sixties with their Civil Rights Movement
opened university careers to black scholars and urged historians to focus their
attention on slave narratives and visions of history these narratives depicted
(534). A surge of novels on American slavery followed. Rushdy continues to
distill further divisions and specifications within the sub-genre, arriving at a list of
four types of neo-slave narratives written in the "post-civil rights era": "historical
novels about slavery," "contemporary novels about the ongoing effects of
slavery," genealogical accounts tracing family roots, and contemporary adaptations
of traditional slave narratives' form and conventions (534-535).
The major characteristic of the neo-slave narrative is, according to Rushdy, the
representation of chatteihood "as a historical phenomenon that has lasting
cultural meaning and enduring social consequences" (533). While this trait is
overtly represented in Margaret Walker's Jubilee or in Morrison's Beloved, where
literal slavery is ubiquitous, The Color Purple's allusions to the legacy of this
system are less apparent. I would like to place The Color Purple within the
literary tradition of the neo-slave narratives, and demonstrate that it fits into
Rushdy's category of "contemporary novels about the ongoing effects of slavery"
(535). He labels them "palimpsest narratives," because they usually involve
stumbling upon some sort of a narrative, or a story inherited from an ancestor
slave. He characterizes them as first-person writing featuring "a contemporary
African-American subject" who functions within "modern social relations that are
directly conditioned or affected by an incident, event, or narrative from the time
of slavery," and who usually experiences some sort of personal destruction due
to the legacy of slavery as it exists in the collective memory (535). Celie is
enslaved by her husband, because he has internalized the racist stereotypes of
the master-slave position as exercised during the times of slavery. In Audre
Lorde's rewording of Paulo Freire's assertions expressed in The Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, the patriarchs from her immediate surrounding are guilty of having
this "piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which
knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships." These
patterns must be subject to immediate change and revision if we hope for a nonsexist and non-racist society (Lorde 287).
The underlying concepts of the neo-slave narratives are trauma and postmemory,
and in her novel Alice Walker unpacks these notions from the point of view of
a black female author. These psychological phenomena occur years after the
actual tragic event took place. Robert Burns Stepto sees "remembering" as the
"most impressive feature of slave narrative" (225), while Barbara Christian adds
that it is "a critical determinant," for it defines the manner in which "we value the
past, what we remember, what we select to emphasize, what we forget" (333)
and what writers choose as their subject matter. Carl Plasa and Betty Ring
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"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
recognize this phenomenon and state that "forms of historical reflection play a
crucial role in any attempt to counteract oppression in the present: a culture that
seeks to evade the more violent aspects of its own history will only perpetuate
them" (xiii). If "remembering" was pivotal to antebellum slave narratives, then my
contention is that post-remembering, also referred to as postmemory, or
"re-memory" (Christian 329), has been incorporated into the contents of the
neo-slave narratives, and has bridged the past (hence the "postness") with the
present (hence the "neoness").
In her essay "Mother's Milk and Sister's Blood: Trauma and the Neoslave
Narrative," Naomi Morgenstern analyzes Deborah McDowell's evocation of the
theory of trauma and how it is related to the compulsion of remembering, retelling
and rewriting the experience of slavery, resulting in such literary forms as the neoslave narrative, "the twentieth-century novel about slavery" (Morgenstern 101).
McDowell presupposes that repeating the stories of the past is an effort to claim
control over history (Morgenstern 101), or as Timothy Cox puts it "to recover the
past and to recover from it" (Cox 2). Morgenstern, however, suggests that the
neo-slave narrative "marks the undesirable return of an unforgettable past"
(102), thus giving birth to postmemory, which has lingered at the back of our
heads, waiting to be unleashed and allowed to interrogate the past. It is not
irrational to assert that Walker, as a black American conscious of her people's
past, has carried the burden of postmemory all her life and vented its fragmented aspects into her writing, which is haunted by denigrated images of black
women. Cox asserts that the neo-slave narratives (he coins his own terms for this
sub-genre: new slavery novel, new literature on slavery, the New World slavery
novel, recent slavery novel) "create a time-space in the past for working through
questions of the present" (3). Accordingly, The Color Purple constitutes an
attempt to quilt the fragments of history together, to show enslavement as it is
carried on in the twentieth-century environment, and to articulate questions of
how to counteract this morbid, internalized legacy of racism and sexism. Walker
admits that "all history is current; all injustice continues on some level" (qtd. in
Davis, T. 26), and informs her writing with issues of twentieth-century personal
struggle for freedom of all kinds (30).
Morgenstern bases her analysis on two neo-slave narratives, Gayl Jones'
Corregidora and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The novels' plots are brimming with
traumatized memory of past events that influence the contemporary protagonists'
life. Bearing witness, giving testimony, Morgenstern insists, is an integral element
of the African-American experience: it stems from the compulsion to articulate
and reanimate the history of violence as lived by blacks (105). Slave narratives
are the earliest written evidence of this compulsion. If, as she claims, the
neo-slave narratives are "fictional testimonial literature" evoking the painful
memory of slavery (105), then The Color Purple can also be viewed as such. The
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Marta Lysik
"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
Color Purple employs themes of an antebellum slave narrative and implicitly
refers to the legal system of chattel slavery while telling a traumatized tale of
sexual oppression and violence. The protagonist is not haunted with the memory
of past ordeals of her people, but she faces her own enslavement and her own
traumas. Neo-slave narratives come to life out of a growing need to share an
ancestral tale of slavery, to pass it on to the next generations. Moreover, Walker
attested to that tradition by rewriting her grandmother's traumatic experience.
She adapted the form of the slave narrative and produced a legitimate, one-of-akind contemporary neo-slave narrative.
John Bayliss observed that slave narratives are "the Blues in prose," for they
record the hardships as they were experienced in order to commemorate them
and come to terms with them (9). The African slaves' musical inclinations were a
coping mechanism developed by their culture. Eleanor Traylor analyzed the theme
of music, the blues in particular, in Margaret Walker's neo-slave narrative Jubilee.
She asserts that "a legacy of two centuries of singing" cannot pass unnoticed in
contemporary African-American creativity (Traylor 512). This "blues mode of
Afro-American narrative and fiction," which manifests itself in the oral qualities of
many texts, becomes an embodiment of tradition and uniqueness, an "ancestral
touchstone" (513). Jubilee abounds with quotations of spirituals, gospel and
early blues songs. Alice Walker also paid a tribute to this tradition by placing the
blues-singer protagonist Shug Avery in The Color Purple. While the book only hints
at the songs she is repeatedly humming, Quincy Jones, a musician, co-authored
the score to Steven Spielberg's film version of the novel, thus giving a specific
shape to our fantasies of the blues-singing and performing Shug. Along with Rod
Temperton and Lionel Richie, Jones wrote "Miss Celie's Blues (Sister)/' a song
which presents the quintessence of African-American female experience from a
historical point of view. It is a woman's manifesto song, which Alice Walker
"immediately imagined as a signal of affirmation that women could hum to each
other coast to coast" and saw as "an immeasurable gift to the bonding of
women" (The Same... 31). Shug addresses and dedicates the song to Celie,
with whom she begins to form a personal female bond—only a step away from
establishing a supportive community of women.
Slave narratives contained themes of black Americans' tradition, be it telling
stories, quilting, dancing or singing spirituals and early blues compositions. By
incorporating this particular element of African-American tradition—singing the
blues—Alice Walker, later on aided by Jones' musical rendition of Shug's
presence, equips us with evidence proving that her novel can be seen as a
neo-slave narrative, as it resuscitates many flavors characteristic of the ancestral
slave culture.
Beauiieu observed that whenever a black female writer sits down to produce a
neo-slave narrative, she has to account for "paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction"
which will accompany her in this process of recreating the "enslaved motherhood"
(Beauiieu 25). Moreover, each of these writers reawakens not only "the woman
who is her enslaved ancestor," but also "the woman who is herself" (25). This
concludes with "personally driven and socially charged" literature—the neo-slave
narrative—which pays a tribute to the tradition as well as "creates it" (25). For
Beauiieu these narratives are "imaginative in ways [their] predecessor could not
possibly be and yet factual in content and faithful to the spirit of the original slave
narratives" and "responsible for adding a new voice into American literary
discourse" (143). As Andrews puts it, the neo-slave narratives "testify to the
continuing vitality of the slave narrative, as contemporary African-American
writers probe the origins of psychological as well as social oppression and
critique the meaning of freedom" (670).
Alice Walker recognizes her literary and cultural heritage, she "celebrates her
people" and manifests "a deeply-rooted consciousness of her role as an artist in
a socially and politically complex world" (Davis, T. 32). As a black writer, she is
aware of her people's folk tradition and pays homage to her ancestors by
conceiving a neo-slave narrative that features a twentieth-century female
character, who—although living under the yoke of psychological and social
"slavery" imposed on her by the patriarchs of her clan—is capable of re-affirming
and re-claiming her self.
In order to grasp the structural essence of the literary tradition of slave
narratives, and their subsequent adaptations and variations, and to speculate
about Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) as a contemporary variation on this
form, I have examined recognized critics' definitions of the slave narrative as a
genre. In what follows we will examine the specific plot analogies between Alice
Walker's novel and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published
in 1861. I will juxtapose the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century contexts by
analyzing the relation between Harriet Jacobs' Incidents and The Color Purple,
and demonstrate a parallelism of plots, in order to substantiate the contention
that Alice Walker wrote a slavery novel including a motif of the slave-master
relation—a neo-slave narrative.
According to Frances Smith Foster, slave narratives are "the personal
accounts by black slaves and ex-slaves of their experiences in slavery and of their
efforts to obtain freedom" (Foster 3). They were retrospective accounts stating,
and sometimes creating, the slave's identity. They soon became political acts
challenging this "peculiar institution" of exploitation and domination. The authors
used a simple, but graphic style bearing in mind the need to reach diverse
sensibilities, and the subject matter they sought to express was "the inhuman
and immoral characteristics of slavery" (3). Slave narratives employed a set of
conventions, recurrent themes which were deemed representative of the slave's
lot, and therefore determined the form and content of the narratives. I will
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Maria Lysik
mostly address themes related to women's situation during slavery. The recurring
plot patterns characteristic of the genre concern, for example, the woman's
treatment as a human being as opposed to her status as a slave, the perils of
being a woman, the tragedy and frustration of being a mother, and the woman's
survival instinct which gives birth to the spirit of an activist.
I have chosen Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, because this particular
narrative is considered exemplary of the slave narrative genre in general, despite
the fact that for quite a long time academia focused its interest on the narratives
authored by male slaves, thus leaving out half of the story of slavery (Braxton 18).
Joanne Braxton states that slave women were often represented by men as
helpless mothers, or "as degraded and dehumanized individuals who have lost
their self-respect and self-esteem" (19). Jacobs' account depicts a different type
of first-hand experience, thus bringing up from obscurity "an archetype of an
outraged mother" (19) and an ardent freedom fighter who refuses to comply with
the rules of bondage forced upon her. She is a mother "because motherhood
was virtually unavoidable under slavery," and she is outraged "because of the
intimacy of her oppression" (19). As one of thousands of slaves in the slave-holding South, she is "an element" or exemplification of this system, but she is
also enslaved as an individual, within her immediate, intimate context: her white
master wants to reign in her own bed and would go to any lengths to have her
succumb to his will.
After a relatively enjoyable childhood spent first with her slave parents, and
later on with a kind mistress, Jacobs is willed to a five-year old white girl, whose
stepfather, Dr. Flint, desires to gain complete control over the slave. A lifetime of
sexual oppression commences for Jacobs, who is determined not to submit to her
master's lust. She is not allowed to marry the free black man she cares for.
However, she insists on picking her lover herself, and—to her master's outrage
and amazement—has an affair with a white man, Dr. Sands, who fathers her two
children. Dr. Sands promises to emancipate them, yet it is not due to his efforts
that they eventually obtain their freedom. Jacobs flees North and there, thanks to
the kindness and compassion of Mrs. Bruce, her white employer, hers and her
children's freedom is guaranteed with a bill of sale.
The 1861 publication of Incidents marked a new era in the African-American
literary tradition of slave narratives. So far only men had voiced their victimization
under slavery and had very briefly and from a very different perspective
mentioned the condition of female slaves. Incidents was a revolutionary work in
that it paved the way for other female authors to voice their experience and
to address an involved audience that would listen. The Color Purple, published
only twenty years ago, continued the tradition of Incidents-like revelation, and
verbalized tabooed, yet legitimate issues referring to women's experience as
human beings, women, wives, mothers, daughters, sisters.
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"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
While Incidents had been welcomed as a controversial, yet worthy and
eye-opening tool in the abolitionist activism, The Color Purple incited much fierce
censure, as well as widespread national attention. It also opened new horizons
in the ongoing debate on the position of black women in the discourse of
feminism. Numerous critics dismissed and condemned Walker's book because it
did not fulfill their expectations of what a good black novel should be like. Walker
writes in one of her essays: "The attacks, many of them personal and painful,
continued for many years, right alongside the praise (...) I often felt isolated,
deliberately misunderstood and alone" (The Same... 22) She catalogues the
charges she was faced with: that she hated black men; that because of her work
and other women's being published black male writers were having difficulties
publishing their writing; that her "ideas of equality and tolerance were harmful,
even destructive to the black community" (22). Walker confessed that "of all the
accusations, it was hardest to tolerate the charge that I hated black men. From
infancy I have relied on the fiercely sweet spirits of black men; and this is
abundantly clear in my work" (23). Walker was also accused of "degrading" black
speech, but the novel "was deliberately written in a way that would not intimidate
(...) readers (...) with only a grade school education and a lifetime of reading the
Bible, newspapers and magazine articles" (24). Walker claims that "when The
Color Purple was published and later filmed, it was a rare critic who showed
compassion for, or even noted, the suffering of the women and children explored
in the book, while I was called a liar for showing that black men sometimes
perpetuate domestic violence" (39). When Spielberg offered to adapt the book
into a movie, Walker was reluctant: "I feel some panic. I want so much for this to
be good. Something to lift spirits and encourage people" (18). When the movie
was finally released, Walker had mixed feelings, yet she realized the undertaking
was a challenge well-worth the effort: "Having a film made of one's book is an
agonizingly complex gamble, with hundreds of people having something to say.
Though The Color Purple is not what many wished, it is more than many hoped,
or had seen on a movie screen before" (40-41). Both the book and the movie
had their enthusiasts and enemies, which is bound to be the case whenever
controversial themes are at stake.
The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a poor, barely literate black woman
living in the South. As a fourteen-year old girl she is repeatedly raped and beaten
by her "Pa," and sacrifices herself for her sister Nettie, whom "Pa" also wants to
rape. She has two babies by her "Pa T " and he gives them away. Then she is
forced by him to marry Mr.
, a nameless patriarch and a widower with four
children, who mistreats her even more and conceives of her as a "mule." She is
his servant, who, while raising his children, constitutes "an occasional sexual
convenience" (Watkins 16). Her beloved sister runs away and goes to Africa. The
vicious Mr.
intercepts the letters she writes to Celie. After the first traumatic
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Maria Lysik
event Celie takes to writing a diary in the form of letters to God, and right before
our eyes she "writes herself into being" (Gates, Signifying 239). One day Mr.
brings home his sick lover Shug Avery, a charismatic blues singer, for Celie
to nurse back to life. Celie launches her long journey to mental and physical
liberation when she forms a supportive relationship with Shug, first as her friend,
then as her lover. She leaves Mr.
, goes to Memphis with Shug, and starts her
own business designing and making pants. The book ends with a family reunion:
Celie's children and her sister Nettie come home, and, surprisingly enough, Celie
becomes friends with Mr.
, whom she learns to address by his first name,
Albert.
Black female slaves wove autobiographical texts focusing on the oppressed
woman's journey from literal, physical bondage to freedom. Incidents is a good
example of such a plot. Even though Celie is a fictional character, and her
enslavement is enforced first by her black stepfather and later by her husband,
her experience was modeled on the lot of Walker's own ancestral figure: her
grandmother was violated at the age of twelve by her master, i.e. the author's own
grandfather (Henderson 67). The plots of these two books differ discernibly, yet
they employ common motifs of the enslaved woman's ordeals. Jacobs lived under
a slavery sanctioned by the white, male-dominated American society, while Celie
endured paralyzing bondage from the hands of black patriarchs: her stepfather
and her husband. Jacobs fought most of her life, whereas Celie needed a
spiritual awakening of her strong inner self in order to commence the battle for
her own freedom, voice and happiness.
Walker adapts the form of the slave narrative to her own purposes: she makes
Celie's journey to freedom individualized and very specific. Walker modifies the
conventions of the genre with respect to racial conflict and oppression. While
Incidents have a white slaveholder as the oppressor, The Color Purple features
black patriarchs. Both works, however, "prioritize" the sexual bondage of their
heroines as pivotal to their experiences and consequent struggle for self-sovereignty.
We have examined the similarities between the plots of Incidents and The
Color Purple. Let us now proceed to a detailed analysis of situations which are
parallel in both works, despite the gap of over one century between their dates
of publication. As mentioned before, slave narratives included certain leitmotifs
and stock conventions constituting the pattern of the plot. The Color Purple
modifies these requirements, following some more attentively than others. I will
group the recurrent plotting devices according to their commonalities. Slave
autobiographies authored by women told stories of females who were treated like
chattel property, mistreated as human beings, mothers and women, and grew to
become survivors and activists.
The course of a female slave's life was determined by obligatory work that
significantly overshadowed all the remaining activities of her existence such as
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"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
familial responsibilities. Slave women were seen as "profitable labor-units"
(Davis, A. 5) and toiled for the white man's economic benefits. Jacobs is a servant
and a nursemaid for white men's babies, while Celie plays all the roles assigned
to black female slaves in the previous centuries: she labors in the field, kitchen,
and in the washroom: "she can work like a man" (The Color Purple 9).
Significantly, she, too, nurses someone else's children. Her life as a family slave
is a chain of degrading experiences, unhappiness and hard work.
Viewed not only as a commodity and a worker, but also as a breeder, the
female slave was subjected to economic exploitation in the literal sense: her body
produced more slaves' bodies for her owner. Her children were often sold away
from her, or the slave herself might be sold. Slave markets were a venue of
human degradation. Jacobs witnessed one herself but escaped this humiliating
lot. Sandi Russell claims that passages in The Color Purple, like the one below,
make the reader think of a nineteenth-century slave narrative (Russell 130): "She
ugly. He say. But she ain't no stranger to hard work. And she clean. And God done
fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain't gonna make
you feed it or clothe it" (The Color Purple 9). Thus advertised, Celie is sold to her
husband. She is not placed on the slaves' auction block, yet she is treated like
a commodity by her "Pa" and Mr.
. As Mae Henderson rightly points out "the
buyer" comes for an inspection (69):
He say, Let me see her again.
Pa call me. (...) Like it wasn't nothing. Mr. want another look at you.
I go stand in the door. The sun shine in my eyes. He's still up on his horse. He look me
up and down.
Pa rattle his newspaper. Move up, he won't bite, he say.
I go closer to the steps, but not too close cause I'm a little scared of his horse.
Turn round Pa say.
I turn round. (The Color Purple 11-12)
The transaction is agreed upon when Pa assures Mr.
that a cow is "still
coming" along (The Color Purple 12). Celie shares the female slave's experience of
being sold away as "a voiceless chattel" (Willis 119), except that she is not handed
over to a white slave owner, but to her future husband. She is sold away into a
loveless marriage where all that awaits her are back-breaking chores and humiliation.
Physical abuse was a part of daily existence, both for male and female slaves.
Masters exercised random brutality as well as systematic violence upon their
slaves in order to keep them in their place. If a woman spoke "too sassy" to her
master or mistress, she would be mercilessly flogged by the overseer or the
master himself. If caught running away, she would have the letter "R" branded on
her skin. Throughout her life Jacobs witnessed many atrocities. She managed to
avoid certain experiences, but she had a fair share of torment from her master.
She proves to be a clever narrator, aware of the future role her narrative will play
in the abolitionist cause, for under the pretext of telling the reader what has not
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Marta Lysik
been a part of her own experience, she catalogs various abuses and crimes of
slavery, as she has seen them happening around her.
"Pa" and Mr.
abuse and objectify Ceiie without a second thought. Violence
becomes a tool for controlling her and crushing her spirit. They treat her as if she
were a thing, their property, as if she had no feelings. Mel Watkins pinpoints the
following quote: when Mr.
's oldest son, Harpo, asks him why he beats Celie
he replies: "Cause she my wife" (qtd. in Watkins 16). Celie endures this abuse:
"He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He
say, Ceiie, get the belt. (...) It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to
myself, Celie, you a tree" (qtd. in Watkins 16).
The narratives of slaves emphasized and insisted on the slave women's
status as human beings. Jacobs objects to inhumane treatment: "When he told
me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in everything; that
I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his, never
before had my puny arm felt half so strong" (352). Though she is probably the
least powerful being under the system of slavery, Jacobs will not settle for her
own degradation, which she has made up her mind to resist. Celie, despite her
troubled body, mind and soul and the overwhelming abuse she has to suffer daily,
learns how to forgive, how to heal her wounds and how to liberate herself from
under the influence of the ruthless patriarchs.
Hard labor, floggings and mutilation were common to the female and male
slaves lot, but women had to struggle against yet another mistreatment: forced
sexual encounters. They lived under constant threat of being raped by the white
masters. In the words of Angela Davis, "when it was profitable to exploit them as
if they were men, they were regarded as genderless" and made to toil like men,
"but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited
only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles" (6). White
masters controlled black women's reproductive capacities. By raping them they
produced more chattel and more work force for the greater good of their own
economic well-being. Black babies were frequently sold away to distant
plantations never learning who their family was.
Seen as commodities rather than human beings, slaves were often denied
the human right to know their identity in terms of genealogical relations. Some
barely knew who their parents were. While Jacobs' narrator has unique luck, for
she has known both of her parents and has substantial knowledge of her
relatives, Celie for the largest part of her life wrongly believes "Pa" is her father,
it is only much later that she is accidentally led out of this forced ignorance and
she says, dumb-founded: "My children not my sister and brother. Pa not pa"
(183). "Pa," the man who raped her as a teenager, was not her real father; her
biological father had been lynched. After many traumatic years the unspeakable, •
burning stigma of incest is finally removed.
28
"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
Apart from the economic aspects of rape, it was the white master's idea of
extra-marital sexual encounters without having to face legal punishment. Dr. Flint
is infamous for his sexual relations with female slaves and his desire for control.
When Jacobs is only fifteen years old, he wants her to the point of obsession. He
manipulates each situation so as to have her submit to him. Thus, it is in the
context of sexual pressure that she begins to experience first hand the cruelties
of slavery. She nurtures her sense of personal dignity and her survival instinct:
"The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless
creatures, I resolved never to be conquered" (Jacobs 353). Dr. Flint follows her
everywhere and makes her a constant and unwilling recipient of his lust. He preys
on her virtue, making empty promises to free her and to treat her better. Yet, she
is familiar with the reality of such a scenario: Dr. Flint has eleven children with
female slaves on his plantation. "My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But
where could I turn for protection?" (361). Indeed, where is she to seek help?
When she turns to her mistress, Dr. Flint's wife, and denounces him, instead of
winning protection, she is scorned as a rival: "I was an object of her jealousy and,
consequently, of her hatred" (366). She wants to confide in her grandmother:
"I told him that I must and would apply to my grandmother for protection. He
threatened me with death, and worse than death, if I made any complaint to her"
(364). No one will advocate the case of a fifteen-year old black female slave.
Ceiie's sexual bondage is complete: she is raped by her stepfather and she
endures sex with her husband much like other domestic chores. She describes
the experience to Shug Avery, her husband's lover: "I don't like it all. What is it
like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most
times I pretend I ain't there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I
feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep" (The Color Purple 81);
"He ciam on top of me and fuck and fuck, even when my head bandaged, Nobody
ever love me, I say" (117). She recounts these secrets to Shug, who immediately
scorns Mr.
for treating Celie object-like and develops feelings of contempt
towards her former lover. Thus, both Celie and Jacobs are sexually abused. In
Ceiie's case the abuse was fulfilled, while Jacobs' it was resisted and finally
conquered, but the parallel is nonetheless significant. Moreover, both plots give
the heroines a chance to tell another woman about their sexual oppression, and
both examine the consequences of such confidences.
Initially Celie is not allowed to choose her beloved. In the course of the novel,
as she undergoes a metamorphosis and liberation of the mind, body, and soul,
she falls in love with Shug—a vibrant independent woman. Jacobs is also not
allowed to marry the black man she chooses. Dr. Flint makes it clear to her that
he wants her as his concubine. He disparages her capacity for love: according to
him, slaves have no free will and no mind to decide. He threatens to have her
jailed or to kill her, and schemes to break her spirit. Against all adversities, she
29
Maria Lysik
"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
claims her right to love whomever she will. She is not allowed to marry the man
of her choice, but no one can stop her from having a relationship with a white
man, Dr. Sands, who eventually fathers her children. Both Ceiie and Jacobs
triumph over their masters, each choosing her own preferred kind of love, one
charged heavily with social taboo. A black female slave has an affair with a white
gentleman, not her master; a black woman feels for another black woman—
willful miscegenation and lesbianism, both in the name of love and personal
autonomy.
Slaveholders refused to see slave women as mothers and perceived them
as "instruments guaranteeing the growth of the slave labor force" (Davis, A. 7)
who were, more often that not, denied the "luxuries" of traditional motherhood.
Masters sold their slaves' children to far-off plantations, thus destroying,
sometimes irreparably, the family structure among slaves. Jacobs' first baby is a
son, her second a girl: "When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart
was heavier than it had been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more
terrible for women" (405). Jacobs is deeply upset by the fact that her children are
born as slaves. Because she knows what awaits female slaves from the hands
of their lecherous white masters, she is already worried about her daughter's
future.
Both Ceiie and Jacobs are mothers who experience a phase of frustrated
motherhood, but in the end were reunited with their children. When Jacobs can
no longer endure Dr. Flint's abuse, she runs away. While in hiding, she has to part
with her children for almost seven years. More separations follow until she is
freed, but undoubtedly her children are her links to life, a reason to continue
struggle against abuse and injustice. "Pa" gives away Celie's children shortly
after they are born. Shug asks Ceiie where they ars: "I say, I don't know," she
replies (The Color Purple 52). Initially, Ceiie is denied the chance to raise and
protect her little ones, just like many female slaves. Not only is her motherhood
not voluntary, it is also "snatched away" from her by her oppressor. However,
because The Color Purple is a work of fiction, Walker could repair some damages:
"Fortunately I was able to bring Celie's own children back to her (a unique power
of novelists), though it took thirty years and a good bit of foreign travel" (Walker,
In Search 359). Jacobs belies another stereotype: she refuses to be solely
a black "mammy" for white children, and remains deeply committed to her own
children's well-being. While Ceiie initially tends to other people's babies, in the
end she is reunited with her now grown-up children and tries to make up for the
years of forced separation.
While Jacobs' first kind mistress teaches her how to read and spell, Ceiie is
deprived of literacy and education, just like most slaves: "The first time I got big
Pa took me out of school. He never care that I love it. (...) You too dumb
to keep going to school, Pa say" (The Color Purple 10). Literacy facilitated
discarding the silence forced upon slaves. Jacobs and Ceiie, each in her own
time, discover the meaning of that truth. Jacobs produces a slave narrative, thus
giving an anti-slavery weapon to abolitionists, while Ceiie, after being threatened
"You better not never tell nobody but God" (The Color Purple 1), first talks to
God via letters, then talks to Shug, and as a result begins to re-affirm, her own
being.
The slaves who authored narratives, more often than not, defied their oppressors'
orders, whereas Ceiie for the large part of her life remains passive and submissive
within the hostile context of male domination. For Jacobs writing her testimony
becomes a semi-therapy, because it helps her vent the sense of injustice, and
liberates her from silence to expression. Literacy (and the quest for it) was
irreplaceable in the slaves' journey to freedom. Ceiie initially writes (to God)
because she is ashamed of what happened to her. She is not yet conscious of
the process of writing in terms of self-definition and gaining power. It is her
subsequent telling of her story to Shug that sets her free. She ceases to address
her letters to God, and writes to Nettie, a change which constitutes "an act of
self-affirmation" (hooks 225).
In the course of her lifetime Jacobs grows stronger, whereas Ceiie first
discovers the strength in herself and then learns how to exercise it and how to claim
agency over her life. Jacobs was humiliated and objectified, yet she persevered,
cherishing the thought of being free one day. Her inner strength stems partly from
her relatively happy and intact childhood, and partly from her grandmother's
power of spirit and ongoing heartfelt support. Not all women slaves had such
luck, yet many were able to resist, thanks to the support given them by their
communities, and especially by other women.
Celie's awakened homosexuality comes as a revelation of a new, alternative
form of love. When Jacobs says: "Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of
my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard
as others" (386), she, too, demands a new standard of morality, new definition
of womanhood. Jacobs, having had a voluntary liaison with a white man, asks for
the reader's authorization and understanding, while Ceiie simply lives her life
loving Shug and asks no one for permission. Both works were controversial due
to their overt treatment of taboo subjects: sexuality and sexual exploitation. While
Jacobs was supported in her literary initiative by a white woman, her editor Lydia
Maria Child, and rewarded with a wide readership, Alice Walker's under
taking was recognized by the prize her book was awarded—The Pulitzer, and by
the successful film adaptation.
Slave narratives and The Color Purple have one more important feature in
common: they end on an optimistic note. Jacobs escapes bondage, gains
freedom and bears witness to the inhuman oppression exercised by whites. She
speaks up as an activist in the anti-slavery campaign. Ceiie escapes another kind
30
31
Maria Lysik
"You have seen how a [wo]man was made a slave...
of slavery: an abusive husband and family. In the end, she wins all forms of
empowerment and fulfillment: love, capital, happiness, and independence. "1 am
so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time" (The Color Purple
222).
Nineteenth-century slave narratives marked the beginning of the AfricanAmerican novelistic tradition. These autobiographical works told true tales of
chattel slavery and its horrors. They also told stories of a slave's quest for
literacy, independence and freedom. Alice Walker is well aware of the black
literary tradition, she acknowledges and praises the authors and their works in
many of her essays. I have attempted to prove that The Color Purple is fashioned
after antebellum slave narratives. The slavery this contemporary novel depicts is
no longer a legal system of chattel slavery: it represents subjugation endorsed
and exercised in a post-slavery family context. By comparing it with Harriet
Jacobs' The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written in 1861, 1 wanted to point
at the thematic analogies and bring to light as many plot parallelisms as possible,
thus showing the presence of conventions characteristic of the traditional slave
testimony. While Incidents were written during the time of abolitionism and at the
outset of women's rights activism, The Color Purple came as a result of its
author's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and her
concern for the welfare of black women. Walker adapted the form of a slave
narrative, and produced a legitimate, contemporary neo-slave narrative featuring
a twentieth-century black female character, who—although living in a state of
psychological and social slavery imposed on her by the males in her famity—is
capable of liberating herself and claiming her inalienable right to be happy, free
and independent.
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