Piecing the patchwork self- a reading of walker's th

the color purple

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Document Type:Piecing the patchwork self: a reading of walker's the color purple Shanyn Fiske The Explicator.66.3 (Spring 2008): p150. From Literature Resource Center.Critical essay

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With its epistolarystructure and layered first-person narrations, Alice Walker's The ColorPurpleunfolds a symphony of voices at oncediscrete and intermingled. The novel's inclusion of so many inpidual stories makes it difficult to tell whether these narratives are enclosed within Celie's account of her life or whether Celie's story is part of a larger whole. This formal destabilization of a dominant narrative emphasizes that an inpidual cannot be considered apart from the matrix of his or her relationships and that it is through integration into a collective identity that he or she defines the boundaries of his or her own being. Thus, like the scraps of cloth sewn into Celie's patch work quilt, characters' lives in The ColorPurpleare stitched together into a unity whose strength and vibrancy depend on each inpidual's identification with and

distinction from the others around him or her. Quilts, as Priscilla Leder has noted, "embody the ideal of unity in persity which permeates Walker's writings" (141). What unites the characters of The ColorPurpleis a shared experience of suffering and a common struggle to survive in the face of oppression, violence, and abuse. In what follows, I suggest that Celie's struggles and her strengthening sense of self are contingent on her integration into a supportive network of friendsconstructed on the sharing of stories that testify to the inpiduality ofpersonal suffering and form the threads binding broken lives into a strongerwhole.

From its outset, The ColorPurpleidentifies the struggle for self-preservation with an instinct for storytelling that indicates the healing potential of communicating one's suffering to others.Celie's first audience is God. Despite her apparent disparagement of life ("This life soon be over ... Heaven last all ways" [44]), her letters to God suggest her simultaneous impulse to understand her traumatic experience of rape and to gain authority over her life. Her articulation of personal suffering through writing becomes Celie's chief survival tactic.

Contemplating the advantages of death over life, Celie confesses, "if I was buried, I wouldn't have to work. But I say, Never mine, never mine, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along" (18). Although Celie confesses that her method of survival is emotional numbness, her writing testifies to her shame, anger, confusion, and sense of injustice, serving as a form of release and a means of distancing herself from the past.

At first, however, Celie's equation between her confessor (God) and her tormentor undermines her instinctive desire to heal her emotional trauma by articulating her experiences and understanding her suffering. Asked about her children's father, Celie tells her mother that they are God's ("I don't know no other man" [3]). Celie's victimization by her stepfather is reinforced by her acceptance of her inescapable passivity in the hands of an omnipotent, external force. Thus, even while the urge to tell of her experiences (and purge herself of them) evidences Celie's rejection of self-degrading submission, the limited world of her relationships forces her to locate herself in a passive role that reinforces her resignation to her victimization.

The novel attributes Celie's emergence from her initial state of numbness and self-removal to her gradual integration into a developing network of (at first) female friends. Celie's interaction with Sophia allows her the first opportunity to share her experiences with someone other than "God," and, by implication, to begin severing her ties to the vengeful, incomprehensible force associated with Him. It is by measuring Sophia's audacity against her own submissiveness and by witnessing Sophia's surprise at her attitude toward life ("You ought to bashMr.--head open, she say, Think bout heaven later" [44]) that Celie begins to question her own passivity and recognize the irrepressible force of her emotions. "I'm jealous of you," Celie tells Sophia, revealing for the first time the emotions hidden behind her letters to God. "You do what I can't ... I'm so shame

the color purple

of myself, I say" (42). This startlingly candid confession prompts an empathic counterconfession from Sophia that helps Celie begin to identify and come to terms with her past experiences. Like Sophia, Celie has, in her own way,"had to fight ... all my life"(42). The two women's common experience of suffering allows Celie to identify with Sophia: Sophia's story at once gives new shape to Celie's own by allowing her to reimagine herself in the active role of survivor and fighter. This narrative exchange validates the poignancy of each woman's private experience and, through that validation, binds them in a healing bond of friendship as Celie tentatively emerges from her habitual numbness. Thus, even as the two women begin to "make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains" (44), Celie begins to mend her emotional wounds and piece together the first fragments of a more stable subjectivity. Judith Els-ley, among others, hasemphasized the unique symbolism of quilting for the process of suffering andhealing in The ColorPurple: "[T]he quiltmaker begins work on herpatchwork quilt by cutting or ripping her fabrics apart. Indeed, a patchworkquilt cannot come into existence without that rending" (164). The quilt thus both legitimates the suffering that characters have

experienced and symbolizes the integration of broken lives with the threads of stories the women share about their "messed up" pasts.

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