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by Kevin Patrick Mahoney
What is History? A mere tale, or a scientific
discipline? Stories told by men, about men (history)? Do all men write it?
Or just ‘the winning side’ (whatever that may be). Does it exclude women, as a
matter of fact? If it does, is there a need for a Herstory? And if there
is a Herstory, does it have to be inclusive of all women? As Hazel Carby writes
"when
they write their herstory and call it the story of women but ignore our lives
and deny their relation to us, that is the moment in which they are acting
within the relations of racism and writing history" (1).
There is no easy definition of history. If one were being pedantic, then one
could dismiss this whole argument at a stroke - as a culturally specific
debate. It is due to a coincidence; found only in the English language
that we have juxtaposition between history and herstory in the first
place. The coincidence being, of course, that the word his is fully
integrated in the word history, the first originating from Old English,
the latter from Greek (2). Until
the juxtaposition of herstory on these two words (by Hazel Carby et al),
they were never related in any form of meaning, There does not appear to have
been any attempt to adhere ille and histoire together in French,
for example. Yet, to dismiss herstory
does not mean to discount other aspects of the feminist critique of history
(such as that presented by Carby). Indeed, if one were to conduct an
imaginative exercise, and present how one could perceive the reception of The
Color Purple in two hundred years’ time (say, by Professor Pieixoto of The
Handmaid’s Tale), then one could easily see why a certain type of academic
History needs revision. This is how Pieixoto might view The Color Purple:
"This tale has been resurrected by
my learned colleague, Roberto Sexto, as The Wife of Georgia, by Miss Mississippi
- for it is as bawdy as that original tale of Chaucer’s, and seems to have been
written by a woman with the same liberal humanistic zeal as one of the
contestants in our Miss Continent beauty pageant. Although, whether she
was as beautiful in a swimsuit as one of our girls remains to be seen."
Perhaps
this conception of our academic successors is a little unfair. However, then
one discovers Harold Bloom’s introduction to the edition of Modern Critical
Views based on the work of Alice Walker, and reads that
"Rather than to seek to analyze
verse and fictional prose that is of a kind I am not yet competent to judge, or
a speculative essay such as ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’ which eludes me
. . . "(3)
he
would write about Zora Neale Hurston instead. This does on the surface seem to
be an insensitive male academic approach to the work of Alice Walker on the
surface, but at least it has the virtue of being honest. Besides, Walker has
acknowledged her historical literary debt to Hurston many times herself (4). To
extrapolate, it may even be that Walker has been forced to compromise, to a
certain extent, in her creation of Celie, the narrator of The Color
Purple. Perhaps it would be best to give an example of this potentially
contentious point, by referring to an incident in the novel. Walker does
sometimes cite real male historical figures in her novels (for example, Carl
Jung in Possessing the Secret of Joy). In The Color Purple, a certain ‘DuBoyce’
makes an appearance (5). He criticizes Samuel’s Aunt Theodosia for her pride in
being the recipient of a medal from King Leopold of Belgium whilst she was in
Africa -
"Rather than cherish that medal,
Madame, you should regard it as a symbol of your unwitting complicity with this
despot who worked to death and brutalized and eventually exterminated thousands
and thousands of African peoples" (6).
We
have already seen how a future reactionary academic critic could view The Color
Purple, and DuBoyce’s perception of Aunt Theodosia could give us an idea of how
a future radical feminist could convey the novel. In such a judgement, Walker
would be condemned for having employed patriarchal modes of narration for her
work (such as the epistolary mode) (7). Condemned and found guilty for having
won the Pulitzer Prize ‘complicit with a regime that had ten blacks for every
white on Death Row’. And the crime that Walker would have committed? Having a
central character who progressively attains her full subjectivity. Yet
one has to ask how this could be described as such a felony.
Alison Light
provides evidence for the offensiveness of Celie's subjectivity:
"The claim of the White bourgeois male to full subjecthood has often
depended historically and socially upon the relegation and exclusion of all
others from just this status: the dark continent, the great unwashed, the
second sex, all these others are pushed to the margins of humanity: sometimes,
as in the racist theories of the nineteenth century, even denied such humanity"(8).
How can Alice Walker claim the same subjectivity
for Celie? Light herself provides the clue: ‘the nineteenth century’. It could
be that Light is suggesting that subjectivity is historically relative. Perhaps
we have reached an era where all can strive for subjectivity. Maybe Derrida’s writings have been
inculcated, for now a word does not have to rely on its binary opposite for a
definition, when there is a whole chain of signifiers to choose from. Thus,
Celie can self-define a kind of subjectivity without oppressing anyone, whether
consciously or unconsciously.
Besides, the earlier reference to Mae G.
Henderson (7) conveys that Walker does not use patriarchal modes uncritically
(such as the epistolary genre). As bell hooks writes of The Color Purple:
‘Historical accuracy is altered to serve didactic purposes - to teach the
reader history not as it was but as it should have been’ (9). Even if one is
familiar with American history, one may still not recognise the name of DuBoyce.
Francis L.Broderick provides the answer to his identity: ‘A mulatto of
French Huguenot, Dutch, and Negro ancestry, Will Du Bois - the name is
pronounced ”Du Boyce”...’
(10). Alice Walker has
defamiliarised the only historical character in The Color Purple, by producing
a bastardized version of his name, and by presenting him in an incident
that never actually happened. Walker does have great justification for doing
this. As Celie’s sister, Nettie, says, ‘I hadn’t realized I was so ignorant,
Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble!’
(11). Nettie is referring to the far greater education that she has received
from her adoptive guardians, Corrine and Samuel. She reveals that the Black
people of the South have been denied their own history, with even Black
teachers living in ignorance of it. This may be the reason why Samuel
misreports W.E.B. Du Bois’ name.
However, it may simply be that because Du Bois
lived in the same historical era as the characters of The Color Purple they
might not attach the same importance to him, as we would do. Besides, having
spent the earliest decades of the twentieth century in Africa, it is entirely
reasonable that Samuel would not have heard of Du Bois’s spreading fame. Until
the building of the great road that destroys the Olinka village, nothing much
of America (apart from the missionaries), is able to penetrate Africa,
including Celie’s letters to her sister.
There is a further possibility that we all view
history in diverse ways. To borrow from L.S. Kaufman’s commentary on The
Handmaid’s Tale, we can ask ‘whether any of us can understand history at the
moment it is in the making, whether we are ever able to view the present in
perspective’ (13). The answer is that some of us can - specifically Anna Wulf in Doris Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook. During her therapy with Mrs. Marks, Anna changes the way she
keeps her diary. For several years, all she does is paste news reports into her
diary. These stories pertain to Senator McCarthy’s Witch-hunt, the execution of
the Rosenbergs, and the development of the hydrogen bomb. Mrs. Marks asks Anna:
‘And that seems to you the truth about the last few years?’ (14), the irony
being that those news stories are all that anybody will remember of the
fifties, if they had not lived at that time. Alice Walker’s critique of
a History, if she has one, would seem to be that there are many histories - not
just the cold, scientific, rational history of facts and figures. Not just the
history of Beloved’s Schoolteacher, who obtains all kinds of empirical data
from his slaves, just by measuring them (15).
In The Color Purple, Alice Walker attempts to
convey what has been one of the greatest absences in American history: the
Black voice. Forty years after emancipation, Du Bois was still able to write
this in The Souls of Black Folk: ‘One ever feels his twoness, an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings...’ (16). Even after
the slave narratives, such as that of Frederick Douglas, Afro-American writers were
still struggling to find their own voice. This is despite the fact that with
‘the publication of slave autobiographies, oppressed Afro-American slaves moved
from object to subject, from silence into speech’ (17). The question one must
ask, is: why did this ‘revolutionary literature’ (as bell hooks called it),
decline? A discourse that allowed a liberatory exclamation of self was surely
too valuable to lose, for who could be subjugated by the subjectivity of a
former slave?
Henderson provides a possible explanation in an
article on Toni Morrison’s Beloved: that the slave narratives themselves were
flawed. Morrison herself wrote that ‘the writers pull up the narrative short
with a phrase such as, “but let us draw a veil over these proceedings too terrible
to relate”’ (18). Henderson says that these ‘proceedings’ often involved the
rape of black women by white men. In The Color Purple the true extent of this
appalling violation is made only too clear in a number of incidents. Celie
herself writes ‘Bub in and out of jail. If his granddaddy wasn’t the coloured
uncle of the sheriff who look just like Bub, Bub be lynch by now’ (19). When
Sofia is in jail for striking the mayor, Mr.----- , Celie’s husband, asks
‘Who’s the warden’s black kinfolks?’ (20). The worst episode occurs when Mary
Agnes is sent by Sofia’s family to gain her release: her own white uncle rapes
her. The only weapon Celie’s family has is literally that of blackmail. By
reminding the warden, and other powerful Southern whites, of their sexual and
familial relationships with blacks, they can help each other to survive just.
By the time Sofia is finally free, not much of her spirit remains.
Celie is quite evidently barely literate in her
first letters, due to the fact that it has been the Southern whites that have
controlled the written word for generations. So pervasive is their influence,
it even affects the way black men behave, as Henderson relates
"If Mister has inherited from his
father... the farm that belonged to his grandfather, the white slave owner, he
has likewise inherited... the values of ownership, mastery, and domination
bequeathed by the white slave owner"(21).
From
the very beginning, Celie is introduced to us as a slave. She neither controls,
nor possesses her own body. At the age of fourteen, she is raped by her (step)
father, and sold by him into marriage to a man at least twice her age. Such is
the evil of black male patriarchy as portrayed to us by Walker. bell hooks
finds it difficult to believe that Celie could ever be a writer - finding the
time being the least of her problems (22). Perhaps this lies at the heart of
Walker’s message. If Celie as a writer were fiction, then this would only
assist Walker in signifying what has been lost from history.
It may well that Celie never wrote her first letters. If one cannot define oneself by writing, then how else can
one do so? As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote, ‘one’s sense of one’s existence...
depended on memory’ (23). It would seem that Walker is emphasising the great
role that oral history has played in Afro-American culture. The best example of this is when Celie
relates the Olinka version of Adam and Eve. However, there is doubt over the
real value of such tales, as Celie says, ‘they think so much in terms of thousands
of years that they have a hard time gitting themself through one’ (24). So
perhaps Walker is not celebrating oral history so much as oral culture.
Throughout the novel, there is a commemoration of song. Significantly, Du Bois
opened every chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with a bar from the Sorrow
Songs. As Du Bois himself affirmed, ‘there is no true American music but the
wild sweet melodies of’ the Negro slave’ (25). Celie’s confidant and lover is
Shug Avery, a blues singer. Shug is empowered by her voice. Her profession
provides her with the income she needs to stay independent - that is, until she
is infected by a sexually transmitted disease. Denigrated by the whole of her
home community, it is left to Mr.-----, Celie’s husband, to try to restore her
to health. Only Celie though has the wit and ability to achieve this. Through
aiding her admired soul singer, Celie becomes a subject for the first time.
Just as Shug has made her name a cultural signifier (she names her street in
Memphis Sugar Avery Drive), so she names a song after Celie:
‘First time somebody made something and name it after me’ (26). Shug is able to
affirm her sense of self even more by revising the Bible.
“Ain’t no way to read the bible and not think God white’, she say’ (27). Shug
dares to redefine the Book, for the God she finds therein is alien to
her. This shocks Celie at first but then her own faith in God has already been
shaken the revelation that Mr.----- has hidden her sister’s letters from her.
Du Bois had also vocalised similar misgivings, as Broderick reports: ‘Evidence
of a recurring hostility to the white Christian church appears time after time’
(28). The church is also the site of the most sustained attack on Shug’s
character: ‘Even the preacher got his mouth on Shug Avery, now she down’ (29).
Shug’s vision of God is almost like a descent into the Imaginary - ‘it come to
me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all’ (30).
However, as Toril Moi writes of Jacques Lacan’s theory, ‘to remain in the
Imaginary is equivalent to becoming psychotic and incapable of living in human
society’ (31). If that is true, then what Shug done is wonderful: she has
managed to return to the Imaginary
after her departure from it in childhood. There is still the notion of lack -
Shug feels ‘like a motherless child’ - but a powerful communion with nature
overwhelmingly compensates this lack. Shug’s vision of God is fantastically
liberating - ‘I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a
field somewhere and don’t notice it’ (32). For the first time in her life, the
color purple that is Celie is being noticed, and being noticed as a part in
God’s majestic composition. This God is everything, everywhere, and he has no
need for a white beard or a pale complexion.
Thus the European notion of God is
smote down. Other European prejudices are also brought to light. Implicit
within the text is an overwhelming assault upon the concerns of the Western academy.
A common misreading of The Color Purple has Celie call her husband ‘Mister’,
when this is obviously not so. Much is made of Celie’s surprise when she hears
Shug calling Mr.----- ‘Albert’
(33), as if Celie has never signified him with a name. That Celie does
throughout is to call her husband by his surname. Yet this surname is absent,
something that would have infuriated an academic such as Pieixoto, for without
a name, how could he write his history? However it is extremely dubious that
Pieixto would find anything of interest in the life of Albert to begin with,
for a poor black Southern Negro would not have exactly the same sort of
influence on history that a white fascist dictator might have (in his view).
The very fact that Albert’s surname is absent would seem to suggest that Walker
is pointing out yet another blank space in Afro-American history: the small
number, until recently, of university educated blacks. For it is neither Celie
nor Nettie (34), who erase Albert’s surname - this is done by the Editor of
this collection of letters. An Editor, who admittedly does not make his/her
presence felt greatly in the correspondence, but is there nonetheless.
The role of the editor can be problematic. For instance, we know from the very
fact that Celie is able to relate the Olinka Adam and Eve story that she must
have read some of Nettie’s letters that are absent from the text. It would seem
then that the editor, rather than Celie has dictated the whole narrative flow
of the novel. Although the majority of the letters are written by a barely
literate woman, there are no crossing outs, apart from one very deliberate one
in the first letter (‘I am - I have always been a good girl’) (35). Who
else but the editor has placed the imperative - ‘You better not never tell
nobody but God’ - above all else?
It may very well be, contrary to bell hooks' belief, that there were many
Celies who had time and opportunity to write such a narrative, yet without the
academics who would be interested in collecting them around, these diaries
would be fated to rot away in attics - until now. As Henderson writes,
"recent feminist scholarship has
recovered and reclaimed letters, diaries, and journals... associated with the
culture of women who have been historically denied access to the popular and
commercial print media" (36).
Moreover, it would seem that this editor conveys some sympathy towards the male
characters in the novel, for even Samuel’s surname is erased. Although, this
could equally signify that the fictional narrator is a radical feminist, keen
to deny the names of the male characters, whilst overwhelmingly signifying Shug
Avery, a woman who keeps her own name even when married. In the best of
all worlds though, this editor would be Celie herself.
bell hooks has also contributed to the
controversy that surrounds The Color Purple’s conclusion. The controversy being
that hat the novel concludes far too happily for Celie. Alison Light
describes how her adult education class (composed wholly of women) reacted to
it:
"what does it mean for a group of
white students to see as ‘ romantic’ the empowering of an impoverished, beaten,
raped and abused Southern black woman?" (38).
bell
hooks’ verdict is that this ‘fantasy of change without effort is a dangerous
one for both oppressed and oppressor’ (39). To another reader, however, any
ending that would have amounted to Celie’s death (in a painful and miserable
way) would have been a betrayal of the text.
The
fulcrum around which the text seems to hold is the scene where Shug converts
Celie to her empowering vision of God and its creation. Before then, Celie had
seemed all too resigned to her fate - ‘Heaven last always’ - she says at one
point (40). Celie’s story, if it is anything, is how she escapes this terrible
negativity, and how she learns to embrace life. Perhaps hooks would have
preferred an ending more in line with the scenes from The Harlem Book of the
Dead (41): Celie as a photographed cadaver. Is this image not also a
misrepresentation of the history of Southern black women? Is the only time that
they can appear in history is when they have become a wretched corpse?
Celie is saved from this fate in a crucial scene in The Color Purple, which is
similar to the finale of Beloved. Probably the saddest part of Celie’s story is
how she first comes to be raped by her stepfather. When she was young, she had
a passion for cutting hair. Until, that is, her stepfather began to use these
barber sessions as an excuse to rape her. It is by no means coincidental that
the way Celie unconsciously reacts to the revelation that Mr.----- has hidden
Nettie’s letters from her, is to stand behind his chair with his unsheathed
razor at his throat. Celie behaves in exactly the same way as Sethe, as
Henderson writes:
"Like the historian, Sethe is able
to ‘re-enact’ or ‘re-think ‘a critical moment from the past and is consequently
able to demonstrate her possession of rather than by the past and to alter her
own life history" (42).
If
Celie had cut Albert’s throat, it is more than probable that she would have
shared the
fate of
Sofia - a brutal prison sentence. Besides, if hooks is not satisfied that Celie
has struggled enough, Walker provides us with the alternative story of Albert’s
first wife, Annie Julia. A jealous Shug kept Albert away from home so often
that Annie Julia would have to come begging for enough money to feed his ever
enlarging brood of children. Annie Julia’s fate is to be shot dead in front of
her children by her ex-boyfriend whilst coming home from church . . . Above all
the other misrepresentations and absences that Walker portrays in The Color
Purple, the ones that state that abused Southern black women must remain
victims all their lives, are the ones that must be overturned above all others.
As Walker herself has said, ‘I liberated Celie from her own history. I wanted her to be happy’ (43). And in
that, she has succeeded admirably.
NOTES
1). H.V.Carby,
‘White women listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ in The
Empire Strikes Back, London, 1982, p.223.
2). J.B.Foreman,
ed., Collins Contemporary Dictionary, London, 1977, p.243.
3). H.Bloom,
Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989, p.3.
4). Ibid.,
p.4.
5). A.
Walker, The Color Purple, London, 1986, p.200.
6). Ibid.,
p.200.
7). M.G.Henderson,
‘The Color Purple Revisions and Redefinitions’, in H.Bloom, ed. Modern
Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989, p.67.
8). A.Light,
‘Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism’, in M.Green, ed,
English and Cultural Studies, London, 1987, p. 108.
9). B.Hooks,
‘Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple’, in H.Bloom, ed. Modern
Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989, p.224.
10).
F.L.Broderick, ‘The Search for a Career’ in R.W.Logan, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: A
Profile, New York, 1971, p.1.
11).
Walker, op. cit. p.111.
12).
Walker, op. cit. p.216.
13).
L.S. Kaufman, Special Delivery; Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction,
Chicago, 1992, p.225.
14).
D.Lessing, The Golden Notebook, London, 1972, p.251.
15).
M.G.Henderson, ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical
Text’, in D.C.Stanton, ed. Discourses of Sexuality, 1992, p.323.
16).
G.O.Taylor, Studies in Modern American Autobiography, London, 1983,
p.44.
17). Hooks, op. cit. p.223.
18).
Henderson, Beloved, p.313.
19).
Walker, op. cit. p.71.
20).
Walker, op. cit. p.80.
21).
Henderson, Color Purple, p.69.
22).
Hooks, op. cit. p.225.
23).
Henderson, Beloved, p.319.
24).
Walker, op. cit. p.233.
25).
W.E.B.Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics,
p.220.
26).
Walker, op. cit. p.69.
27).
Walker, op. cit. p. 166.
28).
Broderick, op. cit. p.27.
29).
Walker, op. cit. p.40.
30).
Walker, op. cit. p.167.
31).
T.Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, London, 1985, p. 100.
32).
Walker op. cit. p.167.
33).
Walker op. cit. p.43.
34).
Walker op. cit. p.107.
35).
Walker op. cit. p. 3.
36).
Henderson, The Color Purple, p.68.
37).
Walker op. cit. p.18.
38).
Light, op. cit. p.106.
39).
Hooks, op. cit. p. 227.
40).
Walker, op. cit. p.39.
41). Henderson, Beloved p.316.
42).
Henderson, Beloved p.338.
43).
Hooks, op cit. p. 227.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bloom,
Harold, Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989.
Broderick,
Francis L., ‘The Search for a Career’ in Logan, R.W., ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: A
Profile, New York, 1971.
Carby,
Hazel V., ‘White women listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’
in The Empire Strikes Back, London, 1982.
Du
Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics,
Foreman,
J.B., ed. Collins Contemporary Dictionary London, 1977.
Henderson,
Mae G., ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text’, in
Stanton, D.C., ed. Discourses of Sexuality, 1992.
Henderson,
Mae G., ‘The Color Purple: Revisions and Redefinitions’, in Bloom, H., ed. Modern
Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989.
Hooks,
Bell, ‘Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple’, in Bloom, H., ed. Modern
Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989.
Katz,
Tamar, ‘“Show me How to Do Like You”: Didacticism and Epistolary Form in The
Color Purple’, in Bloom, H., ed. Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker,
New York, 1989.
Kaufman,
L.S., Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction, Chicago,
1992.
Lessing,
Doris, The Golden Notebook, London, 1972.
Light,
Alison, ‘Fear of the Happy Ending: The Color Purple, Reading and Racism’, in
Green, M., ed. English and Cultural Studies, London, 1987.
McDowell,
Deborah E., ‘“The Changing Same”: Generational Connections and Black Women
Novelists’, in Bloom, H., ed. Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker, New
York, 1989.
Moi,
Toni, Sexual/Textual Politics, London, 1985.
Morrison,
Toni, Beloved, London, 1988.
Taylor,
Gordon 0. , Studies in Modern American Autobiography, London, 1983.
Walker,
Alice, The Color Purple, London, 1986.
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