"Looking at the Back of Your Head": Mirroring Scenes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy

Abstract

Although Alice Walker insists that Possessing the Secret of Joy is not a sequel to The Color Purple, she has chosen to recast various characters in the later novel. The novels are also alike in that their protagonists, Celie in Purple and Tashi in Joy, are women who experience epiphany-like moments that lead to a fuller, more coherent sense of self. In these moments the presence of a literal or metaphoric mirror enables the protagonists to move from an experience of fragmentation to a vision of a more unified state of self-possession. As Daniel Ross notes, this transformation resembles Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory.' According to Ross, in The Color Purple there are several mirror scenes that are crucial to Celie's development of selfhood. Before these scenes, Celie endures a barrage of rapes and brutality that causes her to experience her body as fragmented and as being possessed by others, namely her victimizers. At age fourteen, Celie already questions her self-image as a result of her abusive father's repeated rapes. She begins a letter to tell God that she is a good girl and immediately strikes out the word am, and revises her sentence to say, have always been a good girl, demonstrating that she no longer feels certain of her goodness or her identity (1). Celie's violent, loveless marriage to a man she calls is no less damaging than her relationship with her incestuous father. In her best moments with her husband, Celie imagines herself as the beautiful, grinning Shug Avery and puts her arm around him as she supposes Shug might. Of more dangerous times, particularly when Mr. is beating her, Celie says It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree (23). Celie detaches herself from her identity because of her intolerable circumstances. Shug's arrival marks Celie's