Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple

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An important juncture in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when Celie first recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie. This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this epistolary novel but also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie struggles to puzzle out the markings on her first envelope from Nettie provides a concrete illustration of both Celie's particular horizon of interpretation and Walker's chosen approach to the epistolary form: Saturday morning Shug put Nettie letter in my lap. Little fat queen of England stamps on it, plus stamps that got peanuts, coconuts, rubber trees and say Africa. I don't know England Don't know Africa either. So I stir don't know Nettie (102) Revealing Celie's ignorance of even the most rudimentary outlines of the larger world, this passage clearly defines the site she occupies as the novel's main narrator.(1) In particular, the difficulty Celie has interpreting this envelope underscores her tendency to understand events in terms of personal consequences rather than categories. What matters about not knowing where Africa at - according to Celie - is not knowing where Nettie at. By clarifying Celie's characteristic angle of vision, this passage highlights the intensely personal perspective that Walker brings to her tale of sexual oppression - a perspective that accounts in large part for the emotional power of the text. But Walker's privileging of the domestic perspective of her narrators has also been judged to have other effects on the text. Indeed, critics from various and camps have commented on what they perceive as a tension between public and discourse in the novel.(2) Thus, in analyzing Celie's representation of national identity, Lauren Berlant identifies a separation of aesthetic and political discourses in the novel and concludes that Celie's narrative ultimately emphasizes individual essence in false opposition to institutional history (868). Revealing a very different in his attacks on the novel's womanist stance, George Stade also points to a tension between personal and public elements in the text when he criticizes the novel's narcissism and its championing of domesticity over the public world of masculine power plays (266). Finally, in praising Walker's handling of sexual oppression, Elliott Butler-Evans argues that Celie's personal letters serve precisely as a textual strategy by which the larger African-American history, focused on racial conflict and struggle, can be marginalized by its absence from the narration (166). By counterposing personal and public discourse in the novel, these critics could be said to have problematized the narrative's domestic perspective by suggesting that Walker's chosen treatment of the constricted viewpoint of an uneducated country woman - a woman who admits that she doesn't even know where Africa at - may also constrict the novel's ability to analyze issues of and class.(3) Thus Butler-Evans finds that Celie's private life preempts the exploration of the public lives of blacks (166), while Berlant argues that Celie's family-oriented point of view and modes of expression can displace race and class analyses to the point that the nonbiological abstraction of class relations virtually disappears (833). And in a strongly worded rejection of the novel as revolutionary literature, bell hooks charges that the focus upon Celie's sexual oppression ultimately deemphasizes the collective plight of black people and invalidates . . . the racial agenda of the slave narrative tradition that it draws upon (Writing 465).(4) In short, to many readers of The Color Purple, the text's ability to expose sexual oppression seems to come the expense of its ability to analyze issues of race and class. …