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I found that Alice Walker to great extents deviates from the epistolary formula in both the construction of the story as well as the rhetoric of Celie's letters ...
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Mastergradsoppgave i engelsk litteratur Fakultet for humaniora, samfunnsvitenskap og lærerutdanning Universitetet i Tromsø Vår 2011
I would like to thank my mother for having shared all my ups and downs during the work on this thesis, whether I wanted her to or not. I would like to thank Far for having contributed with excellent motivation during my work. More than anything, I must thank my father for having kept me fed and clothed during this last year of my work: I will pay you back when I am rich and famous, I promise. Finally, I give sincerest thanks to Førsteamanuensis Stephen F. Wolfe, who supervised the work on this thesis and has contributed with invaluable help and advice.
When I started working on that which eventually became this thesis, I did not know which author, or which literary work, I wanted to write about. I only knew what I wanted to write about: I wanted to write about narratology, and more specifically, about epistolary narratology. It was not surprising that I ended up working with the novel that first roused my interest in the letter as a narrative agent: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I first read it in an introductory class on American Literature, and one of the things that stuck with me was the way that the letters worked as a narrative voice. Simply put, reading The Color Purple opened my eyes to the difference in how a reader perceives the narrative of a person who is unconsciously telling her story in letters to someone else, and a first person narrator telling her story in a “regular” novel, in a voice that might be genuine but in a situation where the telling of the story is never explained. The fascination stayed after I reached the end of the last page, and closed the book. When I started working on my thesis, I did so with the knowledge that I wanted to learn more about how epistolary narrative works, and what makes it different from other kinds of first person narration – for there is unquestionably a difference, in the way that they work on the page and in the way that they give insight into the mind of the storyteller.
While much criticism of The Color Purple acknowledges the importance of the letter form and the way it portrays the growth of the protagonist from a voiceless and cowed child who is not acknowledged as a person into an independent woman who controls her life the way she controls the narrative of the novel, there seems to be little work that investigates the role of Walker's epistolary narrative in any depth. The only narratological scrutiny of the letters that I have found was in The Signifying Monkey, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. makes the case for Walker's narrative revision of Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by her use of free indirect discourse. However, his focus is on the revision of previous texts within the African-American tradition, and he does not discuss the epistolary form at large. When I began planning this thesis, I wanted to fill this gap for the sake of my own curiosity. I was not so much interested in the historical implications of the form or the aspect of minority literature, but these things changed during the course of the work. The existing theory on epistolary narrative is often centred on older and more “conventional” epistolary works; the most recent work discussed in any of the studies I read was Saul Bellow's Herzog ,
to revise the epistolary novel in Celie's and Nettie's letters, and that she does so from her position as an African-American woman writer concerned with the destructive effects of European colonialism that linger even in the present.
The first chapter of this thesis is an introduction to the novel and the theoretical approach I have chosen. I will start with a summary of The Color Purple and present the novel's major thematic points as well as its reception and impact. The second part of the chapter introduces the theory on which this thesis is based, starting with the historical place of the epistolary novel and its particular relationship to female characters and woman writers; critics have suggested that the epistolary form was particularly fitted to the changes in the gender ideology of the period when the epistolary novel thrived. The chapter ends with a brief overview of the narratological aspects of letter narrative, focusing on the particular qualities of the letter as a narrative agent, as well as the differences between diary narrative and letter narrative, a line that is blurred more than usual in The Color Purple.
The second chapter is focused on the role that the letter narrative plays in The Color Purple. It investigates the relationship between The Color Purple and the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century, particularly Samuel Richardson's Pamela , for the purpose of illustrating how Alice Walker intentionally avoided the conventions of the “classical” period of the epistolary novel. The second part of this chapter focuses on theoretical studies of epistolary narrative. It discusses The Color Purple in the light of two different studies, one on the epistolary novel and one on the diary narrative, and finds that Celie's letters corresponds remarkably little with the typical traits found in either of the two. The chapter ends with a reading of Nettie's letters in the light of the “traditional” epistolary novel, which shows that she writes her letters in a style that is far closer to the typical epistolary rhetoric than Celie's are.
The third chapter is about colonialism in The Color Purple , which is frequently related to racism and sexism. It maps racial and gendered problems, which are remarkably prevalent in the novel; in Celie's world, almost all problematic relationships have their source not in personalities and ambitions that clash, but in prejudices based on gender and race. Both these conditions are brought together in Celie, who in the early parts of her story describes herself and her work on Albert's farm with a language that evokes images of slavery. The chapter is also about the overt presence of European colonialism in Nettie's tale. This chapter discusses
the narrative voice in The Color Purple in light of post-colonial theory, and argues that the differences between Celie's and Nettie's letters are part of Walker's commentary on the colonial ideology.
A note on terminology
While most people understand “Epistolary novel” as a novel made up of letters, the term is often used as somewhat of an umbrella term for a variety of different narratives like letters and diary entries, or rarer forms like newspaper clippings, blog entries and forum posts. As such, I prefer to use the term “letter novel” when talking about the form that The Color Purple has taken. Because narrative in letters (or diary entries and the like) are often found in works that are not considered epistolary, I will use the word “letter narrative” when discussing the qualities inherent to the letter as an independent narrative agent. Likewise, I will talk about “diary narrative”. Finally, this thesis makes extensive use of H. P. Abbot's study on the diary narrative, and Abbot uses the term “diary mode” about a certain kind of narrative that he detects in diary novels and in letter novels where one voice dominates the narrative completely, and is so self-focused that the addressee exists only as an excuse for the letter- writer to be writing their life at all (Goethe's Werther and the like).
The use of letters as an agent of storytelling is – of course – a matter of narrative technique, which theoretically is independent of the content and focus of any text. It is highly questionable if the epistolary novel can be considered a “genre” merely because of its narrative peculiarities, and a more correct usage would likely be to consider it a “form”. When I make use of the word “genre” to describe the epistolary novel, I do so with reference to the historical position of the form, which is the epistolary novel of eighteenth century Britain^2. The letter novel was particularly affluent in this period, and it was uniform enough for scholars to make generalisations on the content of it – and for Alice Walker to write a modern novel with enough references to it to be considered a revision.
(^2) Janet G. Altman, who authored the main theoretical study on the epistolary novel used in this thesis, defines it as such in her conclusion: “The epistolary novel, which flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century, developed recongizeable conventions and a thematic cohesiveness that its predecessor, the memoir novel, did not have. Further historical, narratological, and semiotic work is necessary before we could offer more than partial explanations for this cohesiveness. But the simple conclusion should stand: in contrast to the autobiographical or memoir novel, which is definable essentially in terms of a narrative technique, letter fiction is describable as a genre and invites exploration as such” (Altman 200).
addressed to God, and later to Nettie. As far as the reader is aware,no recipient ever read the letters from Celie; they are at least never answered in the kind that one expects from epistolary communication.
The novel begins as Celie stops talking and starts writing, after she has been raped by her father and threatened that she “better not never tell nobody but god”. Celie’s letters to God soberly recounts the death of her mentally ill mother, the two children she has by her father and which he has taken from her and sold to strangers. They tell of her being taken out of school due to her pregnancies until she is taken away from her home by her marriage to Albert (who Celie only refers to as “Mr. ____”), a widower with four children who needs someone to keep his house. This marriage is the start of the main bulk of the novel’s story. Celie parts with the only member of her family that ever loved her unconditionally, her scholarly younger sister Nettie. The early years of the marriage seems to be little more than a continuation of the story of abuse that Celie suffered in her childhood home, but her life starts changing as she meets two women who defy everything she has learned about womanhood: Albert's daughter- in-law Sofia, and his former lover, the blues singer Shug Avery.
Sofia, whose brash and outspoken attitude inspires both jealousy and admiration in Celie, came to be who she is from a background remarkably similar to Celie's: she and her sisters had to fight against the men in their family as they grew up, and learned to stand on their own and to hit back against men who hit them first. She is a contrast to Celie in a number of ways, the most obvious one being her open unwillingness to bend to the will of her husband, Albert’s oldest son Harpo. Harpo is a victim of his father’s bad example as a husband; he loves children and enjoys domestic work normally associated with women, but knows no other image of marriage than the one where a husband beats and dominates his wife. Sofia eventually leaves him, and soon after takes a fall from a fight not even she can win when she gets into a fistfight with the town’s mayor for “sassing” his wife. Sofia is imprisoned and brutally beaten, and her life is saved only by her accepting to work as the mayor’s maid. Her strength in the face of men who seek to oppress her is also what throws her into a decade of modern slavery.
Shug Avery is, much like Sofia, a woman who will not let men tell her what to do, be they her father or her husband or even her devoted lover. But where Sofia is free because she will not let men dominate her physically, Shug is spiritually liberated. She goes her own ways
without paying regard to the judgements of others, and she reveals to Celie how weak her husband can be in the face of a woman that he loves, but cannot control. As Celie befriends Shug, and later also becomes her lover, she finds unconditional love for the first time since her sister left her. With this love, with her body and her sexuality reclaimed and with the ability to finally speak about the things she only could write about before, Celie finally starts healing, and learns to see that her life is her own to make.
The story turns again as Shug and Celie discover that Albert has been stealing Celie’s mail; they find years’ worth of letters from Nettie hidden in his room. Nettie found Celie’s stolen children with Samuel and Corrine, a missionary couple preparing to go to Africa, and followed them to their mission among a tribe called the Olinka. A great number of letters blindly written – Nettie never got any answers and correctly surmises that Albert is interfering in her correspondence – tells about her daily life in Africa, the life of the Olinka, her family and her work among them. When she confesses her relation to Celie’s children to Corrine and Samuel, she learns the truth about her family: the man she and Celie knew as their father had married their widowed mother after their real father – a successful businessman – was lynched just before Nettie's birth. The discovery of these letters, the truth about the man who raped her and the injustice done to her by her husband is what makes Celie finally leave Albert. She goes to live with Shug in Memphis, where she starts sewing trousers for the people she loves and soon turns it into a thriving business when she discovers how in demand they are from both men and women. She continues writing letters, but her recipient is no longer God, but Nettie.
Celie is finally free from the men who held her down, but is faced with the final hurdle on the road to full self-fulfilment when the free-spirited Shug leaves her for a fling with a nineteen-year old boy. As Celie comes to face that she cannot force others to love her, so does the steady letters now arriving from Nettie tell about how the mission must acknowledge that not even Christ can save the Olinka from the clutches of colonialism: the village is destroyed to make place for a rubber plantation, and Nettie and her family – she was married to Samuel after Corrine died – cannot help them any longer. As the novel comes to a close, Celie comes to peace with herself as she reconciles with Albert and finds an unlikely friend in him, Shug returns to her, and she is reunited with Nettie and her children after having been separated from them for three decades.
save and reform abusive men who have been brought up into an understanding of the world were the woman, and what the woman does, are seen as inferior to the male actions and values. The ideal man is Jack (Sofia's brother in law) who always cares for children and stands by his wife. Albert and Harpo are reformed when they embrace “feminine” tasks like caring for children and elders (Harpo) and sewing, cooking and keeping house (Albert). There is also a preoccupation with female sexuality. Celie must learn to love the world and to love herself before she can stop depending on others for her own happiness. Celie's learns to love herself as she discovers her ability to sexual pleasure in Shug's acceptance and love – the initially unrequited love for Shug brings Celie more anguish than the abuse of her husband, and these feelings also spark the first glimpses of Celie as a sexual being, years before the first time she and Shug make love^4.
The problems of race are not as harmonically resolved, although the novel hints that the next generation might bring conciliation^5. However, the novel firmly establishes that the victim can also be a perpetrator: Shug and Albert's treatment of Annie Julia and in the beginning also of Celie is evidence of this, as is Nettie, Samuel and Corrine's discovery that the Olinka consider them to be no better than the white missionaries that were there before them.
The Historical Influence of the Epistolary Novel
Until the recent revolutions in technology and the flow of information, the private letter was the most common and the most accessible form of written narrative. Other kinds of writing was largely reserved for those who were professionally occupied with regular publications. The writing of fiction takes training and talent, and the publication of it was and largely still is a matter of market demand and the approval of individual publishers and editors. The letter (^4) Walker is more open about the connection between female sexuality and emancipation in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a novel about female genital cutting in which the main character is Tashi, Celie's daughter-in-law. In this novel, FGC is explained as men's fear of women finding sexual pleasure with each other, or through masturbation. (^5) Henrietta and Reynolds Stanley seem to find friendship in the very scene in which their mothers fall apart, as Sofia finally tells Eleanor Jane that she never was a mother to her. Miss Eleanor Jane starts seeing things from Sofia's side after this, and starts speaking out against her family. That this is a task for the future is clear in Celie's unusually polemic observation of how it looks like the toddler is “raping” Henrietta's leg, yet the normally rude and mean-spirited Henrietta claims to “not mind” company of the child. This scene is ambivalent, however, and one can read the compliancy of the normally rude Henrietta as a demonstration of how not even she dares challenge the white authority.
might appear trivial compared the print of the mass media or the works included in literary canons, but it is a form of writing that was much more accessible than the production of a newspaper editorial, far less a novel. Anyone who can write and read and afford the stamps can also write and mail a letter, and the writing of letters was an activity so universal that their authenticity are rarely questioned except in cases of known censorship. This contributed to the realism often perceived in epistolary fiction: the “artless” language made it easier to believe that these words had not been filtered by a narrator (Perry 13). This perceived authenticity likely contributed to the popularity of the letter as public reading after the Reformation, because it did not violate the Puritan scepticism towards the falsehood of fiction (Perry x), and because the personal nature of many letters was such that it opened for the soul-searching and introspection highly valued in the Puritan theology (Perry 65). The Enlightenment and the spread of Puritanism in Britain created a demand for “truth” in art, for which the letter was a particularly well-suited form: there was a new demand for realism, and the simple, everyday language of the private letter was something that the reading public could recognise from their own lives – an important departure from the flowery tales of the romances of the previous times (Perry 75). Letter literature was not only used for fiction and entertainment; as Ruth Perry notes, the letter form was “a perfect frame for travel reports or essays of any length and on any subject in this new age which so valued collecting information. (Indeed, the earliest newspapers were no more than batches of informative letters published together)” (Perry 7). Letters were also the substance of one of the peculiarities of the time, namely the letter manuals that constructed difficult situations and then offered solutions to them, instructing their readers in proper behaviour and correct moral response. Symptomatic of the developing novel was also a secondary mission of many letter manuals: they intentionally made use of emotional subtleties to train the “sensibilities” of their audience (Perry 88).
Letter fiction has been known since Antiquity, and examples certainly existed before the rise of the novel. The epistolary novel first appears alongside the publication of letters for informative and didactic purposes, and it would soon become a major figure in the literature of the Enlightenment. The novel of letters is an inescapable part of many national literary canons, which may be seen in the critics that consider Pamela to be the first true novel in Britain, the effect Les Lettres Portugaises had on the French writers of the seventeenth century, or the space that Die Leiden des Jungen Werther occupies in the German literary canon (not forgetting its part in fuelling Goethe's rise as a literary name). The novel of letters
the feminine love letter was seen as anything but literate. Its designation as a feminine art, however, helped to glamorize its marginal status and encourage women to engage in a cultural practice to which they were purportedly naturally suited and that, of course, supported male literary and sexual hegemony. (Jensen 35) Jensen’s claim is that the letter novel became a female way of writing a form that was invented by men, in a period when publication and editing of literature was controlled entirely by men. She believes that this happened as a reaction to the salon culture of the Enlightenment France, where women participated along with men and where the idea of galanterie came to question a culture where love and marriage were institutions in which women acted as possessions traded between men (Jensen 3)^8. “The Epistolary Woman”, eventually established as the norm of the French woman writer, became the antithesis of the “sexually dominant, literary empowered” woman writer of the salon culture (Jensen 21). Now, the ideal image of the writing woman is one who has been seduced and abandoned by her lover, and who is writing her unfulfilled emotions. Female suffering became a virtue, and pain something positive: it might persuade the lover to come back (Jensen 27). Women's letters which did not conform to this were often not published until centuries later, if at all (Jensen 177, note 62). Women's place in public writing became locked to the form of the personal letter, an influence that likely was felt on the other side of the channel; Ruth Perry notes on the popularity of epistolary fiction in pre-Richardson Britain that “epistolary fiction flourished in England long before Richardson wrote Pamela. Some of it was original, some translated from the French” (Perry xi).
Perry’s Women, Letters and the Novel is a historical study of the growth of the novel in England, particularly the epistolary novel. She is interested in the social status of women at the time, and charts how industrialisation brought on women's gradual loss of economic independence and social influence, and ultimately reduced them to an infantile legal status, where their survival was fully dependent on men (the father or the husband), where any
(^8) “galanterie positions the lover as passionately, yet respectfully, in thrall to a virtuous and inaccessible mistress. She must constantly protect her virtue and honor and demand ever more signs of her lover's obedience before indicating, through discreet indirection, that he has pleased her and may continue to love her. The emphasis of galanterie is on a spiritual love that transcends carnal desire and is in harmony with honor and reason. Galanterie grants women power and independence and can be seen as their attempt to rewrite the traditional relationship between the sexes (…) a pregnancy out of wedlock could destroy her reputation and good name, while any pregnancy always threatened a woman's health and indeed her very life. Galanterie, then, was proposed as a way for women to engage in love without physical and moral danger” (Jensen 13).
possessions they brought into marriage fell to their husbands, where they received no education, and where the separation of workplace and home excluded them from influence on the dawning capitalist economy. The wife was the servant of the husband, and even their bodies – their chastity – were seen as male possessions. There was a shift in how woman's place in society was seen: where the nun had once been an independent, scholarly and respected figure in the Middle Ages, she was now an object of pity because she was not married, and became a staple figure of repressed female passion in the novels of the time (Perry 40-42). Perry notes that the development of the novel corresponded with a period when women – particularly in the growing middle class – were reduced to a state where they were expected to stay away from public life and devote themselves to their families, living on the mercy of their fathers and, as they grew older, their husbands (Perry 137). The women of this social group were often deprived of meaningful activities, brought up with the instruction that their foremost ambition was to find love in marriage, and that their most important occupation was to please men (Perry 149). Perry believes that this was a contribution to the popularity of the novel, as the focus on the individual and its scrutiny of thought and psychology in turn fostered a focus on emotion, which ultimately made for fiction more easily focused on the idea of romantic love as the fulfilment of a woman's life: “The epistolary novel was the perfect vehicle for stories of romantic love because its very format demanded a subject matter in which emotional states were most prominent” (Perry 138). She also shows that the motivation of the letter-writers in epistolary fiction is a passive response to emotional tension, which gives the genre a tendency to value emotion over plot (Perry 94).
Perry also discusses the novel's focus on women's sexuality, and the implications this had for the epistolary form. If women's value to society had been reduced to their sexuality, then the same process was seen in the novels: “if a novel had a male protagonist it could be about almost any sort of subject and circumstance, but if it was about a woman, it was almost certain about her relation to a man; nothing else was germane” (Perry 138). The epistolary form foregrounded subjective experience and emotions, which made it a perfect vessel for romantic fantasy, but this had an insidious flip side: the connection between consciousness and sex. In a medium where a person exists solely as the words they put onto paper, and where these words are assumed by the reader to be the unguarded view into the writer's mind, the conflict around which the story centres is often not physical, but mental. Seduction is sexual persuasion, and many epistolary novels seem to suggest that a woman who opens her
