Piecing the patchwork self- a reading of walker's the color purple

Title:Piecing the patchwork self: a reading of walker's the color purpleAuthor(s):Shanyn FiskeSource:The Explicator.66.3 (Spring 2008): p150. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type:Critical essayFull Text:With its epistolary structure and layered first-person narrations, Alice Walker's The Color Purple unfolds asymphony of voices at once discrete and intermingled. The novel's inclusion of so many individual storiesmakes it difficult to tell whether these narratives are enclosed within Celie's account of her life or whetherCelie's story is part of a larger whole. This formal destabilization of a dominant narrative emphasizes that anindividual 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, likethe scraps of cloth sewn into Celie's patch work quilt, characters' lives in The Color Purple are stitchedtogether into a unity whose strength and vibrancy depend on each individual's identification with anddistinction from the others around him or her. Quilts, as Priscilla Leder has noted, "embody the ideal of unity indiversity which permeates Walker's writings" (141). What unites the characters of The ColorPurple is a sharedexperience of suffering and a common struggle to survive in the face of oppression, violence, and abuse. Inwhat follows, I suggest that Celie's struggles and her strengthening sense of self are contingent on her integration into a supportive network of friends constructed on the sharing of stories that testify to the individuality of personal suffering and form the threads binding broken lives into a stronger whole.From its outset, The Color Purple identifies 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 instinctivedesire to heal her emotional trauma by articulating her experiences and understanding her suffering. Askedabout her children's father, Celie tells her mother that they are God's ("I don't know no other man" [3]). Celie'svictimization by her stepfather is reinforced by her acceptance of her inescapable passivity in the hands of anomnipotent, 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 tolocate 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 gradualintegration into a developing network of (at first) female friends. Celie's interaction with Sophia allows her thefirst 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 bash Mr.--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 shameof myself, I say" (42). This startlingly candid confession prompts an empathic counterconfession from Sophiathat helps Celie begin to identify and come to terms with her past experiences. Like Sophia, Celie has, in herown way,"had to fight ... all my life"(42). The two women's common experience of suffering allows Celie toidentify with Sophia: Sophia's story at once gives new shape to Celie's own by allowing her to reimagineherself in the active role of survivor and fighter. This narrative exchange validates the poignancy of eachwoman'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 piecesout of these messed up curtains" (44), Celie begins to mend her emotional wounds and piece together thefirst fragments of a more stable subjectivity. Judith Els-ley, among others, has emphasized the uniquesymbolism of quilting for the process of suffering and healing in The Color Purple: "[T]he quiltmaker beginswork on her patchwork quilt by cutting or ripping her fabrics apart. Indeed, a patchwork quilt cannot come intoexistence without that rending" (164). The quilt thus both legitimates the suffering that characters haveexperienced and symbolizes the integration of broken lives with the threads of stories the women share about their "messed up" pasts.Celie's growing self-awareness and assertion are accompanied by the novel's formal expansion as it integrates Celie's letters to God with accounts of other characters' lives, which, like the patches of a quilt, are both enclosed within the novel's larger narrative and help to define the patch that is Celie's unique experience. Nettie's letters, for example, reveal the truth of Celie's parentage and help her turn her passive shame into active anger against her stepfather's injustice. Celie's relationship with Shug Avery helps her come to terms with her sexual identity and further emphasizes that human beings are not manipulated by distant, external gods but are capable of shaping their identities through responsive interactions with others. "God is inside you and inside everybody else," Shug tells Celie, giving new significance to Celie's assertion that "I don't write to God no more, I write to [Nettie]" (199). Celie's abandonment of a tyrannical, "big and old and tall and graybearded and white" (201) God becomes a recognition of and respect for the God in herself--a self composed of and enclosed by the patchwork lives constructed in her and others' stories.The color purple is continually equated with suffering and pain. Sophia's swollen, beaten face is described asthe color of "eggplant." Purple is the color of Celie's private parts: the site of her sexual violation. Nettie'sdescription of Africans as "blue-black" suggests that suffering is already marked on the flesh of a historicallyoppressed race. However, it is also from their scars and bruises that the characters derive the stories thatconstruct their solidarity and that link them. As Thadious Davis has remarked, these marks of trauma mightalso be seen as badges testifying to each character's strength in surviving to tell her history. Placed together,these stories are like quilted patches whose complimentary chromatics contribute to the strength of cooperative artistry. A patch, as Houston Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker have noted, "is a vestige of wholeness that stands as a sign of loss and a challenge to creative design'" (706). In Walker's novel, shades of pain are also colors of triumphant, creative survival. Suffering, the novel suggests, is an inescapable part of human life, but it is also the articulation and validation of that suffering that grants the sufferer her self-transcendence.--SHANYN FISKE, Rutgers University (Camden)Copyright [C] 2008 Heldref PublicationsKEYWORDScollective identity, The Color Purple, quilting, recovery, storytelling, Alice WalkerWORKS CITEDBaker, Houston, and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. "Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker's 'EverydayUse.'" Southern Review 21 (1985): 706-20.Davis, Thadious. "Alice Walker's Celebration of Self in Southern Generations." Southern Quarterly 21 (1983):39-53.Elsley, Judy. '"Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent': Fragmentation in the Quilt and The Color Purple." Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. Ikenna Dieke. Connecticut: Greenwood?, 1999: 163-70. Leder, Priscilla. "Alice Walker's American Quilt: The Color Purple and American Literary Tradition." Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. Ikenna Dieke. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999: 141-52.Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket, 1982.Fiske, ShanynSource CitationFiske, Shanyn. "Piecing the patchwork self: a reading of walker's the color purple." The Explicator66.3 (2008): 150+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 29 July 2011.Document URL.proxy.library.carleton.ca/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA189711328&v=2.1&u=ocul_carleton&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=wGale Document Number: GALE|A189711328。