Humour in Alice Walker's "The Colour Purple"

In the introduction to In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983), Alice Walker defines a womanist, in part, as "a black feminist or feminist of color" who "values tears as [the] natural counter-balance of laughter" Although the novel is much more bleak in nature because it deals with social facts such as oppression, rape, violence; yet the comments of Celie adheres to a different sense of humor, unlike the traditional ideas of fun and witty joyous instances. Though The Colour Purple doesn’t elicit heart laughters from the readers of the novel, yet it cannot be totally dismissed that there is a comic element in it, since the character or nature of comic itself cannot be assessed based on the laughter inductive factor. Alice Walker can be said to have used comedy of ideas this novel probably due to the fact that it is subversive in nature in contrast to pure tragedy. High comedy is often not too funny, but quite effectively explores and reflects on the conditions prevalent in society that need not be just or that can be criticized in a discreet way so that may be something can be ltered to bring into effect a better social reality that probably would be a bit more acceptable to society in general so much so that they can face the realities directly rather than receiving it in a sugar-coated form. Wylie Sypher goes so far as to suggest that the comedian refuses to make . . . concessions to actuality and serves, instead, as chief tactician in a permanent resistance movement, or rebellion, within the frontiers of human experience. By temperament, the comedian is often a fifth columnist in social life.

Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, does not despair of "man" either, for it incorporates these elements of comedy: it makes the incongruous congruent to a larger pattern; it refuses to accept the limitations imposed on its fictional society; and it posits a new order which is presented in the novel as ideal. Even its tragic elements are not anomalous. The male and female characters of The Color Purple do not live in a polished and sophisticated society, nor do they engage in what is traditionally considered sparkling and witty repartee. And the violations of social norms and decorum that occur are not perpetrated by foolish, stupid, or dandified characters but by female characters with whom we are expected to sympathize. However, the conventions of the comedy of manners are so clearly inverted in The Color Purple that we cannot but suspect it to be deliberate. Walker writes from the point of view of an outsider who is rebuffed by a closed social order; yet in her novel she transcends these social restrictions and envisions a world in which they cease to exist. The Color Purple is an intellectual comedy in that it is a comedy of ideas : it dramatizes possibilities and completes itself in a vision of an ideal world2 — a world which is matriarchal, a parody of the boy-gets-girl endings of most comedies and fairy tales. This world is also an ideal one which is in direct opposition to the rigidly closed society that is in evidence in the opening pages of The Color Purple. However, the tragic elements so apparent here are necessary to Walker's idea, since she must work through the limitations of the closed order to give credence to the Utopian possibilities of her open, womanist world.

She dramatizes the crippling social order through the character of Celie- a social pariah, and the instances that she faces. Being a black lesbian she is thrice alienated from acceptance in the male, white heterosexual social superstructure which seems to exclude realities outside of the familiar normative doctrine and social stratification based on ascribed statuses of sex, colour of skin and more. She also questions the continuously perpetrated gender roles. The very foundational and basic structural element of society, i.e., the family is put to question through the picture of children being raped and abused. "First he put his thing up against my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it". The first three letters suggest that Celie's "father" kills her mother through abuse, at which point he ominously be- gins to eye her favourite sister, Nettie. Clearly, "a girl child ain't safe in a family of men"  and no woman in the household is inviolable. Nor is marriage a safe haven for Celie; it merely be- comes an extension of her unhappy home life. Ironically, she is offered to Mr. like a slave on an auction block, and Mr._____ is more interested in her dowry than in her: "Mr. say, That cow still coming? He say, Her cow" . In turn, Celie's wedding day is equally desolate, "I spend my wedding day running from the oldest boy. He twelve". Marital sex is brutal and animalistic, and Celie later equates it with defecation, since it is hardly an act based on mutual fulfilment : "He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain't there. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep". From the above references to the novel it is evident that the position of black women aren’t all that cool, rather it’s like life becomes a mere existence! Even in case of Celie’s step-daughter-in-law, an independent woman we can see how the paradigms of justice and power are biased. Sofia becomes a victim of social injustice when she refuses to respect authority in the person of the white mayor's wife, who wants Sofia to work as her maid. When Sofia responds with a "hell no" , a brawl ensues and the police are called. The dangers of fighting back are clear since Sofia's punishment is hardly "just" or merited by her crime.

Thus we can see the  deep satire prevailing despite the melancholy, and there is a transformation towards positivity as the novel makes progression with Sophie accepting Squeak’s children, the nuclear family being more understanding and empathising and not stringent on old patriarchal norms, God being universal, free of colour and other discriminations; the fact that the social system is questioned and satirized and rejected and later on in the final stages rejuvenated imparts the idea that it is the limitations that make society closed to individual differences and diversity. The clothes that Celie and Mr. design celebrate rather than restrict people; they become a symbol of the humanist or womanist utopia manifested at the end of the novel. Indeed, this utopia becomes an Edenic paradise, as Thadious M. Davis suggests, for the arrival of Celie's son, Adam Omatangu, and the rest of her family from Africa signals the continuity of generations, the return (ironically per- haps) to the 'old, unalterable roots.' Their return is cause for a larger hope for the race, and for celebration within the family and community, because they have survived 'whole,' literally since they miraculously survive a shipwreck and symbolically since they have acquired definite life-affirming attitudes.

This is precisely the note on which the novel ends, since the new order, the order that opens to the once segregated, is celebratory :"White people busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don't have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other". To paraphrase Martin, in Walker's comedy, the female/black incongruous is seen to be more congruous than the white patriarchy, which made them incongruous in the first place by denying them entry into its closed society. Therefore, while it may seem "incongruous" to classify The Color Purple as a comedy, it cannot truly be called anything else, for it seeks to improve society by eliminating the limitations prescribed by the societal norms. Meredith stresses that where "the veil is over women's faces, you cannot have society, without which the senses are barbarous and the Comic Spirit is driven to the gutters to slake its thirst". In The Color Purple, the "veil," of which Meredith speaks, is lifted, the barriers between the sexes are razed, and a new world is erected on the ruins, in which the sexes meet on an equal footing and celebrate each other, life, and humankind.

References

·        Harris, Trudier. "Chapter 1." South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. Athens: U of Georgia, 2002.

·        Taylor, Carole Anne. Preface. The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance: Reading Modernity through Black Women's Fiction. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 2000.

·        Woodard, Helena. "Expressions of "Black Humor": Laughter as Resistance in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36.4, Geography, Gender, Risibility, and Race in American Writings (1994): 431-35. JSTOR. Web. 29 Aug. 2014.

·        Walker, Alice. The Colour Purple. N.p.: Phoenix, 1992. Print.

·        Taylor, Carole Anne. "Humor, Subjectivity, Resistance: The Case of Laughter in The Color Purple." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36.4, Geography, Gender, Risibility, and Race in American Writings (1994): 462-82. JSTOR. Web. 29 Aug. 2014.