Thursday 28 August 2014

Nikhil Shankar
II PSEnglish
1313211
CIA 3- American Literature

A Critical Appraisal of  'The Color Purple- Silences and Stereotypes'

It is a fact that ‘The Color Purple’ is a critically acclaimed novel. It has been canonized, and won a Pulitzer for its story. It is a remarkably written story about a woman’s journey of self-realization. It has been claimed to be a pinnacle of black feminist literature. However, there are also opinions (often unspoken) prevalent among scholars that the story itself in reality manages to do the exact opposite of what it is supposed to- it reinforces racist and feminine stereotypes. In this context, I will be summarizing a research paper by Afro-American scholar Trudier Harris, titled ‘On The Color Purple, Stereotypes, And Silence’.
Described as one of the ‘harshest critics of The Color Purple’, Harris provides a detailed, objective explanation of the drawbacks of the novel, substantiating each of her points with examples. An admirer of Alice Walker’s works, Harris’s primary issue with the novel is the fact that the novel is open to large audience out of which most of the readers do not truly identify with the protagonist “and do not feel the intensity of their pain, stand back and view the events of the novel as a circus of black human interactions” (Harris, 1).
Her proclamation“The Color Purple has been canonized. I don't think it should have been.” (Harris, 1), hence stems from this point. By creating such a hype about the novel, Harris categorically proves that the media in itself is racist, since it has chosen one piece by one  Afro-American author to present its opinions on the plight of all Black people of that time, and the piece itself is constructed in a manner so as to reinforce racist and feminist stereotypes. In fact Harris during her endeavour of showcasing the true effects of the novel claims that “One white woman commented that, if she had not been told the novel had been written by a black woman, she would have thought it had been written by a Southern white male who wanted to reinforce the traditional sexual and violent stereotypes about black people.”( Harris, 4)
Harris consistently is preoccupied with the fact that only a black woman could truly understand the many little problematic elements in the novel. To any white or non-black person, this novel is simply information to how a black woman’s life is and this information is false. The novel’s popularity silences many of the black women critics who actually have something to say against the novel for two reasons. First, a sense of “treason” emerges against a fellow black woman author and second, there seems to be nobody who accepts such criticisms against the novel. “There are many black women critics in this country who would rather have their wisdom teeth pulled than be accused of objecting to it.”( Harris, 1)
One of the most important problems with the novel, in Harris’s perspective, is the characterization of the protagonist Celie. Harris finds it inconceivable that any black woman would refuse to fight and stay suppressed for that long. As an Afro-American woman herself, Harris speaks about how she has interacted with several female scholars as well as Afro-American men and women and all were of a unanimous opinion that a Black woman is never submissive, her natural instinct is to fight. ‘Silences’ becomes an issue also in the fact that Afro-Americans do not want to voice out their issues with Celie. To be in disagreement with the prevalent opinion of the novel is blasphemous. The persona of the story has become so commonplace a framework to view the Afro-American woman, even Afro-American women don’t want to contradict it.
‘With great power comes great responsibility’, is one of the most universal truths out there. Having been granted the power of the pen, Walker could have actually come up portraying true black woman struggles and the accurate characterisation of a black woman like Celie. Instead, Walker seems to have misused this power by irresponsibly showing a weak black woman character and also the character of every black man in the novel seems to be negative. Completely unlike the true situations, even during the time the novel has been set, every black man in the novel seems to be beating up and raping women. Harris explains, “All the men (...) fit into that froglike perception Celie has of them. And the problem with these frogs? None of them can turn into princes.”( Harris, 6)
The problem, in Harris’s opinion is therefore the fact that no reader looks at this novel as a story of a specific black woman, in a specific black family of a specific black society. Almost every white person when asked (in fact myself too) tend to generalise the situations and struggles of Celie to the female black population. This problem can also be applied to the image of black men as portrayed in the novel. The lack of contextualization in the novel hampers the Black woman’s status more than help it. This is a major problem, especially since Walker herself claimed that the novel is a realist fiction. To have done that, and then written a story that is anything but real, is nothing short of unforgiveable.
This contextualization is very important for several reasons. One of these is the fact that critics of Harris would claim that Celie’s character makes perfect sense, since she was constantly and consistently abused by her father since the age of fourteen, and her subsequent opinions of men all stem from there. However, the average Black woman is not like that; it is the context of Celie’s upbringing that makes her that way. Her story is not the story of every Afro-American woman.
I liked this article because Harris is very objective in her opinion. She does not make claims simply because she wants to, rather, she backs her claims with strong arguments. For instance, when she talks about the characterisation of Celie in the story, she simply does not say that she has a problem with Celie’s character because her own life was never like that, but she explains how she spoke to many black women about this issue and also held many discussions with varied groups of people on multiple occasions. In fact Harris keeps mentioning how she herself read the novel several times every time she heard someone appreciate the novel to reconfirm her own idea of the novel. Though I think Harris could have been a little less harsh in her language in the paper and could have mentioned a few things she appreciates about the novel, these are very minor criticisms, almost nitpicking in that sense. I am sure she does see a few positives in the novel and has simply refrained from mentioning them. For example when she says that other black women appreciated the language used in the novel, Harris doesn’t have any objection unlike other times where she refuted any appreciation to the novel. In my opinion her silence regarding various aspects of the novel is actually subtle appreciation. Harris undoubtedly has a very different perspective to the novel, an authentic, yet unconventional one, and one that is extremely brave, considering the popularity of the work she chose to criticize. Her writing however, is honest and on point, and compels one to listen to her.
Therefore, while the linguistic prowess of the novel cannot be denied, along with the fact that the story Celie’s journey in life towards assertiveness is inspirational, it is an incorrect representation of the lives of Afro-American men, women and children in the Jazz Age South in the USA. It does not encapsulate the complexities of their lives, and must not be treated as an authoritative work on the African-American way of  life.


Works Cited

Trudier, H.  “On The Color Purple, Stereotypes, and Silence.” Black American Literature Forum Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1984) : 155-161. JSTOR. Web. 

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