Abuses in "The Color Purple"

 

Exploring the Multidimensional Kinship of Women under the Abusive Space in The Color Purple

 

Abstract:

The basic focus of this paper is to attempt a critical study of how Alice Walker, the most famous Afro-American women writer explored the State Apparatuses under the theory of Marxism and Feminism. Alice Walker converges Marxist and feminist perspectives. Walker also demonstrates the concept of the hegemony of society through the women’s character in the novel. In associating with the Apparatuses, it demonstrates how the family and community resulted from the hegemony within the female characters of the novel. The most notable women’s novel of the 1980s The Color Purple in which Walker delineates women in different ways deprived of their freedom, rights, and happiness, enforced to live their life by sacrificing their needs and own desires for male domination family as well as society by bestowing their heads in the novel men hold superiority over women along with the supreme position of the family. Alice Walker demonstrates Afro-American people who are oppressed, marginalized, and exploited culturally socially, politically, and on the religious ground in their own community and family. The Color Purple is an excellent account of the life of poor black women who suffer greatly at the hands of their own community, own family.

      Keywords: Marxism,  Ideology,  Interpellation, Hegemony, abuse, subaltern    

The aim of this paper is to attempt a critical study, exploring the multidimensional kinship of women in the abusive space. The paper focuses on the ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses in the novel. The Color Purple is the main focus of female characters.

The paper argues that despite the patriarchal family dynamics as represented in The Color Purple, women have been able to establish themselves as powerful and capable to disrupt this order.

•     To observe the operation and function of power structures in the novel The Color Purple
•     To examine the hegemony of civil society in the novel The Color Purple.
•    To analyze or examines the power relations between bourgeois and proletarian concerning The Color Purple.

The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker is an American novel that among other things, explicitly covers domestic abuse. Alice sets her novel The Color Purple in the black rural South. It is an excellent account of the life of poor black women who suffers not only in the form of social ostracism due to gender and skin color but also women suffering greatly at the hands of black men within their own family and community.

Alice Walker delineates the concept of Marxism of Louis Althusser who combined Marxism with the scientifically oriented methods of structuralism in his essay, Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (1970), and analyzed how the dominant systems enforce their control by subtly molding their subjects through ideology. Propounding that the structure of this society is not monolithic but constituted by the adversity of non-synchronic social formations or ideological state apparatuses (ISA), Althusser employed a structuralist account of the ideology’ interpellates, individuals and make them and makes them unwillingly participate in their own oppression.

In The Color Purple Alice Walker portrays her female character as victimized and violated by their own community. The ISA includes social institutions like family, school, religion, and so on. Althusser observes that these instructions operate with relative autonomy and obtain their power. Alice Walker highlights another theory of Marxism Hegemony developed by Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Alice Walker naturalized hegemony at the end of the novel in which the oppressed females developed womanhood to gain their position in society.    

        Alice Walker explores the multidimensional kinship of women with family and society and embraces the redemptive power of social and political re-evolution. In the novel, almost all the black male characters dominate women and treat them in all ill-mannered, violent physical, and oppressive ways. Women are violated in different ways like physical, emotional, and sexual torture which makes women live fearfully in their own society and own family. This is notably evident in the life of the central character Celie, where she is mistreated more than a slave in her own family. This pictures the brutal action of Afro- African males towards the black women in the community.

However, despite the patriarchal family dynamics that are displayed in The Color Purple women are shown as powerful and capable to disrupt this order. Alice Walker laid the stress on the gendered subaltern that is women who were doubly oppressed because of their gender, particularly in Third World Countries. It studies a society who are under control by superior or leaders which makes an individual feel inferior and worthless. This paper also studies the subaltern characters of Afro-American women who are dominated by the male gender in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple is one of the most significant black women’s novels of the 1980s in which it can be seen how women lost their identity in particular how black women are facing many problems under dual oppression.                  

Alice Walker sets her novel The Color Purple in a black rural South. It is an excellent account of the life of poor black women who suffer not only in from social ostracism due to gender and skin color but also from women who suffer greatly at the hands of black men within their own families and community. Walker through her characters shows the oppression that the female gender is put through by the patriotic society. In every part of the novel the attitude of superiority is deeply rooted. Where the men are the decision-makers in their family. In the novel almost all the black male characters dominated women and treat them in an ill-mannered violent oppressive way, women are violated in different ways like physically emotionally, and sexually forte which makes women live fearfully in their own society. This is notably evident in the life of the protagonist of the novel Celie, where she is victimized by the ideology of the family, first by her father and then by her husband. And she is burdened with a lot of adult responsibilities at a young age. Alice Walker's depiction of an afro – American family in Georgia in this novel is full of robust reality which profoundly shocks them. In the 3^rd and 4^th letters. Celie, the major narrator of the novel, tells about what is happening to her and her young sister, neither because of the brutal lust of their pa, father (Alphonso) for short. After her mother passed away, she is taken out of school to take care of her siblings. In Althusser's theory “ ideology and ideological state “apparatuses “Althusser extends the family holds the power and control over other members of the family and forces them into submission. The family is described as an ideological apparatus – this means it socializes people to think in a way that encourages and forces people to accept the capitalist system or position as unchangeable. In the novel The Color Purple Celie the protagonist tells in her 1^st letter that her father holds the superiority of the family and controls all over the family and forces them. To submit to him. She tells that her “pa” (Father) cannot tolerate her presence. He calls her 'evil' and says that she is not good for anything. Alphonso her father deprives her of a chance to get her education and also sexually abuses her for his pleasure. In the 3^rd letter, Celie tells that she has been raped by her father and she is pregnant for the 2^nd time with his child, a boy, and sold it to a childless couple, but theoretically selling black children went out with the abolition of slavery. Celie is harassed not only physically only but also mentally, as Alphonso, her father criticizes her for not looking decent. Going through molestation by her father, Celie grows with cold indolence towards men. Her father constantly told her “ You sure are ugly”. The constant destructive comments from her father led her to accept that she was an ugly woman. She lost her self-confidence from her constant reputation with men. Celie's happiness because of her new baby’s safety is short–loved because she is left with unneeded milk in her breasts and she has no decent clothes to wear. As a result Alphonso because hateful and acts “ like he can’t stand me no more” Accordingly, Alphonso’s sexual lust turns from Celie to her younger sister Nettie. This is walkers way of emphasizing the fact that life with Alphonso is a deadly nightmare. In the novel, Celie is interpellated by her father and subjugated in her own family as Althusser says in his essay  Ideology and Ideological  State Apparatuses to interpellates individuals and make subject. In color purple Alphonso interpellates for the Celie and then moves to Nettie. But she doesn’t respond as Celie does.

     Later on, Celie was forced to marry Mr.__ cruel older man her own father, and engaged herself in a loveless marriage. Celie's husband beats her up to make her submission and to reduce her state in the community. She was also deprived of her identity as a wife since. Mr.__  ruled over their marriage through abuse. Celie is a passive and subservient young woman who had two men in her life none of them showed love toward her. They are not only physically violent but sexually and emotionally abusive, making her live fearful and feel worthless and inferior. Moreover, Mr. __ marries Celie to abuse or have her sister Nettie. He marries Celie with his own intellect to get Nettie but he fails.        

            Celie is a suppressed black woman, who had lost her identity. Having been mistreated and dominated by both families. She feels hatred and disgust towards men. She is the prime example of the voiceless black women of the era. Alice Walker demonstrates marriage as a complete destruction of women by explaining that women were considered to be men’s private property. For example, the law many times allowed a husband to beat his wife. In the above this very law can be seen through the action of Mr.—beating his wife Celie in letter 13 to which Harpo, his son asked why he beats Celie to which Mr.__replied “Cause she is my wife “ followed by his son repeating the same action like his father Harpo beats his wife Sofia when she stands for her interest against her husband who beats her up believing that by beating her he can make his wife under control and he believes it is his rights to do so as he is the legal sole husband of her. Moreover, Celie acquired with Sofia a desire for the power that she lacked. This at first led to jealousy, which led to her telling Harpo to beat Sofia. Sofia takes the power within the household, which leads Sofia takes the power within two households, which leads to jealousy from Celie and implies her own ideology, and encourages Harpo to beat Sofia. Celie represents many other women who are forced to keep their voices not heard in the men’s world in their own community. The novel opens up with a personal injunction of silence, “ You better not tell anybody but God. It’d kill your mammy. And proceed several lines later, “ He starts to choke me, saying you better shut up and get used to it choke me, saying you better shut up and get used to it (letter 3). These lines suggest that Celie is denied the right to speak to raise her voice against her step ---father’s sexual assault in her own family.

                   The Color Purple took place when racism was intensely deep in society. The black people in the society were at the time seen as lesser beings compared to white people. More, so the colored people in the novel are forced into a lower class through oppression, not only because of the color of their skin, but also because they are women. After slavery, the social and economic relations for African Americans remained much the same. While no longer slaves, many blacks remained on the land as sharecroppers. There were two groups of people in the society the bourgeois and proletarians Karl Marx delineates his theory of Marxism as well as delineated in his theory of ideology and ideological state Apparatuses. As the proletariat tilled the soil but the land was owned by their former slave masters, the bourgeois. After 1915, economic opportunities in cities of the industrial North encouraged many blacks to the South. Those that remained continued to live isolated from white society, schools, and churches were segregated as well as housing. The novel The Color Purple demonstrates segregated churches while most African- Americans were either Baptist or Methodist and they expressed their religion in the church was much different from the white congregation. Celie and Nettie talk in their letter about  God, where Celie confesses that she sees god as white, but Nettie replies that being in Africa has made her see God differently. Her  African experience has made her see God differently. Her African experience has made her see god spiritually rather than in the physical form that is represented in Western Christianity. The laws that were passed to enforce this segregation were called Jim Crow laws, named after pre-Civil War minstrel characters. In The Color Purple  Sofia is victimized by this social policy. When she shows defiance to the white Mayor’s wife who insults her. Mayor and his wife Millie believe that it is a great honor to be a white lady’s housemaid. But Sofia rejects to become a housemaid so she got hit by Mayor and police, who put her in jail for twelve years to assault their racial dominance. In this manner Walker brings the state apparatus of repressive which functions through violence as Althusser says that ideology massively and predominantly functions by ideology. In the novel, The Color Purple Walker shows the internal bourgeois law as valid in (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercised its authority.

Alice Walker was admired for her powerful portraits of black women. Walker reflects on her early political interests as a Civil rights worker during the 1960s, and many of her social views are expressed in the novel. In The Color Purple as in her other writings, Walker focuses on the double repression of black women in the American experience. Walker contends that black women suffer from discrimination by the white community, and from a second repressive from black males, who impose the double standard of white society on women. As the Civil rights movement helped shape Ms. Walker's thinking regarding racial issues at home. The primary theme of The Color Purple, though reflects Walker’s desire to project a positive outcome in life, even under the harshest conditions. Her central character Celie triumphs over adversity and forgives those who oppressed her at the end of the novel.

Walker demonstrates Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical aspect Hegemony” in his Marxist essay “ The Formation of Intellectuals within her novel. Hegemony, the concept employed means a process of “Intellectuals and moral leadership” that embedded a ruling class across society. In the novel Color Purple,” all the female characters developed a sisterhood and are devoted to struggling against Sexual, racial, and heterosexual violence, and subjugation among others the way black feminism struggles to liberate black women from the vicious domination of the patriarchal society. They together struggle against sexism and racism. 

Alice Walker notes that a womanist is committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people, male and female through confronting oppressive freedom by accepting abuse and victimization from Southern patriarchal family .she learns from Nettie that for survival, resistance and struggle are necessary though she is ignorant about methodology to use. She writes,” …….  I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.”(Walker, A.1982). She thinks fighting back can cause problems, hence submits to male authority and subjugated herself to her father and husband. Walker affirms that the key to wholeness is forgiveness. Celie forgives herself and Alphonso after the wrongdoings done to her. In the process, she encounters Sofia and Shug who help her emerge as a courageous self-loving woman. When Celie gets the letters Nettie had sent, she stops writing letters to god and addresses her to Nettie. It becomes a means of structuring her own identity, and her sense of self, and healing her wounds about her sister and children. She starts her own business with the help of Shug Avery for economic freedom and becomes self-supportive. She decides to create a new identity by leaving her husband which is considered a father step to wholeness. At the end of the novel, all the characters live a very insular and communal wholeness.    

          Besides Mr.__’s performance of control and dominance, he certainly is independent in one way, namely that he obviously manages to do what he wants within the patriarchal domain and he also independently succeeds in ordering other family members what to do on the other hand, he may wonder how he would manage without his subordinated wife and family members. Obviously, he is dependent on someone who does the so-called, ‘housewife's job ‘and thus is responsible for the home or domestic affairs:

After having declared that Celie is going to have a home to go off with Shug.Mr.__ reacts in a very negative way saying, “You bitch, he says- what will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don’t have a house to look after?”(Walker. 181).

        Here he clearly behaves like he is afraid of losing control when he is blaming his wife for not talking he sees the patriarchal institution, with its clearly defined gender roles, threatened and questioned by her choice to break up. The roles between men and women are here described as strictly divided. Men are first and foremost supposed to be the head of the family, as is the case for Mr.__, and due to that also a dominant part of the married couple. In this position men have the main duty to deal with affairs outside the domestic spheres and family, on the other hand, women’s main sphere is the home with its domestic duties. Women are supposed to deal with interior family tasks like taking care of the children. Furthermore, on Mr._ decidedly uses his dominance to put Celie down, “You’ll be back, he said, Nothing up North for nobody like you. Shug got talent, he says, she can sing. She got spunk, he says. She can talk to anybody. Shug got looks, he says. She can stand up and be noticed, but what have you got? You are ugly, you skinny” (Walker.186). 

Obviously, this quote illustrates well how Mr._ is domineering his wife and wakens her position and individuality. His superiority over her is once again symptomatically expressed by him. In one of her letters to her sister Nettie, Celie describes the difficulties with male sovereignty with these words, “Well, you know wherever there’s a man, there’s trouble”(Walker 186).

Certainly, it illustrates well her experience of patriarchal oppression and subordination. Celie opposes her husband’s critical views about her decision to leave by responding “The jail you plan for me is the one in which you will rot”(Walker 187). For Celie, the experience of the limitations that patriarchal oppression has affected her is so strong that she compares it to jail.

          The friendship that Celie forms with Sofia is deeply significant to the outcome of Celie’s growth. However, after Sofia confronts Celie, they begin to form a strong friendship that persists throughout the novel. It is important to note that Celie never loses her admiration for Sofia’s strength, but it does not manifest itself in the form of destructive jealousy again. Thus Sofia turns into a positive force in Celie’s life even if it is never stated quite so bluntly. Their later creation of ‘Sister’s choice quilt ‘ is a further solidification of their deep bond. It also serves as a further reinforcement of the importance of women, in this case, black women coming together and forming strong bonds. With this strong beat in mind, it becomes clear to the reader that sisterhood is a concept that Walker wants to reinforce, and it helps to show the power that comes with these bonds.

A term that is used frequently throughout this analysis is patriarchy. This term is used to describe a general social structure in which men hold power over women. The novel Color  Purple shows a deeply patriarchal family structure that reflects the situation for women at large within the society portrayed. Patriarchal in this case is both the system and an ideology that the characters, the men in particular subscribe to within the novel. It is shown through the men’s justification of their dehumanizing and abusive treatment of the women around them. The obedient wife who does what the husband tells her is seen as the norm and the men enforce this through violent behaviors when their wives step out of line. Men are also viewed as being above women in the social hierarchy. Thus, the idea of patriarchy as an ideology is important to this analysis as it helps contextualize events and actions. It is also important to look at the way patriarchy as an ideology affects the men that subscribe to it as well. Patriarchal Structures can be seen as a double-edged sword that negatively affects both genders and not just once. Having such an overt presence of patriarchy also makes it appropriate grounds for observing the literary breakdown of said ideology through the action of the female characters.

 There are several ways of abusing a woman through psychological violence. Some of these are described as follows and are, as well seen relevant in the case of Celie' and Mr.__ One way of exerting psychological violence or oppression is verbal, which means that women are degraded and often described as unintelligent or sexually objects. Secondly, isolating the woman from contact with friends, relatives, or important institutions of society, is a form of violence that prevents her from help and support. Thirdly, the woman is usually economically dependent on her husband. Moreover, the woman’ is usually frightened and threatened by the destructive relationship she lives within. Obviously, in Celie’s case, it is possible to apply these criteria of psychological violence for woman abuse from above. Undoubtedly, Celie is the object of degrading and diminishing comments and attitudes by her husband. Symptomatically, Celie is also exposed to sexual abuse. Moreover, she is deprived of her earlier so close contact with her sister Nettie. Finally as a poor girl,’ Celie has no money and is thus dependent on Mr. _ he resolutely tells his wife what she should do and he seems to demand Celie not to stay with him. By commanding his wish to have her at home, the patriarchal order can be maintained. Celie’s journey and search for her self _identity is a long one. Her knowledge of self-identity and self-worth grows with her understanding of her body, past, and the truth’ of her life. She gets support from her fellow women like Nettie, Sofia, and Shug who provide mental, spiritual, material, and financial support while her marriage exposes her to the world. She comes to know the reality and truth of her life with the help of Shug where she becomes aware of her individuality and personality, learns to fight herself, and gets the skill of inner voice. This characteristic of Shug is a typical one within the African- American racial societies. Shug teaches her to believe in herself which is important for her psychological freedom from Albert’s colonization of her mind and body. Therefore, Alice Walker shows the ability of black women to grow out of passive submission to male authority and oppression to the state of being an independent woman.

The above paper is part of a Seminar Presentation written under the guideship of Miss Aditi Ghosh

Paper presenters: Ummay Kulsum, Begum Khaleda, and Maha Firdous