4, 1982

181

to devote their new-found leisure time

to child care-whlch was itself increasingly portrayedas a science. Strasser
quotes extensively from
turn-of-thecenturychild-rearingmanuals,including thepopular Dr. LutherEmmett
Holts
Care
of
which warned mothers not to
trust their own instincts when I t came to
nurturing. (Bablesunder
SIX months
old should never be played with . . and
the less of ~t at any time the better.)
photograph of what appears to be a
primitive set of boxing gloves is accompanied by the captlon, Aluminum mittens, recommended by early twentiethcentury child-rearing experts to discourage thumb-sucking and masturbation.
Advertlsers have rivaled the experts ~n
their ability to Induce guilt In American
women.Strasser
up the paradox
of consumerism by noting that,while
industrlallzatlon has clearly improved
the quality of life at home, elmmating
back-breaklnglabor, ralslng standards
of healthand
nutntlon,and
freelng
peoplefrom virtual slavery to natural
cycles, the market has recently eroded
those standards by lntroduclng
unhealthfulfoodsand
by mocklng the
values of love and communlty.
Strassers analysis compelling, but
at times her arguments seem a bit too
neat. For example, as Hagoodsstudy
suggests, child care and housework are
very d~fferentthings. Feeding a baby
not the same asscrubbing a floor, and a
person mlght quite reasonably enJoy the
formerandloathethelatter
wlsh
Strasser had thought
the
d~stlnction
through;she
might then have avolded conflatlng
technological
progress,
whose blessings, however mlxed, are
undenlably
real,
with the
constantly
changing
and
frequently
bogus
prescr~ptionsof child-care experts (thinkof
thepoor early-twentleth-centurybaby
raised by the book and introduced to
the mysteries of toilet trainingatthe
tenderage of two months).We may
want to trustexperts
to wash our
clothes andprepareour
meals-and
Strassers sympathetic discussion of
CharlottePerklns Gllman leads me to
suspect that thls
what she has in
mlnd-while resisting theirlncursmns
upon our kids.
Strasser implies that we can have our
cake mix and eat i t too. Shewould have
us enjoy technologlcal advances, In
housework while simultaneously
red~scoverlngthe lost values of love and
communlty that have fallen prey to the

marketmentality.
when didthls
harmonlous society exist? Certainly,
women have alwaysdependedonone
anotherforcompanionshipand
help,
but it is not possible to correlate famlly
closeness with the use of candles, or the
strengthof
womens bonds with the
prlrnltiveness of their cookmg utenslls.
To take Strassers point to its logical
conclusion, we would have to believe
thatfor Amerlcanwomenthe
seventeenth century was a period of unremitting toil intermingled wlth an u n paralleled
spirit
of neighborly
generosity.
In
reality, however, New
England villages had thelr own brands
of social tens~on, manifested in contmuous gossip and quarrels, and punctuated by thesporadicexecutionof
witches and excommunication of heretics. Rug-braidingpartiesofferedonly
partialcompensatlonfora
general atmosphere of Yankee cranklness.
Strassers Implied preference for the
collectivization of housework
well
and good; but at thls point, communal
arrangements lack asponsor.The
re~

cent failure of the Equal Rights Amendmentreminds us thattheideology

of
womanssphere
very much
allve. For all the medla fanfare about
liberated husbands who pick up their
own socks and concoct gourmet meals
on the weekend, few households seem
to be moving toward sharing the everydaydrudgery
of housework between
marriage partners Even fewer seem Interested in communal
cooklng
and
cleaning arrangements
Still,
is a lively and provocative book, and 11 ought to attract a
wlde audience
richly illustrated
wlth materials from the State H~storical
Society of Wisconsms impressive iconographycollections, and
is full of
fasclnatlnglore,both
about the ways
household lmplements have shaped our
dally lives, and the ways ouy dally lives
are connected to broader
trends
In
society and the economy
For brmglng housework into the light
of historical scholarshlp,Strasserdeserves tohavehernamebecomea
household word
CJ

~~~

Celie,Youa
SMITH
THE
COLOR
PURPLE.

Dear God,
am f o u r e e n years old I
have
always been a good girl. Maybe you
can glvc me a
lettmg
know

what 17 happenltlg me.

Cehe, who retreats Into an emotional
s admirers of
numbness that will last foryears, has
of
and twobables by her father; he gives
already
know,
to them away. They end up in Afrlca with
.read an Alice Walker novel 1s Cehes sister Nettle, w h o works for the
to enter the country of surprise. I t is to missionary family thatadopted
be admltted to the world of rural black (The novel
a serles of letters, first
women, a world long neglected by most from Celie to God, and then back and
whites, perhaps out of Ignorance, perforth between Celle and Nettie.)
haps out of willed indifference. The loss
Celle 1s married off to Mr.
,a
ours, for the lives of these women are downtrodden farmer who beats her. At
so extraordinary I n their tragedy, thelr night,sheparts
her legs for him and
culture, their humor and thelr courage forces all thought and feellng from her
that we are immediately gripped by body:
make myself wood. 1 say Lo
them
myself,Celie, you atree.Thats how
Witness the openlng passage of
come know trees fear man.
a tale of violence, Incest
AlongcomesShugAvery,a
blues
and
redemption
that
starts
out
In singer of legendary beauty. Mr.
Georgla in the 1900s and goes on for has been In love wlth her for years, and
about thirty years. Beginning when her when she
slck, he brings her home
mother is l a ~ dup in childblrth, skmny,
to Celie to nurse.
Cehe
and
Shug
ugly14-year-old Celle
repeatedly become
frlends
and then lovers.
raped by the man she believes to be her Through
Shug,
Celle discovers that
fat her:
Mr.
has been intercepting Nettles letters for several years. And from
a wrrter
the letters, which Shug helps her obtain,
is The Hard Ram (Drat). she learns that the man who raped
her

245 pp. $1 1.95.

4, 1982

TestYour

Mitical 10
-

Do You Know Whos

tunning the Government

Q:

wasnt herreal father. Her real father

had been lynched. Wlth the stigma of
incest removed, Celle finally stands up
to Mr.
You lowdown
dog
Its tlme to
leave you andenter
Into Creation
And your dead body JUSI the welcome
mat need.

wanted to cheer.
Cehe goes with Shug to Memphls.
andthereshelearns
to live and love.
When her father dies, she lnherlts his
farm and returns to Georgia, wHere she
sleeps In a roompaintedpurple-for
Walker, the color of radiance and maJesty (and also the emblematlc color of
lesblanism).She
reunited wlth her
children and Nettie, and, surprisingly,
she befriends Mr. ___, who has been
broken
and
humbled
by Shug
and
Cehes Jolnt departure. The end of the
book finds Celle and her erstwhile
tormentor slttlng companionably on the
frontporchsmokmg
their plpes, two
old fools left over from love, keeping
each other company under the stars
Walker can be a pungent writer. When
Celies father-in-law, Old Mr. -,
crltlclzes Shug, Celie, who has been sent
to get the man a glass of water, overhears
him:

I drop Ilttle
I n Old
Mr
.
water
I t w d the
round wlth
my finger
tlme he come
put a Itttle Shug Avery pee In
glass
See how he llke that

And sometimes shecan break our

hearts. When the agmg Shug wants
to
have one last fllng wlth a young man,
Cehe is so devastated she cannot speak.
She can only talk to Shug in wntlng:

100 Officials

nlneteen A bab]; H o w long can

last? [Shug says 1
Hes a man. I wrlte on the paper
Yeah, she
say
but some men$
can be lots of f u n
Spare me, I wrlte
11

No writer has made the intmate hurt

of raclsm more palpable than Walker
I n one of the novel?mostrendlng
scenes, Celles step-daughter-in-law,
Sofla, sentenced to work as a mald in
the white mayors house for sassing
the mayors wlfe In a fit of magnanlml t y , the mayors wlfe offersto
drive
Sofia home to see her chlldren, &horn
she hasnt lald eyes on In five years. The
reunion
lasts
only fifteen
mlnutesthen the mayors wife insists that Sofia
drive her home.
Color
1s about the struggle between redemptionand revenge.

Andthe chief agency of redemptlon,

Walker
saylng, the strength of the
relationships between women: thelr
friendshlps, their love, their shared oppression Even the whlte mayors family
is redeemed when his daughter cares for
Sofias sick daughter.
There is anote of tendentlousness
here, though. The men in thls book
change
when their women join
together and rebel-and
then, the
change 1s so complete as to beunrealistic. I t was hard for me to believe
that a person as vlolent, broodlng
and
Just plain
nasty
as
Mr.
could
ever become that sweet,
quiet
man
smoking and chatting on the porch.
Walkers didactlclsm 1s especlally evldent i n Netties lettersfromAfrica.
whlch make up a large portlon of the
bookNettle
relate5 thestory
of the
Ollnkatnbe, particularly of one glrl,
Tashl, as a klnd of femlnlst fable.
The Ollnha do 1101 bellcve glrls should
be educatedWhen I asked amother
what she thought of th~s,she yald
glrl nothlng
herself,only to her
husband can she become somethmg
What can she become? asked
Why, she sald, the mother of 111s
chlldren
But am notthe mother of anybodys chlldren.
Tald, and I am
somethmg

Later,Nettle tells Tashls parentsthat

the world 1s changing
. I t is no
longer a world Just for boys and men,
and we wince at the ponderousness, the
obvlousness of the message. At tunes
the message is confusing, too. Thewhite
rubber
planters
who
disrupt
Ollnka
soclety alsodestroytheold
(andpresumablybad) tribalpatriarchy.Does
this mean the white mans comlng is a
good thing? I doubt It, but was puzzled.
Walkerspchtlcs are notthe problem-of
sexism and racism are
terrible, of
women should band
together to help each other. But the
polltlcs
have
to be incarnated in
complex,
contradictory
characterscharacters to whom the novelist grants
the freedom to act, as it were, on their
own.
wish Walker had let herself be carried along more by her language, with
all its vlvld ftgures of speech, Blbllcal
cadences, distinctive grammar and trueto-life start5 and stops. The plthy, direct
black folk ldlom of
Color
is
In the end Its greatest strength, remlndlng us that I f Walker is sometimes an
Ideologue, she 1s also. a poet.

4. 1982

183

Despite Its occasional preachmess.

Color
marks a major advance for.Walker's art. At its best, and
at least half the book 1s superb, it places
her in the company of Faulkner, from
whom ,she appears to have learned a
great deal: the use of a shiftlng flrstperson narrator,for Instance, and the

presentation of a complex story from a

naive point of vlew. like that of 14-yearhas not turned her
oldCelle.Walker
back on the Southern fictional tradltlon. She has absorbed It and made it
her own. By infusing the black experience into the Southern novel, she
c1
enriches both i t and us.

Japanese Master
RIPHARD HOWARD
SECRET HISTORY OF THE LORD
OF MUSASHI
ARROWROOT:
Two Novellas.

vv

200 pp. $12.95.

-ith thisslxth

(and seventh) work publlshed I n

English, we begin to
discernthe ;coastline of
that other Japanese archlpelago, the
works of Junlchlro Tanlzaki. The tale
and the meditation whlch Anthony
Chambers has so handsomely translated
were wrltten fifty years ago,after the
publlcatlon of the author's first "Collec'ted Works"-the twelve volumes of
novels, storm, plays and essaysofhis
first twentyyears of wnting. Eyen so,
they predate the books bywhlchhe
known In the West-Some
They stand
mild and maieutlc, a klnd of prolegomenon to any future storytelling.
almost comlc In Its excruclatmg violence-as
flags
staklng
claim to a stlll unexplored continent, o r ,
glventhe nature ofthe case, rncontinent. Coprophilia,a curiously lyrical
theme sounded In all of Tanizakl's
works, constltutes one of our clues. I t is
hinted at in the famous last sentence of
his 1949 famlly chronlcle, the Turgenevlike
("Yuklko's diarrhoea persisted, and was a problem on
the train to Tokyo"). In
It
glven astonlshlng scopeLadles born intoa dalmyo famdywere
not onlyignorant
of mqney. they
never allowed anyone to see their excretory matter, nor did they ever see it
themselves.
There a story of the

beautlfulHelancourt
lady whotantalrzed a suitor with a copy her feces
fashioned out of cloves. Dlscretlon o f
thls order
shared by
hgh-born
ladles I n contrast,themodern
flush
tollet, while satlsfymg the
requlrements of hyg~ene,lays everythlng bare
before your very eyes, and so, 11 must
be sald, 1s anill-mannered.
vulgar
devlce, thedes~gner of which must
have forgoftenthatthere
1s such a
thmgasdecorum
even when one
alone

This
one of the mocklngasides
whlch accumulate, llke
the
terrible
serles of severed heads and lopped
Imaginary
noses, in this archive of
documents in which horror story nests
within horror story like a set of glistening Japanese boxes. But the vlolence,
like Tanizaki's obsesslve pursuit of an
Ideal Mistress in her fecal prme, is offered as a kind of bribe to attend to the
writer's real concern. It
the sensatlonal sop to get past the Cerberus of
amusement and into the
reglon
of
Tanizakl's authentlc preoccupatlon:
how can a story be told?
there n o
story, if there only the prestlge of an
overpowering past and a prostrate present, how do you make one up?
Apparently you forge It. In his essay
on Tanizakl, Donald Keene tells us that
the preface to
1s "wntformal
Chlnese," and
ten in stiff,
Chambers reports that two yearsbefore wrltlng
TanlzakI
translated Stendhal's
of Castro,
basedon authentlc Itallan documents,
Into Japanese. These transformations
and remodelings of sources and genres
are cruclal to Tanlzaki's enterprise here:
the permutatlon of
what
passes
for
hlstory-prudlsh Confucian narratives
and tradlt~onalBuddhist accounts-into asubverted world of demonlc women

1982

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FOR THE
OF

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SOCIETY

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$14 50

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