“A View from "Elsewhere? "": Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple Linda Abbandonato PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 5. (Oct., 1991), pp. 1106-1115. Stable URL: bhtp: links jstor-org/sici?sici~0030-8129%28 1991 10%291065%3AS%IC1 106%3AGI2VF%E27G228 %3E2.0.CO%IB24 PMLA is currently published by Modem Language Association, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at htp:sseww jstor org/aboutiterms.html. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you hhave obtained prior permission, you may aot download an entie issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and ‘you may use content in the ISTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use Please contact the publisher eegarding aay futher use ofthis work. Publisher contact information ray he abained at fpiy stor ongtournalsnle hal Each copy of any part ofa JSTOR transenission must contain the same copyright tice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transtnission, ISTOR isan independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive ot scholarly journals. For more information regarding ISTOR, please contact suppom@jstor org. hup:thrww jstor.orgy Moa Tul 24 00:23:36 2006Linda Abbandonato “A View from ‘Elsewhere’ ”: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple LINDA ABBANDONATO, a syaduate student at the Uni versity of Southern California, es currently completing her dissertation, “Seductive Fie- ons," which explores fetal representations of female sex wulity by auchors front Elia. beth Gavel! co Alice Walker ros LICE WALKER’S NOVEL The Color Purple begins with a paternal injunction of silence: You better not never tell nobody but God. Ie kill our mammy. (1) Celie's story is told within the context of this threat: the narrative i about breaking silences, and, appropriately, its formal structure creates the illusion tat it is filed with unmediated “voices.” Trapped ina aridlock of racist, sexist, and heterosexist oppressions, Celie struggles toward linguistic self-definition. She is an “invisible woman,” a char- acter traditionally silenced and effaced in fiction; and by centering omer, Watker replots the heroine's text. I want to show how Celis sory—the story of thet most marginalized of heroines the black les- bian—challenges patriarchal constructions of female subjectivity and sexuality and thus makes representation itself « compelling issue for allwomen, regardless of their ethnicity or sexual orientation." Tbegia by exploring the question of representation and considering The Cofor Purple ia relation ta feminist theoretical discourses on femininity. 1 then argue that by exposing and opposing @ powerful ideological constraint, institutionalized or “compulsory” neterosexuality, the novel appropriates the woman's narrative for herself, in effect rein senibing “herstory.”” To substantiate my claim that The Color Purple is a conscious rowriting of canonical male texts, propose a literary connection that is at once obvious and untikely; the novel’s epistolary fora invites 4s to trace its ancestry all the way to Clarissa. Both novels represent a woman's struggle toward linguistic self definition in a world of dis- rupted signs: Celie, like Clarissa, is imprisoned, alienated, sexualty abused, and deiven imo semiatic collapse (sce Castle's excellent anal- ysis of Clanissa’s collapse), The Color Purple, however, stands in a pacadie or atleast an irteverent relation t0 the monolithic ClarissaLinda Abbaxdonato 07 “The comparison between two fictions 90 cadically separate historically and culturally is appropriate, think, because Clarissa fully endorses the bour- sa¢0is morality that The Colar Purple attacks and because Samuel Richardson himself (at least as constructed in our literary histories) perfectly symbolizes white patriarchy: the founding father of the novel (by convention, if not in fact), he tells the woman's story, authorizing her on his terms, eroticizing her suffering, representing her ‘masochism as virtue and her dying as the emblem. of womanily purity. Clarissa, even if largely un- read now, occupies a dominant place in literature: its myths and values are recirculated in many fictions, especially in the ideology of romances, with which women are most fully engaged as readers and as writers Buried beneath the monumental edifice of works like Clarissa, male-authored volumes that tell the woman's story “as an Exemplar to her sex,” lie a mass of texts by women. The history of publishing is a record of female silencing; as many feminist critics have pointed out, women traditionally experienced educational and eco- nomic disadvantages and other cultural con- straints that prohibited them from writing.” When they overcame oppressive technologies of gender and took up the forbidden pen, the technologies of print could always be deployed against them. ‘This may seem an overtehearsed, even an out- dated argument, but the problems ave still acute for women of color. Feminist attempts to revise the canon and address sexism in discourse are frequently marted by their failure to recognize heterosexism and racism: the counternarratives, of femininity that emerge continue to erase women who are not white or heterosexual. Soe joumner Truth’s lament, “Ain't [a woman?” is insistently echoed in the contemporary writings of lesbians and women of color.* Alice Walker too, in her nonfictional prose, protests the exclusion of black women writers from feminist revisions of literary histories (see esp. Search 231-43, 361-83); and in The Calor Purple, she shows her heroine trapped in the whale ‘range of possible oppressions. Celie’s struggle to create a self through language, to break fee from the network of class, racial, sexual, and ‘gender ideologies to which she is subjected, rep- resents the woman’ story in an innovative way. ‘Can a book like The Calor Purple make any real difference to the hegemony af patriarchal dis- courses? Placed beside Clarissa on my bookstielf, ‘The Colar Purple symbolically suggests in its ihysical size the position and power of the ‘womanist” text within the canon: dominated by the weight, protixity, and authority of masculine accounts of female subjectivity, it may nonetheless challenge and displace those “~masternarratives."" Walker gives several definitions for the term womanist, which is, of course, her coinage: “A black feminist or feminist of color... . Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous ‘or willful behavior. . .. A woman who loves ‘other women, sexually and/or nonsexually” {Search xi). [choose the phrase womanist text in preference to woman's text (ie., a book weitten bby a woman) to stress that the problem of rep- resentation cannot be resolved simply by the. inclusion of more women writersin a male-com- inated canon, While it is important for women to tell their stories, to gain a voice in literary and theoretical discourses and thereby achieve a cer- ‘ain empowerment, the ideological constraints on representation must also be considered. Put bluntly, how can a woman define herself differ- cently, disengage her self from the cultural scripts ‘of sexuality and gender that produce her as em- inine subject? In Alice Doesn i, Teresa de Lauretis distinguishes between “woman as an ideological construct and “women as historical subjects and argues that women experience a double con- sciousness in relation ta their representation. in film: seduced into identification with woman, they are yet aware of their exclusion, af their onrepresentation in that construct. If women are always constituted as objects (of desire, of the gaze) or as other, if “female” is always the neg- ative of the positive value “male,” women find themselves situated in a negative space, neither participating in patriarchal discourses noe able to escape from them. When Lauren Berlant de- seribes Celie as “falling through the cracks of a language she can barely use . . . crossing out “L fam’ and situating herself squarely on the ground. (of negation” (838), she attributes Celie's situation to saintly selfrenunciation; but I propose a dif-1108 ferent explanation. Celie's burden in building a selfon assite of negation is shared by any wortan Who attempts to establish an identity outside pa- triarchal definition. If women are constituted as subjects in a man-made language, then itis only through the cracks in language, and in the places where ideology fails to cohere, that they can begin to reconstruct themselves. Luce Irigaray points out that “if [women] keep on speaking the same language together, {they're} going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same stories all over again" (205). She urges women to “comic out of fmen’s} language.” But it is no easy task for women to authorize themselves as women, to disengage their feminine identity from the idea- logical masternarratives that inscribe it. Feminist discourse itself is inevitably corrupt, deeply im- plicated in the sexism of language and in patriar- chal constructions of gender. As de Lauretis argues, women’s theories of reading, writing, sex- uality, and ideology are based “on male narratives of gender . . . bound by the heterosexual con- tract; narratives which persistently tend 10 re- produce themselves in feminist theories.” The ‘challenge facing feminists is no less than to “re- write cultural narratives, and to define the terms of another perspective—a view fram ‘elsewhere’ (Technologies 25) T suggest that The Color Purple offers that “view from ‘elsewiere.”” It succeeds partly be- cause Celie’s sexual orientation provides an al- ternative to the heterosexual paradigm of the conventional marriage plot: her chaice of lesbi- anism is politically charged, 2 notion I develop later. For the moment I want only to point out that the novel is also leshian in the much broader serie implied by Adrienne Rich's concept of the “Jesbian continuum,” which spans the whole specteum of women’s friendships and. sisterly solidarity. Walker's own term wontanist is clearly influenced by Rich; and in this woranist text, the eroticism of women’s love for wamen is at ‘once centralized and incorporated into a more diffuse model of woman-identifying women. Another way in which The Color Purple offers a view from elsewhere is through its displacement of standard English. Aware that “ute master’s tools can never dismantle the master's house” (Lorde 99), Atice Watker has fully confronted the “A View from ‘Ehrewbere’": The Color Parpte challenge of constructing an alternative language. ‘The significance of her achievement here fas been overlooked, partly because critics often insist on confining the novel to the genre of realism and thus evaluate the Southern black vernacular solely for its authenticity. Indeed, Watker herself disingenuously describes her role as that of @ me~ dium, communicating on behalf of the spicits who possessed hier (Search 355-60). She seems to intend this myth of creative inspiration liter ally, and it is attractive because we certainly ex perience the novel as filled with voices that address us directly. With Celie we undergo a ‘metamorphosis of experience, aligning aurselves fully with her vision of the world since she insists ‘an being taken on her own terms. Her language is indeed so compelling that we actually begin to think as Miss Celie—like Shug, we have her song scratched aut of our heads—because by partici- pating in her linguistic processes, we collaborate in her struggle to construct a self. For various reasons, then, we are distracted from the extreme skill with which Walker exploits her formal aad Jinguistic resources, and thus we underestimate. the degree to which the text is language as per- formance. There is a clue, however, in what is commonly perceived as. flaw in the navel—the sequence of letters from Nettie, which invariably disappoint readers. If signifying is “a form of meta-communication, where the surface expres- sion and the intrinsic position diverge” (Cooke 15), we can regard The Colar Purple as an elab- orate act af signifying, since the apparently im- poverished and inarticulate language of the illcerati turns out to be deceptively resonant anid dazzlingly rich. By incorporating Nette's leters into Celie's text, Walker illuminates the contrast between Colie’s spare suggestiveness and Nettie’s stilted verbosity. Thus the expressive flexibility of the black vernacular, a supposedly inferior speech, is measured against the repressed and rigid linguistic codes to which Nettie has con- formed; the position of standard (white) English ischallenged, and Celie's vitality is peivilesed over Nettie's dreary cocrectness. Nettie has been. imaginatively stunted, her fanguage bleached white and her ethnicity virally erased. Always the Other Woman, one who lacks an identity of ‘her own, she is cast in. the preposterous role of aLinds Abbendonato black missionary who attempts to impose the ideology of her oppressors onto a culturally self sufficient people. Nettie's story perfectly illus- trates the way society constmes women as subjects (or as subject-objects, in de Lauretis's phrase): neither represented within the white mainstream nor able to construct a selfhood out- side it, Neti is internally divided, experiencing ther subjectivity as otherness, Celie, by contrast, refuses to enter the linguistic structures (and strictures} of white patriarchy, commenting that “only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind” (194), and so retains a discourse that is potentially subversive. We might compare Walker's tech- nique with Irigaray’s linguistic playfulness, frag- mented phrases, and poetic cadences, which are similar in purpose, though not in style, to the suppleness, the sharp wit, and the compression of the black vernacular: each mode of expression represents both resistance to the hegemonic dis- course and the deliberate use of linguistic on- conformity to position the self outside the dominant systern. In The Color Purple the dialect is both naturalistic and symbolic, and if we try to confine the work to cealism, we may easily miss the complexity of Walker's womanist aims. Her purposeful transgression of generic hound- aies has also been perceived as @ lack of amtistie control, although it is entirely consistent with cuttent feminist practice; and some of the criti- cisms directed at Walker imply a covert form of racism—an assumption that black novelists should (or can) write only in the realistic vein established by Richard Wright.° By adopting the crazy quilt, the craft of her foremothers, as the structuring principle of her fiction, Alice Walker places herself within a tra- dition of black female creativity. This differently crafted, quilted novel, is also differently sexual: its formal structure allows many playful varia. tions on a sexual theme, Some designs emerge early, but the overall patiern is extremely com- plicated; themes and relationships are introduced and inverted or turned, lke a piece of fabric, in- side out, so that the patter can fe traced anew ‘way. Triadic combinations proliferate: characters are constantly realigned in an intricate network ‘of configurations, apparently in a continual state L199) of metamorphosis until the final utopian vision, the brave new world ofthe ending” ‘The novel maves freely through time and space, juxtaposing the African motifs with the Africas American, thus supplying a dialectical commentary on the (wo cultures. Comic ceversals of expectation are part of the scheme: for ex- ample, the Christian missionaries, striving to im- ose monogamy on the Olinkas, inadvertently reinforce polyzyny because the Olinkas believe (quite rightly, as it turns out) that Samuel is mar- ried to both Corinne and Nettie, The treatment of incest is particularly interesting: although in one part of her design Walker reveals the full horror of father-daughter rape, she weaves in complications, ewisting her narrative thread in ways that challenge the taboo. And if the incest taboo is subverted in this novel, so t00 is that ‘other taboo homosexuality. T suggest that the great tventieth-century cultural narratives of sexuality and socialization, Freud's oedipal the- ‘ony and Lévi-Strauss’ theory of kinship systems and the exchange of women, are played out in the drama of Celie's life. The two theories center ‘on the incest taboo and mesh together precisely. oth also explain, and have been used to reine force, our system of “compulsory heterasexual- ity.” As T have suggested, Celie's lesbianism is politically significant, subverting masculine cul- tural narratives of femininity and desire and re- writing them from a feminist point of view. Let us consider briefly how those narratives explain and reinforce heterosexuality, both i the construction of societies through kinship systems and in the enculturation of individuals within those societies. Lévi-Steauss describes the ex- change of women as “the system of binding men together” (emphasis added), thus defining mar- riage as a social contract between men and view- ing the kinship system asa means of reinforcing male power thsough the cicculation of women. Lévi-Strauss concludes that the incest taboa is “the supreme rule ofthe gf,” designed to ensure cxogamy (481), Compulsory heterosexuality thas ‘becomtes the basis on which society operates and the exchange of women the condition whereby ‘the patriarchy flourishes, Women are prevented from becoming subjects in an economy where they are exchanged as abject, and homosexualuo desice becomes taboo, like incest, because it disr rupts the terms of the sacial conteact. Naturally, this system can only operate smoottiy so long as sexval nonconformity is kept invisible. An im- portant project of feminism, then, is to make the invisible visible: to topple the dominant ideology boy placing the unorthodox and the marginalized at the center of the discursive and cultural stage. ‘Thus feminist theory constructs homosexuality asa powerfully subversive threat (o the social or- der: Eve Sedgwick, for example, takes up René Girard's notion of “triangular desire” —which in turn develops Lévi-Strauss's theory of the ex- change of women as a form of bonding between ‘men—and argues that homophobia functions to suppress recognition of the homosociality on ‘which patriarchal domination depends. Irigaray’s coining of the word hone(mJasexualité plays on a pun to sugaest a similar concent of society as founded on a masculine economy of sameness, so that homosexual relations must be forbidden “Because they openty interpret the law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact 0 shift the horizon of that law” (193). Psychoanalytic accounts of enculturation also rest on the prohibition of incest, as enforced through the castration complex; in the oedipal plot, the phallus becomes the coveted marker of sexual difference and desire, Lacan’s famous dia- ‘gram of the identical doors labeled “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” suggests the different ideological worlds that the subject enters according to gender, although gender, like the signs on the doors, is no more than an arbitrary and fictional construct, subjects who wish to function within the symbolic oder must pass through ane of those doors (147— 59), The successful inseription of subjects as masculine or feminine, as “ladies” or “gentle- men,” depends on acquiescence to the Law of the Father and on suppression of the polymor- phously perverse drives of infancy; in the process, heterosexuality is reinforced as a culeural insti- tution. An important objection 10 the oedipal scheme is that it predicates female sexuality on @ masculine paradigm, thus effacing the very subject of femininity it claims to investigate. Women are effectively excluded trom being de- siring subjects or from having their sexuality theorized except through a distorting masculine “A View from ‘Eluenbere' "The Coloe Purple lens. Consequently the lesbian remains outside the framework of representation, becoming, in effect, unrepresentable (for further discussion see de Lauretis, Alice and Technotogies, Cixous and ‘Clément 62-132), Feminist critiques of the oedi- pal theory have challenged its masculine econ- ‘omy of desire and exposed its inadequacy as an account of female sexuality. Adrienne Riel, for example, wonders why the female child should redirect her libidinal activity from the original object of desire, the mother, to the father and concludes that heterosexuality is political ine stitution into which women are conscripted ideologically, by force and through the censorship of alternative models of sexuality.* But what happens when the taboo is broken and women refuse to be co-opted into a system of compulsory heterosexuality, refuse in effect to become objects of exchange between men? Or, in Irigaray’s words, “[W/ Var if these ‘commodi- Hes" refused (0 go to ‘market’?” (196). ‘This is, of course, the question posed by The Color Purple, which reduces the system of com- pulsory heterosexuality to its basic level, making it abstract. The representations of male tyranny rein one sense reductive or crade and in another sense emblematic, their implications farceaching ‘The specific systems af oppression that operate, in Celi’ life symbolize the more or les subtle ‘operations of patriarchal power in the lives of women everywhere. Compulsory heterosexuality enforces Celie's subjugation and erases her subjectivity. Cee ‘graphically represents this situation when she be- gins her story by placing “am” sous rare ‘Trapped from the start into complicity in the. shameful secret af incest, Cale makes a timid plea to Ged: “Maybe you can give mea sign let- ting me know shat is happening to me” (11) But how can Celie be given a sign when she is a sign, a mete object of exchange between men? ‘The God she concepuializes is a cruel father sos identity merges ominously with P's when asked whose baby she is carrying, Celie tells the lie that isthe truth: “I say Ged’s. don't know no other man or what els 10 say” (12). ‘When Celie marries Mr. ——, this man with no name becomes part of the system of male oppression, joining God the Patriarch and Pa inLinde Abbandonats an unholy trinity of power that displaces her identity. The marriage negotiations take place entirely between the stepfatier and the husband: Celie is handed over like a beast of burden, iden- tified with the cow that accompanies her. Phys- ically and psychologically abused by stepfather and fuushand alike, Celie is denied a status as subject. Her sexuality and reproductive organs are controlled by men, her children are taken from her, and her submission is enforced through violence, In her terrified acquiescence t0 such blatant male brutality, Celie symbolically mierors Eveqywoman, Fear of rape, for example, is 50 Drabitual that it as become naturalized and con- ditions women automatically: when it eircum- scribes their movements, we call it Common Sense, and our judicial system holds women who lack it accountable for male violence. Celie bleakly represents the plight of her more privileged sisters, who are victimized by social (yrannies like antiabortion legislation, the kid- napping of children, and state intervention in the family and in individuals’ sexual orientation. Celie's vernacular is used to poignant effect in the double negative of “I don't have nothing." Her connection with her sex is severed; doubly silenced, by father and by husband, Celie sends dead letters to an absentee God, and the only “sign” she eventually gets—the discovery that her real father was lynched—shatters an already eroded identity and precipitates her semiotic cl- lapse. Her attempt to make. sense of her new family history breaks down into the negative tau- tology of “Pa not Pa" (as Berlant has also argued), ‘This is a puzzling moment in the text. Why does Walker set up incest at the beginning and then reinscribe family relations halfway theaugh? ‘And what is the effect on the reader of discovering that “Pa not Pa"? At one level, I would angue, the revelation makes no difference at all: Cebie was still raped, and by a man who was in every respect socially, if not biologically, her father. But suagestions of incest recur toa insistently forthe question to be dismissed so easily. What, for ex- ample, do we make of the marriage of “Sister Nettie” and “Brother Samuel” or of his claim that “we behave as brother and sister 10 each other”? Shug and Celie, sisters in spirit, become lovers in the flesh. Albert complains that Shug mn loves him like a brother- “What so bad about that?” Shug has an affair with a boy who subsequently becomes “like a son. Maybe a grandson.” Time and again, the incest taboo is symbolically dissolved as the dif ferent eategories of social relations, family and sexual, are intertwined, Perhaps this focus on incest is an honest and courageous attempt to situate sexuality where it belongs: in the heart of the family. Ifthe family isthe site of sexual repression and taboo, itis also the place where sexuality is engendered, in the fullest sense.® Yet, the Pa-Celie sexual relation, though initially presented as an actual violation of a primary taboo, turns out to be not literal incest but a social and symbolic equivalent. The novel seems to delve into the oedipal drama to unravel and then teweave the complexities, and the discovery that “Pa not Pa” confronts Celie with another contradiction. The Pa who is not Pais yet—irrevocably—Pa, Her history has been shattered, and she cannot connect with the re- vised version sent by sister Netti, It is hee love for Shug that enables Celie to ‘bury her sad double nacrative of paternal origins and construct a new identity within a feminine domain. In an earlier scene in the novel, Celie tells her story to Shug, breaking the father's in- junction of silence and discovering a sister lover, compassion and passion combined. Significantly, that first eratic encounter involves bath women in a recipracal mother-infant exchange: “Then 1 feels something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my litle lost babies mouth. Way after while I act like a litle lost baby too” (109), The anaclitic satisfaction repeesented here suggests a symbolic return to the preaedipal stars, an idealized state of innocent eroticism; itis, i Foucault's words, about “bodies and pleasure." Subsequently, when disconnected from her ‘nom du-nére by the discovery that her paternity is indeed a legal fietion, Celie is rescued from an identity crisis by Shug, who tells her, “Us each other's people now"; the two women have motheted each other and now elect to be woman- identified wornen. Implicit here i an escape from patriarchal law. In breaking the taboo against ho- moscxuality, Celie symbolically exits the mas ternarrative of female sexuality and abandons them2 "A View fram ‘Elzewhere! " The Color Purple position ascribed to her within the symbolic or- der. Instead, shechooses a mode of sexuality that Freud describes as “infantile”; but perhaps the ‘value af that term should be reassessed. Shug, for example, is enviably infantile: as polymorphously perverse as a child, she pursues her pleasures without guilt or repression. Her sexual pluralisin reminds us that sexuality is the site not only of regulation but of subversion; as Carole Vance ar- gues, sexuality remains, in the end, “flexible, an- archic, ambiguous, layered with multiple meanings, offering doors that open to unexpected experience. The connection of both sexual be- havior and fantasy to infancy, the irrational, the unconscious, is a source of both surprise and pleasure” (22). It is this highly disruptive poten- tial—sexuality’s ability to resist the ideological laws that operate through its very terrain, to sur- viveand flourish in “aberrant” forms despite the cultural imposition of a norm—that Shug’s erotic behavior suggests; she embodies and embraces the notion of jouissance as a liberating power. Celie’ initiation into eroticism is linked with her growing sense of self and her capacity to see wonder in the world. Taught by Shug, whose re- ligious practice is to “admire,” Celie metamor- phoses into a Miranda, taking childlike delight in the brave new world to which her latent sensory responses have been awakened. If homosexuality Involves narcissism, as Freud believes, we see its positive and empowering effect on Celie. In loving Shug, Celie becomes a desicing subject, and in being loved by Shug, ste is made visible to herself asan object of desire. In contrast to the repression that Celie has experienced in accepting her social position asa “mature” woman ina phallocenteic culture, her “infantile regression" is an act of radical rebellion. By choosing “deviancy,” “im- maturity,” and the “sickness” that lesbianism signifies in a system of compulsory heterosexu- ality, Celie enacts 2 eritique not af the oedipal theory itself but of the sexist socialization that it insightfully yet uncritically represents, In a hostile review of the novel, Trudier Harris describes Celie as “a bale of cotton with a vagina” and dismisses Celie and Shug’s love affair as a “schoolgin fairytale,” thereby missing the radical political implications of the shift from vagina to clitoris that the lesbian relationship involves. In Freud’s theory the clitoral orgasm is notoriously ‘immature; and within the culture, [ would sug- gest, the notion of the mature vaginal orgasm. still predominates, since it is a necessary myth, ‘within our compulsorily heterosexual society. For a long time Celie’s clitoris remained “undiscov- ered”; and while real women in heterosexual re lationships undoubtedly have lovers more skillful and sensitive thaa Mc. — (even if his being signified in. this way does mischievously imply that he is the archetypal male), the ideological construct woman still seems to be experiencing ‘orgasm without reference to her clitoris. Think of representations of sexuality in popular films, for example. [n the typical love scene, the camera. shows a couple commencing missionary-position sex and, eight seconds later, moves in to a clase up of the woman’s face 10 reveal that, miracu- ously, she is in the throes of orgasm, her mouth wide open, perhaps to suggest that place where the camera is forbidden to go. At this climactic point, the scene dissolves fam the screen in an. act of self-censorship, and we are left with the dominant image of the desirable woman in our culture: passive, available, and obligingly able to reach instant vaginal orgasm. If film directors know about the clitoris, ar about active female desire, film censors are surely involved in the conspiracy to keep such knowledge inadmissible. ‘What this practice sugges is that the ideology of popular culture subjects women to a mi form of psychological clitoridectomy, and pechaps for the same reason that real clitoridectomies are performed: as Kathleen Rarry argues, they ensure that women will not form erotic attachments to one another (193). I would suggest that the eratic zane of the clitoris has ta be censored in social constructions of sexuality, since its mapping on. the female body would allaw women ta “just say no” to the coveted male organ. So, far Celie, the discovery of the dlitoris (and of the possibility of sexual fulfillment with a woman) is accompanied by a whole range of other discoveries that relegate man to the margins of a world he has always dominated. The most significant of these is a reconceptualization of God the Patriarch. Describing her feminist re- definition of God, Shug makes an explicit con- nection between spiritual and sexual jouissance.Linda Abbandonate My fest step from the old white man was tees. . ‘Then birds, Then other people. But one day... «it come to me: that feeling of being pan of everything, notseparateatall, . . Infact, when it happen, vou can’t mis it It sort oflike you knows what, she say, fining and rubbing high up on my thigh In answer to Celie’s shocked protest, Shug maintains, “God Tove all them feelings. That's some of the hest stuff God did.” And shortly af- terward she echoes the title of the novel by ob- serving, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the calor purple in @ field somewhere and doo’t notice it” (178), This is a moment of epiphany for Celie, and we might notice her appropriately detumescent metaphor when, in severing the connection between “man” and “God,” she ob- serves that “[plext to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr. —'sevil sort of shrink.” Phal- locentrism has collapsed: the transformation of God from the “old white man" to a new form of otherness, the ungendered creator of the color purple, is one of the major metamorphoses of the novel Finally, what is meant by that richly allusive symbol, the color purple? Clearly, in par, it rep- resents the wonder of the natural world, to waich Celie’s eyes have been newly awakened: “I been so busy thinking about him T never truly notice nothing God make, Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from)” (179). ‘The color purple is encoded within the novel as a sign of indomitable female spitit. For ex ample, Celie makes red-and-pucple pants for So a (who has survived a brutal beating by the police that leaves her “the color of eggplant”): "E dream Sofia wearing these pants, one day site was jumping over the moon” (194). Consider also Walker's definitions of womanist, which are rep- resented by the color purple. One of those defi- nitions, quoted in part earlier, is embodied by Shug: “A woman who loves ather women, sex- ually andor nonsexually. ..., Sometimes loves individual men, sexually or nonsexnally” (Search xi). Another definition relers to female joie de vivre, or exuberance; and in her fourth and final definition, Walker states suggestively, “Womanist is to feminist as purple ta lavender.” 13. But most daringly significant is the use of the color purple to encade the specifically feminine Jouissance experienced by Celie. Associated with Easter and resurrection, and thus with spiritual regeneration, purple may also evoke the female ‘genitalia; indeed, Walker makes the color con- nection explicit in “One Child of One's Own” by provocatively describing a black wornan’s var gina as “the color of raspberries and blackher- ties—or scuppernongs and muscadines" (Search 374), In that essay Walker complains that white ‘women feminists “cannot imagine that black ‘women have vaginas. Orif they can, where imag ination leads them is too far to go" (373) ‘What want to suggest is that in The Coloe Purple, in her representation of the unrepresent- able, Walker dares us to arrive atthe place where “imagination . . . is taa fae to go.” Notes a The Heroines Tes, Nancy Miler defines the “euphoric vent" as ull 99 a"weaectary of ascent” aod ending ont the heroine's integration ino soiey. Miler cotine her study todighrenth-cencury novels, ut her model provides usefut coattat to The Color Pupis,demonscatng Row Walker's novel subverts te conventional plo by rewriting te story of seduction within a lesbian framework In erpbssizing the relevance af Cle try forall worsen, {do nat mean co deny the specicty of er appression as Dek lesbian, Indet, any blanket reference to women a5 2 Clegary i in any cae controversial ey paper des suggest Tye hate emis discourse this use ends ca reinforce he marsinlizaton of "minority" groups, but {should also nave that some feminists would Ike wo stand the ere al together. Kose claire nat “to beleve hata ‘isa woman ts almast as absurd and cscarantist as 19 believe that ei a maa!" (La femme; ce n'est java ga" Tet quel 38. 3 [1974 19-24, gtd in Mol 163), Momequ Wiig provocatively ‘secles, “Lesbians ate ot women” (10), Fhe tem cxmpalcory feterasenualty otginated with Gayle Rubin: her iofluerial esoy "The Treffen Women” syntheses readings of Freud, ican, Maryan iw Stust ta account for our excitation smo the sexcgener syste, See also Adrienne Rich. The term ercory crnes for Alice ‘Walker’ feminis preset ep, Search) Blass emivst fete that deal with the problem of sc Jencing include Viginia Waol"s Roam of One's Onn, Tile Otens Sones, Patricia Meyer Spacs's Female Lmzmaton, Elsie Shovalee's Literature of Ther Own, ane Sandra M. Gilbert aed Susan Gubr's Madman a the AinM “see, Gloria F Hull, Patrica Bell Sort, and Barbara Smiths anthalogy Same of Us dre Broveand Cheme Marte sand Glona Anealdua’s This Bldg Called My Back. Severs, sani oolecied in Shwalers New Feminis Criticism als Tecuson wetng ty back wormen an lesbians Barbara S's “Towarce 2 Black Feminist Crticiem,” Deborth E. Me Dowelts"New Diretions for Blak Feist Cntiis, "an annie Zimamerman’s “Wha: Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbise Ceminist Literary Cie” Pring presses geared iokard“minosty" roups have been set up cecemtly far example, the Kitenen Tasle: Women of Clos Pres. Buta The Sexaat Mownain and Black Waren Wrcers Adventures tn Sex, Literature, and Real Lifoma tle 0 peavoeaive tha Cinuies speculation about men's place ig black fersiniem Calvin Hernton desenbes the male speaker's misogyny at 2 meeting set up to establish a new ‘Atocan Amenean publishing compeny: “|The speaker] went fino a Grade aginet black women writers. laa that they had "ten over the publishing world fa conspiracy amainatbluc male wes” (es), Note also Trudie Hare's allegation that Alice Welker hecame 2 media favorite by “wattng i the wings ofthe feminist moveroent and the power fethad generated Long encugh for ber curtain cll to come! (55). Guy of sucees, Toni Morrsoo and Alice Walker lear the brant of such animosity; compare the personal and entice heey ditetes atthe flamboyant Zara Neale ut slon, who eventually “disappeared” unde ts preiute. "Masteraratives” i of course, Fredric Fameson's ero, though he uses ¢ more generally ta denote the hegemonic discourse ofthe ealingelss and intends no specie referee to gendee [refer tothe epaventignal assessment of Weight a8 a ze alii rie, though it seems me that his 2, misplaced, that his works are, ache, sureaitie. Mall Fite discusses the enc! blindnes thet as restitea from arelyingconven- ‘ions of ess eelin to The Color Parte “The ferns tradition of trassgnessing generic houndanes can be race at least ta Weoll's Room af One's Ow, which insertes ie (emis social nd eultured enti wot on ‘ncisvels ani nareaoe framework, The strategy © mast otably coeuined in the wark of the Fen (emis, pae- ticular Luce Ingray, Héléne Cixous,ané Catherine Clement, the issue here isa eenepotiation of the relation ecw. the petsona andthe impersonal, or the alleged objectivity of a> dems discourse Distupting generic boundaries scomnecied with disuptiog gender boundaries: feminist writers use sub- sersve narenve saree fo instead reshape de ogical fetions of Ferien "For discussions af quiling in Walkes’s work, see Barbaca (Obsiuac; Lindsey Tucker, Houston A. Baler, Ir and Char lowe Pietce Baker See Showalter’s "Piecing and Waiting” for a cotique ofthe evval af fenaineratisasteopes i feriast Feions and theory. "Far an opposing View, we Cara Kaplen, who objects to Rich's concept of “inte” esbznism a4 poled so lution, aguing tha it has produced among feminists «ess source af sexual shame and gilt “Aby peasuce thal accrues ‘fo women who tke part in eteresenual asi therfore ne “A View from ‘Eleerbere! ‘The Color Purple saul cued; a the exreme end of this pasion, wemen ‘sha a with men” are considered collaborators. 2” (52 [Note also Paula Webster's argument that by privileging ls bianism, feminist discourse hee constricted an alternative sexual hierarchy that creses new probibiions and reduces ‘women's "latonshis with erotic 1 issues af prefecence and putiy. "G87. * Mice Foucault argues thatthe fails he mest sive site of sexuality” and thet cent ie"condarty being slieted and refuse a thing that 1s continuous deesanded in fordet forthe fey to be & hated of consant sexual incte- ‘ment (109. 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