Coping Strategies of Women Characters in Alice Walker's the Color Purple
MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION
Department of English Language and Literature
Coping Strategies of Women Characters in Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Master's Thesis
Brno 2020
Supervisor: Author:
Mgr. Pavla Buchtová Bc. Jana Mühlfeitová
Declaration
I hereby declare that this thesis is my own, that I worked on it independently and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography.
Prohlášení
Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou diplomovou práci vypracoval samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů.
Bc. Jana Mühlfeitová
Brno………………………. ………………………………..
2
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Pavla Buchtová for her patience, support and kind guidance during my work on the thesis. I would also like to thank my family for their encouragement and faith.
3 Anotace:
Cílem této diplomové práce je sledovat čtyři hlavní ženské postavy z románu Alice
Walker The Color Purple (v českém překladu Barva Nachu). Práce se zaměřuje na popis a analýzu způsobů, kterými se tyto ženy vyrovnávají s obtížemi ve svém životě.
Tyto způsoby se nazývají strategie zvládání. Práce si klade za cíl ukázat, že individuální volba strategií, které používají, vychází z jejich odlišných osobností, životních zkušeností a je v souladu s konceptem jejich sebepojetí. Práce také ukazuje, že tyto strategie se mohou vyvíjet a měnit. Sleduje také motivy a události, které takovou změnu umožňují. Práce se snaží ukázat, že všechny tyto změny jsou přirozené a jejich kořeny lze dohledat.
Klíčová slova:
Afro-americké ženy, strategie zvládání zátěžových situací, životní zkušenosti, vývoj
4 Annotation:
The aim of this diploma thesis is to observe the four main female characters from Alice
Walker's novel The Color Purple. The focus of the thesis is to describe and analyse the ways these women use to cope with difficulties in their life. These ways are called coping strategies. The thesis aims to show that the individual choice of coping strategies they use is based on their different personalities, life experiences and are in accordance with the concept of their self-value. The thesis also show that these strategies may develop and change. It also traces the motives and events that enable such change. The thesis aims to show that these changes are natural and their roots are traceable.
Key words
Afro-American women, coping strategies, life experiences, development,
5 Contents:
Introduction: ...... 8
1 The Color Purple and Coping ...... 11
1.1 Alice Walker, Focus on Relationships ...... 11
1.2 The Novel and its Reception ...... 14
1.3. The Time and the Themes ...... 17
1.4. Coping Strategies ...... 22
2 The Black Women Characters ...... 25
2.1. The Submissive ...... 26
2.1.1 Celie, from Existing to Living ...... 27
2.1.2 Celie's Troubled Childhood ...... 27
2.1.3 Someone to Talk to ...... 29
2.1.4 The Sisterhood ...... 31
2.1.5 Leaving the Christian God ...... 35
2.1.6 Nettie, the Lucky One ...... 38
2.1.7 Nettie's Childhood ...... 39
2.1.8 Nettie's Double Flight ...... 40
2.1.9 Nettie on a Mission-a Decent Young Lady is Born ...... 42
2.2 The Fighters ...... 44
2.2.1 Shug, the Heartbreaker ...... 45
6 2.2.2 From Lilly to Shug ...... 45
2.2.3 Troubles with Albert ...... 48
2.2.4 Encounter with Celie ...... 50
2.2.5. Shug and her Faith ...... 52
2.2.6 Sofia the Fighter ...... 56
2.2.7 Sofia’s Family ...... 57
2.2.8 Sofia and Harpo ...... 58
2.2.9 Sofia and the White Man’s World ...... 61
3 Conclusion: ...... 67
Works Cited: ...... 72
7
Introduction:
The aim of this thesis Coping Strategies of Women Characters in Alice
Walker's The Color Purple is to observe four individual women characters in the novel and focus on the different ways they use in dealing with difficulties. The thesis introduces the basics of the theory of coping; however, it does not intend to provide a specific psychological analysis of these characters. The main focus of the analysis is to show the factual ways of coping of these individual women, as they are pictured in the novel, and trace the possible root-causes of their unique strategies. As the characters sometimes evolve and change, the thesis also seeks to discover the triggers leading to such development and change.
My first encounter with The Color Purple was through the famous film directed by Steven Spielberg. I remember that it happened one Sunday afternoon, many years ago. I switched on the TV and the film was on. When I started watching, it was already halfway through; however, I liked it so much that when I found out that it was based on a novel, I went to a bookshop and bought it. I loved it. It was sincere, wise and thought-provoking. It spoke about the essential life issues in a clear, simple way. It did not pretend anything. I especially liked the way
Walker pictured her women characters. I found them authentic and relatable.
Thus, when I was about to choose a topic for my Diploma Thesis, The Color Purple was at the top of my list.
The novel has been loved by many; however, it has also been a subject to strong criticism. While I was going through those numerous research papers written about the novel, I realized that the main problem might be, that some
8 scholars stubbornly need to put the novel into a category. Some try to see it as a historical novel and then are confused by historical inaccuracies and factual mistakes. Other scholars want to see Black-Afro American novel and then are surprised that the novel’s main concerns are not racial issues but rather problems within the Afro-American community. In the theses, I would like to draw attention to what I see as the main assets of the book. I want to focus on individual women characters, their different personalities and different fates, on encounters and relationships that play such an important role in their personal development. I realized that the major differences among the individual characters are in the way they approach life difficulties. Therefore, I decided to study these differences and try to find what had caused them.
There are two main parts of the thesis. The first part introduces the author and the novel and also presents an overview of the theory of coping and lists major categories of coping strategies. This first part is divided into four chapters. The first chapter focuses on the author of the novel. It aims to show the possible motives that lead Alice Walker to making the life challenges of Afro-American women one of the main focuses of her work. The following two chapters are concerned with the novel The Color Purple. Firstly, the thesis presents different opinions and controversies that have followed the novel and also gives reasons why the author of this thesis believes that the novel deserves its recognition. The following chapter describes the setting of the novel and introduces the main themes and topics which the novel deals with. The last, fourth, chapter of this introductory part focuses on the theory of coping. It gives a brief explanation of the term and lists the most common categories used to describe differences in individual ways of coping. It also introduces a theory suggesting that the ways in which Afro-Americans deal
9 with difficulties have their distinctive patterns. This final chapter of the introductory part provides some theoretical basis for categorising of the individual coping strategies in the second analytical part of the thesis.
The second, analytical, part of the thesis, presents four main women characters from Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple. These characters are further divided into two groups in accordance with their initial approach in dealing with difficulties.
The first chapters are dedicated to the submissive women characters from the novel; Celie and Nettie. Although these two women are sisters, their fates are different and so are the ways they use to cope with difficulties. Celie is the character whose development and change in the way she approaches life is the most striking and thus sometimes criticized as unbelievable. The aim of Celie's chapter is to show that all the phases of her development are natural, influenced by people she meets and concepts she believes in. The following two chapters introduce Shug Avery and Sofia. The two characters share the same category, the
Fighters, thanks to their self-confidence and temperament, however, their ways of dealing with troubles are still very individual and highly influenced by their distinct personalities and life experiences. The analytical part shows the events and the people that influence their approach to life and sometimes initiate changes and development. I believe that such an analysis could contribute to clearing some doubts surrounding the novel and can facilitate a better understanding of the message of the novel.
10 1 The Color Purple and Coping
This part of the thesis aims to provide a background for the second, analytical part. The first chapters introduce the author and the novel. Firstly, they focus on the author and her stimuli for writing the story, then the impact and overall reception of the novel are summarised. In further chapters, the setting of the novel is given, and the main topics and themes which appear in the book, are introduced.
The final chapter provides a brief introduction to the theory of coping and coping specifics found in Afro-Americans.
1.1 Alice Walker, Focus on Relationships
Alice Malsenior Walker was born on 9th February 1944 in Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children of African-American sharecroppers. Her childhood and early life had a significant impact on her self-determination and attitudes and consequently on her ways of dealing with life difficulties. From her childhood experience comes her concern about the effect of life events on people's self- concept and their relations with other people. It is her personal life experience that is reflected in fortunes, views and attitudes of her literary characters. It is probable that her ambivalent relation to men, often considered biased or excessive, also stems from her personal experience with men in her family and reaches far back to her childhood.
Professor Maria Lauret of the University of Sussex in Brighton in her book
Modern Novelists: Alice Walker explains that although Walker was close to her
11 mother, her relationship with her father and brothers appeared more distant and negative (5). An event which Walker often mentions as something that radically changed her life and which arguably helps to explain her feelings towards men, happened when she was only eight years old. While she was playing with her two older brothers, one of them shot her in her right eye with his BB gun. The shot not only blinded her eye, but the consequences of the incident deeply hurt Walker's delicate soul. In Alice Walker a life, Evelyn C. White claims that Walker remembers this event as a turning point in her life.
When she looks back, Walker often points out the injustice of the situation when, during the game, her brothers were the ones with guns, (the boys had got the guns from their parents), so they were the cowboys. She was left to play an Indian with only a wooden bow and arrow to protect herself with. After the accident, her brothers persuaded her to say that she hurt her eye when she had accidentally stepped on a wire. And later, when the truth came out, Walker's brothers insisted that they had allowed Walker to use one of their guns to protect herself, trying to safe their faces in front of their parents. White explains that Walker felt betrayed by her brothers but also by her parents who, in her eyes, never really punished the boys for what they had done (White 33-36). From that point, Walker felt that she, as a girl will always be treated differently, she felt as if she had mattered less after her father hesitated to take her to the doctor which, in the end, cost her eyesight in her right eye. The following years were really hard for an eight-year-old who used to believe that her cute face makes her special among her siblings. Walker felt ugly with a big scar over her blind eye and started to hate people's attention:
Now when I stare at people—a favorite pastime, up to now—they
will stare back. Not at the "cute" little girl, but at her scar. For six
12 years, I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head
(Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Garden" 364).
She lost her confidence and even refused to talk to other people for some time. The situation got even harder because the family moved to a new town. Walker hated her new school and thought that everybody only knew her by the scar and not by what she really was. In an attempt to make her life easier, her parents sent Walker back to their old town and old school leaving her to live with her paternal grandparents. Nevertheless, Walker looks at this time with bitterness. Although she loved her grandparents, she felt abandoned, unwanted, left behind by her nuclear family. For years after the accident, Walker felt like an outcast. It was during this time that she turned to nature, solitude and writing, as her ways of coping. Christian, the author of Black Women Novelists, suggests that perhaps this experience made Walker "particularly attuned to the relationship between social forces and personal development" (260). Christian believes that these events caused that Walker became to "really notice relationships"(261) not just between people but also between people and nature. And relations of people from the Afro-
American community rather than history and facts concerning the Black American tradition are the theme that Walker persistently treats in her works.
13 1.2 The Novel and its Reception
The Color Purple was first published in 1982 as Walker's third and probably most famous novel. Since its publication, the novel continues to draw attention of both black and white reviewers. And although their opinions differ, the fact is that The Color Purple became one of the most popular novels written by an
Afro- American woman writer and has been awarded both The American Book
Award for fiction and The Pulitzer Prize.
Despite its high appreciations, the novel has also drawn a lot of controversies. One of the strongest criticisms of The Color Purple was written by literary historian Trudier Harris. In her article "On the Color Purple, Stereotypes, and Silence" Harris holds that the book has, because of the way it depicts them, done harm to the black community and Afro-American women (155-156). She claims that she finds Celie's character unbelievable and is irritated by her passivity.
Harris writes that "it is that burying away of the instinctive desire to save one's self that makes [her] in part so angry about Celie" (158). Other critics focus on Walker's characterisation of black men and women and their relationship and consider
Walker's views as somewhat stereotypical (Royster 348; Harris 158) picturing black women as exploited and subjugated and men as worthless frogs. There are other scholars who find the plot too unrealistic and the narrative chaotic.
According to Lauret "the story [of the novel]… is full of holes, unlikelihoods and strange coincidences" (93). Lauret also argues that although the book is considered a historical novel, the time of the story is set very vaguely and that "The Color
Purple does not seem to care … about historical facticity" (95). Steven C.
Weisenburger, of the English Department at Southern Methodist University, has
14 dedicated his whole study, "Errant Narrative and The Color Purple" to dealing with chronological inaccuracies and errors that appear in the novel.
On the other hand, some scholars object to these observations. Proudfit, in his essay "Celie's Search for Identity", uses psychoanalytic theory to explain that
Celie's behaviour and development are constructed realistically (1-11). Lauren
Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, in addition, concludes that those "holes" and "inaccuracies" that Lauret sees in the story, might be caused by the fact that Walker is "not concerned with the public history of war and conquest, but with domestic strife and victory" (qtd. in Lauret 93). Moreover, Alice
Walker, herself, in her interview with William R. Ferris, explains that she does not really intend to picture a particular place during a certain period of time, her main concern in her novels are people and their feelings:
If people can only understand the work by placing it in a context, that's
fine. But I'm really trying just to understand people and how they get to be
the way they are. The region is the heart and the mind, not the section of
the country. (Walker, Byrd "The World Has Changed" 234)
There are undoubtedly many different attitudes on the value of the novel. The author of this thesis, however, believes that the primary value of the book lies in the fresh ideas, unorthodox views of the world and people in it. Also essential, is the humanity of the characters who are shown raw and uncensored yet with understanding and kindness. Walker's characters are full of colours, not just black and white; they develop and often change. The happy ending of the novel, seeing the transformation of Celie into a very new Celie, a strong and independent one, could give hope and inner support to thousands of poor abused girls around the world. As Walker claims:
15 The Color Purple is modelled after my grandmother, who was raped at the
age of twelve by her slave-owner. Celie's fate is brighter, however. I
liberated her from her own history. I wanted her to be happy. There are so
many people like Celie who make it, who came out of nothing. People who
triumphed. (qtd. in Henderson 14)
The novel does not aim to be a universal picture of life of Afro-Americans during a certain time at a certain place. It tells a very personal story about an Afro-
American girl who, as Walker stresses in the Preface to the novel, "through her own courage and the help of others breaks free" (CP Preface). It is a story based on a real character and her life story but also "a theological work examining the journey from religious back to spiritual" (Walker, CP Preface).
16 1.3. The Time and the Themes
Although, as already mentioned in the previous chapters, there is no exact year or event mentioned in the story that could precisely mark the period when
Celie's' story takes place, it is believed to be set in the first half of the twentieth century in rural Georgia, starting in the early 1920s (Jones 655; Thomas 247;
Henderson 14). Thus, the story begins more than forty years after the Civil War finished, and millions of black slaves celebrated their freedom. Nevertheless, the journey of Afro-Americans towards a decent place in society as a rightful American citizen only started then. The roaring twenties that brought prosperity and rapid development to the big cities in the North did not have much impact on the life in the underdeveloped rural South. Jim Craw laws, enforcing racial segregation and leading to unequal opportunities and removal of economic or political possibilities from Black Americans were at its peak in the South. Afro-Americans lived in their close communities, separated from the white majority. Their segregated schools and libraries were underpaid, and so their quality was poor. Due to poor education and low social status, the number of occupations available for blacks was limited.
The typical black family were sharecroppers working on a rented piece of land and giving part of the crop (usually a half) to their (typically white) landlord.
However, as Higginbotham explains, equally important as the racial inequalities of that time were the gender and class issues taking place within the black community. According to Higginbotham, the black community of that time
"cannot be interpreted as harmonious and monolithic" (273). The Afro-American community struggled with being equitable to its members. There were class differences among the members of the black community, and the deeply rooted stereotypical views on gender predestination allowed for unequal and often
17 degrading treatment of women. Higginbotham alerts that attention to racial problems "has tendency to devalue and discourage attention to gender conflict within the black community" (273).
It is evident that Alice Walker is concerned with exactly those issues within the Afro-American family and community. Many characters in The Color Purple are based on members of Walker's family. The character of Celie is based on her grandmother, Rachel, brutally abused by Walker's grandfather. Similarly to Albert from the novel, Alice Walker's grandfather only married Rachel to have someone to take care of his children after his first wife, Kate Nelson, had been murdered by her lover. And like Celie, Rachel was treated lower than a servant. (Walker, Byrd 19).
During Walker's grandmother's time, the life of a black woman was hard.
Afro-Americans were generally considered inferior to the white Americans, and their rights were limited. However, within the black patriarchal society, Afro-
American women were those of lower importance, often viewed as cheap labour, a man's property with no rights at all. And Walker, who had herself experienced unequal treatment in her family, decides to choose these Afro-American women and their fates as the central theme of her novel. Dr Tanritanir, professor of
Yuzuncu Yil University, in his article, "Female Solidarity in Alice Walker's Color
Purple", claims that Alice Walker is well aware of the fact that gender determines the position of an individual in society (Tanritanir 118), and she chooses Celie, a poor Afro-American girl, to demonstrate the injustice and suffering of women within the patriarchal Afro-American community as her main topic for the novel.
Tanritanir alerts that "black women suffer more than white women, and their struggle is beyond what an ordinary woman can endure" (119).
The gender inequality and traditional role stereotypes are the most prominent concern of Walker's criticism. Walker points out that these problems
18 still prevail, and believes that it is necessary to deal with them. Consequently, although the American South is traditionally considered as a place where racial issues are the most burning problems, Walker prefers to address the issues inside the black community and the white-black problems seem to be just of peripheral importance in the novel. As a social historian, Jacqueline Jones, summarises in her study, most characters from the novel only deal with other Afro-Americans. They have little or no encounters with white society. From all characters in the book,
Sofia is the one who has the most contact with whites (Jones 666).
Walker, herself a part of the black female community, understandably prefers to view the period from the point of view of an Afro-American woman and focuses on personal issues rather than those universal or national. Her main character Celie is poorly educated naive black girl. Her struggles and hardship come mostly from her relationships with black men. Yet, not all the black men in the story are evil, and it is often made clear that those men are themselves victims of their prejudices and stereotypical views.
The theme of a black woman in the black world is a very specific one. Walker is convinced that women within the black community have to deal with different issues than the white feminists and maybe, as Tanritanir writes in his study even
"suffer more" (119), therefore Walker develops a special term for black feminism - womanism. Alice Walker defines a womanist as a black feminist and specifies the term as derived from the phrase "You are acting womanish" referring to
"outrageous, audacious, courageous behavior, trying to be in charge, responsible, wanting to know more and in greater depth, than is considered good for one", in further definition of the term Walker adds that a womanist is "a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Someone committed to survival and
19 wholeness of entire people, male and female." ( Walker, In Search of Our Mother's
Garden xi)
Williams, the author of "Womanist Theology", further describes the idea. She explains that in Walker's womanism there is no place for homophobia, there is respect for sexual preferences and also no Colorism1, and colour variety is seen as the "substance of universality" (Williams 120). Hill similarly concludes that womanist is "a young girl or a woman who refused to be contained in the limited world of knowledge constructed for her" (62). Izgarjan and Markov hold that Alice
Walker believes that womanism is a typical feature of a woman of color, a feature that is shared by the women community and works as an engine for growth and progress (305). The spirit of womanism is felt throughout the novel and plays a vital role in the development of individual women characters.
However, Walker does not only picture the problems; she tries to offer solutions. She tries to look at the problem from different perspectives. The motif of racism is mainly present in the story of Silvia, who is sent to prison for insulting the white mayor and his wife after she refuses to become their maid. However, through the character of the mayor's daughter, Eleanor Jane, who is trying and eventually able to break the white-black border and befriend Sofia, Walker suggests that there is hope for improvement and change. Walker believes that the change lies in mutual understanding, tolerance and empathy. Similar solution
Walker finds for gender issues, the big theme of the book. According to the author, the traditional concept of woman, the caretaker and servant to her husband, the obedient puppet in the man's world does not work well for women nor does it work
1 Preference of a certain skin colour. 20 for men. Only mutual respect and understanding bring Harpo and Silvia back together and enable peaceful coexistence of Celie and Mr__.
Walker is not much concerned with the political situation and the struggle within the nation; she cares more for personal struggles and human feelings. The author is concerned with interpersonal relations, human motivation and the events and circumstances that are behind it. The novel is about the ways that people choose to survive or overcome difficult situations. It focusses on those poorest of the poor, the Afro-American women and their ways of coping in a strongly patriarchal society. From the very first page of the novel, the reader can follow the main character Celie and watch her suffer but also learn, grow and develop.
Growth and development of the main women characters are reflected in ways in which these characters process and respond to events in their life. These responses, coping strategies, together with events and motives that caused them are also the main focus of this thesis.
21 1.4. Coping Strategies
This chapter introduces the most commonly used definitions of the term and also brings up the theory that there exist differences in coping between men and women and also the white and black community. Although this thesis does not aim or have the ambition to give an exact psychological analysis of the women characters, the theory of coping can help the author and the reader to interpret and understand the motives behind the different approach to coping of different characters.
Shelley Taylor of the University of San Francisco summarises the coping strategies as follows: "Coping strategies refer to the specific efforts, both behavioral and psychological, that people employ to master, tolerate, reduce, or minimise stressful events". She explains that there are two general coping strategies distinguished: problem solving and emotion-focused. The problem-solving coping strategy is defined as coping aimed at resolving the problematic situation or trying to diminish the source of the stress. While the emotion-focused coping strategy is aimed at managing the emotions associated with the situation, rather than changing the situation itself (Taylor UCSF). According to Linda Caroll of the
University of Alberta "problem and emotion-focused coping are not mutually exclusive, and individuals frequently use both problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies to deal with stress" (1541). In a study led by J. T. Ptacek of
Washington University, women, more often than men, tend to use emotion- focused coping and more often seek social support (420). Ptacek et al. suggest that it could be connected with prevailing sex-role stereotypes expecting men to be
"independent, instrumental, rational reasonable and ambitious whereas women are supposed to be emotional, supportive and dependent" (428).
22 Some psychologists, however, also employ classification which distinguishes passive and active coping. According to Caroll, active coping means using psychological or behavioral coping strategies that employ one's own resources to deal with a problem situation. While using active coping strategy, the person actively tries to alter the nature of the stressful situation or to decrease the problematic nature of that situation or to change the way how one thinks and feels about it. The passive coping is connected with the feeling of helplessness; the person feels unable to deal with the stressor and relies on others help him resolve the problematic situation. Passive coping often involves wishful thinking, withdrawal and avoidance. (Caroll 1442)
There is also a special theory concerning the Afro-American way of coping.
According to some scholars, the Afro-American community tends to have their own ways of coping. In a study concerned with coping of Afro-American women, Daly et al. suggest that Afro-American coping strategies are specific. Family and community play a much higher role here than they do in white society. Afro-
Americans tend to search support and solution to their problems within their broader family, their close neighbours or their community. This collective aid is something that has deep roots within the black society where group benefit is always more important than the individual. (Daly et al. 241-245)
While following the individual characters in the novel, this thesis aims to watch their behaviour and deeds and try to recognize the motives and events behind them. The female characters' stories are different, and so are the obstacles they have to deal with. The aim of this thesis, however, is to find, exemplify and explain different strategies of dealing with their fate as each of the women in the novel wields her own. As R. J. Walker claims in his short study, various methods have come to existence in the struggle for equal opportunities of black women. R.J.
23 Walker calls them "survival efforts" (401). The thesis aims to trace the background to individual differences in these survival strategies and show how these strategies can change and develop depending on the development and change of individual self-concepts of the women characters in the novel.
24 2 The Black Women Characters
From what has already been said about the author of The Color Purple, Alice
Walker, it is obvious that Afro-American women and their struggle for self-identity are among the most prominent topics Walker addresses in her books. Her colourful characters are often based on real people from Walker's childhood, and the issues these women have to deal with are often based on the author's personal experience. There is no doubt that the women characters and their struggles against gender inequality and racial discrimination are at the core of the novel.
The Color Purple is one of the best examples of Walker's work where she, through her characters, not only shows the hardships they face during their lives but also tries to picture the ways that these women use to deal with them.
The following chapters of the thesis look closely at four main female characters from the novel and try to describe and analyse their ways of coping and watch how they develop and change. These changes and development are often influenced by the people who enter their lives, and thus the thesis also tries to trace the events and motives that enable such change. In the centre of the interest are four black women characters who are divided into two groups: The Submissive:
Celie and Nettie and the fighters: Sofia and Shug. The individual chapters are titled according to the phase of development, and sometimes also by the people who were the significant influence during that phase. For Celie and Shug, there is also a chapter focused on their spiritual development that plays a very important role in the process of their self-acceptance. The analysis is supported by excerpts from the novel.
25 2.1. The Submissive
Nettie and Celie are sisters. They grew up together and their "starting line" in life seems to be similar. However, Nettie's life appears a lot less difficult than
Celie's. Nettie is pretty and smart and gains a better education. As the younger of the two sisters, she could rely on Celie's protection and help during her childhood.
Even after she leaves Celie, she finds Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine who lead her through life.
Celie, on the other hand, is the one who has to take responsibility for their household when their mother dies. She has been repeatedly raped by their step- father who often reminds her that she is the dull, ugly and worthless.
Throughout their youth, both sisters prefer to submit to other people and try to avoid getting into a conflict. Nevertheless, their life stories are different, and so the strategies they use for dealing with difficulties are influenced by their different life experiences.
26 2.1.1 Celie, from Existing to Living
Celie is the central character in the book. All the events in her life are viewed through her eyes in her letters to God, and later to her sister Nettie. Celie is the one whose life challenges are probably the hardest, but also the one whose development and change is the most striking. From a neglected, abused girl unable to resist her stepfather and later her husband, Celie becomes an independent, strong woman who is not afraid to make her own decisions and who is even able to run her own business successfully. Although some scholars find her development and growth rather unbelievable (Harris, Royster,), this thesis aims to show that the change in her way of coping has been a natural process, launched and fuelled by the events and encounters that happened during the course of her life.
2.1.2 Celie's Troubled Childhood
Childhood is a very import stage in everybody's life. Hertzman, a professor in the School of Population and Public Health, holds that childhood experiences have a powerful impact on one's life "(167). It is the time when a child builds their trust in the world and the people in it. According to the National Child Traumatic Stress
Network, a child who is not provided consistent safety, comfort and protection is likely to develop coping strategies that only help them to survive from day to day.
These adaptations which are useful during the times when the threat of physical or emotional threats are present can however influence their "capacity to live, love and be loved" (NCTSN). There is no doubt that Celie's traumatic childhood has a major impact on her initial choice of coping strategies.
27 When the reader meets Celie, she is just a child, the oldest child in her family.
Her mother is seriously ill and dying, and her stepfather Alphonso abuses her and rapes her. Celie is confused and miserable. Although a child herself, she has to take on her mother's duties; do all the housework and take care of her younger siblings.
Celie feels responsible for her sibling and especially for her younger sister Netties with whom she is closest. Thus, Celie provides care for all her siblings and tries to protect her sister Nettie. Yet, she has no one here to protect or really care for her.
Unfortunately, at this point, the family and community that Daly et al. mention as the most important supportive forces within the Afro-American society (241) do not work for her.
While growing up, Celie does not get support or a kind word from her sick mother, and her stepfather makes her believe that she is ugly and dull. Even her teacher, who comes to persuade Celie's stepfather to allow her to go back to school gives up on her when she finds out that Celie is pregnant. No one is willing or dares stand up for her. Celie grows up uneducated and unloved. The picture of herself that she gets from adults around her only confirms her feelings of worthlessness.
Proudfit points out that it is the lack of mother-daughter bond in Celie's childhood that prevents Celie from becoming self-confident woman early in her life. And only after she interacts with her mother surrogates in Kate, Sofia and Shug, is Celie able to work through her traumas and mature emotionally (Proudfit 1).
Celie is sometimes viewed as too passive and submissive, but it is only because of the lack of her self-love. She does not feel like someone who deserves to be loved or cared for. We can see a significant difference in her behaviour when it comes to fighting for her sister Nettie. When her stepfather starts looking at Nettie and Celie thinks he might start abusing her too, she is determined to "…take care of her.
28 With God help." ( CP2 3) Celie is even ready to sacrifice herself to protect her little sister when she dresses up to seduce her stepfather so that he "takes her" and leaves Nettie alone. Hopson explains:
Celie sees herself as a good girl gone bad, a girl marked by the abuses of
her father, and because Celie sees Nettie as being unalterably good, Celie is
able to fight for her sister and not for herself." (Hopson 6)
Thus, after Nettie runs away and Celie thinks she is dead, Celie has nothing left to live or fight for, she just keeps on existing (not living) and awaits heaven as a release from this world.
During her childhood and young age, Celie is unable to deal with her difficult situations and chooses a passive emotion-focused strategy to deal with her stressors. She uses an active approach only to protect her younger sister. She, herself does not feel worth any effort, and so she focuses on bare survival. She does not see a way out from her difficult situation; however, she instinctively feels that sharing her troubles with someone could help her through her mixed feelings.
She starts writing about the things that trouble her. As she initially sees no one else to rely on, she turns to God for help.
2.1.3 Someone to Talk to
"You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy."
(Walker, CP 1)
2 For the quotes from the primary source, the novel The Color Purple, the abbreviation CP will be used. 29 Celie, quite in compliance with the theory of gender predispositions in coping introduced by Ptacek et al., does not see fighting back or an escape (active coping strategies) as a solution to her situation (420-480). She feels responsible for her siblings; she feels too weak to fight and has no one to confess or run to. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Celie lacks the support of her family or community when she seeks for some emotional support. However, she still needs to communicate her situation with someone who cares. Thus, when her abusive Pa
(stepfather Alphonso) warns her not to tell anybody but God about his sexual abuse, she does what he advises her. Celie starts writing letters, letters to God. For many years, God becomes Celie's confidant, someone with whom she can share her troubles. R. J. Walker specifies it: "Celie pours out to God her thoughts, her fears, her impressions of others, and her aspirations - as modest as they are" (413).
Sharing her feelings with God helps Celie when the situation in her family becomes unbearable. Her mother is very sick and dying, and her stepfather chooses Celie to, as he puts it, "do what her mother wouldn't" (CP 1), and sexually abuses her. In her letters, Celie talks about her life, her feelings and worries. Celie believes that showing God that she "has always been a good girl" (CP 1) will perhaps make him help her. However, Celie's letters do not resemble prayers or pleas for advice or help; the letters are, in fact, Celie's diaries of things and events that happen in her life. She feels lost and confused and needs to share her feelings and worries with someone who would listen. She hopes that God will listen to her and maybe understand her:
Dear God,
He beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church. I may have got
somethin in my eye, but I didn't wink. I don't even look at mens. That's the
30 truth. I look at women, tho, cause I'm not scared of them. Maybe cause my
mama cuss me you think I kept mad at her. But I ain't. I felt sorry for
mama. Trying to believe his story kilt her. (CP 5)
It is evident that not God as such, but writing the letters works for Celie as a therapy. Even after she abandons the Christian God and starts writing to a real person, her sister Nettie, Celie's letters keep their character of a personal diary.
The letters to Nettie, nevertheless, also signal a turning point in Celie's life.
She starts writing to Nettie after she had found Shug, her lover and friend and after she had found her lost feeling of self-belief. And most of all, after she has embraced the new God; the God/Nature that would love her unconditionally, God who is not a man and not white (so she does not have to fear him). Celie starts writing to
Nettie after she had found friends who became her new family and after she had gained back hope that her sister might still be alive. From that point on, Celie starts actively pursuing her happiness. And soon, Celie writes to Nettie:
Dear Nettie,
I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time. And
you alive and be home soon. With our children." (CP 218)
The letters to Nettie mark the moment when a new Celie is born.
2.1.4 The Sisterhood
Celie's development and growth starts with the growth of her sense of self- worth. Celie's experience with men is terrible; she is afraid of them. The men in her
31 life treat her like a second rate person, a property, a servant made for fulfilling their needs. Celie grew up that way and believes that the duty of a "good girl" is to obey men and does not ask for more. It is her encounters with strong women that change her view and help her to grow into an independent, confident woman.
The first such encounter happens when Mr_'s sisters come to visit him. They are the first people who seem to appreciate Celie and even try to speak up for her.
They praise the way she keeps Mr_'s house clean and like the way she takes care of his children. One of the sisters, Katy even persuades Mr_ to buy Celie a new dress; the first new dress ever bought just for her in her life. Celie feels so grateful that she does not know how to thank her. Katy replies that Celie deserves more than that. And for the first time, Celie agrees: "Maybe so. I think" (CP 21). However, when Katy, after an argument with Mr_, leaves their house, telling Celie that she has to fight the men for herself now. Celie thinks:
I don't say nothing. I think about Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away.
What good it do? I don't fight, I stay where I'm told. But I'm alive. (CP 22)
Celie does not believe that any kind of resistance might improve her situation. Up to that moment her life had been nothing but misery, and she probably thinks that that is the way women should live their life. Just exist and be happy to be still alive.
When Celie meets Sofia, she, at first, seems not to be able to understand her.
Sofia is so different from her. Strong, proud, not afraid of anyone or anything. Celie likes her and even admires her, but, at the same time, is jealous of her. She would like to have her confidence, her fearlessness and also a loving relationship like the one Sofia has with Harpo. This hidden envy leads to an initial conflict between Celie and Sofia. Sofia's marriage with Harpo is so different from what Celie had ever
32 experienced. However, also Harpo is confused by the egalitarian thinking that Sofia tries to apply in their marriage. Prompted by his father's remarks and prejudiced by what he had experienced during his childhood, Harpo fears that he may lose some of his "manliness" if he submits to Sofia, and asks Celie for advice. And Celie, following Mr_'s advice, suggests that Harpo should beat his wife. Deep inside, Celie knows that her advice to Harpo is not right; however, beating is something that she has experienced regularly from her husband and stepfather, and so she may think that it's something natural. Yet, Celie cannot sleep at night and knows that she has done something wrong. She has “sinned against Sofia's spirit” (CP 39). When Sofia confronts her, Celie at first tries to lie to escape the conflict, but then, she admits: "I say it cause I'm a fool…I say it cause I'm jealous of you, I say it cause you do what I can't… [you] fight" (CP 40). After Sofia and Celie talk things over, Sofia asks Celie what she does when she gets mad. Celie explains :
… I can't even remember the last time I felt mad….I used to get mad at my
mammy cause she put a lot work on me. Then I see how sick she is.
Couldn't stay mad at her. Couldn't be mad at my daddy cause he my daddy.
Bible say, Honor father and mother no matter what. Then after while every
time I got mad …I got sick. Felt like throwing up. Terrible feeling. Then I
start feeling nothing at all...sometime I have to talk to Old Maker…This life
soon be over,…heaven last all ways. (CP 42)
Celie simply tries just to bear her life, survive it and wait what comes after. The warm, loving relationship between Sofia and Harpo is something she did not even know could exist. Before, meeting Sofia, Celie believed that women were here only to serve men and so the relationship that Harpo and Sofia had is something new for her. Sofia shows Celie that women can be strong and independent and that man
33 and a woman can be partners. She soon becomes Celie's close friend and a person she can talk to.
The woman who turns Celie's life over is Shug Avery. Celie had heard about
Shug and admired her even before she met her. She kept her photo and considered her "the most beautiful women she had seen" (CP 6). When Celie meets Shug for the first time, she is sick and weak, and Celie is determined to take care of her and help her. After Shug enters their house, Celie changes. She "wakes up". After a long time of just existing, trying not to feel anything, she has someone to care about, somebody to fight for. And even though Shug, in the beginning, does not care about Celie and is even mean to her; Celie feels love and even physical attraction towards her. Her love towards Shug also gradually improves her relation with Mr_ when they unite to protect Shug:
Me and Mr_both look up at her. Both move to help her sit down. …Then I
see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr__. Us three set
together gainst Tobias and his fly speck box of chocolate. For the first time
in my life, I feel just right. (CP 57-58)
After she had lost trace of Nettie, Shug is the first person Celie truly loves and the bond that builds between them helps Celie grow up and believe that even in the life here and now good things can happen. Shug does not only show Celie that she is worth love she also teaches her how to understand her sexuality and love her own body (Ross 69-71). Shug requites her love and is always ready to fight for Celie. It is her love and protection that help Celie to start finding her lost feeling of self-worth.
She teaches Celie to love herself and slowly overcome her fear of men and the world in general. Shug chooses Celie over Albert (Mr_) when she finds out how he
34 treated her and helps her to leave him and start her own business. Even after their relationship stops being sexual, Shug remains Celie's best friend. Most importantly, Shug is the one who helps Celie to change her view of the meaning of life, the world and nature. When it happens, Celie discontinues writing to God and starts writing to Nettie: "Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more. I write to you"
(CP 193).
2.1.5 Leaving the Christian God
With her newly gained self-confidence, and under Shug's influence, Celie starts to look at the world differently. She does not just blindly follow what she had been told; she begins to question things and creates her own opinion on them. The most radical twist is her abandoning the Old Christian God and, with Shug's help, finding a new one: God-Nature that will love her no matter what.
This change, however, can happen only after Celie finally comes to the point where she feels worth God's love. Yet, she feels that she never got any from him,
Celie ruminates about "what God do for [her]?", she thinks that "if [God] ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place" (CP 193).
Celie than decides to believe that there is no God, but at the same time finds life without God difficult. It is Shug who comes to help and shows Celie her own concept of God, the God who is of no gender or colour, the God who is inside her and all around her, the God who is happy when she is happy, God that truly and unconditionally loves her. This is how Shug explains it:
God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with
God. But only them who search for it inside find it.…It ain't something you
35 can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is
everything. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you
can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it…God love
everything you love … (CP 196-197)
From now on, the reader sees a new Celie. She is no longer lost, she is no longer alone, she has the support and love from Shug, and she knows that there is a
God whom she does not have to fear because he does not: "threaten lightning, flood and earthquakes" (CP 199); a God who will always be there for her. With this change comes the change in the way she deals with difficulties. Celie is finally not afraid to employ active coping strategies. She is ready to solve the problems and also able to find emotional support to deal with difficulties that cannot be easily solved. With this feeling, Celie is finally able to stand up to men. She finds the strength to confront Mr_ and leaves with Shug for Memphis. She is finally free and happy. R.J. Walker points out that Celie always needs someone's help and support in moving forward and finding her place in the world (Walker R.J. 416). This is mainly due to the lack of love and support during her childhood and teenage, the lack of mother-bond, that Proudfit writes about in his work, and consequently her non-existent sense of self-worth. After she acquires love and gains confidence, she slowly starts to change the pattern, and at the end of the book, she is strong enough to forgive Mr_ and stop being dependent on Shug. She is ready to live a content life on her own:
… Shug write me she coming home. Now. Is this life or not?
If she come, I be happy. If she doesn't I be content.
And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn. (CP 288-289)
36 Celie's life has been full of suffering, injustice and pain. However, Celie has always found a way to come through, to survive. First, she just passively bore her sufferings, later relied on her friends for help. But when she eventually finds her inner strength and belief in herself, she truly matures and finally gains the courage to actively seek her freedom. After she learns to love herself, she is able to come from the lessons of life as a winner.
37 2.1.6 Nettie, the Lucky One
Nettie is Celie's younger sister and her best friend. The two girls grow up together. They are both kind, humble and naïve. They start their lives in the same family; however, their positions within the family are not the same and also their life stories and consequently, also their coping strategies are different. Celie, as the oldest child in the family, has to help in the household and take care of her younger siblings. Her role in the family is significantly influenced by the fact that her mother is ill and dying. So Celie's role is to work hard and provide care for the other members of her family. Although she is able to run the household pretty well, her stepfather never has a kind word for her. All she hears from him is that she is ugly and dull. Nettie, on the other hand, is pretty and very smart. She is the lucky one. These traits positively influence her fate. Her appearance and talent even partly protect her from her abusive stepfather, Alphonso. Nettie seems to be too valuable to be hurt or spoilt3. Alphonso knows that this beautiful and educated girl could bring the family some profit. Nettie's initial luck also lies in the love and protection of her older sister, Celie who is determined to: "take care of her. With
God help" (CP3) and is ready to sacrifice herself for her. It is Nettie's good looks and decent education that help Nettie to get a job in the Reverend Samuel's family and make her life overall easier than Celie's.
Nettie's character is often considered the least developed of all the women characters in the novel, and so it is the character who is rarely studied. When mentioned, it is often criticised. Harris, for example, suggests that Nettie is
"neither authentic nor true" (156), King-Kok remarks that her letters feel "bland"
3 sexually abused, deprived of virginity 38 compared to Celie's (170), and according to Scholl, Nettie "fails to acquire the voice
Celie does" (260).
Lindberg-Seyersted, a professor of American literature at the University of
Oslo, was one of the few scholars who dedicated their research paper to just
Nettie's part and examined her role in the novel. Nevertheless, Even Lindberg-
Seyersted describes Nettie's character as "half-hearted and blurry" (96). However,
Lindberg-Seyersted suggests that this "kind, hardworking and slightly conventional person" (91) has to fight her own struggle for freedom and explains that Nettie's
"weapon" is her education (91). Nettie's decent education definitely has a positive influence on her life. Moreover, Nettie also always happens to have somebody who cares for her and is ready to support and protect her. When she is little, it is her sister Celie and partly her teacher, Miss Beasley. Later in her life, Nettie can rely on missionaries Corrine and Samuel.
2.1.7 Nettie's Childhood
Nettie grows up loved and protected by her older sister, Celie. From her early years, it is clear that she is going to be a smart girl. Celie describes her to Shug:
"Smart as anything. Read the newspapers when she was little more than talking.
Did figures like they was nothing. Talk real well too" (CP 120). Even Alphonso, her stepfather is aware of her gift and does not accept Albert's proposal for Nettie's hand. Alphonso believes that Nettie can find a way better match than Albert would make. He believes that Nettie can get a respected and well-paid job first. Thus, he replies to Albert's proposal saying that "[Nettie] [is] too young…Sides, [he] want
[Nettie] to git some more schooling. Make a schoolteacher out of her. But [he] can let [Albert] have Celie" (CP 7).
39 So, Nettie lives her young life in very poor conditions but knowing that she is loved by her sister and somewhat valued by her stepfather. Up to this point, there is no evidence that Nettie would not obey whatever her parents want from her. Her way of coping is rather passive; she relies on adults around her and her older sister
Celie. Such behaviour is entirely understandable for a young, timid girl. Yet, there is an occasion when Nettie shows some courage and tries to solve a difficult situation actively. When Alphonso decides that Celie, who is already pregnant by him, does not need school anymore, Nettie tries to help Celie and persuades her teacher, Miss Beasley to talk to Alphonso in the belief that she could help to change his mind. Moreover, when she sees that even Miss Beasley gives up on Celie, Nettie undertakes to teach Celie herself. Nettie is the smarter one, yet, in many things, she relies on her older sister. Nettie's main reason for teaching her sister is her belief that when they both are "smart" (CP 9), they will be able to run away together and finally live the lives they want and deserve.
2.1.8 Nettie's Double Flight
Nettie is a gentle and obedient young woman. She always tries to find a peaceful diplomatic solution to every situation. She is not ready to fight like Sofia would. Most of her life, Nettie has a protector near her. When she is little, she has
Celie, later Corrine and Samuel. She does not feel strong enough to protect herself.
So when she is confronted with aggression that she is unable to stop. She chooses flight as the only possible solution. Fortunately, Nettie always finds someone to run to.
40 When Alphonso gives Celie to Mr_ and she moves out from their house, Celie starts to worry about Nettie and wonders whether she is safe. Celie is afraid that now, when she has gone, Alphonso might start abusing Nettie. Her concerns prove to be right, and Nettie has to run away from home to escape Alphonso. Nettie obviously runs to Celie, and Albert (Mr_) who is still fond of Nettie, agrees that she could stay. Nettie does not submit to Alphonso, like Celie did, from numerous reasons. Firstly, at the time, when Alphonso makes his attempt to rape her, she is older and more experienced than Celie was, and secondly, she is not alone at this.
Her flight is possible because she, unlike Celie, has someone to run to. She has
Celie, now a married woman, who will always do anything to help her.
While living with Celie, Nettie repeatedly advises Celie to be stricter with
Mr_'s children and fight for her rights, but she herself is not really able to protect her or help her. She is not able to deal with Albert who openly shows his liking for her. After Nettie realises that Albert only allows her to stay in his house because he expects her to become his lover, Nettie decides to run away once again. She leaves
Celie's house and goes to find help at Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine whose name she gets from Celie4. Many years later, from her letter, Celie finds out that
Mr_ followed Nettie on her way to Reverend, and that he attempted to rape her after she had refused him. "With God's help", Nettie was able to "hurt him bad enough to make him let her alone" (CP 127). Thus, in these situations, Nettie is able to fight for herself and chooses flight as her solution to a problematic situation; however, she is not able to help Celie.
4 Celie sends Nettie to Corrine because she believes that she and her husband adopted her children. 41 2.1.9 Nettie on a Mission, a Decent Young Lady is Born
The further adventures of Nettie are shown through her letters to Celie. She has been sending her letters regularly for over two decades, and most of her letters describe her stay as a black missionary in Africa. The distinctive language she uses in her letters is very far from the raw and primitive language her sister Celie uses while talking about her life. However, somehow, the neutrality of the" polished" language she uses decreases the degree of personal involvement felt from the text and thus make them "dangerously close to boring" as Lindberg-Seyersted remarks
(90), and also more difficult for the reader to really feel involved. Nevertheless,
Nettie continues living with Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine, and she more or less follows their opinions and action. Although she sometimes disagrees with the things that are happening around her, she does not really try to change them.
Her ways of coping are partly passive and partly emotion-focused as she uses reading books and even writing letters as her way of dealing with mixed emotions and feelings:
Dear, Nettie…There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds
me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They
don't even look at women when women are speaking…The women also do
not "look in a men's face" as they say…And what can I say to this? Again, it
is our own behavior around Pa. (CP 163)
Nettie is undoubtedly a smart and kind young lady. She is always trying to find a nice word to comfort others, and from her letters, it is clear that she knows what is right and what is not. However, she never really tries to fight for anything, nor she attempts to change things. When an English rubber company comes to destroy the
42 village in Africa (Olinka village) where she and the Reverend's family are on the mission, she writes a long letter to Celie explaining how unfair the situation is. Still, there is no sign of her attempting to help the villagers. Nettie writes:
It was pitiful, Celie. The people felt so betrayed...Every hut that lay in the
proposed roadpath was leveled...our church, our school, my hut, all went
down…The chief set off, seeking explanation and reparation. (CP 170)
Nettie goes on describing how the chief of Olinka tried to talk in English (which he had never learned) with the "white man in charge. Nettie remarks, "It must have been a pathetic exchange" (CP 171). Neither Nettie nor Reverend Samuel or Corrine try to get involved in the conflict and step up for the villagers. After Corrine dies,
Nettie and Samuel come close and eventually get married. Nettie is happy. Samuel and Nettie later return back to America to live near Celie.
Nettie's character is certainly the least developed women character in the story. Through Nettie, the reader learns about the mission in Africa and the difficulties and controversies such a mission can bring. However, it tells them very little about Nettie. She is timid, kind and boring. Most of the time, she uses emotion-focused strategies of coping when she writes about her emotions, but she hardly ever does anything to change her situation. Nettie does not often seem to act independently and often relies on other people for support. She seeks support within her community/family when dealing with life difficulties (Daly et al. 241).
Yet she somehow seems to overuse that, and her character stays overly dependent on others and consequently appears weak and immature.
43 2.2 The Fighters
This part focuses on the life strategies of Shug Avery and Sofia Butler. Shug and Sofia are both strong and independent women characters who try to be in charge of their lives. They know what they want in life, and, most importantly, are aware of their own worth. Jenkins, Associate Professor of English at Hunter College
NY, suggests that Shug and Sofia "challenge a traditional and submissive femininity" (994). Although there are some common traits between the two, their personalities, lifestyles, values and ways of coping are different. Shug loves admiration, and she often relies on men though she tries to keep her power over them. Sofia believes in equality, and her self-awareness is supported by her physical strength and skills. She is completely self-reliant and seeks partnership in her relationships. As shown in the following chapters, their individual coping strategies are influenced by their temperament, beliefs and life experiences. Thus, the following chapters observe these coping ways and seek for the important events and people that influenced them.
44 2.2.1 Shug, the Heartbreaker
Shug Avery is one of the central female characters of the novel. She is good looking, has a beautiful singing voice and pursues a promising career as a jazz singer. She is extravagant, confident and free-spirited. Shug is independent and well aware of her strengths which she uses to manipulate people, especially men who adore her. She has her own unorthodox approach to religion and believes that the world was created to be enjoyed. Her ways of coping with life could often be classified as emotion-focused when she distracts herself from the difficulties she faces and turns to activities she enjoys. However, Shug is not afraid to apply problem-solving strategies and is ready to change things when she no longer feels comfortable with the state of affairs. Combining different coping styles is quite common (Caroll 1541); nevertheless, Shug, unlike what Ptacek et al. say, does not rely mostly on emotion-focused approaches ( Ptacek et al. 420). Shug is able to actively search for solutions to any difficult situation that she encounters. She loves moving places and meeting new people. She is determined to spend her life enjoying the pleasures it can bring her and does not worry much about consequences. Shug may seem selfish and careless at times; however, she becomes
Celie's true friend and selflessly supports her in finding her place in the world.
2.2.2 From Lilly to Shug
Shug's life has not always been easy. Her childhood was far from idyllic. She somehow did not fit in her family, and so she often felt inappropriate and unloved.
Shug Avery was born as Lilly Avery, and she spent her childhood with a mother and father who were not able to understand and accept her. Lilly was from the
45 beginning, a wild and affectionate child who craved for attention and prize from her parents. Her mother, however, was very reserved and cold and never liked to kiss or cuddle her. Shug explains her rocky relationship with her mother to Celie,
"she [Shug's mother] never love to do nothing had anything to do with touching nobody, ...I try to kiss her, she turn her mouth away" (CP 122). Shug's mother even disliked when her father showed Lilly some affection. Shug holds, "she did not like the looks of that" (CP 123). Lilly's mother has never approved of any physical demonstration of love, and so she cannot understand and fulfil her daughter's needs. So Lilly, who is just the opposite, feels like an outcast in her own family, lonely and unseemly
This negative early experience has obviously a significant impact on her view of the world (Hertzman 167). The lack of affection that Lilly feels from her parents causes that she starts to look for it elsewhere. While growing up, she realises that with her good looks and distinctive singing voice, she can make a comfortable living and she starts her successful singing career. Her confidence and beauty appeal to numerous men, and Lily soon realises that from now on, she can be the one in charge of other people's feelings. This is the time when she changes her first name to Shug or Sugar, the nicknames that her admirers gave her.
Shug decides never to get hurt again, and over the years, she builds a "wall" around herself. She is aware of her physical attractiveness and uses it to manipulate men around her. Although her nickname is Sugar or Honey Bee, Shug does not like to be sweet or polite to people. Quite the opposite. She is often sarcastic and rude. When she first meets Celie, Shug is very ill and almost dying, but she is still "dressed to kill" (CP 45), and when Shug looks up, and Celie sees her face, she describes it:
46 Under all that powder her face black as Harpo. She got a long pointed nose
and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish.
And mean. Like sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kilt it. (CP 46)
And Shug shows exactly how rude she can be when Albert (Mr_) introduces his wife, Celie. Celie writes: "She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle.
Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say like she ain't believed it" (CP
46). Also, her behaviour towards Albert, who at that moment, is trying to save her life, is far from polite or grateful. Nevertheless, Celie believes that it is the evil side of Shug that helps her overcome her illness and survive:
Dear God,
Ain't nothing wrong with Shug Avery. She just sick. Sicker than anybody I
ever seen. She sicker than my mamma when she die. But she more evil
than my mamma and that keep her alive. (CP 47)
Shug often treats people around her with disrespect and always tries to be in control of the situation. R.J. Walker comments that Shug "constantly shows confidence to ensure her own well-being" (405). Even when she is physically weak, she is careful not to show any weakness and stay in control. However, when she later befriends Celie and opens to her, it is clear that her toughness is partly a pose which she uses to protect herself from the outside world. Deep inside, Shug is a vulnerable woman who did not always get what she wanted. Once, she truly loved
Albert and hoped he would marry her, but Albert turned up to be too weak to oppose to his domineering father, and although he also truly loves her, he has never proposed to her.
47 2.2.3 Troubles with Albert
There is a special bond between Shug Avery and Celie's husband, Albert. For
Shug, Albert is somebody she can trust, and she can always come to. However, he is also someone who disappointed her and betrayed her when he preferred to obey his family lead by his father and married Annie Julia and later Celie instead of her.
Albert was the first man Shug loved and is the only man who stays in her life for the rest of her life. He is also the father of all three of her children. Shug once tells
Celie:
When I met Albert and once I got in his arms, nothing could git me out. It
was good too…You know for me to have three babies by Albert, and Albert
weak as he is, it had to be good. (CP 123)
To have three babies with Albert can be seen as true proof of her love towards him.
Later in the novel, Shug tells Celie that she can protect herself from getting pregnant by using "sponge and all" (CP 77), and even though she has had other men in her life, she only has children by Albert because she chose to. She hoped that Albert would marry her, but he never did. While pregnant, Shug sought shelter at her mother's house and gave birth to all her children there. Nevertheless, Albert is not willing to take care of them, and so Shug's mother decides that she will take care of Shug's children, but not of Shug who is, according to Shug's mother, too wild and depraved to be living in their house. So Shug is sent to live with her aunt.
She recounts to Celie:
They turned me out. I went to stay with my mama wild sister in Memphis.
She just like me. Mama say. She drink, she fight, she love mens to death.
She work in a roadhouse. Cook. Feed fifty men, screw fifty-five. (CP 123)
48 Shug is left behind by her parents and by Albert. Yet, she does not give up on her life; instead, she turns to music and becomes a successful singer. She builds a decent career and has many admirers and lovers; however, she still keeps her relationship with Albert. Whenever she performs nearby, Albert comes to watch her performances, and it often seems that Shug likes to show off her success and does not try to hide her numerous lovers from Albert, just to torture him.
Janusiewitz, the author of a study concerned with Shug's womanism, claims that
Shug has power over Albert and uses it to command him (Janusiewitz 13-14). For
Albert, Shug is the only woman he ever loved; his behaviour changes whenever she is around. When he is getting ready to attend her performance, Celie describes the scene:
Mr._____ going to hear her. He dress all up in front the glass, look at
himself, then undress and dress all over again. He slick back his hair with
pomade, then wash it out again. He been spitting on his shoes and hitting
it with a quick rag. He tell me. Wash this. Iron that. Look for this. Look for
that. Find this. Find that. He groan over holes in his sock. (CP 25)
Albert loves Shug, and she is well aware of it. But Albert also deeply hurt Shug and she is not going to forget it. Shug is aware of her power over Albert, and she is not afraid to use her sharp tongue to remind him how weak he is and what he had missed by not marrying her. Even when Shug is really sick and almost dying, she remains the stronger one in their relationship:
Mr. be in the room with her all time of the night or day. He don't hold her
hand though. She too evil for that. Turn loose my goddam hand, she say to
Mr___. What the matter with you, you crazy? I don't need no weak little
49 boy can't say no to his daddy hanging on me. I need me a man, she say. A
man. She look at him and roll her eyes and laugh. It not much of a laugh
but it keep him away from the bed. He sit over in the corner away from the
lamp. (CP 47)
Shug does not show her vulnerability and always wants to be the one in control.
She prefers to stay independent and does not want to rely on anybody's help. She protects herself from other people by pretending that she despises them or just does not care what they think. But when Celie asks her about her feelings for
Albert, Shug admits:
I got what you call a passion for him. If I was ever going to have a husband
he'd been it. But he weak... Can't make up his mind what he want… Some
things I love about him though,... He smell right to me. He so little. He
make me laugh. (CP 77)
Even though Shug later marries Grady and then has an affair with Germaine,
Albert always remains the most important man in her life.
2.2.4 Encounter with Celie
There is no doubt that Shug Avery is the woman who had the most significant impact on Celie's growth and change (Bona et al. 117, Berlant 851-853, Walker R.J.
414-416). This thesis deals with her influence in one of the previous chapters.
Nevertheless, Shug herself also benefits from her relationship with Celie. With
Celie, Shug seems to finds some peace for her restless soul; she finds a true friend, a family.
50 Celie had admired Shug Avery from the first moment she heard about her and saw her photo. To her, Shug is the prettiest woman she has ever seen. She loves her courage, her independence, the way she dressed and deals with people, she envies her freedom and her power over men. Shug Avery, however, does not like Celie at first because, in her eyes, Celie, like Ann Joulia before her, took her place and married Albert. Nevertheless, Shug soon realises that Celie does not mean a threat to her relationship with Albert. She is surprised by Celie's kindness and selflessness. (Celie is the one who cares for her day and night when she is ill) Shug soon realises how relaxed and comfortable she feels around Celie; and after she hears Celie's story, she starts to feel sorry and even responsible for her. Celie is probably the only person who really gets behind "Shug’s wall” and is able to see the true her. Celie is able to bring the best out of Shug Avery and make her a better person:
One day she say to me, Well, Miss Celie, I believe it time for me to go. When? I ast. Early next month, she say. June. June a good time to go off into the world. I don’t say nothing. Feel like I felt when Nettie left. She come over and put her hand on my shoulder. He beat me when you not here, I say. Who do, she say, Albert? Mr. ____, I say. I can’t believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop. What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you. Oh, Miss Celie, she say, and put her arms around me. Us sit like that for maybe half a hour. Then she kiss me on the fleshy part of my shoulder and stand up. I won’t leave, she say, until I know Albert won’t even think about beating you. (CP 75-76)
51 For the first time in the novel, Shug puts herself aside for a while. She decides to stay with Celie to help her improve her relationship with Mr_.
So, Shug helps Celie to understand the world and herself better; she helps to build her confidence and self-respect. However, Celie also helps Shug. In Celie,
Shug finally finds someone who she does not need to impress, someone she can share her true feelings with, someone with whom she can be simply herself again.
Thus, Celie plays a great role in Shug’s life. Proudfit suggests that Celie has found her surrogate mother in Shug (4, 5) but also Shug has found her surrogate child in
Celie. Shug is older and more experienced and so is able to teach Celie how to love herself and find happiness in the world around her. Celie is someone who needs her support and help, and Shug is ready to assist her in her search for independence and freedom. For Shug, Celie is her lost family. Celie is somebody she can love and who will always love her back, someone who would never betray her. Celie is her lover, confessor and friend. Celie needs her and makes her a better person.
2.2.5. Shug and her Faith
Religious beliefs play a major role in coping with stressors. Hall, in her article which is concerned with coping responses of Afro-American women, concludes that for Black women, spirituality or prayer is a very common coping response (41).
Wachholtz et al. show that spiritual and religious coping “correlates with feelings of spiritual support, spiritual peace, calmness and decreased anxiety” (316). And contrary to Celie’s initial assumption, Shug Avery turns out to be a very spiritual person. When Celie gets to know Shug, she thinks that Shug apparently does not
52 believe in any God when she does not go to church and leads a rather unconventional life. Once, she asks Shug, “big a devil as you is...you not worried bout no God, surely” (CP 193). Shug opposes that “... just because [she] don’t harass it like some peoples us know don’t mean [she] ain’t got religion” (CP 193).
To Celie, Shug seems strong enough to do without any religion or God. But Shug’s strength springs very much from her spirituality, from her belief in the loving and lenient God that is nothing like the God from the Bible. Shug believes that the
Christian God is just a white men’s God. He is white, has blue eyes and was created by white people for white people only. She believes that that is the reason why the
Christian religion never worked for her and did not work for Celie either (CP 195-
196). She says: “When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest (CP 196). Shug then explains to Celie her concept of God:
Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside
everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that
search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you
not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. (CP 196)
Shug believes that God is not he or she, but It. Shug claims that she found her God when she felt “motherless” (CP 197), sad and alone and suddenly realised that she did not need to feel that way. Shug suddenly knew that she belonged in this world, and that she was right where she was supposed to be, “a part of everything” (CP
197), the trees, the sky, nature. She compares her feeling of finding her God to sexual arousal. When Celie worries that such thinking is sinful, Shug replies:
God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when
you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go
53 with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you
like…Listen, God love everything you love— and a mess of stuff you don’t.
(CP 197)
Shug is able to stay strong very much thanks to her beliefs. With that God all around her, she does not feel lonely. Shug believes that she is right just the way she is. She believes that when she feels happy and content, God/Nature is happy for her. She believes that God’s biggest joy is to please people:
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the
world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? [Celie] say.
Yeah, [Shug] say. It always making little surprises and springing them on
us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the Bible say.
Yes, Celie, [Shug] say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance,
make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice
that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk? (CP 198)
As mentioned previously, faith plays a significant role in coping. Such faith does not have to be necessarily connected with any religion. Such faith often provides a person with the feeling of being a part of “something greater” or sometimes just of belonging somewhere. Shug Avery may not live her life the way that the Catholic Church approves of. Yet, she is able to find herself another God, a
God who would not judge her or reject her. A God that loves her unconditionally.
Janusiewitz describes Shug Avery as a product of womanism with
“empowering and successful persona” (9). Shug may not be physically strong, yet
54 her strength comes from within. Shug’s way of coping seems to be rather subtle or sophisticated. Shug, does not care for gender equality; she enjoys being a woman.
She feels that when used wisely, it gives her some power over men. She uses her femininity to get what she wants. Shug seems to be rather active in coping with difficulties because she never lost her belief in herself and the world. Her inner strength is supported by her pantheistic philosophy which helps her to find joy in life and peace of heart.
55 2.2.6 Sofia the Fighter
Sofia Butler is the girlfriend and a future wife of Albert’s son Harpo. She is a well-built energetic woman. Lauren Berlant quite aptly introduces Sofia as the
“amazon” (843), and King-Kok calls her “a black woman warrior” (167). With her courage and willingness to fight for what she believes is right, Sofia could be seen as a prototype of a womanist character. Since her first appearance in the book, it is clear that this strong, audacious independent woman knows what she wants from life and is ready to go and get it. The way that she marches into the story very nicely depicts her character:
Harpo bring her over to meet his daddy. Mr_ say he want to have a look at
her. I see ‘em coming way off up the road. “They [Sofia and Harpo] be just
marching hand in hand, like going to war. She in front a little…She not
quite as tall as Harpo but much bigger and strong and ruddy looking, like
her mama brought her up on pork (CP 31).
Sofia is the only female character in the novel who openly challenges traditional woman role within the patriarchal Afro- American society. She believes that man and women are equal. Sofia often chooses rather man-like approach and solutions in dealing with life. She prefers active, problem-solving strategies, which are believed to be more likely used by men (Ptacek et al. 428), to overcome difficult situations and is not afraid to use her physical strength to get what she wants.
56 2.2.7 Sofia’s Family
To Celie’s surprise, Sofia also grew up in a strongly patriarchal family. Her mother was kind but not strong enough to resist her abusive father. When Sofia talks to Celie about her family, she even likens Celie to her mother:
“…you remind me of my mama. She under my daddy thumb Naw, she
under my daddy foot. Anything he say, goes. She never say something
back...she never stand up for herself…More she stand up for us [Sofia and
her siblings], the harder time he give her. (CP 41)
Sofia’s father bullied her mother and did not seem to care about his children.
Sofia never felt loved by her father, and she always felt sorry for her mum.
However, the situation in her family did not break her; it made her stronger. Sofia grew close to her siblings, the common enemy (tyrannical father) brought the children together. Sofia describes her family to Celie: “…Six boys and six girls. All the girls big and strong like me. Boys big and strong too, but all the girls stick together. Two brothers stick with us too…” (CP 41) Sofia’s sisters are all strong and fearless and ready to help each other. Sofia often asserts that she is not dependent on anyone and that she is not afraid to live on her own. However, this confidence is based on the fact that she has the support of her siblings. Thus, when her father says no to her marriage with Harpo, Sofia has the courage to stand up to him and leaves her home determined to start living her new independent life.
Sofia’s audacity springs from her overall strong personality, but it is also
“backed” by the help and support of her community, her siblings. A pattern which is, according to Daly et al. so typical for Afro- American culture. (CP 241) Even later, when Sofia decides to take her children and leave Harpo, she knows that she
57 can go and live with her sister, Odessa. This fact makes it easier for Sofia. It gives her a feeling of independence, and Sofia does not need to make compromises in her life. With the help of her family, she is able to pursue the life that she thinks she deserves.
2.2.8 Sofia and Harpo
There are two main reasons why Sofia wants to marry Harpo. She undoubtedly loves him, but more importantly, marriage with Harpo enables Sofia to get away from her father’s influence. Sofia hopes that her marriage will be completely different from her mother’s marriage. She believes that a relationship between a man and a woman can be based on equality and partnership. Sofia is determined and unyielding. She does not mind to work hard to achieve her dreams, but when her effort fails, Sofia does not want to live a compromise. She needs to keep her feeling of freedom and dignity.
When Sofia first comes to meet Harpo’s father, Albert, she is already eight months pregnant. However, she is not afraid to stand up to Albert, who is suggesting that she is in trouble now and marrying Harpo is her only way out of it.
Sofia responds to that:
Sofia face git more ruddy. The skin move back on her forehead. Her ears
raise.But she laugh. …She say, What I need to marry Harpo for? He still
living here with you. What food and clothes he git, you buy…Naw. I ain’t
living in the street. I’m living with my sister and her husband. They say I
can live with them for the
58 rest of my life. … I’m going home.
… Harpo, you stay here. When you free, me and the baby be waiting..
(CP 32)
Sofia is proud and independent. There is nothing more important for her than the feeling that she has power over her life. She is not willing to submit to anyone and believes that she is able to survive with or without Harpo. Even though she loves
Harpo, she shows him and his father that she does not need to rely on a man for support or help. She is not afraid to live her life on her own.
The way Sofia defies Harpo’s father is typical of Sofia’s character. Her personality includes traits which are traditionally considered as masculine. Her way of coping with a difficult situation is almost always active and more problem- solving than emotion-focused. Also, Sofia’s life attitudes and even manners are often quite “manly”. She often uses her physical strength for hard work; she can fix the house or fight if needed. She is not afraid to make independent decisions. In fact, at some points of their marriage, e.g. when she is the one working on the roof while her husband Harpo is looking after their babies, Sofia takes on the masculine role in their family, and Harpo’s part seems to be more feminine. Such an order is in accordance with Sofia’s beliefs. Jenkins claims that Sofia “demands to be treated as an equal by Harpo, to his surprise” (979). When she starts living with
Harpo, Sofia is determined that the family-roles do not have to be traditionally determined and believes that men and women can have equal roles within the relationship.
However, Harpo who was brought up in a traditional, strongly patriarchal family is not able to accept this pattern and his deep-rooted view of how the
“traditional” family-roles are supposed to be, makes him unsure in his relationship
59 with Sofia. Fearing the loss of his power over Sofia, he follows his father’s and
Celie’s advice to beat Sofia. He thinks that it’s the only way how to make her “the obedient wife” that he believes she should be. Jenkins remarks that Harpo is afraid that in his father’s eyes, he might look as “an inadequate patriarch” (980) if he does not beat Sofia. Nevertheless, Sofia fights back, and she is strong enough to protect herself against Harpo. In the end, Harpo is the one who survives the fight all beaten up. Nevertheless, Sofia feels disappointed and betrayed after the fight. She explains to Celie:
All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my
brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in
a family of man. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. …I
loves Harpo. ...God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead before I let him beat
me. (CP 40)
When Sofia married Harpo, she believed that her marriage could be different than the marriage her mother had. She believed that she and Harpo would be able to coexist as equal partners, and both be happy. However, when Harpo tries to beat her, he does exactly, what Sofia hates most, and what she had tried to escape from when she left her father’s house. Harpo loses her respect and gradually, also her love towards Harpo fades away. After she realises that she no longer loves him,
Sofia chooses to end up their relationship and leave Harpo. She does not give up on her dreams; she knows what she wants and that she deserves better. When she does not have a relationship where she feels safe and happy, she is not afraid to change her life completely. She takes all their children and moves to live with her sister’s family.
60 2.2.9 Sofia and the White Man’s World
As already mentioned in the introductory chapters, Sofia is the character who interacts most with the “white world” and whose life story best reflects the racial issues of the early twentieth century. As Berlant comments, “Sofia Butler is the one who has to make it through the racial problem in The Color Purple” (843). Sofia, similarly to other Afro-American characters in the novel, tries to live her life close to the black community and keeps away from the White people. However, an unfortunate encounter with a white mayor and his wife results in Sofia’s imprisonment and later in her obligation to serve in the mayor’s house. Her tragic fate is aggravated by her quick-temper and her firm belief that both man and women and black and white are equal. Unfortunately, the 1920s were not ready for, nor friendly to women of Sofia’s type. Sofia’s urge for independence and unwillingness to submit to anyone almost costs her life and brings her to the point where she breaks down and has to change her coping strategies completely, in order to survive.
After leaving Harpo, Sofia starts a new life. She finds a boyfriend, a well-off prizefighter, and seems to live a content life. The incident that challenges Sofia’s inner strength and almost destroys her life happens while she is travelling with her new boyfriend and her children in their car to town. On their way, they meet the mayor and his wife, Miss Millie. The mayor’s wife first pets Sofia’s children and praises their cleanliness and “strong white teef” (CP 87), and then offers Sofia to work as her maid. Although “Sofia and the prizefighter, “don’t say nothing. Wait for her to pass” (CP 87) while Miss Millie gushes over Sofia’s children. Sofia is not able to stay calm and reacts very resolutely to Miss Millie’s work offer, “hell, no!”
(CP 87). After the mayor slaps her, for being rude to his wife, Sofia’s fighting
61 instinct makes her punch him back, which is something that nobody, let alone a woman of colour, dare to do. Unfortunately, Sofia faces an enemy that she is unable to overcome. She uses her physical strength to protect herself and her own dignity. Harris suggests that Sofia is “beaten, imprisoned, and nearly driven insane precisely because of her strength” (157). She fights because fighting had worked for her before. However, this enemy is beyond her strength, and she ends up all beaten up in prison:
They crack her skull, they crack her ribs. They tear her nose loose on one
side. They blind her in one eye. She swole from head to foot. Her tongue
the size of my arm, it stick out tween her teef like a piece of rubber.” She
can’t talk… (CP 88)
Sofia is sentenced to twelve years in prison. At first, she tries to resist, but after being regularly beaten up, she realises that she can only survive if she submits. When Celie comes to visit her and asks how she manages, Sofia answers:
“Every time they ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I am you. I jump right up and do just what they say.” (CP 90) Sofia likens her submission to Celie’s. She follows the orders and does what she is asked to do. However, she doubts that her obedient behaviour is good enough for her guards who like to torture and humiliate their prisoners:
Good behaviour ain’t good enough for them…Nothing less than sliding on
your belly with your tongue on their boots can even git their attention. I
dream of murder… I dream of murder sleep or awake. (CP 91)
And although Sofia, during her time in prison, has to submit in order to survive, it is against her nature, and she knows that she won’t be able to go on like this for
62 long. There is still that strong, proud Sofia inside her. Sofia, who is ready to fight until her own self-destruction. Fortunately, Celie and Sofia’s friends and family understand that Sofia cannot survive in prison; and together they manage to persuade her incarcerators that the worst punishment for Sofia is giving her the maid’s job that she had initially refused. Consequently, Sofia is released from prison and sent to the mayor’s house to take care of his children.
During the time at the mayor’s household, Sofia recovers her strength and size.
However, she still suffers mentally. She feels deprived of her freedom and dignity, she hates being a white man’s maid and her hatred towards “whites” only deepens.
Celie writes in her letter to Nettie that “[Sofia]…got her color and her weight back, look like her old self, just all-time think bout killing somebody (CP 102). Sofia submits but makes everyone aware that she hates her job and only does it because she has to. Sofia feels like a slave; she never forgets the injustice; never forgets and never forgives. She blames all white people with no exception. Even though the mayor’s little daughter Eleanor Jane develops a strong attachment towards Sofia and is the one who takes Sofia’s side and often speaks up for her during her time in her family, Sofia refuses her affection. After Sofia is finally freed from her sentence and returns back home, Eleanor Jane keeps visiting her. Sofia comments coldly:
You just don’t know what that girl done put me through. You know how
she used to bother me all the time she had problems at home? Well, finally
she start bothering me when anything good happen. (CP 265)
Sofia stays indifferent to Eleanor Jane’s friendship offer, and only politely bears her visits. For Sofia, Eleanor Jane is just one of the white people who have destroyed her life. Even though she does feel something for Eleanor Jane; such a relationship will be too hurtful for her. Sofia prefers to cut off from everything, and
63 everybody connected with the hardest years of her life. She does not believe that such a relationship can work. Sofia wants to forget and start all over again. Eleanor
Jane is a part of the past that she wants to bury. When Eleanor Jane sadly leaves
Sofia’s house after Sofia tells her that neither she nor her baby are welcomed in the house, she parts with her coldly, “thank you for all you done for us…” (CP 271).
However, the tough, strong Sofia is also stirred by the situation as the reader can see from Celie’s description of the scene: “[Sofia] don’t look so good herself, and a little water stand in her eyes” (CP 271).
Eleanor Jane, nevertheless, does not give up on their relationship. After she finally finds out how Sofia became their maid and what her family had done to her, she decides to make up for it and offers Sofia help in her house. Sofia eventually agrees and then proudly reports to Celie:
[Eleanor-Jane’s family] [are] carrying on just like you know they would:
Whoever heard of a white woman working for niggers, they rave. [Eleanor
Jane] tell them. Whoever heard of somebody like Sofia working for trash.
(CP 286)
The fact that Sofia finally accepts Eleanor Jane and her baby back in her life marks the beginning of a new period in Sofia’s life. Thanks to Eleanor Jane, she (at least partly) gets her revenge. When it happens, Sofia is finally able to draw a line behind her past. Moreover, she is able to get over her past and accept that maybe not all white people are evil. Jones suggests that “Sofia…has endured both the best and the worst behavior that southern whites have to offer blacks“(654).
64 Sofia starts her journey determined to live it without compromise. She actively deals with problems that she meets on the way. She believes that her physical strength and resoluteness can help her live the life that she wants. Sofia’s confidence is undoubtedly supported by the fact that she is not alone. She has her sisters and brothers who are ready to help her whenever she needs. Sofia enters the world determined not to submit to anyone and is ready to fight for her place in the sun.
However, during her life-journey, Sofia is to learn that some enemies are too strong to beat and some obstacles too big to overcome. She has to learn her lesson the hard way when she is torn from her children and family, sent to prison and released only to become a maid in a white family. She is deprived of everything she values: her family, her freedom, her dignity. Sofia realises that here and now she has to stop fighting if she wants to survive. She likens her passive surviving to
Celie’s. Nevertheless, while Celie, during the most difficult times in her life, thinks of her own death as a solution and the only release from her suffering, Sofia dreams of revenge and plans to murder her oppressors. Even after she is freed from prison, it takes some time for Sofia to overcome her horrible experience.
However, with the help of her family and friends, she gains back her confidence and slowly accepts that she had to learn her lesson to become the person she is now:
Well, you got me behind you, anyway, say Harpo. And I loves every
judgment you ever made. He move up and kiss her where her nose was
stitch.
Sofia toss her head. Everybody learn something in life. (CP 286-287)
65 Sofia does not change the way she feels about the world. She knows what is right and what is not. However, Sofia has learned that not everything can be changed easily, and not everything can be done by force.
Sofia Butler storms into the story strong and proud, ready to fight for her place in the world. She is always the active one in coping with troubles. Even though she has to adopt passive coping skills for some time in order to survive when arrested, they are not a natural part of her coping repertoire and she suffers while using them. However, even during the darkest days in her life, Sofia learns something. She is able to forgive and even makes some compromises when she comes back to Harpo and accepts Eleanor Jane into her family. Her ways of dealing with life remain active and problem-solving, but at the same time, slightly less uncompromising and more relaxed and lenient.
66 3 Conclusion:
The aim of the thesis has been to observe the four main female characters from the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker and describe and analyse how they cope with difficulties. The analysis focuses on individual differences in coping and tries to discover their roots. The thesis shows that these coping strategies may develop and change in accordance with the development and change of individual characters. The changes in coping are influenced by interaction with other people and also the particular situation.
The first part of the thesis “The Color Purple and Coping” has introduced the controversy that surrounded the book. It is clear that Alice Walker’s concern with the life of Afro-American women springs from her urgent need to change something within the society which she is a part of. The issues that she addresses constitute the main themes in her novel. Walker challenges the stereotypes of gender roles within a marriage and within society. It is the inequitable treatment of black women that Walker wants to draw into the reader’s attention. Compared to these gender issues, the problems concerning racial inequity are given much less attention in the novel where they mainly appear in Sofia’s story. However, Walker also finds the brighter side of women’s deal such as the existence of togetherness or sisterhood among the black women and, equally importantly, Walker allows for hope when she grants her women characters the happy end.
The second, analytical part of the thesis describes and analyses the ways of coping of four female characters from The Color Purple. All four women characters who are the main focus of this thesis are Afro-American women living during the first half of the twentieth century in rural Georgia. The author of the novel, Alice
67 Walker, wrote the novel as a tribute to her grandmother and to all women of Color.
She was aware that their life during this period in underdeveloped American South was extremely difficult. Her heroines go through many strenuous situations during their life and have to cope with numerous difficulties. Their different temperaments, self-esteem and also life experiences; however, cause that the ways of dealing with such situations are highly individual.
The first two women characters are introduced as the Submissive. Nettie and
Celie are, especially during their youth, not ready to fight for their needs. They prefer to suppress one’s self to avoid conflict with others. Celie’s coping strategies have changed and developed a lot during her life. As a little girl, Celie is repeatedly raped and abused by her step-father, her mother soon dies and she, as the eldest child, has to take care of her younger siblings. She gets no kind word or any support from an adult. From her stepfather, she hears that she is ugly and worthless and she starts to believe it. The only moments when Celie is ready to step up to her step-father are when she tries to protect her younger sister, Nettie. She feels too unimportant and worthless to try to protect herself. After she loses touch with her sister Nettie, Celie loses interest in living and just exists, hoping to find a better place in heaven. Until she befriends Shug, her ways of coping are passive, focused on bare survival. She does not believe that she could change anything nor that she is worth it. In order to deal with her emotions, Celie tries to find comfort in writing about her troubles in her letters to God. It is the community of other black women and especially her friendship with Shug, a woman she loves and admires, that gives Celie new reason to live. Thanks to Shug, Celie finally finds her own worth. Thanks to the community of women that forms around Shug and herself, Celie no longer feels lost and lonely. Moreover, embracing Shug’s joyful
68 and merciful God/Nature as her own finally makes her feel loved and content.
Finally happy, Celie is able to leave the life she hates and start living her dream.
Nettie is Celie’s younger sister. Although she also starts her life in a dysfunctional family, she has always had the support and care of her older sister.
Her pretty face and good education eventually help her to find her place amongst black missionaries which allows her to keep her eye on Celie’s children. Although she is sometimes able to use a rather active way of coping; when she persuades her teacher to speak up for Celie or when she runs away from Alphonso and later from
Albert’s house; most of the time Nettie relies on other people for help and support.
Celie, her teacher Miss Beasley and later Corrine and Reverend Samuel all have a huge impact on Nettie’s opinions and deeds. In order to find emotional support,
Nettie seeks God or writes letters to her sister Celie.
The last chapters of the analytical part are dedicated to the Fighters. Shug
Avery and Sofia are the two characters who are not afraid to fight for their place in the sun; they believe in themselves and tend to use active coping strategies in dealing with difficult situations. Shug (Lilly) Avery does not feel comfortable in her family and so, she leaves her mother, father and children and goes on to pursue her singing career. When she cannot have Albert as her husband, she finds multiple lovers and eventually marries Grady, to become a married lady that she had always wanted to be. This strategy could be classified as problem-solving. However, Shug is also able to actively use emotion-focused strategies to find peace in her heart by turning to the pantheistic God who loves her just the way she is. This belief gives
Shug the feeling of love, security and freedom that she missed during her childhood. With this feeling, she is able to stay independent of other people and is able to overcome her painful relationship with Albert who is too weak to fight for her against his family’s prejudices.
69 The lack of attachment from her childhood certainly contributes to her rather pragmatic approach to relationships and life. Life treated her tough; however, Shug is able to find her own way of coping. And when she finds it, the old unhappy and unloved Lilly Avery disappears, and a new strong Shug Avery is born. Thanks to
Celie, Shug finds herself a place among other women in the black community, a place where she is welcomed and needed and where she can be just herself.
Sofia Butler, another strong character in the novel, uses her physical strength and the support of her siblings as the things that she relies on in coping with difficulties. Her behaviour and also her coping strategies are often man-like; active and problem-solving. She is not afraid to make her own decisions; she fearlessly defies her father and marries Harpo. Although raised in a family ruled by an abusive father, Sofia still believes in equality. She hopes to find it in her marriage with Harpo, but when she sees that he is not able to accept it, Sofia does not hesitate to leave him. She seeks help within her community, her family. However,
Sofia is also very proud and quick-tempered and these qualities make her life really difficult. Her proud behaviour and sharp tongue cause that Sofia ends up in prison.
Although she tries to fight, her strength does not work here, and for the first time in life, she has to surrender. The feeling of helplessness takes a terrible toll on
Sofia. She falls into apathy for a time and passively accepts her faith. She does not fight; she follows the orders and waits when it is over. When in prison, Sofia’s original strategies did not work; she could not stand up for herself and the supportive black community was not able to fight against the white mayor and his decisions. After Sofia returns back to her community and her wounded self slowly recovers, she gradually becomes the “old” strong Sofia.
70 The thesis has confirmed that different people have different strategies in overcoming life’s challenges. As people go through different stages in their lives, new experiences and new encounters often influence and sometimes quite dramatically alter their ways of thinking and consequently their behaviour. The thesis shows that without support from a friend or a community and without belief in one’s own abilities, it is very difficult to find the strength to actively deal with life’s hardships. It is the feeling of self-worth together with the feeling of belonging somewhere that positively influence the choice of strategies for coping, leading to a preference of active, problem-solving moves. The thesis also proved that the selection of coping strategies the main women characters make in the novel is only natural and dependent on their situation and life experience.
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