Making Hurston’s Heroine Her Own: Love and Womanist Resistance in The Color Purple

Tracy L. Bealer

I love the way Janie Crawford / left her husbands (, “Saving the Life That Is Your Own” 7)

The unmistakable and intense affiliation between Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) has attracted much comment, most notably from Walker herself.1 In his introduction to a collection of essays addressing Walker’s work, Harold Bloom frames the connection between Hurston and Walker as primarily imitative: “The authority of the male voice, and its , may well be subverted by Hurston [. . .] But what has Walker subverted by imitating and so repeating a revisionist moment she has not originated? No feminist critic will admit the legitimacy of that question, but it abides and will require an answer” (4). Bloom’s question can be answered by re-working the premise of the question: Walker is not merely replicating the subversive moments in Hurston, but rather rewriting Janie’s heroine’s journey with a politically significant twist. The Color Purple features another African American who achieves self-actualization and resists sexist oppression through romantic love, but does so by overcoming a different set of challenges than Janie faces. Celie’s dark skin and homosexuality position her as a heroine particularly suited to resonate within her reformulation of the radical feminist politics of the 1980s. The Color Purple was written in the midst of an intense examination and critique of the precepts and assumptions of white . During the decade following “A Black Feminist Statement” from the Combahee River collective (1977), many writers took up the

24 Tracy L. Bealer statement’s challenge to explore the “interlocking” systems of “racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” (Some of Us Are Brave 13). The 1980s consequently saw an explosion of fiction and nonfiction that addressed the marginalization of poor women, women of color, and lesbians in feminist politics. Collections like This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982) articulated the frustration many women felt with a movement they argued was white dominated, classist, homophobic, and willfully ignorant of the cultural differences that shaped women of color. Walker’s landmark collection of essays, In Search of Our ’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), coined the term “womanist” as one theoretical framework for distinguishing social goals specific to African American women and presented sexual, sororal and maternal love between as a political tool for radical social change Walker opens Mothers’ Gardens with four numbered definitions of a womanist (xi-ii). The first entry explains that the word is appropriated from the Black folk expression “womanish,” connoting maturity and authority in an African American woman. The second and third definitions Walker assigns to womanist—the heart of her explanation of the term—are directly concerned with how and whom a womanist loves. Whereas the third entry reads as an epic catalogue of aesthetic and self-love, the second entry specifies the interpersonal erotics of womanism: “A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually” [emphasis added]. A womanist’s first erotic loyalty is to other women, whether that love is expressed sexually or platonically. Whereas love for men is allowed for within womanism, the “sometimes” is telling. Walker explicitly privileges the love women have for each other as a means to the womanist precept of “[a]cting grown up. Being grown up.” Walker conflates the ability and willingness to love other women either sexually or nonsexually with growth as a human being. The fourth definition compares womanism to feminism by way of color: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (xii). This analogy implies not only that womanists are literally darker in hue than (white) feminists, but also that womanism is richer and less diluted than feminism.