Mo dern Critical Interpretations Nice Walker's The Color Purple Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS Philadelphia PS 3573 4425 c632s 2000 MAIN Contents @ 2000 by Chelsea House Publishers, a division of Editor's Note vii Main Line Book Co. Introduction @ 2000 by Harold Bloom Introduction 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be Harold Bloom repro?uced or transmitted in any form or,by any means withoot the written permission of the publisher. Roce, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple 3 Printed and bound in the United States of America Laaren Berlant 1098765432t Color Me Zora; Atrce Walker's (Re) Writing of the Speakerly Text 29 * The paper used in this publication meets the minimum Henry Louis Gatu Jr requirements of the American National Standard for Peimanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple 53 239.48-1984 bell hooks Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication,Data t'Show Alice Walker's The color purple / edited and with an intro- me How to Do Like You": Didacticism and the Epistolary Form in duction by Harold Bloom. The Color Purpk 67 p. cm.- (Modern critical interpretations) Thnaar Kntz Iniludes bibliographical references (p. ) and index' ISBN 0-7910-5666'X (alk. PaPer) To Do Revision Epistolary l. Walker, Nice, 1944 - Color PurPle. "Trying Without God": The of Address in Tbe 2. Afro-American woman in literature. Color Purple 77 I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. Carolyn Williams P53573.L425 C6325 2000 813''54-dc2t gg-o5zo2+ Romance, Marginaliql Mauilineaget Tlte Color Purple 89 CIP Molly Hite With Ears to Hear and Eyes to Seer Alice Walker's Parable Tlte Color Purple 107 Diane Gabriehen Scholl Contributing Editor: Erica DaCosta Tlte Color Purple: A Snrdy of Walker's Womanist Gospel ll9 Tlayline Jita Alhn ,l 2( HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. Color Me Zora: Alice Walker's (R.)Writing 9f the Speakerly Tbxt O, write my name, O write my name: O write my name . Write my name when-a you get home . Yes, write my name in the book of life . The Angels in the heav'n going-to write my name. Spiritual Underground Railroad My spirit leans in joyousness tow'rd thine, My gifted spirit, as with gladdened heart Mvvision flies along T;ffiEi#'ffi** orcolor,,, 1836 I am only a pen in His hand. Rebecca CoxJackson I'm just a link in a chain. Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools" D I- or just over two hundred years, the concern to depict the quest of the black speaking subject to find his or her voice has been a repeated topos of ItwnTlte SigntfyingMothey: ATltcory ofAfm:American Literary CriticinnbyHenryLouis GatesJr, O 1988 Henry Louis GatesJr. 29 HENRYLOUIS GATESJR. Color Me Zora: Nice Walker's (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text 3l the black tradition, and perhaps has been its most central trope. As theme, as defined an entirely new mode of representation of the black quest to make revised trope, as a double-voiced narrative strategy, the representation of the text speak. characters and texts finding a voice has functioned as a sign both of the To begin to account for the Signifyin(g) revisions at work in Walker's formal unity of the Afro-American literary tradition and of the integrity of Tbe Cohr Purple, it is useful to recall the dream of literacy figured in John the black subjects depicted in this literature. Jea's autobiography. In Chapter 4, I maintained that Jea's odd revision of the Esu's double voice and the language of Signi$zin(g) have served scene of the Thlking Book served to erase the figurative potential of this throughout this book as uni$zing metaphors, indigenous to the tradition, trope for the slave narrators who followed him. After Jea, slave narrators both for patterns of revision from text to text and for modes of figuration at refigured a repeated scene of instruction in terms of reading and writing work within the text. The Anglo-African narrators published between 1770 rather than in terms of making the text speak. While these two tropes are and 1815 placed themselves in a line of descent through the successive obviously related, it seems equally obvious that the latter represents a key revision of one trope, of a sacred text that refuses to speak to its would-be reworking of the former, in terms more conducive to the direcdy polemical black auditor.ln Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston depicts role in which the slave narratives were engaged in an antebellum America her protagonist's ultimate moment of self-awareness in her ability to name seemingly preoccupied with the future of human slavery. her own divided consciousness. As an element of theme and as a highly While the trope of the Thlking Book disappeared from the male slave accomplished rhetorical strategy that depends for its effect on the bivocality narratives after Jea literalized it it is refigured in the mystical writings of of free indirect discourse, this voicing of a divided consciousness (another Rebecca Cox Jaclson, an Afro-American visionary and Shaker eldress who topos of the tradition) has been transformed in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo was a contemporary of Jea's. Jaclson was a free black woman who lived into a remarkably self-reflexive representation of the ironies of writing a text between 1795 and 1871. She was a fascinating religious leader and feminist, in which two foregrounded voices compete with each other for control of who founded a Shaker sisterhood in Philadelphia in 1857, after r difficult narration itself. Whereas the development of the tradition to the publication struggle with her family, with her initial religious denomination, and even of Their Eyes Were Watching God seems to have been preoccupied with the with the Shakers. Her extensive autobiographical writings (1830-1864) were mimetic possibilities of the speaking voice, black fiction aker Their Eyes collected and edited by Jean McMahon Humez, published in 1981, and would seem even more concerned to explore the implications of doubled reviewed by Alice Walker in that same year. The reconstitution ofJaclaon's voices upon strategies of writing. texts is one of the major scholarly achievements in Afro-American literature, Strategies as effective as Hurston's innovative use of free indirect lloth because of *1e richness of her texts and because the writings of black discourse and Reedt bifurcated narrative voice lead one to wonder how a women in antebellum America are painfully scarce, especially when rhetorical strategy could possibly extend, or Signify upon, the notions of cornpared to the large body of writings by black men. voice at play in these major texts of the black tradition. How could a text Jackson, like her contemporary black ex-slave writers, gives a possibly trope the extended strategies of voicing which we have seen to be in prclminent place in her texts to her own literary training. Hers is a divinely evidence in Their Eyes and in Mumbo Jumbo? To Sigrit, upon both Flurston's irrspired literacy training even more remarkable thanJea's. Writing between and Reed's strategies of narration would seem to demand a form of the novel Itt30 and 1832, just fifteen-odd years afterJea,Jaclson-with or withoutJea's that, at once, breaks with tradition yet revises the most salielt features tcxt in mind-refigures Jea's divine scene of instruction. Jackson's through which I have been defining the formal unity of this tradition. rcfiguration of this supernatural event, however, is cast within a sexual Just as Hurston's and Reed's texts present seemingly immovable opposition between male and female. Whereas her antecedents used the obstacles to an equally telling revision ofthe traditiont trope ofvoicing, so trope to define the initial sense of difference between slave and free, African too does Inaisible Man, the tradition's text of blackness and, in my opinion, its nncl European, Jackson's revision charts the liberation of a (black) woman most profound achievement in the novel. The first-person narration of fiom a (black) man over the letter of the text. I bracket black becatse, as we Inaisible 1y[6n, the valorization of oral narration in Their Eyes, and the shall see,Jackson freed herself of her brother's domination of her literacy and italicized interface of showiirg and telling in Mumbo Jumbo, taken together, lrer ability to interpret, but supplanted him with a mythical white male would seem to leave rather little space in which narrative innovation could intcrpreter. even possibly be attempted, Alice Walker's revisions of Their Eyes Were Jaclson, recalling Jee, writes, "After I rcccived the blessing of God, I Wtching God and of Rebcccn Cox Jeckron's G,itr of Powv, however, have had a grcat deeire to rcsd the Biblo," Lamenting the fEct that "I rm the only (Re)Writing 32 HENRYLOIIIS GATESJR. Color Me Zora: Nice Walker's of the Speakerly Text 33 child of my mother that had not learning," she seeks out her brother to "give was spoken in my mind, "Who learned the first man on earth?" me one hour,s lesson at night after supper or before we went to bed." Her "Why, God." "He is unchangeable, and if He learned the first brotheE a prominent clergl.nnan in the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal man to read, He can learn you." I laid down my dress, picked church, was often "so tired when he came home that he had not [the] power up my Bible, ran upstairs, opened it, and kneeled down with it the so to do," a situation, Jackson tells us, which would "grieve" her' But pressed to my breast, prayed earnestly to Almighty God if it situation that grieved Jacftson even more was her brother's penchant to was consisting to His holy will, to learn me to read His holy ,,rewrite,, her words, to revise her dictation, one supposes, to make them word.