Essay on Race and Class in Alice Walkers Color Purple

Essay on Race and Class in The Color Purple An important juncture in Alice Walkers The Color Purple is reached when Celie first recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie. This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this epistolary novel but also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie struggles to puzzle out the markings on her first envelope from Nettie provides a concrete illustration of both Celies particular horizon of interpretation and Walkers chosen approach to the epistolary form: Saturday morning Shug put Nettie letter in my lap. Little fat queen of England stamps on it, plus stamps that got peanuts,†¦show more content†¦But Walkers privileging of the domestic perspective of her narrators has also been judged to have other effects on the text. Indeed, critics from various aesthetic and political camps have commented on what they perceive as a tension between public and private discourse in the novel.(2) Thus, in analyzing Celies representation of national identity, Lauren Berlant identifies a separation of aesthetic and political discourses in the novel and concludes that Celies narrative ultimately emphasizes individual essence in false opposition to institutional history (868). Revealing a very different political agenda in his attacks on the novels womanist stance, George Stade also points to a tension between personal and public elements in the text when he criticizes the novels narcissism and its championing of domesticity over the public world of masculine power plays (266). Finally, in praising Walkers handling of sexual oppression, Elliott Butler-Evans argues that Celies personal letters serve precisely as a textual strategy by which the larger African-American history, focused on racial conflict and struggle, can be marginalized by its absence from the narration (166). By counterposing personal and publicShow MoreRelatedThe Color Purple by Alice Walker675 Words   |  3 Pagesfor humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.† Straight from the mouth of Alice Walker this quote was spoken in order to point out that fact that none of God’s creatures were put on this Earth to be someone else’s property. Alice Walker is an African-American novelist and poet who took part in the 1960’s civil rights movement in Mississippi. 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