The Limits of the Letter: Alice Walker ’s The Color Purple (1982)

Abstract

This chapter argues that it is time to look beyond the celebration of Alice Walker’s blockbuster epistolary novel The Color Purple, in order to think again about the version of liberation that its narrative contains. Whilst acknowledging the importance of The Color Purple as a historical intervention in the field of African American literature, Bower powerfully argues that we should now shift our attention to the question of how far an epistolary narrative can contain the experiences of a poor, uneducated African American woman. By starting with the epistolary Ansatz, the chapter shows how censorship, isolation, poverty and a lack of education all make letter writing difficult. Bower argues that Walker conceals these difficulties, and epistolary limits, under a deceptively smooth, consoling narrative. The chapter is not only critical, but also reveals some of the innovative literary techniques which briefly emerge in The Color Purple (including the development of epistolary free indirect discourse and the ‘signature line’). The chapter investigates the limits of literary forms, particularly in relation to certain kinds of historical experience, and shows that although Walker’s narrative offers a glimpse of a reworked epistolary material, it ultimately hides its epistolary limitations by smoothing over the ruptures produced in using a letter narrative to tell Celie’s tale.