“My mama she fuss at me an look at me. She happy, cause he good to her now.”
If we look on later in the novel we can see the change in her writing style, especially her grammatical structure:
“I lean over the car window and try to show her which way to move the gears. But she flustered and all the children and Odessa and Jack all standing round the porch watching her.”
We can see that her grammar is not perfect but the new vocabulary she has acquired and her writing structure has changed. By writing the letters Celie has been teaching herself and advancing her education.
Many of the letters start with “Dear God” showing that Celie’s religion meant a lot to her. Black people in America at the time of slavery were very religious and spiritual people. When they were kept as slaves the only thing they were allowed to read was the Bible. The only place they were allowed to congregate together was at service on a Sunday morning. Their only escape was to God. Having a strong spiritual belief led them to think that one day they would be free just as Baby Suggs thought and preached about in ‘Beloved’.
Celie believed in the omnipotence of God and always turned to him in her time of need. It has to be noted though of the perception of God by Celie:
“ Angels in all white, white hair and white eyes, look like albinos.”
Celie sees God as pure white – the colour of the society that oppresses her colour. Has the white society indoctrinated her into this line of thinking or has her own life experiences led her to believe this to be true?
When her stepfather tells her to tell ‘nobody but God’ that is what she does do. Celie writes down her experiences and feelings in the form of a letter. Each letter can be seen as a soliloquy – Celie bearing her soul to the reader. She has no reason to lie to God as he is always there for her and it would be a sin to do it. Her strong sense of spirituality lets her ‘pour out her heart’ and write in on a piece of paper. It is known that this is a practised coping technique: instead of keeping everything locked inside, like Paul D in ‘Beloved’, feelings should be expressed either verbally or in text form so there isn’t so much conflict with the body and mind. Celie writes her letters so she doesn’t destruct. Being black in a white-run society is hard enough but when you live in a place where there is internalised racism and prejudice it can be unbearable.
Letters are Celie’s way of mentioning the unmentionable. She is so ignorant that she is biologically and psychologically traumatised that she writes how she feels and the reader understands what is happening to her.
The repetition of this structure helps to overcome the diversity of the plot in character, time, and place. Although Celie is at the centre of the plot, there are many varying characters that enter the action and it is easy to switch between each saga by making the book episodic. By doing this to the book Walker is using a Brechtian technique. Brecht did this so he could explore a new aspect of a social problem or enlarging the study made to a specific point.
An episodic plot covers an extensive period of time, sometimes many years, and may take place in several locations. A large number of characters may enter into the action; there may even be a subplot, involving a different set of characters. The sequence of episodes will not necessarily develop according to the rules of cause and effect; that is, one scene does not always lead to the next, but may skip to another part of the action in the subplot. Rather than the cause-and-effect pattern of climactic plots, the author, in this case, Alice Walker, may use two techniques to organize the action: with parallelism she creates similarities between the fate of different sets of characters; with contrast, the focus may move from one group of characters to another in a different location, short scenes may alternate with longer ones, public scenes with private ones, comic scenes with serious scenes. The overall effect of episodic structure is cumulative. Isolated actions do not determine the outcome of the plot so much as the avalanche of events that sweeps everything toward the conclusion.
Walker is letting us comment on the problems that are encountered with each letter without enthralling the reader into a ‘realm of fantasies’ created in the mind by a flowing nature. She uses little detail to describe the surrounding to back this.
The disadvantages of using the epistolary structure is having so many letters that remember every event and every piece of conversation, is the book a source of reliable information? Is the book an accurate portrayal of a girl in Celie’s position? In order to understand Celie’s world the reader must believe that it is real but by having Celie remember everything and to have the ability to write it all down comprehensibly even though she comes from a rural, non-educated background. Would Celie even know Sofia’s story of being a ‘slave’ for the mayor of the city in so much detail?
By writing the book in letters it lets the reader take a step away and not become emotionally attached to the character of Celie unlike a flowing novel. We learn more about the themes of the book this way as we can analyse each event as it happens.
We learn so much about Celie through her letters. We see her develop whilst we read. This is a very powerful technique as it is as if we are watching somebody grow up in front of our own eyes. Walker places domestic abuse and how oppressed
people can unite with solidarity to overcome their oppressors inside the larger context of
the misery inflicted by a racist society. Throughout the novel, Celie
references the fact that she is discriminated against by the white community. It is clearly racism that lands Sofia in jail. The mayor can slap her and go free, but when she socks the mayor, she is beaten and jailed. When Mary Agnes approaches the warden, her white uncle, about releasing Sofia, she is raped; the warden knows he does not have to worry about being charged with raping a Black girl. When Eleanor Jane brings her baby boy for Sofia to bless, Sofia tells her she cannot bless him, for he will probably grown up to be her oppressor, like most white men. By Celie developing through her letters and through her experiences Walker is commenting on how hard life is for black people in this period and the long history of racism will be hard to overcome.
Having the ability to express oneself is a very important thing as it gives the doer the opportunity to grow mentally and creatively.
