In an essay of not more than 1500 words explain how this statement informs your reading of The Colour Purple, and one other prose fiction text form Literature and Gender.

A210 Approaching Literature

TMA 05

For Walker the use of language is to do with an expression of self in opposition to gender oppression, of presenting self in opposition to a language which is not your own.

As well as The Colour Purple (TCP), I have chosen to write about The Yellow Wallpaper (TYW).

In TCP, written in first person narrative, Walker uses the epistolary style of writing, giving authority to the voice of Celie and enabling the reader to accept her as having real presence and experience. In her opening letter to God, it is obvious she has no self-confidence, crossing herself out with a line through ‘I am’ (p.3 TCP). Because her mother is so ill, Celie becomes a sexual commodity for her Pa, epitomising a male dominated society, where women accepted patriarchy.

This epistolary style of writing was popular in the eighteenth century novel sentiment, morally edifying the reader, with authority being given to the protagonist, in this case, Celie. ‘Celie writes to God, for lack of any living person with whom to share her troubles’ (p.155 Literature and Gender (LG). She is not able to defend herself due to her multiple jeopardy, of being a woman, being black and being uneducated. Celie is a woman who, through being raped and beaten by her ‘Pa’, is ‘taught to fear men and devalue herself’ (p.55 LG). As her letters progress, she grows in confidence within and about her own language. In an early letter to God, written when her Pa stopped her going to school after he got her pregnant the first time and her younger sister continued to go, shows how she wanted to be educated, ‘I feel bad sometime Nettie done pass me in learnin’ (p.12 TCP). Later on, she meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress, who helps her find confidence in herself, they become friends and lovers. Shug is a singer, naming a song after Celie, who is very proud of this, writing in a letter to God, ‘First time somebody made something and name it after me’ (p.65 TCP).

Meeting Shug is a turning point for Celie, she begins to challenge patriarchy, which has oppressed her all her life, even though a perpetrator herself of patriarchal practice with her letters to God, perhaps the ultimate patriarchal figure of male authority.

This epistolary form allows Celie to speak for herself, while simultaneously placing her within a genre previously given only to a white educated elite, usually male dominated. Writing is an important tool for her self-discovery, plus a tool helping her overcome hardships.

Shug becomes her confidante, showing her how to be herself, teaching her to look at herself ...

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Shug becomes her confidante, showing her how to be herself, teaching her to look at herself without feeling guilty, and helping her make connections with other women. She does this ‘through language and other forms of creativity, including sexual expression’ (p.166). Her creativity gives her confidence in opposing her husband as well as making pants and earning a good living. Reinforced in a letter to Nettie ‘I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends and time. And you alive and be home soon. With our children.’ (p.183 TCP)

Throughout her letters, Celie’s actual way of speaking doesn’t change, just her fluency and belief in her own voice. The main turning point was discovering that Nettie had been writing to her and was still alive. Her confidence grew and her letters to God ceased, as she now had Nettie to write to. Writing in one of her last letters to God ‘Now I know Nettie alive I begin to strut a little bit’ (p.126 TCP). Her newly found self-esteem helped her pay a visit to her Pa, shown by her fluency and language with ‘For the first time in my life I wanted to see Pa’ (p.126 TCP) and ‘I don’t write to God no more, I write to you’ (p.164), to Nettie. Also referring to the hurdles women had to overcome in their society, in a conversation with Shug about God, ‘If he ever listened to poor coloured women the world would be a different place, I can tell you’ (p.164 TCP).

Through Shug's didactic examples, Celie moves from her role of sexual commodity and a woman who was denied a voice for so long, to a woman with the power and confidence to succeed as a woman in her own right, who discovers her inner self and beauty.

Coloured women didn’t have privileges higher education; they were hindered by race, class and gender. ‘It was the civil rights and feminist movements of the late 1960’s and 1970’s that led to the inclusion of previously ‘silenced’ and marginalized groups into the traditional white male literary canon’ (p.149 LG). Endeavouring to include women writers in the curriculum focused mainly on white women, but black women writers have since made their way into the newly developing canon.

Writing was a form of work denied to women for a long time and The Yellow Wallpaper (TYW) is a prime example of how unassailable male power determined the rules for female behaviour. Written in first person narrative, by someone who writes and also writes about wanting to write. Her husband and brother, who are both physicians, dominate the narrator of TYW and she is ‘absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until she is well again’ (p.348 LG). Her husband John ‘knows what is best for her’, and in their patriarchal society, she has to accept this. She wants to write, but even when she does, she hides it from him, writing ‘There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word’ (p.349 LG). She is being ‘driven mad by the obstacles (symbolic and real) placed in the way of her self-expression through creative writing’ (p.110 LG). Writing is used as a form of self – expression, which women were not permitted to do in such a male dominated society. It was a means of expressing their identity, but when suppressed, their creative energy needed to find another way to vent itself, resulting in women writers going mad and even committing suicide, as a means of escape. The author of TYW, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and also Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, all committed suicide, having also written about madness. ‘Even suicide it seems is gendered’ (p.110 LG). Female writers had to tolerate such psychological pressures, their literary creativity opposed to their expected domestic roles as women. From TYW, ‘It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!’ and ‘I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me’ (p350 LG).

She begins to lose her grip on the world around her, helped by the awful wallpaper and barred windows. She writes, ‘This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!’ (p.351 LG). Her madness is only implied by the reader’s ability to read between the lines, as she writes only of what she feels and hears, she doesn’t directly express what she thinks. The author offers a disturbingly ‘real’ look at the conditions which may be said to ‘drive women mad’ (p.123 LG). The woman she ‘sees’ in the wallpaper could be an image of herself; the woman she believes is trying to escape out of the wallpaper. She writes ‘and she is all the time trying to climb through.’ And ‘I think that woman gets out in the daytime! (p.356 LG). Even the smell of the paper seems to follow her everywhere, as she writes ‘It creeps all over the house’ and ‘It gets into my hair.’ (p356 LG).

The narrator is deviating from the normal domestic role expected of her and hardly mentions her baby. ‘It is fortunate that Mary is so good with the baby’ and ‘yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous’ (p.350 LG), then again with ‘There’s one comfort, the baby is well and happy,’ (p.353 LG). Presenting herself in opposition to a language not her own, she has gone from a ‘sane’ person who detests the wallpaper, to a ‘mad woman’ who has ‘become’ this awful wallpaper.

In The Colour Purple, Celie writes in a letter to Nettie how she stands up to her husband, Albert, with ‘But Nettie and my children coming home soon, I say. And when she do, all us together gon whup your ass.’ (p.170 TCP). She expresses herself in opposition to gender oppression, no longer accepting male dominance.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator seems to express herself in relation to the wallpaper, losing herself in it. She appears to be liberating herself as a woman and opposing gender oppression in her own way, believing she has won and John can do nothing about it, writing ‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ (p.359 LG).

Both novels depict a changing of gender role. They epitomise patriarchal dominance, both women finding a way to express their inner selves in opposition to gender oppression. Celie (TCP) uses letter writing to offload her ‘hysteria’ and the unnamed narrator (TYW) overcomes her detestation of the wallpaper and uses it to ‘liberate’ herself from the normal domestic role expected of her, and from the patronising husband’s language, such as ‘What is it little girl?’ (p.353 TYW). Through her hysteria, she interprets the patterns on the wallpaper with a female language which is deliberately illogical, Emotional, non-linear, intuitive, as opposed to rational and logical. She writes, ‘There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down’ (p.351 LG). Both women are using their own language against male authority.

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