But on the other hand, if you can believe I am in Africa, and I am, You can believe anything.
—from one of Nettie’s letters in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
The Color Purple, by black feminist writer Alice Walker, is not a good novel. Therefore, one had every right to expect that it would make an excellent Hollywood film since Hollywood has never been able to make great films from great books. And because the film has been recognized rather lavishly with awards and nominations for awards, not to mention a very strong box office as well, it is safe to assert that the novel has indeed been transformed into an excellent Hollywood film. A book like The Color Purple lends itself to the glossy and excessively sentimental treatment that Hollywood is so capable of providing for its “serious subjects” or those endearing pop-culture literary attempts at some sort of social protest. The Color Purple offers Hollywood, rather like a traditional trifle on a wedding gown, a bit of something old and a bit of something new. The old stuff is race, which, in this post-Dr. King age of a perfectly integrated society, where indeed a Negro can marry his white boss’s daughter, is not only unworthy of any trenchant discussion, but scarcely worthy of notice. Blacks have long ceased to be exotic or exciting or even interesting, largely because it has been determined by an act of cultural fiat that, except as nostalgic objects of some ahistorical past, they no longer exist. Dr. Kelly Miller predicted back in 1925 in the New York Amsterdam News that the Negro race would die out, and I guess in the 1980s we can hear, to use an old black folk phrase, “the death bell toning.” So, it is a perfect age to make a movie about race when one is no longer confronted with the question which side are you on and racism is something that occurred long ago and far away. Feminism, though, is something quite lively and intriguing for Hollywood and it has been pursued by the filmmakers out there with all the naive gracelessness and enervating bathos that will eventually cease to make it an object of real thought but rather a shrewd diversion from thought itself. Feminism becomes for us through our films not even something remotely identifiable with a “social problem” but the mere cause for shocks and quakes to the nervous system, something to keep us from being bored that will become a part of the collected fund of contemporary boredom. I sometimes think the sole purpose of the film The Color Purple is simply to stave off boredom with, ironically but not unexpectedly, all the elements of boredom.
There has been in recent weeks a good deal of teeth gnashing and hand wrenching in some quarters of the black community over the film, Hollywood’s latest treatment, among other things, of Afro-American life. One might almost be happy that this decidedly inept film had been made if the ensuing debate in the black community about the meaning of the depiction of black men and black women in American popular culture would produce anything like critical clarity. It will not. So black folk will simply experience another round of murderous name calling and posturing, the sort of emotionalism that passes for constructive argument in the black community, a place where many people still innocently think that mere outrage over insults means something in this world.
The Color Purple is one of such a long line of inept Hollywood films about black life—a cultural enterprise that started with King Vidor’s Hallelujah in 1929—that this sort of thing has become a cherished tradition. The Color Purple is a very bad film, so undeniably bad that one wonders how Steven Spielberg—its director--ever acquired any sort of reputation as a competent artist. (I suppose it is, finally, its utter mediocrity that makes The Color Purple such an outstanding Hollywood film in much the same way that Lilies of the Field was. In Hollywood films about black folk the powers that be usually hit what they aim for.) Spielberg is well considered because, in part, his films make enormous amounts of money, which means that they cease to be films at all and become entrepreneurial events. This ability to make money has always been consistently mistaken by Americans for talent or genius, depending upon how much money is made. Also, Spielberg is loved by American audiences because he makes very expensive B movies, which means that he combines hokum and splendor, that indeed he cares very much about richly etching the details of hokum, corn, and trash. As a result, he has bestowed an enormous significance on a mediocre art. His purpose is not to make the B movie any less mediocre but to make it a more grandiose spectacle. He does not remind me so much of David Lean or Cecil B. DeMille, who also loved the epic, the grand spectacle; Spielberg brings to mind the late jazz orchestra leader Stan Kenton: give me a cast of thousands and I will give you not order but the degenerative excesses of order. This art of the maximum, which is supposed to heighten one’s sensations by playing so blatantly upon the emotions, becomes in the end merely prosaic. Spielberg’s films essentially have the same moral and artistic visions as a professional wrestling match: the experience of an exaggerated morality in an excessive spectacle that is, I think, not an experience of art, but an experience of the negation of art.
In The Color Purple clichés fall upon one another, trip over one another really, in such a tumble that one is forced to think that Spielberg was really directing a parody or a comedy and was not succeeding. There is no need to waste the artistic significance and power of such excess by taking it seriously; but apparently he does, just as Stan Kenton did in jazz orchestration. Sunrises and sunsets abound; children are seen running through grassy meadows of flowers that exist nowhere in the South of the black farm worker; Africa is the land of wild animals and huts. We even have a brief “coon” episode of singing in a church, a barroom brawl, and a happy ending, this last being the only aspect of the novel that Spielberg used unaltered. And, of course, in Spielberg, as in the novels of Henry James, everyone has enough to eat and money is, at best, only a moral abstraction. The whole did not resemble a movie so much as an interminably long television program, which, I think, for Spielberg was precisely the point of all those clinchés. They may not have succeeded as comedy but they did succeed in intoxicating the audience with the comfort of things familiar. In the end, the film is like a very expensive, very large greeting card; and a card, after all, has no meaning except in the experience of receiving it. The Color Purple has meaning only in the experience of having watched it. The audience emerges from the theater in much the same frame of mind in which fans emerge from a wrestling match saying collectively, “I cried,” “I laughed,” “I was angry.” It is not the experience of catharsis but rather something more akin to the experience of receiving therapy or counseling (the white 1980s version of mojo hands, voodoo, and St. John the conqueror root: psychoanalysis and self-help for the masses). The film does not purge one’s emotions or free one’s secret self; in short, it does not produce the true power of dream. It simply, in the absolute darkness of the theater, allows one to evoke endlessly a series of absolutely trite responses to a series of emotional, manipulative, trite situations; for the film does indeed trivialize its themes by condemning the modes of irony, ambiguity, and, ultimately, realism; so, instead of being searing, it is merely heart warming. And a chronically insecure American audience is reassured about its bourgeois pretensions and the moral integrity of the society itself. The Color Purple does not broaden one’s ability to respond but reduces it, and the audience finds this both charming and soothing. The characters on the screen have meaning only insofar as they provide this insular, protective, and narcotic experience for the audience. They mean nothing otherwise.
But the fact that The Color Purple might he dismissed as bad art, as kitsch, is, on one level, the least significant aspect of this quite important film. For what this film brings to mind more significantly is Richard Attenborough’s tribute-epic about a large portion of the nonwhites of the world: Gandhi, a tableau that actually has less to do with the life of Gandhi than with the white West’s romantic love of Indians. Gandhi sits in this film as a sort of centerpiece on an elaborately decorated table, resembling for the most part nothing so much as the late-nineteenth-century representations of Uncle Tom, the white West’s other famous gentle dark man. And probably for the Western mind, Gandhi does indeed become the dramatic, ahistorical, fictional Uncle Tom of the stage plays: his Hinduism washed clean by its similarity to Christian beatitude and humility, his virtue being that he has endured nobly (like Faulkner’s Negroes) and thus can be petted perpetually by condescending whites. This supposedly historical film seems constantly on the verge not only of eschewing history but denying it. Years are denoted on the screen, but little can be made of the significance or lineage of the conflicts that are dramatized; they possess no resonating depths. So history itself becomes worse than confused; it is utterly senseless. What is the meaning of the British raj? What is the meaning of the war between Hindu and Moslem? What does it mean to be Hindu other than, as the film simplistically and tautologically points out, that one is obviously not a Moslem? And what does it mean to be Moslem? This is not a question of whether history ought to mean something—a philosophical and theological concern that this film and most other commercial art do not remotely approach—but rather, whether it can mean something intelligible in this framework. Human beings, apparently saddled with both the responsibility and the need, must by virtue of their humanity make history bear intelligible meaning; otherwise why bother talking about history at all. So concerned is Attenborough with giving us the sweep and splendor of history that its meaning becomes not only displaced but irrelevant. History is simply a grand parade of picturesque, loosely connected events that fail to mean anything aside from being grand and having “changed the world” in some unfathomable way, largely because, one supposes, it was grand enough to do so. Attenborough’s film, like most of its type, gives us history as panorama. That is to say, history as an unintelligible spectacle of the making of history.
The Color Purple is not a historical film in the same sense as Gandhi, but it seems, by necessity of the setting of the subject matter, as preoccupied with history as any “period epic.” The Color Purple gives us a fictive historical sense by, like Gandhi, denoting years on the screen, arbitrary years to all appearances, to indicate the passage of time. But here the alienation from history and from lineage seems even more compelling and distressful than in Gandhi. The years roll by in The Color Purple and they signify nothing for either the audience or the characters on the screen. One can overlook such anachronistic details as Shug Avery playing a blues record in 1916 when blues did not become a recorded art until 1920, or Celie drinking champagne on a Jim Crow car in the 1930s. But what cannot be overlooked are those dumb dates themselves. Time, to paraphrase Rodgers and Hart, might just as well have stood still. The characters are totally untouched by history itself and so is the audience, much to its relief. The changes that occurred in America from the turn of the century through the 1930s (particularly changes in the American South) have no effect upon the characters. The financial fortune of Mr. Albert as a black Southern farmer is not affected by politics; it is not even affected by the weather. The characters remain immaculate, severed from their parents as is true of characters in nearly all American films, and signifying a purity, an innocence that white Americans wish to maintain in their view of their history, of blacks, and of themselves as a people. There is more than a bit of truth in the bitter assessment of this film by one black nationalist who said, in effect, that whites have been unable to portray honestly their own history in American films, so why expect them to handle anyone else’s any differently?
But there is more at stake here than merely that. History has become for the white American that which occurs away from home and mother. And all changes that are wrought upon people are individualistic, internal, and inner-directed, never generated by the outward events in a society. Thus, this “liberal” film winds up purporting a very conservative ethic: we must all pull ourselves up by our own emotional bootstraps. The victim, in essence, cures herself. Even if it is argued that the brutal treatment of women by men is such a “universal” and ageless concern that it transcends history, we are then left, by such grandiose admission of true futility, with the utter impossibility of either understanding or changing such treatment. It would seem as much a mysterious given in the world as air, water, and light. It would be, in short, unintelligible. This view once again endorses another conservative ethic: the way things are is the nature of the way things are. This is a huge conundrum for both the film and the novel because neither makes an attempt to explain the nature of the problem or evil against which they are supposedly protesting. So the ending, which gives us the transformation of Mr. Albert, is not simply far-fetched, which would have been acceptable, but utterly impossible since nothing in his society as we are given to understand it would generate or support such a change. The question is not only why would he change, considering the social conditions under which he lives, but how could he change if his moral sense is so utterly and inexplicably debased? This is why, incidentally, considering the novel alone, a character like Joe Starks in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is an infinitely superior depiction of a brutal, repressive, wife-beating, black man. Starks is a deeply complex man whose bourgeois aspirations we find, in spite of ourselves, to be attractive. And it is that essential attractiveness that ultimately makes the reader realize the horror of Starks’s misogyny. Starks wants what every man in bourgeois culture desires: control, ownership, position. And the male reader slowly but surely grows to know that Starks is really himself. There is a great deal at stake in the war between the black sexes involving the man’s sense of values and his ego and his refusal to lose face before other men; so much is at stake that the reader discovers in the end that men like Starks, and that is most of us, would rather die than change. Starks does not give us much hope but he is not unintelligible.
But much as white Americans may find the great ahistorical sense of the film comforting, black Americans, I think, a significant number of whom liked the film, find it comforting as well. Blacks have shown just how much they have come to resemble other Americans in their alienation from their own history. Nothing indicates this as clearly as Black History Month where history becomes a series of dates and faces, notable persons who have achieved something noble or useful, and who are remembered in a vacuum seal of pious duty that simply announces itself as a sanctimonious unease with the past. What else has the celebration of Black History Month become but a spectacle as empty as the spectacle of transubstantiation in a Catholic church, the moment in Christianity when human history becomes divine? What else but a kind of secret loathing could characterize a people’s labored and self-consciously defensive response to its past?
I think one reason many blacks enjoyed this movie is that it allowed them a certain luxury they had never truly experienced before: to see their past not simply as a story of noble (and local) uplift but as a kind of metaphysical triumph over history itself. The Color Purple has all the historical sense of “Cinderella,” not quite a folk tale because there are no real folk in it, but a superbly realized feminist cartoon about a woman, victimized by cruel relatives, who is transformed into a princess. It is the triumph of the race without precisely being about race, so it has all the overtones of being “universal.” And one has become “universal” in America when one’s history is something one lives through but not in.
The absence of real folk only intensified the enjoyment for those blacks who liked the film because they were not reminded of their greasy, soiled, and messy past. This production goes out of its way to eliminate any trace of folk reality from black Southern life. Consider the film score by Quincy Jones, one of the film’s producers and a former jazz trumpeter and arranger who has gone on, in recent years, to fame and fortune arranging tunes for such rock and pop stars as Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra, and issuing his own albums of bland, finger-snapping dance music. The music in this film is as bland, uninteresting, and offensive as anything to be found in any of Jones’s albums. The horror of this is not that the score is anachronistic but that it absolutely refuses to be, in any way, authentic period music. Shug Avery, one of the film’s principal characters, is supposed to be a blues singer during the early decades of this century, cut from the same mold as, say, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Bessie Smith, or Ma Rainey. In those days, as the autobiographies and biographies of such early twentieth-century black artists as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Scott Joplin, and Sidney Bechet will attest, in black juke joints the songs were very slow (to give the prostitutes a chance to slow-drag their clients into arousal) and quite dirty—for example, this famous 1920s blues performed by Lucille Bogan (Bessie Jackson) called “Shave ’Em Dry,” which, as one commentator pointed out, seems to out-Sade Sade:
Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell-clapper
And your dick stands up like a steeple
Your goddam ass-hole stands open like a church door
And the crabs walks in like people.
The rough audience at juke joints, consisting of prostitutes, pimps, the gamblers, hustlers, and black men and women who had spent previous week doing back-breaking work in turpentine factories, railroad yards, farms, and white people’s homes, would certainly not be interested in the sort of mild fare that Jones presented in the film. Regardless of Jones’s temperamental inclinations or artistic taste, he knows enough about Afro-American music to know that songs at least as outspoken as Ma Rainey’s “Black Bottom,” “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll like Mine,” “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya” and “Hard Driving Papa,” are true representations of black women’s blues of the period. He also knew or at least sensed that a soundtrack of authentic black period music would have alarmed and offended the black audience he hoped the film would attract. Louis Farrakkan, Jesse Jackson, and Benjamin Hooks, to name a few of our nation’s “black leaders” and keepers of the black bourgeiois flame of achievement and respectability, would have been united in their joint denouncement of a score by a black man for a film directed by a white man that displayed such crude, vulgar, and “filthy” music. The silly music for The Color Purple simply underscores the discomfort with and the distance from their folk past that black people are unwilling to admit. And to deny that past, as this film does, is simply to say that blacks have no spiritual or historical genealogy. But what is truly crude and distasteful is not the authentic vulgar black music of the past but the insipid soundtrack of the film, which reflects an even more insipid and dispirited contemporary popular music that basically indicates that E. Franklin Frazier was right: the black bourgeoisie is nothing more than a class of philistines. Jacques Barzun explains the difference between the vulgar and the popular in European art, which I think is quite lucid and applicable to Afro-American art as well: “What had been rough became falsely polished, pretentious, apish, and cheap. The common people of former ages had made folk songs and folk tales and had sung them themselves; the new plebs had cheap songs and cheap tales made for them by hacks in imitation of the high-class product.” (One can only hope that if the rumor about a Hollywood biography of jazzman Charlie Parker is true, Quincy Jones is not hired to do the soundtrack. One has nightmares about the possibilities of hearing dubbed solos by saxophonist Grover Washington or, worse, the Springsteen sideman, Clarence Clemmons.)
So the film has become for black people what it has become for everyone else: the ideal American protest art, freeing Americans from any criticism of their social or political order by denying that the film presents a problem open to any implication of a social or political solution. It is protest art that moves an audience without disturbing it, the most dangerous kind of narcotic art in many instances. And it selects as its villain the black male, the convenient and mutable antihero of the white American psyche for the past 150 years. There is nothing wrong with the black male being a villain in a film about a psychotic wife beater, but it is too facile to be truly credible in a moral way. He is too easy a mark as the villain; and his villainy will, of course, disturb no one because the black male in America has simply come to symbolize all that is degenerate and pathological in the male himself. But those black men who have complained about the film are wrong: it is not an insult to black men. It is, indeed, a perverse tribute to them for it is their thundering demonness, their smoldering sexuality and the still pressing need on the part of whites to mask this in buffoonery that is on everyone’s mind. Toni Morrison was quite right in something she expressed in Sula: the black male will never suffer psychological neglect from white men, white women, black women, or themselves. He is always, in some way or other, the essence of everything that is on every American’s mind.
0 Mary, don’t you weep
And tell Martha not to moan.
—Black gospel queen Inez Andrews’s “0, Mary, Don’t You Weep”
A good friend and colleague, Elizabeth Schultz, pointed out in passing not very long ago that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has a certain similarity to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—something to the effect that both novels have suffered from the popularity they have had to endure. I think she meant that both novels have been burdened by their pop-culture status and, as a result, both mass audiences and the critical elite have tended to misinterpret these works. The misinterpretations have arisen partly because these have been extremely popular works of social protest, indictments about the ways we live, written by women who, many believe, cannot really write and so they have been subject to the most intense and awkward forms of admiration and suspicion. The popularity of the works has tended to blunt and distort the response of some critics by antagonizing their snobbish sensibilities, convinced as they are that these works could be popular only by pandering to certain mass expectations. For these reasons, among others, I suppose it is not surprising that my colleague should begin to think of these novels along the same lines. It may be the judgment of literary and cultural history that these books will be condemned to be yoked together and exist in that limbo of literary reputation between hack work and greatness.
I have said that The Color Purple is not a good novel, but it does articulate one useful observation that I can dispense with quickly. The book utterly condemns the black male’s glorification of his pimp mentality, and for this we should be thankful. For an insufferably long time, the black American male has been convinced, both by himself and by white males, that he is the monstrous stud on our cultural block. It is one of the few contemptible misrepresentations dreamed up by the white male that the black male has taken to heart, has clutched feverishly. Perhaps he has taken an unseemly pride in this perversion because it has titillated some white women (which in turn has titillated him) or because it has endowed him with the power of the slave master and permitted him to turn his community into a kind of brothel filled with “bitches” and ‘“ho’es.” Whatever the case, Walker was quite right in linking that attempt to the oppressive attitude of the slave master, to the attitude of a rapist. It is appropriate that the lazy Mr. Albert should run something akin to a plantation with a big house as he remained a pimp in his soul.
Despite this, The Color Purple remains an inferior novel not because it seems so self-consciously a “woman’s novel” and not because it may be playing down to its mass audience, guilty of being nothing more than a blatant “feel-good” novel, just the sort of book that is promoted among the nonliterary. The Color Purple is a poor novel because it ultimately fails the ideology that it purports to serve. It fails to be subversive enough in substance; it only appears to be subversive. Indeed, far from being a radically feminist novel, it is not even, in the end, as good a bourgeois feminist novel as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written 130 years earlier. Its largest failure lies in the novel’s inability to use (ironically, subversively, or even interestingly) the elements that constitute it. Take, for instance, these various Victorianisms that abound in the work: the ultimate aim of the restoration of a gynocentric, not patriarchal family; the reunion of lost sisters; the reunion of mother and children; the glorification of cottage industry in the establishment of the pants business; bequests of money and land to the heroine at novel’s end; Celie’s discovery that her father/rapist is really a cruel stepfather; the change of heart or moral conversion of Mr. Albert, who becomes a feminized man by the end; the friendship between Shug Avery and Celie, which, despite its overlay of lesbianism (a tribute to James Baldwin’s untenable thesis that nonstandard sex is the indication of a free, holy, thoroughly unsquare heterosexual heart), is nothing more than the typical relationship between a shy ugly duckling and her more aggressive, beautiful counterpart, a relationship not unlike that between Topsy and Little Eva. Shug convinces Celie that she is not black and ugly, that somebody loves her, which is precisely what Eva does for Topsy. For Walker, these clichés are not simply those of the Victorian novel but of the woman’s Victorian novel. This indicates recognition of and paying homage to a tradition; but the use of these clichés in The Color Purple is a great deal more sterile and undemanding than their use in, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Together, for Walker, these clichés take on a greater attractiveness and power than for the female Victorian, since they are meant to represent a series of values that free the individual from the power of the environment, the whim of the state, and the orthodoxy of the institution. The individual still has the power to change, and that power supersedes all others, means more than any other: Human virtue is a reality that is not only distinct from all collective arrangements except family; in the end, it can be understood only as being opposed to all collective arrangements. But all of this is only the bourgeois fascination with individualism and with the ambiguity of Western family life, in which bliss is togetherness while having a room of one’s own.
The heart of The Color Purple is this rhetoric of virtue from which its theological propositions spring. The novel is not representing Celie as a powerless victim simply to establish a critique to Calvinist or conservative Christianity, but to create an outright revolt against such inhuman orthodoxy. For Walker, conservative theology endorses weakness, is enthralled by it because the existence of a superior power demands a corresponding submission; an elect is nothing more than a collective of power, an unnatural sovereignty symbolized first and finally by the Calvinist male God. Two separate concepts become fused at some point in this book: the subversion of Calvinist Christianity by its replacement, which is something like liberal religion, and the absolute elimination of evil. Thus the resulting necessities of two conversions in the book: Celie’s transformation to self-assertion and human dignity denies a Calvinist world, and Mr. Albert’s feminization transforms the power of evil. Walker insists on a theology without victims; this must, to be sure, be a theology in which victims can never be possible, dependent on a world where all are equally strong and where all are equally humbled. This is finally expressed in the novel through a fairly dim-witted pantheistic acknowledgment of the wonders of human potential that begins to sound quite suspiciously like a cross between the New Age movement and Dale Carnegie. Nothing symbolizes the overthrow of this male-centered Calvinism more than Celie’s refusal, about two-thirds of the way through the book, to write letters to God anymore. She writes to her sister instead. These quotations from various characters toward the end of the novel signify the coming of the winds of theological change:
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. (Shug)
God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone—a roofleaf or Christ—but we don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like frees us. (Nettie)
I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start with. The more I wonder . . . the more I love. (Mr. Albert)
As we can see, the transformation of values among the book’s characters has been completed by the end. God has been reduced, though made invisible and nonhuman in a way, and thoroughly accountable to creation. And everyone has, through conversion, been able to become his or her own minister, a community without leaders, all equally endowed with the light: from an oppressive ghetto of political and social unequals to a black Little Gidding.
What Walker does in her novel is allow its social protest to become foundation for its utopia. Not surprisingly, the book lacks any real intellectual or theological rigor or coherence, and the fusing of social protest and utopia is really nothing more than confounding and blundering, each seeming to subvert the reader’s attention from the other. One is left thinking that Walker wishes to thwart her own ideological ends or that she simply does not know how to write novels. In essence, the book attempts to be revisionist salvation history and fails because of its inability to use or really understand history.
There is certainly no lack of history associated with the novel: its title and elliptically rendered episodes harken back to Jean Toomer’s Cane (and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying); its speech patterns and love of anthropological folklore bring to mind Zora Neale Hurston (its specific imagery of swollen male bellies is a direct reference to Their Eyes Were Watching God); and the epistolary style, which may have emanated from the feminist’s realization, as Barbara Christian points out, that “letters were the dominant mode of expression allowed women in the West,” is more likely the result of the influence of Samuel Richardson’s novels of innocent women in distress. And there is also a great deal of history within the novel itself, references to Harlem, Bessie Smith, African emigration, J. A. Rodgers, and European imperialism. The problem with the novel’s historicity is that it seems false and unconvincing, a kind of obvious scaffolding. The bits of history seem undigested and set in the text like lumps. Like the film, Walker’s novel, despite its historical references, really wishes to deny history by refusing to show what change and passage of time mean in a society. This is why the social-protest aspects of the novel, some nicely worked up bits of grim naturalism, are inchoate and why the utopian ending must exist. Walker decided that her heroine has no real way to work out her problems within the context of history. And salvation history becomes the utter supersession of oppression history through the assertion of an unoppressed self. The problem this presents for the reader is that Celie does not find a convincing away to reclaim her humanity and to reassemble the values of her world.
It is equally difficult for Stowe to find a convincing way for Tom to reclaim his humanity and reassemble the values of his world. The difference between the two novels is that Stowe does not believe in the necessity of a world without evil in order for Tom to be a hero or in order for his virtue to mean something. Nor does she believe that salvation history is the supersession of the history of the world as we know it or the history of oppression; rather, she believes that we live now in salvation history. On the surface, one might say that the difference is that Tom (and Eva and St. Clair) are sacrificed for the atonement of the sin of slavery while Celie is allowed to survive and triumph (and so are the other major characters of the book) for the supersession of a male-dominated, oppressive world. Tom dies without changing the worst evil with which he is confronted: Simon Legree. In fact, because he dies resisting Legree’s will, he is really protesting against that evil. Celie lives as the victor, ultimately being the source of change for the evil Mr. Albert. Stowe knows from her experience with the abolitionist movement in Ohio and from suffering the death of one of her children that to rid this world of evil will not simply be the act of the good asserting itself, of saying simply that evil is impossible, but the act of the shedding of the blood of virtue. Walker is unwilling to accept anything less than the conversion of evil and this is because certain pointed theological questions never occur to Walker that are extremely important to Stowe: Is this world worth saving? Should it be saved if the price must be so high? Stowe does not question the nature of the price, as a good Calvinist-tinged Christian would not. A refusal to grant the price its proper respect born of its necessity and its nature would simply be Manichaeanism. Walker refuses to see the necessity of the price itself and certainly does not appreciate its nature as any sort of heroism. Thus she will not have her characters pay it. It seems to me that no matter how much as modern readers we prefer this revised rhetoric of virtue, the Calvinist imagination has a greater grasp of the political and social cost of virtue, a greater sense of the drama of the existence of virtue in a fallen world. Stowe pleads just as strenuously and far more effectively for the humanity and protection of women and children and for the assertion of the values of the home against the values of the marketplace that have dehumanized and debased all human relationships. But her sense of history is greater, knowing that events like the Revolution of 1848, the abolitionist movement, the Fugitive Slave Act, and African emigration are the result of large social and political trends that affect all citizens. Small but significant changes, such as the son of Shelby freeing all of his father’s slaves, come hard; utopias do not come at all. Stowe knows that conversations like the one experienced by St. Clair are rare; most people who participate in a comfortable social order will not change until they are forced to. The Color Purple, book and movie, has become everybody’s protest art: an indication of our need to have a bloodless eschatology where there are no devils in the end, no evil that cannot be repented, and, indeed, no final rendering up of things because there will be no sin, only all of us simply going, quietly and softly, into that good light.