Essay on The Color Purple

Read the extract from 'Mr ----------- come finally one day looking all drug out' (page 12) to 'he say, Her cow (page 13).
Using this extract as your starting point, you should:
Explore how Walker’s  manipulation of Celie’s voice conveys the attitudes of the men involved in this transaction
Examine the methods used by Walker throughout the novel to show how these male attitudes are shaped by the society in which the characters live.
In this extract Walker’s manipulation of Celie’s voice clearly conveys the attitudes of the men involved in the transaction, as it does throughout the novel, and how the society in which the characters live has shaped their attitudes.

           
Student response:
 Walker’s use of double negatives such as ‘wasn’t nothing’,  and her use of short, simple sentences, immediately conveys through Celie’s voice, an attitude amongst the male characters that is less than caring, and which reflects the fact that they see females as second class citizens. ‘Celie, he say. Like it wasn’t nothing. Mr ---- want another look at you.’ Here, imitating African American Vernacular English, Walker shows Celie to drop the ‘s’ consonant on the verb ‘want’, and following the same patterns of speech, shows her to write ‘say’ instead of the correct past tense verb ‘said’. Through this manipulation of Celie’s speech Walker depicts the male characters to have a sexist attitude towards females, as if they were objects to be looked at and disposed of; this was a common attitude amongst men in society at the time the novel is set.
            Walker further conveys how such male attitudes would have been shaped by the society in which the characters live, through Celie’s use of language. Violence is a theme which Walker explores throughout the novel and Celie’s conversations with Shug are used as a tool to depict the male attitudes: ‘He ain’t beat me much since you made him quit, I say. Just a slap now and then when he ain’t got nothing else to do.’ Through Celie’s speech here, and a noticeable vulnerability and helplessness in her voice, Walker conveys Celie’s sense of worthlessness and how Mr ------ may have the attitude that the beating of women was acceptable, until someone challenged him about it. Walker’s use of monosyllabic dynamic verbs with reduced consonant clusters, such as ‘beat’ and ‘slap’ shows the simplicity and ignorance of the attitudes of Mr------. Also the adverb ‘just’ is used to modify the noun ‘a slap’, showing that Celie also accepts the violence.
This sense of the mistreatment of women as an acceptable activity as a running theme throughout the text is one continuously conveyed, ‘I want her to do what I say, like you do for Pa…I try to beat her, she black my eyes.’ Here Walker suggests through the manipulation of Celie’s voice, that Harpo has grown up to believe that a wife should do what a husband says, and she should be beaten if she does not comply, an attitude derived from and shaped by the society in which he has grown up. Harpo’s inclusion of ‘like you do for Pa’ is a way in which Walker portrays the extent to which society has influenced male attitudes in the book.
            Through the use of taboo language such as ‘fuck’ and ‘pussy’ throughout, notably by Shug Avery, Walker effectively emphasises how the women live in a male dominated society in which women are always thought of as objects to satisfy a particular desire; the vulgarity of this attitude is reinforced by Walker’s use of taboo language. ‘Shug don’t actually say making love. She say something nasty. She say fuck.’ Here, through Walker’s manipulation of Celie’s voice and her use of the adjective ‘nasty’, Celie’s innocence and vulnerability is juxtaposed with Shug’s hardness, and knowledge that the treatment of women it harsh, but it is an inevitable part of life. The use of snappy, simple declarative sentences with end-focus on ‘fuck’, and the lack of detail such as the dropped ‘s’ consonant on “say” further implies the simplicity of the unbending male attitudes about black women, and how it was an accepted part of the society in which the characters live in the novel. It could also be argued that Shug’s adaption of ‘fuck’ is almost in acceptance of the mistreatment women have received, and that having been surrounded by such attitudes, she has come to terms with them as normal.

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