Alice Walker’s Masterpiece is A Panoramic View of the Worldwide Black Experience, But With Universal Themes

The only iteration of “The Color Purple” that I’d seen ahead of reading the book was the film  adaptation of the musical adaptation that came out in 2023. And it was pretty good, probably just shy of great. But it gave me enough intel that I knew what I was getting into with the novel when I finally got around to reading it.

 

Which is what made the book, the decades-spanning story of Celie, an abused, self-loathing, depressed black woman living in Georgia, and her journey from despair to empowerment, such a revelation for me. It’s the type of difficult story that can be brutal to read, stories told by prominent black authors, when they depict the state of their communities with a totally unflinching view, such as rape, incest, abuse, and violence. And Alice Walker, like her contemporaries Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, doesn’t turn a blind eye to these issues. But the way she approaches them in “The Color Purple” is unique, powerful, and maybe the defining novel between all of the authors mentioned. 

 

And I say that as a MASSIVE Toni Morrison fan. But what Walker does with “The Color Purple” is really, really special. 

 

First off, the story is written in entirely epistolary form. Which isn’t exactly a novel approach, as our two protagonists, beleaguered and separated sisters Celie and Nettie, write unanswered letters to each other from Georgia across the ocean to Africa. But the twist on the format is that, since the sisters are barred from communicating through the acts of a particularly villainous character, Celie writes her letters to God for the bulk of the novel. The notion of Celie, through all of the pain she suffers, writes letters to God to stay optimistic grants the novel an existential and spiritual grandiosity that really isn’t approached in many other novels I’ve read. 

 

Second, the characters Walker populates Celie’s journey with are robust, real, well-defined and distinguished, and all contribute to Celie’s eventual self-discovery. There’s the strong women in her life, Shug Avery and Sofia, and the sorry men in her life, Mister and Harpo, and all of them, good and bad, are fleshed out, and serve their own, key purposes in completing Celie’s arc. 

 

Finally, there’s a social expansiveness here that’s pretty amazing. Not only does Walker create a compelling and emotional storyline for Celie in Georgia, but she also follows Nettie to freaking Africa. And by doing so Walker tackles not just race relations and black struggles on a domestic scale, but on international and worldwide scale. Through Nettie, Walker examines colonization, culture divides, and the global perception of what it means to be black. While Nettie’s story isn’t as riveting or involving overall as Celie’s, the social concepts it handles are vital.

 

All of these factors coalesce in a story that, while undeniably racial, is universal, inspiring, and uplifting, as we watch Celie, through all of her experiences and the experiences of the vibrant characters around her, recognize her own self-worth and independence. It’s a story that’s moving and extremely rewarding, despite its occasionally devastating turns, and it’s for that reason that I imagine the book, and story in general, is so beloved.