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39 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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"Celie's sexual desire for women and her sexual encounter with Shug is never a controversial issue even though it is the catalyst for her resistance to male domination, for her coming to power. "
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55
Harold Bloom, ed., Alice Walker's The Color Purple (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000) 55, Questia, 6 Oct. 2007 <http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98106506>. |
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"She later traveled to Mississippi, to work in voter registration drives. There, she encountered a young White lawyer named Melvyn Leventhal. They married in 1967, and had one daughter, Rebecca, 22, a senior at Yale University."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"But the strain of being an interracial couple in the '60s era South (they were the only interracial married couple in Mississippi at the time) took its toll, and the Leventhals divorced in 1976. After a brief stint at Ms. Magazine, where she worked with her dose friend (and godmother of her daughter) Gloria Steinem, she moved to San Francisco, where she still has a home near Hillside Park."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"For nearly a decade Walker has been "involved" with writer Robert Allen (The Port Chicago Mutiny), whom she met back in 1962 when they were students, she at Spelman and he at Morehouse. Though they are extremely dose ("We are very good and supportive friends who sometimes make love"), marriage is not in the offing."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"I don't believe in marriage," she says. "Its a patriarchal construct like all of these other horrible institutions. Besides, I also like being courted."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"She also likes the independence of her life as she had now assembled it. Living most of the time on her bucolic 40-acre spread three hours outside of San Francisco, she enjoys the tranquility and natural beauty of the environs."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"But even when puttering about in her lush garden, she is never far removed from the "womanist" (a term she coined to describe the Black women's issues that are at the heart of so much of her work) concerns about which she is compelled to write."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"The Color Purple, her third and most acclaimed novel"
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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" Walker as the embodiment of a Black womens literary movement distinguished primarily by its defamation of Black men."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"But Walker, an intensely private woman, has not responded much to her critics. Though she says she was "griefstricken" by the antipathy with which her work has been received by many in the Black community, publicly she has been practically mute on the subject. "I don't have time to dear up all these peoples confusion," she says. "I'm busy. I'm working on the next things that need attention."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Those "things" have come to light in her prodigious body of work (16 books, including five novels, several collections of essays, short stories, childrens books and poems) in which she has tackled such provocative topics as child and spousal abuse, fear of death, female sexuality and incest."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Walker explores the subject through the eyes of Tashi, a minor character in The Color Purple, who submits to this harsh rite of passage out of a sense of cultural allegiance, and bears the deep physical and emotional scars for the rest of her life."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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""But certain characters persist in wanting to be totally realized when you've left them in a certain situation of distress or longing or development. And so in The Color Purple I mention that Tashi has had this procedure done to her, but I couldn't go into it any further because it required much more time and much more development because it's a subject so few people know anything about. But I knew I had to develop a story that made it possible for people to have a fuller understanding of this and a context. I couldn't just drop it."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Walker's premise is that the acceptance of the centuries-old custom of female circumcision has crippled Africa. "I'm saying that if you mutilate 100 million women and make it so hard for them to give birth that many of them will die trying or their children will be born deformed or crippled, how can you expect the continent to be healthy?"
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Her forthrightness has made her a controversial figure, particularly in the Black community. Most of that controversy swirls around The Color Purple. It is the story of Celie, a simple Southern woman--abused first by her father and then by the man to whom her father eventually marries her off--whose confidence and self-awareness are awakened under the guidance of a freespirited cabaret singer."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Though The Color Purple has garnered a truckload of prizes and made Walker a financially secure woman (it's been translated into 22 languages and has sold over 4 million copies), it has remained a sore spot for many Black Americans, particularly males."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Most objected to the depiction of Mister, Celie's malevolent husband. In the absence of another sympathetic Black male character, Mister, in the eyes of some critics, seemed to represent the whole of Black American manhood."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"While Walker was dismayed that Mister was interpreted as a composite of all Black men, she was most disheartened by what she views as Black Americas denial of the existence of any form of spousal or child abuse."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"I think the most chilling thing to me about the response to The Color Purple was that people said 'this doesn't happen,"' she says. "They said this was totally an anomaly. This is all Alice's problem. But what was really upsetting was the total lack of empathy for the woman. Not one person said that even if this happened every blue moon--which we know it does not--and it only happens to a very few women or children, we ought to look at this because we don't want those women or children to be suffering. Nobody said that. And I think thats an indictment of us."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Happy is a state Walker finds herself in often these days. At age 48, she has finally discovered the secret to the contentment that eluded her for so many years. "I'm as happy now as I was sad as a child," she says."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Born in Eatonton, Ga., the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers Minnie Tallulah and Willie Lee Walker, Walker was a quiet and sensitive child. "I was the last child," she says. '"And my mother didn't really want eight children, and she didn't really bite her tongue about saying that."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"From a very early age, Walker displayed a love of reading and a talent for writing. In solitude, she composed poems in her head, but she rarely wrote her words or feelings down, fearing that her older, rambunctious brothers might find and destroy them. Even today, she plots her novels in visions that fill her head, then transfers almost finished prose to a legal pad. No multiple drafts or false starts. "When I'm ready to put it on paper that's pretty much the way it will be," she says."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Occasionally traumatized by her brothers (one of whom nearly blinded her at age 8, when he shot her in the right eye with a BB gun), the seeds of her decidedly female point of view were sown in a household in which boys were unfettered and girls were tied to domestic duties."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"She escaped this world in 1961, going first to Spelman College and then to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York."
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Whitaker, Charles. "Alice Walker: 'Color Purple' author confronts her critics and talks about her provocative new book." Ebony 47.n7 (May 1992): 86(4). General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Princess Anne High School (VA). 6 Oct. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/ips/start.do?prodId=IPS>. |
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"Wedded by their mutual desire for Shug, their shared rejection, Celie and Albert are joined in a sustained committed relationship. Reunited, they stand together, "two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56.
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"Shug's lust for a young man is not depicted as an expression of sexual liberation, of longing for a new and different sexual pleasure, instead it is a disempowering force, one that exposes her vulnerability and weakness."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56.
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"Placed within a stereotypical heterosexist framework wherein woman is denied access to ongoing sexual pleasure which she seeks and initiates, as the novel progresses Shug is depicted as an aging female seducer who fears the loss of her ability to use sex as a means to attract and control men, as a way to power."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56.
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"Until this turning point, sex has been for Shug a necessary and vital source of pleasure. As object of intense sexual desire, she has had power to shape and influence the actions of others but always in the direction of a higher good."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56.
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"Ultimately, Walker constructs an ideal world of true love and commitment where there is no erotic tension—where there is no sexual desire or sexual pleasure."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56.
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"Just as the reader's perception of Shug is dramatically altered towards the end of the novel, so is the way we see and understand Celie's sexual history; her sexual confession changes when it is revealed that she has not been raped by her real father."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56.
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"The tragedy and trauma of incest, so graphically and poignantly portrayed, both in terms of the incest-rape and Celie's sexual healing which begins when she tells Shug what happened, is trivialized as the novel progresses."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 56-7.
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"Presented in retrospect as though it was all an absurd drama, the horror of Celie's early sexual experience and the pleasure of her sexual awakening assume the quality of spectacle, of exaggerated show. A curious tale told in part as a strategy to engage and excite the reader's imagination before attention is diverted towards more important revelations."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 57.
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" which is fundamentally anti—male domination"
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 57.
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"Walker relies on similar narrative strategies and preoccupations as those utilized in the pornographic narrative."
characters are never very strongly developed or psychologically rounded human beings. They perform function, they take on roles already fixed within the commonplace characters are what they do, and given a minimal amount of familiarity with the genre, the reader needs little by way of explanation in order to understand what is going on. simple forms of narrative, stories in which characters are no more than what they do and the reader has some general idea, as soon as the story begins, of who is going to do what to whom and with what outcome" |
Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 58.
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"Characters are very much what they do in The Color Purple. Mr. is brute, Lucious the rapist, Harpo the buffoon, Celie the sexual victim, Shug the sexual temptress. Many of the characters perform roles that correspond with racial stereotypes. The image of "the black male rapist" resonates in both racial and sexual stereotypes; Walker's characterization cannot be viewed in a vacuum, as though it does not participate in these discourses which have been primarily used to reinforce domination, both racial and sexual."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 58.
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"Celie and Albert, as oppressed and oppressor, must as part of their personal transformation learn to feel pleasure and develop a capacity to experience happiness."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 59.
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"Albert is transformed in part by his rejection of isolation and self‐ sufficiency for connection and interdependency"
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 59.
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"Celie's shift from underclass victim to capitalist entrepreneur has only positive signification. Albert, in his role as oppressor, forces Celie and Harpo to work in the fields, exploiting their labor for his gain. Their exploitation as workers must cease before domination ends and transformation begins. Yet Celie's progression from exploited black woman, as woman, as sexual victim, is aided by her entrance into the economy as property owner, manager of a small business, storekeeper-in short, capitalist entrepreneur. No attention is accorded aspects of this enterprise that might reinforce domination: attention is focused on how useful Celie's pants are for family and friends"
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 59.
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"Sofia as worker in her store will treat black customers with respect and consideration. Embedded in the construction of sexual difference as it is characterized in The Color Purple is the implicit assumption that women are innately less inclined to oppress and dominate than men; that women are not easily corrupted."
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Book Title: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Contributors: Harold Bloom - editor. Publisher: Chelsea House. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 59.
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