The Color Purple 1115tic and sexual slave. “Mr.” treats her with contempt
as he punishes Celie for his own regrets over his ill-
fated love affair with Shug Avery; she is victimized
for not being the glamorous and eroticized Shug.
While Celie’s experiences with the men in her
life leave her void of any sexual feeling toward them,
she nevertheless fantasizes about the female Shug.
Even before the two woman meet, Celie is given a
photograph of Shug and dreams about meeting this
uniquely independent woman: Shug is the antithesis
of Celie and is, therefore, a highly attractive object.
Moreover, when “Mr.” brings a weak and sickly
Shug Avery into his home, Celie is consumed
by excitement. Without feeling either jealousy or
contempt for her husband’s lover, she gratefully
undertakes the role of nurse to care for Shug and
help her regain her health. Indeed, it is at this point
in the text that new emotions are awakened in Celie:
She finds herself attracted to Shug in ways that go
beyond any conventional display of female friend-
ship. After seeing Shug naked for the first time,
Celie is overpowered by a sexually charged desire
for the woman’s body. She explains how she feels
like a man as her love for Shug gains an erotic ele-
ment. Indeed, as the two women spend more time
together, they develop a bond that becomes stronger
than any other in the narrative. It is Shug’s love for
Celie that helps the downtrodden woman keep bat-
tling through her ever-repressive life.
What begins as a female friendship soon devel-
ops into something much more substantial. Sig-
nificantly, as Shug gains a deeper understanding of
Celie’s past and present miseries, she begins to feel
a new type of love for her companion. In contrast to
“Mr.” or any other man that Celie has encountered,
Shug offers her the affection and sexual intimacy
that has been absent from her life for so long. The
two women embark on a highly eroticized and sen-
sual relationship that is hidden from “Mr.” and all of
the other people in their domestic sphere.
Such bliss, however, is doomed to end. After an
initial period of happiness when Celie leaves “Mr.”
and goes to live with Shug in Memphis, she is
abandoned by her female lover. Shug seems unable
to fully commit herself to either man or woman and
leaves Celie for a 19-year-old boy in order to have
one last fling. Things are destined to end well for
Celie and Shug, however, when Shug returns to her
as a lover just before Nettie brings Celie’s children
home from Africa to be reunited with their birth
mother.
Jessica WebbvIoLence in The Color Purple
Violence relentlessly invades Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple. Indeed, it is a world characterized by
various forms of social and domestic violence—a
world from which Celie, the main female character,
struggles to escape. Set in the heart of America’s
Deep South, the book is structured as a set of letters
that Celie writes to God and, toward the end of the
novel, to her sister Nettie in Africa.
From the very opening letter, the reader is intro-
duced into Celie’s family home and the disturbing
cruelty to which the women of the house are sub-
jected. Celie’s mother is physically ill and struggling
to look after her home, her brood of children, and
her husband. As a result of her illness, she does not
want to have a sexual relationship with her husband,
who, in turn, forces 14-year-old Celie to do what her
mother will not. After being repeatedly beaten and
raped by her Pa, the frightened child falls pregnant
twice, only to have her babies stolen from her and
sold to an unsuspecting minister and his wife, who
cannot have children of their own. This form of
sexual violence continues even when Celie’s mother
dies and her Pa remarries. Fearing that her Pa will
subject Nettie to this type of sexual violation, Celie
marries “Mr.” with the hope that Nettie can escape
from home and live in safety with her. But this plan
is doomed to fail. After Celie’s new husband tries to
seduce Nettie, she is forced to leave her sister and
find a new life away from both Pa and “Mr.”
While Nettie is able to flee the men around her,
Celie is incarcerated in a marriage that offers a new
type of brutality: Domestic violence and suffering
are the only things that Celie experiences in her
new life. Even on her wedding day Mr.’s children
cut her head with a rock and leave the blood run-
ning over her body. Moreover, her husband seems
to encourage this violence, viewing his new wife as
a sexual and domestic slave who can be beaten like
an animal. When Harpo, Mr.’s oldest son, asks his
father why he beats Celie, the man calmly states that