Study Guide to The Color Purple and Other Works by Alice Walker

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Alice Walker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983. Titles in this study guide include The Color Purple, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, The Third Life of Grange, Revolutionary Petunias, Once, Meridian, and In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women, Good Night Willie Lee, and I'll See You in the Morning.As a world renowned author of African American literature, Walker established her reputation in poetry, short stories, essays, novels, and even children's stories. Moreover, she coined the term "womanist" to describe feminist women of color, first exemplified in The Color Purple. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Walker's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ALICE WALKER

ALICE WALKER’S LIFE, WORKS, AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONCERNS

A world-famous writer. In 1983 Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple won her the Pulitzer Prize. She is the first African-American woman writer to win that award. The Color Purple has since made her internationally famous. But Walker had been publishing books since 1968. To date, she has developed her vision and craft in four volumes of poetry, a children’s story, two collections of short stories, many essays, and three novels. The Color Purple is part of a larger body of work that is characterized by Walker’s commitment to the “survival whole” of black people; to the legacy of black women’s creative forms, as well as their struggle to become free; and to an exploration of the black South’s history and traditions.

CHILDHOOD INFLUENCES

It is no accident that Walker’s work emphasizes these three elements. She was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. Her parents were sharecroppers, which meant that they farmed for a pittance of land owned by a white “boss man” who controlled practically every aspect of their livelihood-from the shacks they were forced to live in to the yield from their crops. From a very young age, Walker experienced the racism of the South and its restrictions on black people’s development. Despite long years of toil, her father was hardly able to feed and clothe his family. While raising eight children, her mother made everything her family wore, and worked hard in the fields, as well as in white women’s kitchens. Walker’s childhood was filled with stories of past lynchings and, like other Southern black children, she had to address her little white girlfriends “Miss.” Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which traces three generations of a sharecropping family, and many of her poems in Once and Revolutionary Poems are based on memories of her childhood.

AN OUTCAST AND HER NOTEBOOK

A traumatic accident occurred when she was eight. She lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun. For years, an ugly scar covered her eye and it was feared that she would lose the other eye. As a result of her injury, Walker felt like an outcast. Her sense of her difference certainly contributed to her ability to ask questions that others did not. She kept a notebook in which she began to look closely at relationships and to write poems. Ironically, Walker received a “rehabilitation scholarship” from Georgia, a state known for its racism. Along with her achievement as valedictorian of her class, that scholarship made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia.

During her childhood, Walker also experienced another important quality of black Southern life - that of community and struggle. Her father was the first black man to vote in Putman County, despite death threats. Black families bonded together to build schools for their children. Unlike blacks in the North, no black person feared another black, not even the convicts on the chain gangs, which were still a part of Southern life. Walker has said in one of her essays that “what the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community.”

“IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS”

Perhaps for her the most important person of that community was her mother. Walker has said that many of her own written stories are based on stories her mother told her and that she absorbed not only the stories themselves but also the urgency with which her mother told them. Just as important, her mother gave the young Walker the legacy of understanding that beauty is necessary to life. Despite her long days, Minnie Lou Walker woke early to plant gardens that became famous throughout the county. She transformed, with the little she had, the shacks, in which the family lived, into homes. In her classic essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” Walker tells us the effect her mother’s art had on her:

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to be point of being invisible-except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work that her soul must have.

Years later, Walker developed literary forms based on the legacy of black women’s creativity in the only media they were allowed in Southern society-quilting, gardening, cooking, storytelling.

WALKER AND HISTORY

Walker also grew up in a family well-versed in its own history, a factor that may have encouraged the importance of history in all of her work. It may also be why her three novels depict generations of a Southern black family. She knew, for example, about her, great-great-great-great-grandmother Mary Poole who, after Emancipation, walked with two babies on her hip from Virginia to Eatonton, where she established their family. It is in honor of this ancestor that Alice retains her maiden name, Walker. She also heard stories about her grandfather and grandmother. In the early 1970s walker wrote the poem “Burial” to her grandmother, Rachel, whose husband did not even notice that her name was misspelled on her tombstone. Later, Walker gave new life to Rachel and her husband; they are the bases of her characters Celie and Mister in The Color Purple.

When she left Eatonton, Georgia, the seventeen-year-old Walker went to school first at Spelman College in Georgia, then two years later, to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. During her junior year she went, as an exchange student, to Africa. Her experiences in these three places had a profound effect on her work.

EFFECTS OF CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ON WALKER

Walker went to Spelman College in the early 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement, what she calls “the Southern Revolution,” was having a transformative effect on the nation. She reports in one of her essays on the Civil Rights Movement that the face of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the first she saw on the television set that her family was finally able to afford. In Atlanta, she met young leaders of the movement, e.g., John Lewis and Ruby Doris Robinson, and she participated in demonstrations where “everyone was conquering fear by holding the hands of the person next to them.” Her experiences there are one source for many of her poems in Once (1968), her first collection of poems, Revolutionary Petunias (1973), her second collection of poetry, and for Meridian (1976), her novel about the Civil Rights Movement.

Walker was deeply aware that the movement helped make it possible for young Southern blacks like herself to envision actually following paths to which her parents, even her older brothers and sisters, had no access. She makes this clear by ending her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), with the arrival of Civil Rights workers to the racist town in which Ruth, her young protagonist, lives, an indication that there is hope she might “survive whole.” The Civil Rights Movement is a definitive factor in Walker’s life and helped to open avenues which made it possible for her to become a writer.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and the 1960s was a people’s movement that attempted, through nonviolent means, such as demonstrations and boycotts, to eradicate the segregationist and racist laws of this country. Its philosophy was similar to that of the great Indian leader, M. Gandhi’s belief that violence violates all life and is inherently evil. Walker also characterizes the movement’s philosophy as Animism, an African philosophical position that she defines as the belief that “Spirit inhabits all life.” For her that belief is rooted, as well, in Southern black culture, from the spirituals and slave narratives to the rituals of the black church.

VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Walker’s participation in and observation of the Civil Rights Movement deepened her sense of how violence is a predominant thread in the American social fabric and affected her intense exploration of societal violence in all her work. Her novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland dramatically demonstrates the effects of racism, a societal system of violence, on three generations of a black sharecropping family and how societal violence results in family and personal violence. Her novel Meridian explores the question of whether violence is necessary to social change, a question that must be confronted by all serious revolutionary movements. And her novel The Color Purple depicts the violence men inflict on women in order to feel powerful in their families and in the general society.

In all three novels, violence is transcended through the major character’s growing awareness of the meaning of life, of how spirit inhabits all life, and of how the violation of any living thing affects all other living things. Walker uses Nature, trees, flowers, rocks as an embodiment of her philosophy. For example, the most glorious tree in the county, the Sojourner Tree in Meridian, which embodies their history, is cut down by Saxon College students during a demonstration; but by the end of the novel, when Meridian has transformed herself, it begins to sprout. The Civil Rights Movement is not only a source of Walker’s concern with societal violence, it is also an influence on her philosophy about the oneness of all life.

EFFECTS OF WOMEN’S MOVEMENT ON WALKER

The Sojourner Tree in Meridian was inspired by the beautiful cherry trees at Spelman. Walker also used this college to explore another theme in her work-a celebration of black women’s history and her protest of sexism, which affects all women. Spelman had traditionally been a school noted for its espousal of black middle-class values, a place where “being a lady” was paramount. In her essay, “Lulls: A Return to the South,” Walker tells us about some of the women she’d experienced in her childhood, women who “did everything,” who could hunt and fish and who also dressed beautifully. But such women would not have been considered ladies at Spelman. Walker uses Spelman as the basis for Saxon College in her novel Meridian, and as a means of protesting the concept of ladyhood that restricted even black women’s ability to struggle for the freedom of the race.

Nonetheless, Spelman was an important institution for the preservation of the history of black women. Walker was later to use its archives as the basis of the Nettie sections in The Color Purple. For generations, Spelman graduates had done outrageous things, such as going to Africa as missionaries and helping to galvanize social black Southern movements. The school itself represented the two major influences on black women that dominate Walker’s works: the tradition of black women’s history and the restrictions that have affected them even in black society.

MALE CHAUVINISM IN AFRICA

After spending two years at Spelman, the young Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student. While black nationalists of the period were evoking romantic images of Africa, she experienced it firsthand. Her sojourn there was the impetus for some of the poems in Once, as well as for the African sections in The Color Purple. Of black women in Africa, Walker was later to say, “we are the mules there as well as here.”

Her trip to Africa also resulted in another significant event in her life. When she returned to Sarah Lawrence College, the twenty-year-old Walker discovered she was pregnant. At that time, abortion was illegal, but she knew that her pregnancy would halt her education and shame her parents. While her friends looked for an abortionist, she discovered how “alone woman was in her body.” Convinced that she would commit suicide, she urgently wrote poems and stuffed them in the box of Muriel Rukeyser, her teacher at Sarah Lawrence and one of America’s foremost women poets. These poems would become Once, her first published volume.

RACISM AND SEXISM....

What Walker intensely felt, as the result of her pregnancy and abortion, was the impact of the double standard that existed for men and women in the society. She realized how necessary it was for women, as women, to achieve their freedom. The young Walker became one of the first contemporary African-American women writers to overtly explore sexism in black society in her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and in her controversial first collection of short stories, In Love & Trouble, as well as to demonstrate how the interaction of sexism and racism results in grave restrictions on black women’s lives.

Walker, as well, has been an active participant in the Women’s Movement. She knew that one cause of the second wave of American feminism, which erupted in the early 1970s, was the Civil Rights Movement in much the same way that the Women’s Rights Movement of the nineteenth century had evolved out of the Abolitionist Movement. White women activists of both these black movements had discovered the extent to which they were restricted as women. Black women also experienced sexism within the Civil Rights Movement, which was necessarily affected by gender definitions of the entire society. Like Meridian in Walker’s novel, most women were initially perceived as typists rather than as potential leaders. And even when they obviously had been leaders, their activities were subordinated to male leaders, just as prominent black women activists, like the nineteenth-century feminist Ida B. Wells, had been ignored in black history books. Such was the case with Rosa Parks, who had refused to give up her seat to a white man, an act that precipitated the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and is generally identified as the beginning of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Although Mrs. Parks had been an activist for many years, her act was preempted by the nation’s focus on Martin Luther King, Jr., the young preacher who was drafted by Montgomery’s black leaders to become the boycott’s spokesman. Limited by their media visibility, women in the Civil Rights Movement learned much about political tactics and eventually used these lessons to analyze and confront the sexism and racism in the society.

.... ARE INTERACTIVE CONCEPTS

Then as now, the Women’s Movement is often perceived as a white Women’s Movement. Black women are often categorized solely as “black” as if they were not women as well, an attitude that is clear in the phrase “women and minorities.” Walker protested such a characterization of black women. In her essay, “One Child of One’s Own” (1979), she addresses the racism of white feminists and the refusal of blacks to address sexism in a discussion that summarizes her protests of that decade. She answers the question as to whether for black women, sex should come before race, or race before sex, by pointing out the obvious fact that black people come in both sexes. She traces the history of American feminism and reminds us that black women like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells were at the forefront of the nineteenth-century Women’s Rights Movement. And she also emphasizes that the Women’s Movement refers to women moving all over the world. Walker comments: “To the extent that black women dissociate themselves from the Women’s Movement they abandon their responsibilities to women throughout the world.” Through her work, Walker has challenged the idea that sexism and racism are separate categories. For black women, they are interactive concepts, and unless black women challenge them both, they will not achieve their freedom.

The two political movements that evolved during Walker’s youth - the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement-are crucial to the directions she has taken in her work. The subjects she has explored, from the restrictive ideology of motherhood to the history of black women’s creativity, are set in the spaces these movements opened for her.

WALKER AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION

Walker studied literature while she was in college. Like most writers, she has been influenced in her work by writers that preceded her. She tell us, in an early inter...