Redeeming Power of Art in

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy

Maryam Aminian1

Abstract
This study largely investigates Alice Walker’s fictions by focusing on the forms of art
portrayed in her literature.Bsically, the diversity of arts illustrated in Alice Walker’s books
their roles in resurrecting female’s identities , in general, are analyzed. It further scrutinizes
the impact of art on the relationship of women and men including Celie, Shug, and Mr__;
Mary Agnes and Harpo; Tashi. To a great extent the study scrutinizes the howness of women’
redemption and reconstruction thanks to the act of Celie’s quilting, writing letters addressed,
first to God, then to Nettie, and finally to nature ; Shug’s and Mary’s singing; Tashi’s
painting.
This research is intended to prove the effective nature of art on generating the inspiring
literary paragons who fight back the silence imposed on women. This result is accomplished
through exploring Alice Walker’s two novels: The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy.
Throughout the research, the points of great importance are sewing, writing, singing and
painting.

1
- M.A in English literature
Redeeming Power of Art in

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy

This essay provides answers to the preceding posed questions: What is the general purpose of
art? What are the interwoven elements of art represented in Walker’s literary works including
The Color Purple and Possessing the secret of Joy? What makes these artistic creativities
significant? What roles do they play in the character’s lives or how do these abilities
contribute to character’s development?
As Collins claimed art can construct our potential identities by “locating, shaping, and
sharing alternative histories, values, rituals, and myths”. Accordingly, speaking about the
purpose of art Bell adds :

myths, legends, folktales, and other forms of verbal art [as well as literary works and artistic
works ] have four principal functions. They transmit knowledge, value, and attitudes from one
generation to another, enforce conformity to social norms, validate social institutions and
religious rituals, and provide a psychological release from the restrictions of society. (The
Afro-American 15)

These elements notably the psychologiacl release of art is a distinguished characteristic of art
which is clearly demonstrated in Pulitzer prize winner Alice walker’s literary works including
The Color Purple and Posessing the Secret of Joy.
The integrity of art and life elaborated in Afro-American literature lies in -to a large extent-
the perceived Afro-American literary philosophy about the function of literature in their
lives.Collins quoting Donaldson in her essay “Activists Who Yearn for Art That Transforms:
Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States” elaborates Black
artist are in the quest of power in their works since “Black image makers are creating forms
that define, glorify, and direct black people-an art for the people's sake”. Unlike the ideal
philosophy of “art for art's sake” dissociating art from real life, the replaced theory of “art for
people’s sake” proposed by African writers, underlies call for self recognition and self
awareness (Collins). Likewise, Karenga observed “Black Art must be for the people, by the
people, and from the people. That is to say, it must be functional, collective and committing”
(qtd. in Collins). Walker, if not notably, like other African reaffirms how art can work toward
releasing human, especially women, from the social restrictions keeping them under the
supervision of patriarchal authority.
Art in Alice Walker’s word is not high elaborated works exhibited in room overflowed with
some intellectual persons, time to time, murmuring appreciating words looking at an artistic
work. Regarding the practical use of art in daily life- reaffirmed in walker’s Short story
“Everyday Use”- Coleman remarks “Walker turned the idea of art on its head. Instead of
looking high, she suggested, we should look low. On that low ground she found a multitude
of artist-mothers--the women” working their own freedom and power and community,
employing their underestimated arts. Therefore as Davis puts in “Walker's Celebration of Self
in Southern Generations” art is a reservoir for generating “...freedom …beauty, … power and
community”.
To Alice Walker art is a primary source to which women can resort for obtaining their own
selves in restrictive society in which women’s crashed individualities depicted in her works
can be regained by employing diverse forms of art. Subsequently, underscoring the role of art
in society, she asserts art should “make us better; if [it] doesn't then what on earth is it for?”
(qtd. in Davis,28).
Art and its aesthetic qualities, inspired by human emotion equip women hushed as a result of
the degenerating role played by men in social stage to express their battered feeling in the
form of art and literature leading to their empowerment. Consequently, women’s artistic
drives are considered as outlets for unrelenting immense oppression they have faced.
Henderson elaborates, for Walker, “art is liberational and life-saving; it is an act for
reconstruction and reclamation of self, of past, of women, and of community” (67).
Reaffirming the concept, Walker highlights that “people can hear Celie's voice. There are so
many people like Celie who make it, who came out of nothing. People who triumphed.”
(Walker, qtd. in Henderson 67).
Like Joseph Beuys asserting “To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the
science of freedom.” in his critical essay “Introduction: Alice Walker A Woman Walking into
Peril” Dieke confirms that “for Walker the end of art is salvation and redemption; in other
words, salvation is the result of artistic … agency” (Smith, qtd. in Dieke).
Her portrayed characters compromising Celie, doing patch work, making pants, writing her
autobiography; Mary Agnes singing Blue songs, Tashi painting, commence using their own
exclusive artistic abilities for expressing their creativities to improve their social as well as
psychological statues.

Quilting Sisterhood
The first focused concept prevailing Walker’s works is the art of quilting, playing an
effective part in forming and reconstructing female identities. Sam Whitsitt in “In Spite of It
All: A Reading of Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use ” regarding quilt making acknowledges
since sixties the quilt has been revaluated, from the marginalized position as a symbol of
gossipy women’s sewing circles, to seventies position, in which it contributes to black female
identities.
Concerning the importance of new found definition of quilt making in “Nothing Can Be Sole
or Whole That Has Not Been Rent” Judy Elsley observes:

A woman makes the world her own by taking apart the patriarchal ways of being to create a
space for herself. That space allows her to accept her own fragmentation and thus validate
herself….In effect she makes a patchwork quilt of her life. (164)

Being arranged and designed in definite male patterns Afro-American women lost their
individualities, so as Whitsitt and Elsley note through quilting their original creative patterns
women can inscribe and create new definitions of themselves. Therfore, confirming the
critical significance of quilting Elaine Hedges asks “whether the needle doesn’t at times move
too magically to dispel conflict, to solve complex issues of gender and male power?” (
Hedges, qtd. In Whitsitt) and contributes to Women’s self realization.
Quilting is an act of tearing and reconstructing, Celie beaten to be reminded of her own place
as a woman in order to provide her husband with superior feeling reverberated in Mr__
words “Wives is like children You have to let ‘em know who got the upper hand ( The Color
37) starts off redefining herself through patch working. Fallen apart from her own real self as
well as family including her sister and her children, Olivia and Adam, like parted scraps Celie
is patched up together at the end of the novel through sisterly affection . Celie should have
been torn, to be sewn and patched again in a renewed feminine artistic pattern by the help of
her other peers. As Ikenna in “Introduction: Alice Walker, A Woman Walking into Peril”
suggests:

Quilt-making is therapeutic, because it is interwoven with the whole elemental process of

restoration and wholeness. In Walker’s The Color Purple quilt is a trope for Walker’s
deconstructive temper and for understanding the paradox that in order to find the self one
would have to lose the self. (9)
So making quilt emphasizes the movement from male defined fragmented entity to the whole
restored female one and from loneliness to community. That is why Celie defined by her
husband Mr “what you got? You ugly…you shape funny. You too scared to open your mouth
to people” (The Color 212), is reconstructed to an individual capable of fighting back all male
definition prescribed to the benefit of them as well as her husband by articulating “the jail you
plan for me [my body and voice] is the one in which you will rot…” (The Color 213) and
declaring “every lick you hit me you will suffer twice”.. Celie takes her features cast away or
repressed by patriarchy and regenerates a new version of herself through art.
On the other hand, for Walker, in Christian’s words, quilting is a female written history,
referring to the common experience of everybody, “their relationships, with the young to the
old, with women to men, which are often embodied in their family structure, rituals, mores,
music, and language” (27). Relinquishing patriarchal means of communication and inscription
Walker’s women write their own histories in their own language by piecing together shapes
and fabrics, taken from different women. For instance, having been accused of illegal sexual
affair, Nettie disdained the patriarchal rules by resorting to female written history- “herstory”
(McMahon). Having taken out the quilt made by Corrine out of children’s worn clothes,
Nettie could convince Corinn, suspicious of Reverened Mr and Netties’s prior affairs –since
their step children, Adam and Olivia, were similar to Nettie- about her story that she is
“children’s aunt and their mother is … [her] older sister” (The Color 191). For Walker, art of
quilt like a literature is one means of recording the black women’s history contributing to the
freedom from patriarchal history.
Additionally, from Cutter’s perspective discussed in “Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker’s
Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple” Celie’s sewing functions as an
alternative methodology of language that moves her away from violence and victimization
into the self-empowered individual earning her own living. In “Philomela Speaks: Alice
Walker’s Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple”, Mainimo points out,
“sewing does more than enable conversation: sewing is conversation, a language that
articulates relationships and connects and reconnects networks of individuals to create a
community”. Tavormina continues in “Dressing the Spirit: Clothworking and Language in
The Color Purple” “sewing is an act of union, of connecting pieces to make a useful whole.
Furthermore, sewing with others is a comradely act, one that allows both speech and
comfortable, supportive silence” (224).
The new language, uttered through the sounds the vibrations of which are too high to be heard
by patriarchal hearing mechanism introduced a new female communicative releasing means.
Opening a new communication through patching discrete scraps, Celie and Sophia
accompanied with Shug, make whole new identity out of disposal by commencing to talk
with muted lips and needles working -a mechanism to which male are completely unfamiliar.
That is the reason, Celie sitting between Mr__ and Shug, quilting describes herself as a
complete entity “I see myself sitting there quilting tween Shug Avery and Mr.__ us three
together ….For the first time in my life, I feel just right” (The Color 60).
Taking some different advice from various folks, reshaping her identity, Celie transforms to a
living moving artistic quilt, formed by absorbing their features including Shug’s
independence, Sofia’s courage to fight and Nettie’s eagerness to learn, culminating
respectively in establishing her business and fighting back Mr__’s oppression, and her
literacy.
“Sister’s choice” (The Color 61) the pattern of the quilt Celie and Sofia choose obviously is a
symbol of the “female bonding that restores the women to a sense of completeness and
independence” and connectedness (Wade, qtd. in Shakhovtseva). Celie’s suggestion “Let’s
make quilt pieces out of these messed up….And, I run git my pattern book” (The Color 44)
figuratively refers to the artistic pattern she chose to make herself anew out of the dispersed
pieces of advice she had collected during her life, based on which she constructs her shattered
self, and wins over her passivity and victimhood.

Writing Letters
Among domestic works Walker shows great interest in letter writing as another artistic
method through which the suppressed voice gain power . Deprived of knowing about her
body and failed to express her feeling including desires, anger and happiness, Celie
commences writing her unuttered words in the form of letters addressed to three addressees,
chronologically God, Nettie and Nature. Using writing as an outlet, humiliated and
maltreated Celie, who at the very first page of novel erases “I am” and replaces it with “I
have always been a good girl” (1), improves to a recognizable individual, and transforms to a
Celie, commenting on herself and judging the others. She could rebuild herself through
replacing her creative written letter and her sister’s letters with her battered physical body.
In “Laugh of Medusa” Cixous discusses “It is writing….by taking up the challenge of speech
which has been governed by the phallus, that woman will confirm” (Cixous, qtd. Watkin
117). Celie’s writing letters, Lauret claims, makes us regard writing as the mark of liberation
from patriarchal oppression (103). Her fragmented nullified body is reconstructed throughout
the series of letters. At the end Celie who previously called her husband Mr___ and confirmed
him with “yessir” (The Color 47), turned to nothing as result of absorbing the wrong picture
presented and interpreted from bible - wives should obey their fathers and husbands -
regardless of what they inflict upon them, transforms to a woman, affirming her existence
through fighting back with words, articulated from her mouth against her husband. She starts
defining herself by her words rather than drawing her definition from the other sources linked
to patriarchy. As an example, Mr__’s ridiculing her decision to start her business with Shug in
Memphis “you too scared to open your mouth to people” (The Color 213) and his
emphasizing on his description of her as a wordless individual, is answered back by Celie
who articulates “the jail you plan for me [my body and voice] is the one in which you will
rot…” (The Color 213).
Wendy Wall in “Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple” mentions how
one ideological group establishes power by imprinting its traces on the bodies of other people
through invading (rape), impressing (wife beating), and fragmenting. Maintaining power by
suppressing the female bodies into a position of powerlessness, patriarchy denies that
women’s identity comes true. However, Celie learns to transform those forces of oppression
and frames herself in her letters. Being raped, battered, imprinted by patriarchy, she starts
rewriting traces inflicted on her in a new inspiring way. Writing enables her to revert the
impressing forces in her own advantage. Her fragmented body is reintegrated through her
discrete, though, innately unifying letters, acting as a second body through which she can
speak.
Shortly after being raped she transformed – in her own term—to a senseless tree
which neither can feel “I make myself wood” (23) nor can show feeling “I don’t
feel nothing …. Patting Harpo back” (31), so she begins writing to reaffirm and
prove her lost desensitized body. As Wall points out in “Lettered Bodies and
Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple.” “Letter language” is not “the nearest
record of … consciousness in ordinary life” or “instantaneous experience” (3)
Celie’s writing is:

neither a pure channel of communication nor a duplicitous self-

misrepresentation but a complex means of restructuring herself, an active
process in which she moves toward a self-realization through the mediation of
language. (3)

By rewriting herself she finds a way to review her emotions and feelings
suppressed by Mr__. For instance, on Mr__’s arrival from Shug’s performance,
Celie’ mind is obsessed with so many questions about Shug, yet she keeps silent
and writes her unuttered questions in letters, her second self. The letter becomes
the outer skin of her body, keeping her unexpressed emotions separately from
her apparent action, she doesn’t react against Mr__’s maltreatment and just
mirrors her discontent in her letters. Through writing letter she could leave her
body for her second body by which she could tolerate the situation and stay
alive.
It is through sticking together her discrete scrapes and writings, recording her
fragmented inexpressible feelings that she could achieve wholeness. She buried
her real self in her letters, to keep it safe from disruption. Her quotation “I talk to
myself a lot standing in front of mirror” (The Color 266) metaphorically refers
to her letter writing through which she regenerated a new self and made
something out of nothingness.
Each letter by itself is a separate entity with a recognizable border yet collected together,
these letters create a unified form of art that are related due to narrating ones story life.
Having been written in first person point of view, her literary letters or her own written
literature preserved and framed the feelings she could not articulate, so provided her with
good resources to recreate herself. Celie’s letters addressed first to God, and then to Nettie
and ultimately to nature connects her to her lost interior being or inner voice.

Singing Blues
Singing is the other form of art contributing to Walker’s character including Shug and
Squeak to recognize their identities. One of the most influential singings is blues singing – a
supernatural force that can take on human characteristics and possess its victims. About
singing Blues, Marvin Thomas proclaims in “’Preachin’ the Blues’: Bessie Smith’s secular
religion and Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple” “when a blues singer refers to her own
troubles, these personal difficulties resonate for members of the audience who have had
similar experiences, so that personal expression becomes collective expression”
Shug Avery, a blues singer giving voice to the voiceless, power to the
powerless, and money to the poor is a dominate character in Alice Walker’s
novel. She transforms the life of Celie, the novel’s protagonist, and Mary Agnes,
Hrapo’s wife, through a blues conversion. Shug’s shedding new light on Celie’s
life leads to Celie’s metamorphosis from a passive victim to a confident girl.
Reversal in Celie’s fortune underscores what Johnson in “’You Just Can’t Keep
a Good Woman Down’: Alice Walker Sings the Blues” claims “The blues
woman, whose song is true to her own experience and rooted in the values and
beliefs of the community- underscoring “art for People’s sake”- empowers those
who love her and effects change in those around her”.
Byerman, writing bout blues in her essay “Walker’s Blues” claims, Mary Agnes, the shadowy
figure who is ridiculously addressed by her husband as Squeak since her voice reverberates
the sound of animals, finds her voice through singing . Describing Squeak as her duplication,
Celie states “She a nice girl …but she like me. She do anything Harpo[her husband] say”
(86). Although silent like Celie, having gained her voice and started to sing she asked Harpo
to call her Mary Agnes. Shug helps her to start singing as her carrier, her encouragement
allows Squeak to find her own voice as a blues singer and to demand that she no longer be
“called out of her name” (64) by Harpo, who has previously treated her as insignificant. For
walker singing is another way for women to express and empower themselves
At first Shug and Squeak sing together in the evenings and Squeak imitates “Shug’s songs,
then she begins to make up songs of her own self” (The Color 103) and gradually starts
singing her own songs and tries singing in public even though she doesn’t have the “big and
broad” voice typical of blues singers. Receiving admiration from the public “Folks love her”
(225) and evaluating herself as worthy to perform in front of public she acquires her true self,
denied from her by society patriarchy and Harpo. Squeak could establish her own personality
through expressing repressed agonies and hardships she has gone through Singing Blues.
Deprived of her voice squeak could find singing blues as an outlet for speaking on her behalf
about her problems and feelings previously suppressed by society.
Shug and particularly Mary through singings blues, what Russell called coded artistic
“language of resistance” (qtd. In Lauret 113), metaphorically outcries voices silenced by
patriarchy, announce their sufferings and oppressions and free their voices in their own songs.
Squeak’s singing reverberates the log-lasting hushed sound of negro women who
“individually and collectively work toward their own and each other's salvation” throughout
the history, Russell suggests, Blue singers “talk to us,…they are the expression of a particular
social process by which poor black women have commented on all ….political questions
facing us ….” (qtd. In Lauret 113).

Queen Honey Bee, Shug, through dedicating Celie one of her songs, naming it after her
“Celie’s song” (77) to express her gratitude for all the troubles she has gone through for her
metaphorically, Marvin writes in “’Preachin’ the Blues’: Bessie Smith’s secular religion and
Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple” “encourages Celie, to reaffirm her experiences to free
herself from those who have oppressed her, and to understand her inherent value as a person”.
In “Queen Bee, King Bee: The Color Purple and the Blues” Wasserman emphasizes that
through composing and singing a song for and about Celie, leading to her reformation, Shug
reflects her unvoiced experiences, suffocated by society. Shug reminds Celie of her worth to
be spoken about, furthermore, Shug’s singing functions as a Celie’ speaker, publicly
pronouncing her sufferings.
Painting
The other form of art interesting to Walker is the art of painting represented in the Possessing
the Secrete of Joy. One of the means by the use of which Tashi who in contrast with a silent
numb girl unable to utter her sufferings inflicted on her, turns to a nonconformist girl and can
remove the boulder keeping her silent is painting. Suffering from boulder keeping her silent
and her unfulfilled marriage, for many years, Tashi initially starts breaking silence by thinking
about her situation pinpointed by Mzee’s remark “Negro women . . . can never be analyzed
effectively because they can never bring themselves to blame their mothers….Blame them for
anything….” (55).
To initiate her therapy Mzee her psychiatrist asked her to draw. Remembering the story of her
birth told by her mother “I did not carry you to term [since] coming back from bathing I was
frightened by a leopard” whose cubs has been shot and skinned” Tashi says “The first thing I
drew was a Leopard with two legs. My terrified mother with four” (54) In the painting the two
legs with the face of Leopard represent patriarchy while her mother on her four legs refers to
the oppressed victimized condition of leopard. Having been deprived of giving voice to the
suffering she and other women had experienced she transferred them through painting.
In one phase, having watched a film- made by Mezee her psychiatrist- taken of Africa in the
scene of which there were several small children, being prepared for undergoing a ritual and a
fighting cock which appeared in the frame, Tashi fainted (72). Having recovered her
consciousness, she obsessively started painting to transfer the great horror she felt deep into
her heart but could not speak about it because of the boulder, obstructing her throat, created
by Patriarchy. Tashi started painting the “extended series of ever larger and more fearsome
fighting cocks” (73) and a foot holding something between her toes. She painted “the cock,
what Adam later termed feathered creature, because it was too devil to be called cock”, on the
wall of Mezz’s bedroom “because [as Tashi explained ]only there could I paint the cock as
huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me” (Possessing 74). Recounting this moment she
remarks:

There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the cock
continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached
steadily toward what I felt would be the crisis. (Possessing 74)

Watching the film has recalled her the scene in which hidden she was watching her sister’s
undergoing African ritual -exclusively practiced on women- leading to her death. This
epiphany unfolded her past. “I took a deep breath and exhaled it against the boulder blocking
my throat: I remembered my sister Dura’s murder, I said, exploding the boulder” (74). When
she removed boulder of her sister’s death, suppressed by society “don’t cry” she came to
understand the reality of African ritual practiced on women. Moving the boulder from her
throat she begins to use her voice, culminating in questioning authorities and finally rejecting
the Onlinkans’ values leading to her imprisonment and consequently her sentences to death
by firing squad

Fragmented Tashi, represented in her different names, Tashi, Evelyn, Tashi- Evelyn, Evelyn-
Tashi, Tashi- Evelyn-Kept silent about her suffering, could release from the iron bars of
patriarchy through watching film and painting the plight imposed on her. As soon as she
watched the films and initiated painting she could spotted the cause of her suffering concealed
in her unconscious - her sister's death under the initiating surgery- and could speak about it.
Paintings mirrored the reality about Tashi and contribute to her self recognition. Painting
reflected and illustrated her plight to which she was kept ignored. By drawing her suppressed
feelings, she could recognize her self and the causes of her torments so she starts eliminating
them

Conclusion
To warp up, it is concluded that pervaded art ‘in Alice walker’s works nurture the characters.
Walker’s recurrent reference to quilting, writing, singing and painting indicates her real
contention in the efficient real effect of art in resurrecting women whose dead beaten bodies
have been suffering due to patriarchal oriented society. Resorting to art illustrated in the
novels, rediscovering their own voices and speaking in their own terms rather than duplicating
the very things they are dictated Celie Shug Mary Agnes convert to new self-assured women.
Alice’s redemptive practical art conclude with individual promotion of humanity in the
nationwide Negro society epitomized in the art of quilting, writing, singing, renovating social
imposed codes in favor of classless and Womanist society flowering humanity for the whole,
irrespective women or men. Walker’s utopia formed through incarnation of art integrated in
the literary figures
Controlled and mastered by their husbands, women go through the secondary enslavement
and silence represented in being beaten, subjugated, governed mentally and physically. Each
character uses his or her own methods to break through silence imposed on them In Celie
and Mary’s case silence was created and prolonged by being beating, for Tashi this notion is
preserved by undergoing the African ritual dispossessing her of her own inner voice. Each
character using her own strategies could win over her silence: Celie by narrating her stories in
her letters and reflecting on them could gain knowledge, Squeak by singing her songs about
her feelings and giving voice to her hopes, dreams, pains and sorrows, and ultimately, Tashi
by her paintings, displaying the causes of her sufferings, by listening to songs and watching
the film dedicated to her by her supporters.
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