Academic Exchange Quarterly Spring 2005 ISSN 1096-1453 Volume 9, Issue 1
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Case Study: The Color Purple on
the Whiteboard
Rob
Baum,
Baum, Ph.D.,
Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies, is a poet, playwright and performer.
The
assigned high school reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was intended to rectify
an imbalance in gendered and raced texts in the curriculum and increase
Caucasian awareness of race. But the school administration failed to adequately
prepare its predominantly white population and instead reinforced stereotypes
about gender, race, and sexuality.
This
case study reveals what happened when the novel The Color Purple was introduced into high
school curriculum to correct gender and racial inequity in school readings.
Administrators, well meaning but ill-informed, failed to prepare teachers—and
therefore students—for the text’s cultural biases. I address The Color Purple’s
resistance of canonical writing and the need for re-education of readers
approaching unfamiliar cultures.
Dominant
reading sources reflect “the canon”: Euro-American (Western European or North
American) literature, almost always written by men, commonly from an
unconsciously privileged and/or colonial perspective. A movement to
challenge—or unseat—the canon’s dominance resulted in a flurry of
sub-literatures by writers labelled “marginal” or “postcolonial,” predictably
resulting in alternative canons. The concept of “writing back to the Empire”
has engendered a sense of
But
alternative canons do not inherently re-condition readers to re-think plot,
character, or voice: structuralist textual expectations prevail, readers adhere
to canonical criteria structuring comprehension and predicting preference.
Marginalized authors have argued that unless readers themselves shift from a “central” point-of-view there can
be no conscious engagement with marginal texts. Readers must learn to read and
comprehend in a “de-centralized” manner. Thus, non-canonical works necessitate
re-contextualization: students must be encouraged to consider the suppressive
forces underprivileged authors face, constructively grapple with ramifications
of gender in writing and reading the marginal, and locate themselves within an
ongoing academic argument about what constitutes literature and how to read it.
Texts
introduced to satisfy gender imbalances in education may stir rather than quiet
emotions. Not only an issue of male and female sex
characteristics or roles, gender is a complex negotiation between
individuals and societies, affecting every part of life. In this study issues
of race and its gendering, as well as
sexual preference, provoked controversy in and out of the classroom.
Role Modelling
In
the early 1990s
In
its narrative exchange of letters as the conduit for sisterhood, the novel
promotes love of language and writing and displays the possibility of genuine
love between unrelated women: the beautiful entertainer Shug
Avery, Mr. ___’s long-term mistress, falls in love with Celie
and eventually rescues her from a loveless marriage. The novel’s representation
of positive female characters is uncommonly powerful and forthright: women
defend their honor, family, and rights; care for the
sick, needy, and undeserving; work to ensure their families’ livelihood; and
keep society from absolute moral decay.
The
school administration intended a positive and powerful gender and race identity
role in author Alice Walker, a female African-American writer. Where single
texts—or teachers—represent whole categories (concepts found in many high
schools and perpetuated at the tertiary level),
Forthrightly
identifying with
A woman who loves other women,
sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers
women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility...and women’s strength.
Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually.
Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male
and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health.
Traditionally universalist, as in “Mama, why are we
brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?” (Walker
1983: xi)
With
this personal mandate
And
fame. The Color
Purple (1982) swept the
Woods
High administrators’ first priority was to study a female writer’s work. The Color Purple’s
measurable financial success made
Big Screen
When
Warner Brothers approached
The
comparison was not an idle one: the novel did uncommonly celebrate common
people. The Color
Purple is brilliant, engaging, and deeply moving;
All the virtues of the book—its gumption and directness and
the potency of its private, vernacular vision of anguish—are evident in the
first half of this section.
While
powerfully presenting the issues, the movie soft-coats the unremitting horror
of Celie’s childhood, the girls’ epistolary
achievement, and occludes
The presence of lesbian sexual desire in the written texts
has been deliberately erased in the screen versions, possibly because the film
industry has until recently been reluctant to grant screen space to something
as progressive and disruptive as lesbian identity. (Kabir
113)
Public
reactions were extreme:
Since its premiere…The Color Purple…provoked constant
controversy, debate and appraisals of its effects on the image of Black people
in the U.S. [However,] one of the problems most of the film’s reviewers have in
trying to analyse the film… is to make sense of the overwhelming positive
response from Black female viewers. (Bobo 90-92) [2]
The
film’s portrayal of black life and female friendship was unusually apt; but
many spectators protested Spielberg’s trivializing of
Student Reception
Woods
High School students found the novel so compelling that they forgot the
author’s involvement, completely negating Walker as a positive role model—or,
because of autobiographical nature of essays at secondary level—conflated
Walker with her novel’s subjects, seeing her alternatively as an ugly, abused
black woman (neglecting Celie’s many successes) or an
exotically beautiful yet dependent black woman (Shug
Avery). Students’ access to the movie is probably most to blame for this latter
identification. John Peacock notes, “While far behind the number one and two
best-sellers up until then…The Color Purple had the distinction of being the only
video in the top hundred all-time best sellers to date that was concerned with
black feminist issues” (Peacock 127 n.1).
It is
also possible that teachers, ignoring tutorial design, skipped over the
biographical material, plunging directly into the text. In any case, students
were not guided to adopt a different reading protocol towards non-canonical,
specifically raced and gendered texts. The
It was really sad, how black people live. I mean, the black
people are all poor because they were slaves. They aren’t slaves in the book
though, but they’re still poor and they don’t know how to read or write...
And the girl has a baby because she’s ugly and can’t get
married, so her father does it to her, but because she gets pregnant he has to
kill the baby...
But later the man who does the rape is okay, because he puts
the sisters together again, so all is forgiven.
While
these students felt they had understood the novel, and indeed achieved an
empathetic relationship to the primary female characters, what they understood contravened curricular intentions. The module
in fact presented what the students received—but the film interfered:
Then she gets married to Danny Glover. But her husband can’t
stand her, ‘cause he loves the beautiful one. Celie loves her too, only she can’t really because Shug isn’t like that. She wasn’t beaten up and...wasn’t raped...she’s a normal woman.
The
students unfortunately made a connection—common to fairytales upon which they
were raised—between physiognomy and virtue. Both Shug
and Nettie are sexually objectified, and mostly good
things happen to them; Celie, repeatedly labelled
ugly—even by Shug herself— suffers a range of
brutality by male perpetrators. Finally, Sofia, who defies women’s normative behavior, is grossly punished by white society.
White
students’ mixing of character and actor is indicative of the association they
feel exists between black Americans’ story-life and reality. These students
didn’t personally know blacks because of a faithful economic demarcation
securing relatively wealthy white kids in private schools close to their own
elite neighborhoods, and blacks, Chicanos, and
disadvantaged whites in public schools at the outskirts. Apart from the rare
(and speedy) drive past rough, lower class neighborhoods,
blacks were visible only on television, which featured three seasoned
representations of black family life: The
Cosby Show, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Family Matters—sitcoms dedicated to proving rich black folks just
as vapid, materialist, and apolitical as rich white folks. Renunciation of the
novel’s same-sex pathos demonstrates the students’ inability to de-centralize
or allow novelties in race and gender to suggest other differences. While
reading, therefore, students received impressions of American blackness that supported what they heard of inner-city
black life and opposed what they saw
of black life.
Woods’
students emotional kinship with black tv families was actually usurped by exposure to The Color Purple: if
black people could behave so badly and live so poorly, then they were truly
Other. Black segregation was, ironically, justified
by a text denouncing black shame and exploitation.
Unable
to grasp the people they encountered in novel form, they also failed to
distinguish between norms inculcated by inferior financial status, economic
hardship, and white heterosexist ideology. This is not the novel’s fault, [4]
but a problem in reading. Bobo explains the necessary
act of reading from the margins:
A viewer of a film (reader of
a text) comes to the moment of engagement with the work with a
knowledge of the world and a knowledge of other texts, or media
products. What this means is that...she/he does not leave her/his histories,
whether social, cultural, economic, racial, or sexual at the door. An audience
member from a marginalized group (people of colour, women, the poor, and so on)
has an oppositional stance as they participate in mainstream media. The
motivation for this counter-reception is that...mainstream media has never
rendered our segment of the population faithfully. (Bobo
96)
Marginalized
readers learn to locate themselves in dominant texts. The practice typically
employed by dominant readers is to whitewash privilege for the duration of the
reading. For all its humility, humanity, and delightful audacity, The Color Purple could
not be accepted as the text it is, but only as the text it appeared to be, refracted by whiteness into an impoverished picture
of African-American life.
[1] Many
lesbian critics hesitated to embrace The
Color Purple as a lesbian novel. renée c. hoogland’s “unequivocal ambivalence” about Celie’s lesbian—or sexual—subjectivity is a case in point (hoogland 1997).
[2] Black and white women viewers were positive
for different reasons; Bobo’s thesis is interested
only in articulating the black female debate. Bobo
expands upon this chapter in her book (Bobo 1995).
[3] Karen Ross critiques the “forgettable and
undemanding” characters Whoopi Goldberg has played in
a career beginning with award of
[4]
When an
References
Bobo, Jacqueline. Black Women as Cultural
Readers. NY:
Bobo, Jacqueline. “The Color Purple: Black
Women as Cultural Readers.” Female
Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. Deidre Pribram.
Christian, Barbara T., ed. “Everyday Use:” Alice Walker. NJ:
Davis, Thadious
M. “Alice Walker’s Celebration of Self in Southern Generations.” “Everyday Use:” Alice Walker. Ed. Barbara T. Christian. NJ:
Dworkin, Susan. “The Making of The Color Purple.” Ms. Magazine (Dec 1985): 68.
hoogland, renée
c. why small
letters “Defining Differences: The
Lavender Menace and The Color Purple.” Lesbian Configurations.
NY:
Kabir, Shameem.
Daughters of Desire: Lesbian
Representations in Film.
Peacock, John. “Adapting The Color Purple: When
Folk Goes Pop.” Adapting
the Contemporary American Novel to Film. Ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack.
Ross, Karen. Black and White Media: Black Figures in
Popular Film and Television. NY: Polity Press,
1996.
Vineberg, Steve. No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan
Decade. NY: Macmillan Books, 1993.
Walker,
Walker,
Walker,