紫色论文定稿

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: CELIE’S PURSUIT OF FEMALE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN
THE COLOR PURPLE
Abstract: This essay discusses the course of the heroine in The Color Purple, Celie’s pursuit of her self-consciousness. Even though her life is full of hardship, Celie persists in looking for her self-consciousness and finally she successfully achieves the value of herself. This essay is based on historical evidences and womanism. It analyses Celie, a black woman growing up in the South. She writes letters to God in which she tells about her life——her roles as a daughter, a wife, a sister, and a mother. In the course of her story, Celie meets a series of other black women who help shape her life: Nettie, Celie's sister, who becomes a missionary teacher in Africa. She also becomes Celie’s spiritual dependence after Celie knows that God doesn’t exit in reality, and the guardian of Celie’s two children who symbolize Celie’s hope; Shug Avery, the Blues singer, who her husband Mr. X is in love with, and who becomes Celie’s salvation; Sofia, the strong-willed daughter-in-law of Celie whose strength and courage inspire Celie. Celie finally gets rid of those troubles which have been bothering her. Through the constant awareness of the life and the influence from a few women around her, she realizes her true self, having her own work, life, family. And at last she forgives her husband which symbolizes the compromise between black women and black men. There is a special spirit on her. The spirit is that she dare fight with adversity, dare pursuit life. And there is always a strong belief of optimism in her. This essay names the course pilgrim’s progress.
Key words: Celie letters black woman womanism God The Color Purple
论文摘要
本论文探讨的是《紫色》这部小说中的女主人公，茜利，在她充满坎坷困苦的一生中，去不断的追求女性自我意识并最后实现自我价值的过程。

本文从历史角度及女性主义入手，分析茜利，一个生长在美国南方的黑人妇女，写信给上帝去讲诉她作为女儿、妻子、姐姐、妈妈的角色的一生。

同时，有几个影响了她一生的黑人妇女，聂蒂，她的妹妹，一个非洲的传教士，她不但是茜利认识到上帝不可能真正走入她的生活中帮助她后的精神寄托，也是象征着黑人妇女希望的茜利的两个孩子的监护人；莎格.埃佛里，蓝调歌手，她丈夫的情人，成为了她的拯救者；索非亚，她的儿媳，意志坚定，一直激励着她。

最后，她终于摆脱了一直困扰她的那些烦恼。

通过对生活的不断认识，以及周围的几个女人对她的影响，找到了一个真实的自我，完全拥有了自己的工作，生活，家庭，并原谅了她的丈夫。

在她身上有一种精神，一种敢于与逆境搏斗的精神，敢于探索人生的精神和对自己对生活充满信心的乐观主义精神。

最后她实现了自己的人生价值，自我意识得到了体现。

本论文称这个过程为天路历程。

关键词：茜利；信；黑人妇女；妇女主义；上帝；《紫色》
Contents
Ⅰ. Introduction (1)
Ⅱ. Pursuit of Self-consciousness through Suffering (6)
A. Cultural and Historical Background (6)
1.Womanism (6)
2. Historical Events of the Novel’s Coming into Being (11)
B. Exploration of Self-consciousness through Suffering (12)
1. Two Oppressions Upon the Black Women (12)
2. Celie’s Unusual Childhood (13)
3. Celie’s Unhappy Marriage life (14)
4. The Stepson’s Wife, Sophia’s Affection (15)
5. Shug’s Coming into Celie’s Life (16)
6. Celie’s Leaving for Her Own Life (18)
7. Nettie’s Letters (19)
8. Women Themselves, the Only Goddesses to Save Themselves (20)
9. The Final Independence of Celie (21)
Ⅲ. Conclusion (24)
Notes (27)
Bibliography (29)
Pilgrim’s Progress: Celie’s Pursuit of Female Self-consciousness
in The Color Purple
Ⅰ. Introduction
Alice Walker is one of the most important and prominent contemporary black American woman writers. She is a novelist, a critic, and a poet at once. Her novel The Color Purple causes the critics’attentions due to her new conception and unique techniques. After its publication in 1982, the novel immediately became the best seller in the United States. In 1983, it won both the Plitzer and the American Book Award. In 1984, it was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg. Alice Walker became the first Plitzer winner among the American black women writers. She rose on the stage of the American literature like a brilliant star and has become well known to every family.
Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944. A black child born into poverty, Walker started her life with many disadvantages. Her family lived as sharecroppers in the Deep South. At the age of eight, Walker lost eyesight in one of her eyes when an elder brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun. Her childhood was typical like other black women of her time; she often had to confront racism and sexual abuse. Due to the loss of eyesight and scars on her face, Walker soon grew isolated from the rest of her community, spending most of her time reading and writing about people around her. During this period, she developed a deep bond with her mother and other women relatives who inspired her to become an independent black
woman. Despite these obstacles, Walker grew up to be quite successful. She graduated at the top of her high school class and soon graduated from college. Walker lived in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement and was an avid activist for minority and women’s rights. In 1983, Walker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her most famous novel－The Color Purple. Walker will be remembered not only as an award-winning author, but also as a leader for black women’s rights.
Alice Walker’s achievements as a writer are equally at home with poetry and fiction--it’s worth remembering her first appearance in book form as a poet, not as a novelist or fiction writer. Indeed, as an essayist alone she would be a noteworthy presence in American letters. But it is her novels that she is best known for, and it is her novels that the full complexity of her vision is most evident in.
Until now, Walker has published five novels: The Third Life and Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Her short stories have been collected in two volumes－In Love & Trouble(1973) and You can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1982). Walker’s publication of poetry has kept pace with her novels－Her collections are Once (1968), Five Poems (1972), Revolutionary Petunias &Poems (1973), Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979), and Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984). She has published two important collections of her own
essays, －In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988);a significant collection of the writings of Zora Hurston; and a young adultbiography of Langston Hughes.
The Color Purple, Alice Walker's third novel, was published in 1982. The novel brought fame and financial success to its author. It also won her considerable praise and much criticism for its controversial themes. Many reviewers were disturbed by her portrayal of black males, which they found unduly negative. When the novel was made into a film in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, Walker became even more successful and controversial. While she was criticized for negative portrayal of her male characters, Walker was admired for her powerful portraits of black women. Reviewers praised her for her use of the epistolary form, in which written correspondence between characters comprises the content of the book, and her ability to use black folk English. Reflecting her early political interests as a civil rights worker during the 1960s, many of her social views are expressed in the novel.
In The Color Purple, as in her other writings, Walker focuses on the theme of double repression of black women in the American experience. Walker contends that black women suffer from discrimination by the white community, and from a second repression from black males, who impose the double standard of white society on women. As the civil rights movement helped shape Ms. Walker's thinking regarding racial issues at home, it also shaped her interest in Africa. During the 1960s, a strong interest in ethnic and
racial identity stimulated many African Americans to look for their roots in Africa. The primary theme of The Color Purple, though, reflects Walker’s desire to project a positive outcome in life, even under the harshest conditions. Her central character triumphs over adversity and forgives those who oppressed her. This central theme of the triumph of good over evil is no doubt the source of the book’s great success.
The color purple is about thirty years of the life of Celie, a southern black woman born at the turn of the twentieth century, and growing up in the South. In her teens，she is raped by her stepfather, who sells the two children whose mother is Celie.Celie is married off to Albert, whom she calls Mister. Albert expects Celie as a wife, to work in his fields and to accept his beatings which was, a common belief in the world among husbands at that time. Her sister, Nettie, runs away because of the mistreatment of her stepfather, and later is adopted by a black missionary couple who takes her to Africa. The novel consists of three sets of letters: Celie’s letters to God, about the incest and abuse she can not speak or write of to anyone else; Nettie’s letters to Celie, mainly about her experience in Africa; and Celie’s letters to Nettie, emphasizing the theme of sisterhood at the core of this novel’s concerns. Celie writes letters to God in which she tells about her life--her roles as a daughter, a wife, a sister, and a mother. In the course of her story, Celie meets a series of other Black women who help shape her life: Nettie, Shug Avery, Sofia, and Squeak. Throughout the story, though, Celie is the center of this
community of women, the one who knows how to survive. This paper will discuss this topic “how the black woman finally find her real value of life” through several parts: unit structure of Blacks; the fate of Black slaves; the characters of the novel. It talks about the black women’s statues in the society and the contradiction between the Black and the White, then between women and men. The real value at last breaks through the unit of the society, the community of Blacks, and then the old way that they hold. It expresses the whole meaning from the character of the author, the host in the novel and the community of Blacks. The aim is to tell women’s real value of life in the society of USA and the world.
Ⅱ.Pursuit of Self-consciousness through Suffering
A. Cultural and Historical Background
1. Womanism
Walker's works are all inseparable from her deep understanding of the history and culture of the South which provide her with a way of seeing the contemporary world and a field of expressing the true meaning of life for the black people, especially black women. Walker sensed the misery of black people, especially women, many of whom have lived the most miserable life at the bottom of American society for long. Black people suffered from inhumane slavery, plunder and oppression. And today, they still live in a dreadful plight under racial discrimination and segregation, which has been difficult to ravel out since the black stepped on the land. The history of black people itself has been imbued with humiliation. The division of lines of color was, and is still rigidly in place, though the civil rights movement constantly claims credit for desegregation in schools, housing and public transportation. In the state Georgia in which Walker grew up, it was illegal for a black person to enter a public restaurant, library or swimming pool. Her marriage to a white man was also illegal in the state of Mississippi. It is thus clear that, black females, together with black males have undergone great hardships from racial prejudice, yet they have also been fretted by sexual discrimination inside. Black men frequently vent depression, frustration and indignation on their long-suffering wives, who can find nowhere to take it out. Suffering
from racial and sexual oppression, black women have to endure more than black men and white women. They even live beyond the margin where black men and white women are respectively kept, in the white patriarchal society.
Miserable life experiences stimulated black women to write for themselves. However, it had been excluded out of the “mainstream”of American literature for a long time. Alice Walker discovered that her years at first a prestigious black college and then a prestigious white one had left her with a “blind spot” in her education for there she could hear “not one word about early black women writers”1. After moving to Mississippi in 1976, she audited a course at Jackson State University taught by the poet Margaret Walker, one of the few black women writers whose works were in print. Ironically, even there the focus was solely on black male writers such as Langston Huges, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin; black women writers were mentioned, but not read, partly because their works were largely unavailable. Since most of the writing were out of print, or cast off, Walker could only found Zora Neale Hurston-an excellent black woman writer’s name from “verbal footnotes” of white authoritative theories. When asked why black woman writer has been so ignored in America, Walker answered in an interview with John O’Brien:
…she's a woman. Critics seem unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black women. Generally they do not even make the attempt; they
prefer, rather, to talk about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since black women writers are not-it would seem-very likable-until recently they were the least willing worshippers of male supremacy--comments about them tend to be cruel. 2
Being neglected, black female writers had to be kept in a state of silence for long. So readers could only see black women images-slaves or viragos-in the white literature or black male writers’works, which could not truly or objectively reflect black woman’s world inside out. As a result, since 1970s, Alice Walker, along with many other African-American women writers and critics, advocated Black Feminist Movement from different race, class, and cultural experiences. They endeavored to explore the complexity of black womanhood in white America so as to quest for their own literary tradition.
In 1983, Alice Walker coined the term womanism to replace the word feminism and to express her appreciation of her own female gender. She defines the word womanist in the preface of her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers'Gardens (1983) essentially as the one who is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. This idea significantly expands the theory of feminism, thus coalesces a rich cross section of women under the generic conception of womanist. A womanist is identified as “a woman who loves other women or sometimes individual man, sexually and/or nonsexually, a womanist is the one who loves music, loves
dance, loves the moon, loves the spirit, loves love, loves the folk, loves herself.”3 Compared with feminist, the concept of womanist has wider humanitarian concerns, and gains more dimensions in terms of their constitution. To be more specific, womanism has the following characteristics, which are shown in The Color Purple:
a) Womanists search for the source of literary creation in Afro-American women heritage and tradition. They emphasize that Afro-American women heritage and tradition give Afro-American women creativity.
b) Womanists attribute Afro-American women’s misfortune to the combined racism and sexism. While disclosing patriarchy’s oppression upon Afro-American women, womanists point out that racism corrupts Afro-American men and consequently deepens Afro-American women’s suffering.
c) Womanists attach great importance to sisterhood, which is the escape hatch for the oppressed Afro-American women.
d) Womanists believe that Afro-American women’s self-respect and self-improvement will influence Afro-American men and ultimately will make them get rid of their patriarchal prejudice and make them respect women.
e) Womanists believe that mutual understanding and communication between Afro-American men and women will improve and perfect their relationship.
To sum up, a womanist is a psychologically rounded human being, or as is put by Walker, “womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.”4 Womanism, otherwise known as black feminism, is a form of feminism at a deeper level. In retrospect of Walker’s women in her earlier works, notably those appeared in her story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), the characters fight helplessly against their oppressors in a hostile environment with a confused sense of self. Most of them experience certain degrees of identity crisis. For one reason, they still remain on the level of physical existence at most; the goal of spiritual wholeness is yet to be achieved. For another, these women are too isolated to support each other in their helpless struggle. Downtrodden by sophisticated power relations and deceived by the ideological misconception about themselves, many of them find themselves lack of power to alter their lives otherwise. To effect any changes, the real battle with whatever form of oppression has to begin from one’s heart. Disillusioned as they might be in their lives, Walker’s lavender women strive to explore the possibilities of life and to achieve their selfhood, that is, a sense of themselves as autonomous, self-directed individuals. And these figures attained their purple color in Walker’s most noted novel The Color Purple (1982). In this book, an array of black women characters, each experiencing various forms of baptism of self-discovery, emerges with dignity from their pilgrimage. Instead of having their self-identity defined by their men or any external forces, these women learn to define their own selves.
2. Historical Events of the Novel’s Coming into Being
The Color Purple is set in the American South from the 1920s to 1940s; inevitably it reflects some events of that time. 1n the early twentieth century the South was still largely rural and agricultural. Sharecropping replaced slavery as the central source of black labor, upon which southern agriculture still relied. However, it made no change for blacks’ hard lives. Poverty was widespread. From 1915, many blacks broke away from sharecropping to seek a better life in the industrial northern cities, participating in the exodus from the South. This is called the Great Migration. However for those who stayed, both men and women, life remained hard. They had to struggle under the twin burdens of extreme poverty and entrenched discrimination. By the 1920s, after almost half a century’s post Civil War period of Reconstruction, African Americans in the South as well as elsewhere won little improvement of their civil rights. Aided by a reactionary Supreme Court, the Southern backlash against Reconstruction had solidified into the Jim Crow’s regime of enforced segregation between blacks and whites and white domination. Based on the principle of white supremacy, Jim Crow laws created separate societies for blacks and whites. From theaters to drinking fountains, and from schools to theaters and cemeteries, blacks were faced with signs that turned them away. Restrictions constantly reminded blacks of their inferior status in the white’s eyes. Aside from creating separate societies for the whites and blacks, Jim Crow laws ensured that when blacks and whites did mix, they would do so on
terms that guaranteed white dominance. Like Jim Crow laws, which flourished in the south from the 1880s to the 1930s, lynching arose as a white reaction against black freedom, a way for Southern whites to control the blacks. Lynching had sexual and economic aspects in the South, for a common excuse was the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man. As black antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells pointed out, a rape charge could be provoked by consensual relations between a black man and a white woman, or by nothing more than eye contact that a white perceived as a threat. It could furthermore serve as a manufactured excuse for getting rid of a black man who was prospering financially, or one whose attitude was not submissive enough to please local whites. The Color Purple reflects the history of African Americans’ hard life at that period of time.
B. Exploration of Self-consciousness through Suffering
1. Two Oppressions Upon the Black Women
People may know about racial discrimination and sexual discrimination, but they may not know how extensive they are, how they work and how they are interrelated. The following much celebrated passage in Huston's Their Eyes were Watching God can give us an accurate answer, “so the white man throw down the load and tell the nigger to pick it up. He picks it up because he has to, but he doesn't tote it. He hands it to his woman folks. The nigger woman is the mule of the worlds so far as I can see. ”5
The mule of the world-this is the role black women are forced to play in the domestic, social and political circumstances, and this is also the fate of the black women in The Color Purple. In this novel, Alice Walker spares no details and delineates a clear picture of the two oppressions the black women endure.
Black women don’t have any right in the society. They think that they should have no rights before, and they are told that they should obey their fathers and their husbands, I means that they should obey their fathers before they get married and obey their husbands after they get married. Through all their life, they live like a slave, like an animal. But it is not right. Because nowadays, everyone has equal rights, human beings are equal. No one is a slave to another. So the black women must realize that they should fight for their equal rights, for their social status, and for their own happy life. They can choose what kind of life they like, what job they want, even whatever they want which is not out of law.
2. Celie’s Unusual Childhood
Celie begins her story with a quote from her sexually abusive father and then begins her letter writing to God. At the start of the story, she is 14 years old and her mother is refusing to have sex with her father due to just having a baby. Her father then decides to begin sexually abusing Celie. He also tells Celie he is going to keep doing it. Celie’s mother has died. Even up to her death, Celie’s mother is demanding and mean to Celie, especially when Celie
becomes pregnant. After Celie has her baby girl, she believes that her father takes the baby to the woods and kills her. Now she is pregnant again. Celie’s father begins ignoring the pregnant Celie and starts looking at Nettie, Celie's younger sister. Celie then has a boy, and the boy is sent to others. She knows nothing about physiology, and she dare not speak to her mother, because she is threatened by her stepfather, “You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.”6She can’t go to school like other children and is compelled to stay at home to cook, undertake all housework. She is painful and baffled; she doesn’t understand the affair happens to her. Hence she writes to God and puts questions to God. God is an object of indetermination, and is a kind of unreal belief. She will not get the answer from God. Writing letters to God well reflects the solitude on the spirit of Celie.
3. Celie’s Unhappy Marriage Life
At the age of 22, Celie is discarded by her stepfather like discarding an old thing and marries Mr.X who has four children. Mr.X does not love her at all; he marries her just for the sake of the children, the household chores and his farm. He beats Celie arbitrarily. At this time Celie has become accustomed to suffering already. It represents Celie's emotion from pain and suffering to numbness.
Celie finds that she has just moved to another place, and also has no status. Her husband treats her as a worker. All the work in the house and farm need her to do. And her husband doesn’t love her. She also feels alone. No
one can understand her, so she has to write to God, to express her feelings, she can only show her inner world to God, in order to get some of her selfhood. And during her writing to God, she finds her self-consciousness. She realizes that maybe she can have a better life, maybe she can look for her true happiness.
4. The Stepson’s Wife, Sophia’s Affection
Sophia’s coming shows the influence of woman's rights on Celie. Celie’s stepson Harpo falls in love with Sophia. But both of their fathers oppose their marriage. Sophia is one of the representative womanists in the novel. She has strong resistant spirit since her childhood. She will not allow others to order her as they do to Celie. She runs away with Harpo and gets married. Harpo wants his wife to be like his servant, but Sophia has her own personality and dignities and never lowers the head towards men, she says, “all my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles.”7 Now she has to fight against her husband. Celie envies Sophia’s spirit of fighting. She is aware of her benumbed female consciousness. Sophia educates Celie with action. She lets her know that women also have their own consciousness and can protect themselves.
Sophia refuses to be the maidservant of the mayor and strikes back, so she is sentenced to prison for twelve years. She suffers a lot in the jail and her life is close to death. In order to save Sophia, Harpo’s girlfriend Squeak goes to find the warden to ask for a favor, but is raped by him in his office. Finally,
Sophia is compelled to be a servant at the mayor’s home for eleven years. It not only reflects racial discrimination, the corruption of the law enforcement, the despicable action of the officials, but also deeply touches Celie, and makes her further recognize the society and woman’s position in the society. Black women suffer from the dual oppression of the race and sex; the white women also suffer the sexual discrimination of white men. The wife of the mayor Millie, in her husband’s eyes, is just an accessory, which can be played arbitrarily. The mayor buys her a small automobile, but refuses to teach her how to drive. “Everyday he comes from the town he look at her, look out the window at her car, say, how you enjoying Miz Millie. She fly off the sofa in a huff, slam the door going in the bathroom.”8 The white mayor hurts his wife more skillfully than black men do to black women. The occurrences of these matters educate Celie and inspire her racial and sexual consciousness. Celie becomes the comrade of Sophia. Sophia says she always wants to kill the white, and Celie says, “Too many to kill off I say. Us outnumbered from the start. I speak we knock over one or two, though, here and there, through the years, 1 say.”9
5. Shug’s Coming into Celie’s Life
Shug Avery is sick and no one will help her. Everyone talks about her, and laughs at her. Celie listens as the preacher and the other women call Shug a “street cleaner”and a “hussy”. When they get home from church, Mr. X
tells Harpo and Sofia to go and get Shug and bring her home. Celie is beyond herself with excitement.
Even as ill as she is, Shug is still dressed to kill. They bring her upstairs and Celie helps to take off her caked on makeup and clean her up. Sick, sallow looking, and feverish, Shug is still beautiful to Celie. As Celie is cleaning her up, though, Shug looks over at Celie and starts to cackle. Celie feels that she can be servent of Shug. She must live with her selfhood. That is the understanding of self-consciousness of Celie. It makes Celie deeply realize that she should find her value.
Mr.X makes his sweetheart stay at his home to convalesce. Shug Avery is in love with Mr.X and they have three children. Because of Mr.X’s father’s opposition, they cannot get married. Shug Avery is a liberal professional singer, and she sings to make a living independently. Shug is the object of worship for Celie. Before Celie gets married, she has seen a photo of Shug, “All night long I stare at it. Now when I dream, I dream of Shug Avery. She be dress to kill, whirling and laughing. Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty than my mama. She bout then thousand times more prettier than me.”10For Shug’s coming, Celie doesn’t hate her; on the contrary, she is excited. She takes care of Shug meticulously, which makes Shug recovers soon. The sincerity and kindness of Celie moves Shug profoundly. They like each other and become good friends. Shug makes。