The Road to The Color Purple

Walker: The Color Purple

In this course, Professor Nagueyalti Warren (Emory University) explores Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple. In the first lecture, we think about Walker’s life, education and career up to the publication of The Color Purple in 1982. In the two lectures after that, we think about the form of the novel – first as an epistolary novel (i.e. a novel written as a series of a letters) and then as a Bildungsroman (i.e. a novel describing a characters’ growth from childhood to adulthood) – before turning in the fourth lecture to consider Walker’s use of black folk language in the novel. In the fifth lecture, we think about the novel’s representation of gender norms, while in the sixth lecture we think about the novel’s engagement with issues of race, sex and desire. Finally, in the seventh lecture, we think about Celie’s spiritual development in the novel, from someone who believes God is ‘big and old and tall and greybearded and white’ to someone who believes that ‘God is everything […] Everything that is or ever was or ever will be’.

Reading list:

– Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and It’s Tradition (1989)
– Erin Bell, ‘“Us each other’s peoples now”: Expressing Lesbian Desire Through the Epistolary Form in The Color Purple’, in Jericho Williams (ed.), Critical Insights: The Color Purple (2022), pp. 112-127
– J. L. Dillard, Black English (1972)
– Henry Louis Gates, ‘Color Me Zora: Alice Walker's (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text’ in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (eds.), Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (1993)
– Rosemary Hill-Peters and Matthew Pinchback. ‘Women of Letters: Marima Ba and Alice Walker’, in Jericho Williams (ed.), Critical Insights: The Color Purple (2022), pp. 143-158
– Bell Hooks, ‘Reading Resistance: The Color Purple’ in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (eds.), Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (1993)
– Pi-Li Hsiao, ‘Languge, Gender and Power in The Color Purple: Theories and Approaches’, Feng Chia Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, no. 17 (2008), pp. 93-120
– Jeannine Thyreen, ‘Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: Redefining God and (Re)Claiming the Spirit’, Christianity and Literature 49.1 (1999), pp. 49-66
– Alice Walker, ‘Writing the Color Purple’, in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
– Nagueyalti Warren, Alice Walker’s Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit (2019)
– Evelyn White, Alice Walker: A Life (2004)
– Jericho Williams, Critical Insights: The Color Purple (2022)
– Robert L. Williams, The True Language of Black Folks (1975)
– Kellie Wilson, ‘‘Do Ya Understan’ What I’m Sayin’? Alice Walker and Sapphire’s Use of Ebonics’, University of Hawaii (2012)

The Road to The Color Purple

In this lecture we provide an overview of Alice Walker’s life and career up to the publication of her third novel, The Color Purple, in 1982, focusing in particular on: (i) her early life and education, including her earliest publications; (ii) her first poetry collection (Once, 1968) and novel (The Third Life of Grange Copeland, 1970); (iii) the main preoccupations and concerns of her second poetry collection, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973); (iv) her first collection of short stories (In Love and Trouble, 1973) and her first essay, ‘The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?’ (1967); (v) her experiments with literary form in her second novel, Meridien (1976); (vi) her third collection of poetry (Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning, 1973) and second collection of short stories (You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, 1981); and (vii) the origins of her most successful novel, The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983.