Walker was a prodigy in high school; she must have been to win a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta and later transfer to Sarah Lawrence College, an elite women’s college in New York. There her mentor was the poet Muriel Ruckeyser, who promoted Walker’s poetry to her own literary agent.

Where did Walker get the material for the Africa section in her novel? She traveled to Africa in the summer before her senior year. Returning to Sarah Lawrence in the fall, Walker discovered that she was pregnant She soon became enveloped in a physical and spiritual crisis; Walker later admitted that she considered suicide. Her book Once , in fact, contains poems on suicide.

Essentially, Walker is an optimist who worked in the voter registration drives in Mississippi in the 1960's (detailed in Walker’s novel Meridian ).

One recurring theme in Walker’s fiction is the possibility of change-- in the individual and in society. Walker herself has noted that she grew up in the Methodist church, which taught that Paul underwent a profound change on the way to Damascus. In the beginning of Color Purple , many characters, especially the narrator, are trapped in suffocating poverty, racism, and abuse. By the end, however, the same characters have achieved considerable personal freedom and fulfillment.

Thirty-five years younger than Welty and nineteen years younger than O’Connor, Walker is more radical in her politics, which one might expect from a writer who fought on the front lines in the Civil Rights wars. "In Search of My Mother's Garden," an intriguing book of essays by Walker, she calls herself a "womanist." A womanist is a black woman who experiences the "twin afflictions" of racism and sexism.

Walker believes that the extent to which black women can exercise their creativity is a measure of health of the entire society. Thus she is interested in the "low" media--quilting, gardening, cooking–that black women used for creative outlets. In "Everyday Use," the conflict is between a daughter who wants her mother’s quilt as a wall decoration, and the mother who thinks that her other daughter needs it more for everyday use, to keep warm.

In the title essay, Walker says that there are three types of black women. You will find her categories useful in understanding the female characters in Color Purple :

1. the physically and psychologically abused black woman

2. the exceptional black woman torn by "contrary instincts"

3. the new black woman who can create herself out the legacy of her maternal ancestors

Walker addresses this issue in her essay 'The Black Writer and the Southern Experience" (1970).

She relates the story told to her by her mother, a story you will find in Color Purple: in the Depression, Mrs. Walker was denied government flour because she had made herself look dressed up in hand-me-downs. She was able to improvise and "got by all right" by trading to a friend her surplus corn for flour. Walker believes that the story shows the condition and strength of blacks in the South. As a child, she thought she was ugly and deformed.

Walker won't romanticize her home state; "I can recall that I hated it, generally."

One strength that the black southern writer inherits is a sense of community, a coherence that Welty also appreciated. In the poverty of central Georgia, the midwife had to be paid with food, quilts, etc., but she always came. There were Burial Societies and Sick and Shut-In Societies. Sees the black southern writer as determined by rural society. However, the South gave her "a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of justice." The black southern writer has a great responsibility: to articulate "centuries of silent bitterness and hate "but also of "neighborly kindness and sustaining love."

Going out into the world, then, a writer like Walker develops a double vision: she knows her own world but also the larger world that "surrounds and suppresses his own." Racial relations to Walker are too complex to be a matter of one "vast malignant lump" vs. a "conglomerate of perfect virtue."

What other writers influenced Walker? She rejected Faulkner because she felt he had a paternalistic attitude towards blacks--he would bring them along gradually. She prefers O'Connor, who had at least the conviction that the puzzle of race is easier to solve than that of humanity. She calls O’Connor "The best of the white Southern writers, including Faulkner. For one thing, she practiced economy." O’Connor also knew that the question of race "was really just the first question on a long list. She was also influenced by Zora Neal Hurston's use of the vernacular: "She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English."

Walker has a very receptive mind. She studied Russian writers and these poets e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Ovid, and Catullus. She has said in an interview that a sense of mystery is important to her fiction--her poetry influenced by Zen epigrams and haiku, which are short, enigmatic verses. She came to the writing of Color Purple , therefore, with a rich social and literary education.

Walker summed up what she called her "preoccupations" with this

list : the spiritual survival of her people; the lives of black women; the old people, male and female, who persist in their beauty in spite of everything."

After graduating high school in 1961 as the school's valedictorian and prom queen, Alice entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia on a scholarship. While at Spelman she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was subsequently invited to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s home in 1962

at the end of her freshman year. The invitation was in recognition of her invitation to attend the Youth World Peace Festival in Helsinki, Finland. She attended the conference and then traveled throughout Europe for the summer. In August of 1963 Alice went to Washington D.C. to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While there she was able to hear Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" address.

After two years at Spelman, Alice received a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she became one of very few young blacks to attend the prestigious school. Sarah Lawrence gave Walker the chance to study with the poet Muriel Ruykeyser and writer Jane Cooper. Together they helped to stimulate her interest and talent in writing, and inspired her to write the poems that eventually appeared in Once (1968).

Unfortunately, by senior year Alice Walker was suffering from extreme depression, likely becase she had become pregnant. She considered committing suicide and at times kept a razor blade under her pillow. She also wrote several volumes of poetry in an effort to explain her feelings. She was able to have a safe abortion with a classmate's help, not the easiest procedure at the time.

While recovering, Walker wrote a short story aptly titled "To Hell with Dying." Her mentor Muriel Ruykeyser sent the story to publishers as well as to the distinguised African-American poet and writerLangston Hughes. The story was published and Walker received a hand-written note of encouragement from Hughes.

Always an activist, she participated in the civil rights movement following her graduation in 1965. She first went door-to-door in Georgia and encouraged voter registration, but quickly moved to New York City and worked in the city's welfare department. While there she won a writing fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.

In the summer of 1966 she returned to Mississippi where she soon married a Jewish civil rights law student named Mel Leventhal. The inter-racial couple had to deal with threats of violence; Walker’s husband practiced on behalf of the NAACP. Walker again got pregnant (which saved Leventhal from the Vietnam draft) but sadly lost the child.

1. Walker sees the history of the black woman in America as a process of evolution: slavery, sharecropping, urban migration, civil rights movement. How do we see this process in the stories?

2.What does Walker imply about the role of religion in the lives of black American women?

3. In the stories and in the novel, what are some of Walker's variations on the theme of love? What does marriage offer the black woman in the South?

4. How does Walker depict the male-dominated society which her

characters inhabit?

5. Walker frequently depicts her characters, especially men, in frozen poses; what examples can you find of "images of paralysis"?

What do those images suggest thematically?

6. In another vein, one of Walker's recurring themes is transformation or regeneration? What does this theme mean in Walker's fiction and what are some important examples?

7. It has been said that Walker's first collection of stories features self-assertive women. Is this a valid generalization?

"Entertaining God"

1. How is this story similar to the work of O'Connor? How is it different? How would Welty have written this story?

2. How are the three parts of the story related thematically?

3. What does the title suggest?

4. What is suggested about the boy's ritual burning of bread?

5. What is the role of John's mother?

6. When is John happy? What makes him happy?

""To Hell with Dying"

1. A critic has said that the main character in this story--a guitar player, alcoholic, and diabetic-- is a "sentimentalized Uncle Remus type." Do you agree with this assessment?

2. Why is the narrator's family loyal to Mr. Sweet, an aging, diabetic alcoholic?

3. What is suggested by Mr. Sweet's recurring resurrections?

4. How does Mr. Sweet contrast with the male characters in "My Sweet Jerome" and "The Child Who Favored Daughter"?

5. Why do children like Mr. Sweet? What value does the adult narrator find in him?

6. What does the narrator learn about death?

7. What does the narrator mean when she says that Mr. Sweet was her "first love"?

"The Child Who Favored Daughter"

1. What kinds of chaos appear in the story? What kinds of causes produce this chaos?

2. What are the gothic elements in the story? What does the story have to offer besides the gothic?

3. How is this story a critique of white society as well as of the protagonist's society?

4. Does the narrator show any empathy for the father?

5. What does the daughter's entry in the first few paragraphs suggest?

6. What is our impression of the father when we first see him?

"Everyday Use"

1. Unlike the female protagonist in "Her Sweet Jerome," the narrator is articulate and likable. What are some of her important qualities as a reliable narrator? Why is she a good choice of narrator?

2. How does Walker use dress and appearance to reveal character traits?

3. What is Maggie's role in the story?

4. How do Dee and her man contrast to the "beef-cattle peoples down the road"?

5. What does the ending--Maggie and her mother on the porch--suggest to you?

"Her Sweet Jerome"

1. The entire present action takes place in the female protagonist's bedroom. What is implied by this setting?

2. Is it ironic that she is a beautician?

3. What does the story say about this particular set of revolutionary politics?

4. Does the protagonist have a community to sustain her? What kind

of community can Jerome depend upon?

5. What is the suspense in the story? Is the discovery of "agitprop" materials under the bed a deliberate anti-climax?

6. What archetype does Walker employ as the abused wife destroys her husband's library?

Molly Hite,. "Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: The Color Purple."

The book won the Pulitzer and the American Book Award for 1982-3, but there was "immediate and widespread critical unease" over aesthetics. Many reviewers objected to these problems: in the last third Celie and her friends are propelled towards a fairy-tale ending; the very literate letters from Nettie intrude on the middle of the main action with little apparent motivation; the device of the letters to God is unrealistic in that it forgoes the concretizing details that have traditionally given the epistolary novel its verisimilitude: the secret writing place, the cache, the ruses to post letters, the letters received in return.

Hite suggests that the novel may not be a part of the tradition of Anglo-American nineteenth-century realism. Argues that this novel is best understood as a romance. Uses Frank Kermode's idea of Shakespeare's "pastoral-tragi-comedy" as a more precise term for the late plays of Shakespeare commonly called romances that share a set of conventions celebrating a rural, "natural," community constituted in implicit opposition to a dominant urban community. Walker makes a group of black farmers the central social unit and uses this community as a vantage point to critique the surrounding white culture.

Note: Realism is such a dominant form that its tacit claim to mirror reality is difficult to question.The assumption that the realist novel is "like life" implies that the rules governing this kind of fiction come from a repository called "reality" and carry moral as well as metaphysical weight. To call a fictional outcome "unrealistic" is to suggest not only that things do not happen this way "in reality" (which may amount to the observation that things have not happened this way before) but that the rules of "reality" do not allow such developments, and therefore they ought not to occur.

Celie (from celestial) is an exemplary pastoral protagonist--her defining quality, and that of the narrative, is innocence. The innocence makes her a victim at the outset of the story, but also becomes a capacity for wonder and thus for experience. This is the affinity with Shakespeare's late romances, which emphasizes the magical force of moral law. (Walker'snovel was originally subtitled A Moral Tale ). For instance, Nettie, Samuel, and the children miraculously return from the sea after their ship is reported missing. Before this, Shug returns to find Celie and Albert reconciled and living in platonic harmony, a reversal motivated by Albert's realization that "meanness kill." And even before, Celie inherits a house and the information that her children are not the products of incest. As Frye has noted of Shakespearean plots, "What emerges at the end is not a logical consequence of the preceding action, as in tragedy, but something more like metamorphosis."

In Shakespeare, the metamorphosis is both social and metaphysical. Social in that the redemptive conclusion absorbs all the principal characters, whether or not they seem to deserve redemption. In Shakespeare, the tragic element comes from the suffering that the characters must undergo because of the behavior of a powerful male figure, who nonetheless shares in the final blessings. In Walker's book, the most powerful instrument of suffering is Mr.________. Albert and his son are absolved by being integrated into a "female-defined value community." They "find" themselves at last by becoming seamstress and housekeeper.

Metaphysical transformation. Celie's progress serves to redefine the proper relation between humans and the natural world they live in. The "nurturing pantheism" of this novel implies an Eden norm that must be restored before human beings can attain social equilibrium. Celie embraces this idea in the greeting of her last letter.

Romance conventions provide precedent and rationale for the Africa passages, which in effect disrupt the American action for some forty pages. There is a contrast to the main action and the symbolization of a green world, a natural society.

The village of Olinka has organically round huts, a roofleaf religion, restorative myths of black hegonemy, and a simple agrarian economy. (Nettie ends up criticizing it becasue she finds it sexist and vulnerable to incursions of the white empire). By contrast, Celie's world becomes more woman-centered and self-sufficient.

1. In The Color Purple we see a naive rather than an unreliable narrator. In what ways is Celie innocent or naive? Celie suggests celestial. Why does Walker choose a first person epistolary narrative method for her uneducated narrator?

2.Do you agree with the assessment that as the novel progresses, and as Celie grows in experience, her letters become "sharper and more informed," and the dialect takes on a lyric quality? If so, can you find examples?

3. What is the significance of the title?

4. In the same interview, she denies that her work is "gothic," at least in Welty's sense of using the supernatural for horror. Is this novel "gothic"? Is Walker a practitioner of the grotesque?

5. The letters from Africa have been criticized as didactic and intrusive. Make a case for both sides.

6. How does Walker portray courtship?

7. Celie says that all she knows is how to stay alive. How deep is the squalor in which the male characters live? The female characters? Can the characters escape the conditions that oppress them?

8.In the early chapters there are several "images of ease," pictures of men resting or lounging (while the women work). List some of these images?

9. How closely is Celie identified with the Christian faith?

10. What are the symbolic implications of the bathing scene on p. 51.

11. Celie writes that for the first time in her life, "I feel just right." What has brought about this feeling? Do other characters have moments of happiness?

12. What is Shug Avery's role in the novel?

13. How does the revenge vs. redemption theme develop in the novel?

14. One of Walker's themes is the possibility of change. Early reviewers said that Mr._____ 's "conversion" lacks credibility. Has Walker prepared us for this change in character?

15. She also writes that as a writer she articulated (1) centuries of silent bitterness and hate" and (2) neighborly kindness and sustaining love." Trace these two themes through the novel.

16. In an interview, Walker said that her "preoccupations" are the spiritual survival of her people and the lives of black women. Trace these two themes in the novel.

17. A scholar has claimed that Walker has "redefined mothering" in The Color Purple. How has she done that?

19. The same writer says that this novel is a romance in the sense of Shakespeare's Tempest: Walker creates "an ideal world of true love and commitment where there is no erotic tension." What parts of the novel would support such a view?

20. How does Samuel contrast to the other male characters?

21. What is suggested by the story of the white missionary Doris Baines?

22. What point does Walker suggest in the episode with Eleanor Jane, her baby, and Sophia?

Assignment: How does the revenge vs. redemption theme develop in the novel? Does the novel as a whole emphasize redemption?