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1. A Kristevan reading of The Color purple by Alice Walker
Maryam Maasoumi
Department of English Languageand Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Islamic Azad University –
Karaj Branch, E-mail: mary.maasoumi@gmail.com
Abstract. The Color Purple was published in 1982 and brought Alice Walker (1944- ) the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award. The novel explores various social and cultural aspects of the African community of the Southern
United States in the 1930s. In The Color Purple, Walker not only breaks the male superiority tradition with a
comprehensive psychological analysis of male and female characters living in a traditional patriarchal southern family,
but also she provides a depiction of the modern matriarchal African American family, in which the woman takes the
prominent role. She also wrote this novel in epistolary form and used black folk English language. The present article
indicates how Kristeva’s (1941- ) main ideas like Intertextuality, Abjection, Semiotic and Symbolic language lend
themselves in to this novel.
Keywords: Intertextuality, Abjection, Semiotic language, Symbolic language, epistolary, black folk English.
1 Introduction
The Color Purple was published in 1982 and brought Alice Walker (1944- ) the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award. The novel explores various social and cultural aspects of the African community of the
Southern United States in the 1930s. In The Color Purple, Walker breaks the male superiority tradition with a
comprehensive psychological analysis of male and female characters living in a traditional patriarchal southern
family, she provides a depiction of the modern matriarchal African American family, in which the woman
takes the prominent role. Many critics were disturbed by her depiction of black males, which they found
negative. While she was criticized for negative depiction of her male characters, Walker was valued for her
powerful representations of black women. Critics admired her for using of the epistolary form and her ability
to use black folk English and also many of her social opinions by reflecting her political interests as a civil
rights worker during the 1960s which are expressed in the novel.
The novel is considered as a postmodern slave narrative or folk tale while some critics designate it as an
epistolary tradition. The language and narrative poetics which Walker deployed in The Color Purple, engaged
it with the literary reading. Celie wrote letters to God and the letters to God called epistles in religious contexts
but it is known an epistolary form in literary readings. This style of writing provoke many critics to discover
possible interactions between speech and writing in the novel because the letters which Celie wrote to God
were in black folk speech. The critics dispute the level of Celie’s agency both as a writer and narrator and also
demonstrate the influence of changing her writings into Standard English by the arrival of her sister, Nettie.
The Color Purple can also be considered as "woman's novel" that not only it was written by a woman, but
also conveys an identified tradition of women's writing in terms of the strategy of narration, thematic notions
and voice to achieve their true identity.
These women-authored texts have challenged male versions of history as well as the (male) literary canon that
has ... the differences between men's and women's voices, asserting that "the" woman's voice was distinct and
valuable. ... and observation-based; half a century later, another male critic suggested that women's writing
was "self-conscious and didactic (Whitson 31)
It doesn’t mean that women write about the similar things, but there is a tradition identified as women's
literature in which women have developed their consciousness in writing in order to be different from men’s
writing. It is similar to the tradition of the "slave narrative" that former slaves share their experiences by
narrating their stories under slavery due to demand for political and social rights and changes. Walker shows
how Celie as a part of community struggles with patriarchal society or men. In this regard, she is an individual
that her sense of self is shaped by whatever dominant discourses made. Slave narrative mostly highlights racial
oppression as well Walker highlights the representations of rape, the most important problem that oppressed
women faced with, especially Celie was raped by a Black man, and Squeak (Mary Agnes) was raped by a
white man.

2. 2 Intertextuality
Julia Kristeva argues that the concept of a text is not an isolated thing which operates in a self-sufficient
manner, therefore, no text operates in isolation and it is under the influence of cultural and historical
conventions of other texts. Kristeva in her essay “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1986) gives a definition of
intertextuality as "a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion
of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double" (Kristeva,
1986, p. 37). Kristeva adds:
The notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” illustrated by post-structuralists that no
objective reality exists but the subjective one in order to be created by the reader in which “meaning is not
transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to
the writer and reader by other texts (Kristeva, 1986, p. 69).
She believes that each text is understood and interpreted through the knowledge of other texts impressed and
associated with, even if the text is individually produced.
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its
internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other
texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. (Foucault and Sheridan, 1972, p. 23)
Intertextuality challenges the relationship between the reader and the text, within the history of discourses and
cultural conventions as it is only as part of prior discourses that any text derives meaning and significance.
Thus, intertextuality deals with the existence of the text within society and history. Texts have no unity or
unified meaning of their own. They are thoroughly connected to on-going cultural and social processes.
The major themes in the African American history are oppression and liberation of female characters. These
themes are also the major concerns in Alice Walker’s novels particularly The Color Purple. In this novel, she
discusses how colored women are oppressed by men, white people and society. She designates a range of
liberties such as sexual, financial, social and even religious freedom in spite of being in patriarchal rule
governed by society. Intertextuality is in different modes like literary influence, historical and political insight
and epistolary form.
2.1 Literary Influence
Alice Walker mostly inspired by the works of Zora Neale Hurston (1891- 1960), an African-American writer
who wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She worked for Ms. Magazine when her famous
essay called "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" was published in the 1970s. Walker and Hurston both came
from Eatonville, although Hurston's town was located in Florida and Walker's in Georgia. Because of the same
background, it seems enough to Walker being interested in reading Hurston's works and have a great deal of
joy to her works. In the 1970s, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was revived and properly considered
for the first time while the most of apprentices and scholars joined to the feminist and civil rights movement.
Alice Walker was inspired by Hurston’s works and her novel, The color Purple, was written from an African-
American woman's point of view to discover the limitations enforced by both sexism and racism in violent
society. “Walker wrote that Hurston enjoyed "racial health" to convey “sense of black people as complete,
complex, undiminished human beings” (Whitson, 2004, p. 117).
Hurston praised the richness of black culture in the fields of folklore, spirituals, work songs, and blues. She
tried to reveal the positive side of African American life and culture. In her controversial essay “How It Feels
to Be Colored Me” (1928), Hurston inscribed:
I’m not tragically colored…I don’t belong to sobbing school Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has
given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it…No, I don’t weep at the world—I’m
too busy sharpening my oyster knife (Whitson, 2004, p. 117).
Consequently, Hurston’s ideas reflect in self-consciousness of Celie to become aware of herself and her
identity. Walker represents Celie’s growth of self-consciousness in the act of writing her letters. “Celie’s
written voice is remarkable reflective and sensitive teller or writer capable of rendering the speech and thoughts
of others within her writing voice” (Allen, 2012, p. 168).

3. Walker did the same thing as Hurston recommended to do, so she tried to not only demonstrate the harsh
life and the suffering of blacks but also to show the beauties as well. Thus, The Color Purple looks aggressive
upon cruelty, mistreatment and physical abuse of family toward a girl and also advocates readers admiring
Afro-American culture and music. In this respect, Walker, like Hurston, shows a growing confidence in Afro-
American literary tradition by Celie’s character with her capable voice of self within the harshness of the life.
Moreover, Celie is the voice of colored traditional women looking for their own proper identity and self-
recognition in spite of imposed and self-designed dominant discourses. “It demonstrates the achievement of
self-enlightenment within rather than outside of or in transcendence of a hybrid, multiracial and multi-voiced
environment” (Allen, 2012, p. 168).
2.2 Historical and Political Insight
Alice Walker writings were impressively influenced by the political and social events of the time, during the
1960s and 1970s. She wrote about events and found a role to play in as well. The Color Purple carries out a
social sense concerns with women’s fight for self-determination and liberty in a society where they are
observed as inferior to men. She portrays the attitudes of black characters in years after the Civil War.
The Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) had a great impact on her writings. The Supreme Court
proclaimed that the educational facilities which were separable for blacks and whites, made the African
American children a sense of lowliness and destructed their educational and mental growth. The civil rights
began to grow in the United States on that time (Aka, 2006, p.1). As Walker in this novel manifests the
educational level which blacks had received in those days and most of the women forced to marry away instead
of being at school. Besides, many young males were not able to attend school for long, since they were needed
to work. As most of dialogues are written in the position of uneducated persons were trying to speak English.
“She say us not so hot. A dead country give-away. You say us where most people say we, she say, and peoples
think you dumb. Colored peoples think you a hick and white folks be amuse” (Walker, 1983, p. 140) that many
sentences appear in wrong spelling along with grammatical errors as well. Thus, the reader is able to estimate
the education level of the characters by their dialogues. In the first pages, it is very difficult for the reader to
recognize the mode of the writer because the words and the verbs are not written completely and even in a
proper way. In this respect, Walker artistically employed the black slang language for Celie to communicate
with the reader. “Where us going? ast the oldest girl” (Walker, 1983, p. 44).
In 1970s, the Supreme Court admitted to protect the slaves. The law guaranteed the citizenship of the slaves.
Accordingly, racial discrimination abandoned (Aka, 2006, p. 35). But Walker preferably noted many traceable
racial and sexual discrimination. For instance, Celie’s step-father raped her at the age of fourteen, her husband
treats her like an inferior person and no one except Shug brings her rights into consideration. Harpo, Celie’s
stepson, has lots of problems with her wife when he asks his father what he should do in order to make her
wife listen to him, his father says, “you ever hit her?” (Walker, 1983, p. 23) Harpo says no, his father says,
“Well how you spect to make her mind? Wives is like children. You have to let ‘em know who got the upper
hand” (Walker, 1983, p. 23) that determines the different realm of men and women when Civil Rights rises in
the United States.
The black community suffered in a great deal of racial inequality. Walker displays many cases of racism such
as when Harpo’s wife, Sofia, gets asked to clean a house by the white mayor’s wife. Sofia replies “Hell no”
(Walker, 1983, p. 56). The mayor then slaps Sofia for her comment, and she punches him. Sofia is arrested
and injured:
“They crack her skull, they crack her ribs. They tear her nose loose on one side.
They blind her in one eye. She swole from head to foot. Her tongue the size of my arm, it stick out tween her
teef like a piece of rubber. She can’t talk. And she just about the color of a eggplant” (Walker, 1983, p. 58).
Therefore, Sofia was sentenced to be in prison just because a black woman hit a white man and then she made
to work for them for nearly 20 years. This manner shows how whites treated in the South after the Civil War.
Thus, a general sense of fear was among blacks came to whites. Walker humorously states this when Sofia
confesses that she does not love a white child saying, “Some colored people so scared of White folks they
claim to love the cotton gin” (Walker, 1983, p. 177).
The Vietnam War was another significant factor. At the very beginning of the novel, Walker shows a very
poor black family working on the land. Not only were the males working there, but also, the females were

4. forced to work as well. It was typical circumstance in South after the war. “Me and him within the field all
day. Us sweat, chopping and plowing,” (Walker, 1983, p. 18) and “I’m roast coffee bean color now. He black
as the inside of a chimney,” (Walker, 1983, p. 18), as the scars on hand were obviously shown the intensity of
labors’ lives and their houses were described as “Harpo fix up the little creek house for him and his family.
Mr. _____ daddy used it for a shed. But it sound. Got windows now, a porch, back door” (Walker, 1983, p.
22) to declare the harsh situation after war blacks tolerated.
2.3 Epistolary Form
“Epistolary form is written in a series of letters” (Edgar, 2006, p. 70). The protagonist, Celie, initially writes
to God, later to her sister Nettie, and at last to the world. This narrative technique brought Walker several
things such as to be in the passing moments and to give voice to a silent character who got silenced by
patriarchy and is uneducated. This style of writing helps us to know about Celie’s life even Afro-American
women’s troubles such as poverty, cruelty, mistreatment and physical abuses, furthermore, to follow Celie‘s
growth and maturity.
It was another black American writer, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), who stimulated to use the epistolary
form and found God as an addressee, “when Truth ‘cried out’” (Ford, 2010, p. 41) having lost her children to
slave-owners, “none but God heard her” (Ford, 2010, p. 41). As Rachel Lister (2010) exclaimed:
Truth’s cry is, for Walker, ‘the precursor of a letter to God.’ In a conversation with Sharon Wilson and guest
readers of Kalliope magazine in 1984, Walker stated: ‘I can imagine Sojourner Truth saying, “God, what can
I do – they’ve sold my children.” Celie is able to write, “Dear God, this has happened to me and I have to tell
somebody and so I write to you (Lister, 2010, p. 7).
The letters take a broad view of many features like the picture of black men, depiction of Africa in Nettie’s
letters, lesbian love. Walker was able to go beyond of the restrictions by artistically shifting the language from
the black folk to the standard.
Celie’s voice is the successful culmination of Alice Walker’s longer and longer trips outside the safety of
Standard English and into the speech of her characters. Through Celie’s use of black folk speech, Walker takes
the leap completely (Lister, 2010, p. 8).
Dinitia Smith (2003) addressed the novel as a “major advance for Walker’s art, identifying its pithy, direct
black folk idiom as its greatest strength, reminding us that if Walker is sometimes ideologue, she is also a poet”
(Smith, 2003, p. 12). Celie’s voice can be identified from her language and even evokes the voice of whole
occupied world. Walker artistically makes up Celie’s language with all its figures of speech, Biblical cadences,
and distinctive grammar. It places Walker in accompany with Faulkner due to shift the narrative perspectives
and geographical locations. This novel takes the reader to Africa, where Nettie has been recording her
experiences with the Olinka tribe and the missionaries Samuel and Corrinea.
3 Semiotic
The semiotic notion of intertextuality introduced by Kristeva associated primarily with poststructuralist
theorists. Kristeva refers to text in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a
text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva, 1980, p. 69). These two axes are
unifying by shared codes, so every text or its reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declares that “every
text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it” (Culler, 1981,
p. 105). The first part which Kristeva calls the Symbolic, is made up of the dictionary definitions of words and
the grammatical and syntactic rules of the language. But this is far from enough. What is missing is the living
human body. The living body has such drives like inner urges that stimulate activity, and instinctual energy
that has function between biology and culture. The Semiotic is the body's drives organized in and through
language which is manifested in rhythm and tone, is associated with the maternal body. The semiotic elements,
rhythms and tones, within the signifying process are the organization of drives as they discharge within
language. It is allied with rhythms and tones that are meaningful parts of language and concealed element of
meaning within signification which not represent or signify something. “Rhythms and tones do not represent
bodily drives; rather bodily drives are discharged through rhythms and tones” (Oliver, 1998, p. 130).

5. Kristeva attempted to bring the “speaking body” back into linguistics by insisting the language expresses
bodily drives through its semiotic element, Kristeva's modification of the relationship between language and
body avoids the traditional problems of representation. The tones and rhythms of language, the materiality of
language, is bodily. Kristeva's theory addresses the problem of the relationship between language and bodily
experience by proposing that, through the semiotic element, bodily drives manifest themselves in language. In
simple words, the semiotic is defined as the matriarchal aspect of language that shows the speaker’s inner
drives and impulses. These unconscious drives manifest themselves in speakers’ tone, rhythmical sentences
and the images use in order to express what they want to convey. Methodically, Alice Walker is well-known
to record the inexpressible sufferings and rage of the racial victims because her works are firmly based on the
fact and history. She develops several venerable narrative devices like epistolary form to effectually build her
characters' identities. The style of language employed in The Color Purple is heavily influenced by the novel's
formal structure. Walker shows that a woman's identity can be strengthened through effective communication.
The mastery of language is crucial for female empowerment.
“Oppression of black men during slavery has been described as de-masculinization for the same reason that
virtually no scholarly attention has been given to the oppression of black women during slavery. Underlying
both tendencies is the sexist assumption that the experiences of men are more important than those of women
and that what matters most among the experiences of men is their ability to assert themselves patriarchally”
(Hooks, 1982, p. 22).
The act of writing is the act of self-empowerment of black women in a fight against exterior forces trying to
mute them, against a double discrimination, racism and sexism. On the one hand, the black women’s identity
has been denied because of racism. Blacks’ existence particularly females, in a white American society has
been never considered as well as Whites during slavery “denies the existence of non-white women in America”
(Hooks, 1982, p. 8). On the other hand, black women’s identity has been also denied because of Sexism.
Slavery has been considered as “a Black male phenomenon, regarding Black women as biological functionaries
whose destinies are rendered ephemeral- to lay their eggs and die.” (Stetson, 1982, p. 62). Therefore, the black
feminine voice has been seeking the equality between white people and black men. “There is an inherent Black
woman identification in the Black female literary tradition ... black women have used writing as a way of
capturing and exalting their experiences” (Brethel, 1982, p. 185). Walker proposes a color equivalence to
identify women beyond the limitations of race and class. In The Color Purple, she introduces the especial
Blackness in terms of woman’s culture, family, and spirituality which modified with semiotic aspect of
language.
The semiotic also refers to the non-linguistic dimensions of any communication, therefore “a psychic
modality logically and chronologically prior to the sign: without this bodily basis there could be no symbolic,
no language or culture” (Jantzen, 1999, p. 195). Thus semiotic makes possible the different diversities and
interpretations which is closer to reality. This concept means to signify a mode of reading which examines the
ways in which the perspective black woman identity and its interrelationships with semiotic language and its
structure.
3.1. Semiotic Language
Alice Walker’s artistically use of language produces new narrative strategies, reveals ignored stories of
women. The influence of language empowers the speaker, while failure in voicing causes silence and a lack of
control “patriarchal surveillance causes female speechlessness” (Hsiao, 2008, p. 3). Celie’s first letter was
filled with mistakes as spelling errors, sentence fragments, incorrect verb tenses, lack of subject etc. which
unfolds the self–discovery of Celie as a poor, uneducated black girl to “attain linguistic self–assertiveness”
(Mainino, 2000, p. 60). Walker’s employment of Black English manifests her concern about the black cultural
heritage to utter “the black voice” (Green, 2002, p. 165) like many of her black predecessors, by using “the
recurrence of linguistic features” (Green, 2002, p. 165) and her challenge to the superiority of white people’s
language and also to compromise her position in a context where Standard English is the dominant language.
Epistolary novel is a vehicle that can give its fictional writer dominion over form, content and the body through
articulation of the self. Walker makes her revisions of the epistolary novel intersect at Celie’s assertion of self
and rejection of her initial self-abnegation (LaGrone, 2009, p. 101-102).

6. Walker’s experiments with the epistolary novel make the silenced women heard in a double–voiced narrative.
Celie’s letters get more complicated in vocabulary, sentence lengths, and subject matters, but she insists on
using her own language. After she starts her business, Celie is advised to learn how to speak properly, that is,
to speak like “Whitefolks” (Walker, 1983, p. 141) so that people would not think her stupid. Celie, however,
has to struggle while speaking Standard English: “My mind run up on a thought, git confuse, run back and sort
of lay down” (Walker, 1983, p. 141). She refuses to enter the linguistic system of white people because she
wants to keep her own self-sufficiency. Celie and Nettie’ writing creates a double voiced narrative to
accomplish self–awareness. According to the sisters’ different life experience, Nettie’s letters are in divergence
to Celie’s language, in style, in rhythm, or in subject matters.
Celie founds her subjectivity through the process of writing. Celie writes fifty–four letters to God, uncertain
addressee to her. Letter 68, her last letter to God, describes her bitter disappointment: “My daddy lynch. My
mama crazy. All my little half–brothers and sisters no kin to me. My children not my sister and brother. Pa not
pa” (Walker, 1983, p. 113). Celie’s letters to God can be considered as “an extensive interior monologue”
(Butler-Evans, 1987, p. 227). She cuts off herself from everyone and liberates herself beyond horrifying
experiences and tries to value herself. Bakhtin (1895- 1975) asserts that “The semiotic material of the psyche
is preeminently the word, inner speech” (Smith and Watson, 1998, p. 344). Bakhtin in fact defines the
relationship between consciousness and inner speech even more precisely:
Analysis would show that the units of which inner speech is constituted are certain whole entities...
[resembling] the alternating lines of a dialogue. There was good reason why thinkers in ancient times should
have conceived of inner speech as inner dialogue
Thus consciousness becomes a kind of "inner speech" reflecting "the outer word" in a process that links the
psyche, language, and social interaction…If the psyche functions as an internalization of heterogeneous social
voices, black women's speech/writing becomes at once a dialogue between self and society and between self
and psyche. Writing as inner speech, then, becomes what Bakhtin would describe as "a unique form of
collaboration with oneself" (Smith and Watson, 1998, p. 344-5).
Considering Celie’s uncertainty toward her addressee, she seeks for her subjectivity toward herself, her psyche
and society. Her letters to God can be assumed as writing of inner speech and even inner dialogue to herself
which reflects in the letters to find her identity. In letter 76, when Celie moves to Memphis to live with Shug
and owns her own business, signs her letter to Nettie with complete assurance: “Amen, Your Sister, Celie,
Folkspants and Unlimited. Sugar Avery Drive, Memphis, Tennessee” (Walker, 1983, p. 140). The signature
suggests Celie’s assurance about her personal identity, financial security, and social participation.
3.2. Repetition and Creativity
Celie’s ability to make easily relationship to communicate with the other characters is shown by the repetition
of such words as talk and say “Us talk about this and that, me and Shug cook, talk, clean the house, talk, fix
up the tree, talk, wake up in the morning, talk” (Walker, 1983, p. 71), “Shug talk and talk” (Walker, 1983, p.
72), “I talk so much my voice start to go” (Walker, 1983, p. 76), “Well, us talk and talk bout God” (Walker,
1983, p. 127), “Shug come over to where us talking” (Walker, 1983, p. 137), “Us talk about this and that” in
order to indicate Celie’s liberation and her ability to talk with the other characters in the novel. Communication
is the main factor to concern independence (Næss, 2007, p. 24). Walker’s emphasis on voice becomes
significant in the constant repetition of the verb “say” throughout the first half of the novel (Holloway, 1992,
p. 78). According to Celie as a silence character whose voice can be heard from her letters, using of these verbs
might be shown her seeking for the proper voice to communicate and by adding a form of the verb after direct
speech, Celie not only illuminates who the speaker is, but also conveys her liberty to talk and report speech.
Walker insisted on the power of the speaking and singing voice “polemically engaging with white women’s
literature, which tends to take writing as the mark of liberation from patriarchal oppression” (Lauret, 2000, p.
103). As Celie’s relationship with Shug develops, her discourse becomes secularized and she is able to talk
her way into a self (Lauret, 2000, p. 112). From the very beginning of the story, silenced Celie changed into
an agent of Afro-American women by getting her voice through the progress of the story up to the end, she
completely changed into a liberated woman who can freely communicate and even expresses her feelings.
When Shug tells Celie that she wants one last fling, Celie is unable to talk:

7. All right, say Shug. It started when you was down home. I missed you, Celie. And you know I’m a high natured
woman. I went and got a piece of paper that I was using for cutting patterns. I wrote her a note. It said, Shut
up (Walker, 1983, p. 211).
When Celie has lost her ability to speak about the news she heard, Walker evaluated another means of
communication through the art form. She can concentrate on designing and enjoy full artistic freedom to
delimit herself with the help of her art work.
Walker respects the art not only a means of communication but also a means of demonstrating the creativity
of women into expressing their massive abilities. When Celie realizes that Mr.____ has taken Nettie’s letters,
she is willing to kill him while shaving his beard. Shug asked her to do sewing pants: “a needle and not a razor
in my hand, I think” (Walker, 1983, p. 93). So Celie manages her rage into creativity and making pants becomes
her artistic outlet. “Celie’s career as a designer of folk pants is a symbol of Walker’s respect for traditional
women’s work and careers where women assert themselves through creativity” (Næss, 2007, p. 28)
3.3. Semiotic Journey from Misery to Freedom
Stevie Wonder’s epigraph in the very beginning of the novel brought the music in the minds of the readers
“Show me how to do like you Show me how to do it” (Walker, 1983, p. 1) which could convey Celie’s
development guided by female role models. According to Lauren Berlant (1993), the epigraph can be read as
the novel’s most “explicit political directive, deployed to turn individuals into self-conscious and literate
users/readers of a cultural semiotic” (Berlant, 1993, p. 214). The cultural semiotic Berlant refers to is in the
case of this novel not only concerned with the meaning of language, but extended to speech, music,
needlework, sexuality and spirituality, all important parts of African American women’s culture (Lauret, 2000,
p. 101). The characters communicated not only by the means of language but also through dance, song, and
gesture, passing on their stories from misery to freedom in order to find their voices and their own expression,
for instance, Shug get better from her illness and continues singing:
She say my name again. She say this song I'm bout to sing is call Miss Celie's song. Cause she scratched it out
of my head when I was sick.
First she hum it a little, like she do at home. Then she sing the words.
It all about some no count man doing her wrong, again. But I don't listen to that part. I look at her and I hum
along a little with the tune (Walker, 1983, p. 48).
Celie nurses Shug back to health and inspires her songwriting. As Mainino (2000) indicates, most black
women writers regard language “not only as a means of communication, but also as an instrument of
empowering the dispossessed” (Mainino, 2000, p. 40) Mary Agnes starts singing and writing songs, “Mary
Agnes went to git Sofia out of prison, she begin to sing. First she sing Shug's songs, then she begin to make
up songs her own self” (Walker, 1983, p. 64) that her songs were about color in order to find her subjectivity
out of skin color:
They calls me yellow like yellow be my name.
They calls me yellow like yellow be my name.
But if yellow is a name.
Why ain’t black the same.
Well, if I say Hey black girl.
Lord, she try to ruin my game (Walker, 1983, p. 64).
The song is a manifestation of Mary Agnes’s identity and highlights the issue of identity connected to light-
skinned versus dark-skinned African Americans. She tries to show the shades of color that lie beneath her skin
within her singing to find her identity through these colors and also apart from her skin color. While Walker
used the colors in the vast semiotic meaning as an instrument to demonstrate racism, gender differences, and
radical social oppression, the color purple can semiotically be defined in which the color red signifies the
African blood, the color blue implies their American experience of slavery. Blue is the color of their collective
reflection of sorrow, blues. The history of American Negro is the struggle of “To make it possible for a man
to be a Negro and an American” (Gates and Jarrett, 2007, p. 309) Red and blue together form the purple and
make up for the dual African American identity as Du Bois states long ago: “Negro is sort of the seventh son,
born with a veil and gifted with second sight...this sense of looking at oneself through the eyes of the other”
(Gates and Jarrett, 2007, p. 309). Therefore, the color of passion which is red and the color of sorrow which is

8. blue, together, make up for the mixed color, purple. Thus the color purple signifies the female experience
which is subject to twice oppressions, whites and black men, related to the beating and decay of black females
like Sophia‘s eyes become purple since she is beaten by the white and Celie’s body is full of purple scratches
caused by a black man. In light of the utopian ending of the novel, it can be compared to a blues music, as the
last line often softens the message in the song, and gives hope of personal, social and political change. Walker’s
ending is thus, in the words of Maria Lauret (2000) “a way of laying sadness to rest” (Lauret, 2000, p. 114).
4 Abject
The Color Purple begins in abject desolation and ends in extreme joy. Celie struggles to gain linguistic self-
definition within the framework of a paternal restriction of silence that configure the self against the Other.
“You better not never tell nobody but God” (Walker, 1983, p. 1) in a world of disturbed signs and to move
from the paralysis of being an object to the plenitude of being a subject. As that marginalized heroine, Celie is
“imprisoned, alienated, sexually abused, and driven into semiotic collapse” (Castle, 1982, p. 182). Alice
Walker Essentially emphases on blacks, particularly black women to show how they act and communicate
with each other. She has confirmed that “I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole of
my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the
triumphs of black women” (Bloom, 2009, p. 75).
In the process of subjectivity Celie goes through language and desire to construct her own identity and the
darkness in which her spirit reveals itself, alienation, silence, and finally the complexion of racism and sexism,
all of them are presented as being prior to language in Celie’s story. It depicts the importance of language in
the search for linguistic self-definition, identity, and (un)consciousness before the entrance to desire.
Celie, like an infant, is silenced and Others speak so the concept of the lack is engendered by the subject’s
alienation in the Other but Celie is reserved to the closure of the solitude of her experiences. In the matter of
communication, Celie was alienated as far as talking to God in the beginning of the story by her letters to him,
then she promoted her letters by writing them to her sister in which show her attempts to develop her “self” in
many cases and finally her letters addressed universe that leads her into happy life. As seen the circle of
alienated self was bigger through the letters and made her to interact with Others.
Celie writes, “Harpo ast his daddy why he beat me. Mr._____ say, Cause she my wife. All women good
for--he don’t finish. He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do. Remind me of Pa” (Walker, 1983, p. 25).
The rules of the patriarchal considered as Otherness hence impose themselves on the subject as “self” and
Celie internalizes external images which dominant made considered abject, as reflections of her own self.
Therefore she has been forced to reside in a wordless setting. She has no voice, the only access to language is
by means of writing letters which allow the imposition of the father who initially obstructed her possibility to
speak. Celie has realized that language or voice does not belong to her.
Celie’s fear depicted in her letters and the whole novel is a collection of letters written by and to Celie along
times of repression, oppression, love, and desire. In one of her first letters Celie claims that she does not even
look at men whenever she meets them: “I look at women, tho, cause I’m not scared of them” (Walker, 1983,
p. 5). The Other is “a set of discourses through which the dominant group defines itself” (Kitzinger and
Wilkinson, 1996, p. 9). The male community is observed as the prominent source of fear and violence for Celie
that she claims that “wherever there’s a man, there’s trouble” (Walker, 1983, p. 203), which indicates her entire
frustration with men. They compare themselves to trees and animals: “I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s
how come I know trees fear men” (Walker, 1983, p. 22). That is “We use the Other to define ourselves”, both
in terms of what we are and we are not (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1996, p. 8).
Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject is particularly useful for understanding the lack of women who
experience rape. The principal characteristic of the abject is its formlessness, meaning the abject “disturbs
systems” and neglects “positions, and rule” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). Kristeva suggests that all abjection is
actually a reflection of the lack or want in one’s self and is the foundation of all sense of being and meaning.
Abjection can be viewed as “a kind of narcissistic crisis” (Oliver, 2002, p. 240) in which the abject upholds
the “I” by constructing the opposing Other (Oliver, 2002, p. 241).
When Celie was confronting this kind of violence and rape by her step father, the response “is empathy, a
sense of loss, and a desire to help, but there is also a recognition of powerlessness and an attitude of disgust.

9. Helplessness … impinge[s] on any sentimentalized or purely empathetic response to violence” (Coulthard,
2006, p. 133). In this respect, Celie finds herself in helpless solitude “It all I can do not to cry. I make myself
wood” (Walker, 1983, p. 15).
In one of Celie’s later letters to God, Celie indicates how deeply she is disgusted by her body and her looks:
“I hate the way I look, I hate the way I’m dress” (Walker, 1983, p. 69) that is the image in which paternal
Others made her to internalize and she is deeply dissatisfied with sex and is not at all attracted to Mr. _____.
“But what you got? You ugly. You skinny. You shape funny. You too scared to open your mouth to people”
(Walker, 1983, p. 134), she also suppressed by her gender “Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you
a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (Walker, 1983, p. 135) and Celie believes on the picture had
been made for her “I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook” (Walker, 1983, p. 135) as it can be
considered the pre-mirror stage where Celie was included in and when Shug Avery teaches Celie to learn to
love her body, claiming that she looks “like a good time” (Walker, 1983, p. 53). Celie then acts and feels like
“a little lost baby” (Walker, 1983, p. 71) which depicts her abjection before entering in the symbolic order
stage. The change of Celie’s perception about her body, soul and sex signifies the beginning of Celie’s
transformation of mirror stage to find her own identity and entering to narcissism phase and reveals she learn
to love herself.
5 Conclusion
This article focused on Walker’s impressive language and narrative techniques in The Color Purple in the light
of Kristeva’s main concepts like Intertextuality, Semiotic and Symbolic language and finally Abjection.
Walker shows how female characters rebel against male’s authority and even ask for their own identities. The
reading of the novel under the influences of some literary and historical movements, indicated the novel’s
engagement with Intertextuality. Common literary interfaces can be traced in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings
especially in the political era during 1960s and 1970s. The language of the novel was dramatically discussed
based on Kristeva’s Semiotic. Finally, the notion of Abject was examined in this novel to take a journey of
self-realization, considering Celli’s character as the major feature whose journey of self-identification was
portrayed through an epistolary form of narration.
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