Quest For Individual Identity And Womanist Spiritualism

Alice Walker is one of the most important and prominent contemporary black American woman writers. Best known as the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel The Color Purple(1982), Walker writes powerful, expressive fiction depicting the black woman's struggle for sexual equality and spiritual resurrection. For Walker, the black American woman is a universal symbol representing hope and resurrection; through her female characters, she advocates the importance of bonds between women who contend with negative social mechanisms. My thesis focuses on analyzing the protagonist Celie--a fourteen-year-old, poor, and barely literate southern black girl's psychic and spiritual progress who searches for her individual identity and womanist spiritualism. These two main themes have a stake in each other and prevail in the whole novel. On the one hand, Celie's quest is for individual identity. During the progress of this period, Celie undergoes two main transformations. One is from sexual subjugation to sexual freedom; The other is from psychic autism to psychic wholeness. As for the former, according to the primary projects of modern feminism, the female body is the most exploited target of male aggression, so women often fear or even hate their bodies. Such pattern is evident in Walker's Celie. While in her teens, Celie, as the subjects of repeated rapes and beatings by her stepfather and her husband, has no female freedom at all. Celie tries alternatively to ignore and to annihilate her body in order to defend against her husband's subjugation. Celie has no desire to get to know her body until the arrival of her husband's lover, Shug Avery, who helps her gain self-esteem and the courage to leave the marriage. As for the latter, according to the Jacques Lacan's "the mirror stage", which normally occurs between six months and eighteen months of age, a child, during this stage, has no perception of an external world, only of himself. Such a child may become autistic. The child, who experiences no normal passage through a mirror stage, may be arrested in a very early stage of development. Celie who does not pass through the normal mirror stage is left without an awareness of externality or otherness. What's more, Celie's inability to find a listening audience for herself is another sign of her autism, another result of herarrested development. Only Shug Avery is able to draw Celie out of her autism, because Celie needs not only someone who will tell her how to act and what to say , but also someone who will teach her. Shug does initiate such activities for Celie, helping her through the mirror stage to a discovery of her own body, her capacity for speech, her ability to love another, and finally achieving her pursuit of psychic wholeness.On the other hand, Celie's quest is for womanist spiritualism. It's the keystone for The Color Purple. During the process of this period, Celie undergoes three stages of evolution, namely, from spiritual attachment to spiritual abnegation; from spiritual redemption to spiritual resurrection; from spiritual individualism to humanist spiritualism ; and finally up to womanist spiritualism. Firstly, from spiritual attachment to spiritual abnegation. Celie used to be a na?ve, innocent girl. However, misfortune falls on her. One day, her stepfather raped her on the pretext of helping him haircut. Such sudden event shocks her spiritually. Wandering, melancholy, and disillusion mingles together. She feels helpless. She has no choice but to pour out her grievance and sufferings to God. As the time goes by, her miserable situation does not change at all. God who she adores does not heed her at all. Later on, with the Shug's help, Celie gradually understands that "the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful, and lowdown ." (CP,164) Celie firmly abnegates the imago of God. Secondly, from spiritual redemption to spiritual resurrection. It goeparalleling to the first evolution, that is to say, while Celie under...