GEORGE STADE
265
equality of the sexes; it dramatizes, rather, the virtues of women and
the vices of men. Like one of its predecessors,
Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded
(1740), the first great womanist novel in English,
The Color
Purple
is unfolded through a series of letters. In
Pamela,
the virtuous
heroine is pursued by the randy Mr. B. until she catches him.
Redeemed by her example, he becomes her reward. In
The Color Pur–
ple,
the heroine, Celie, is pestered by the sexual demands of her hus–
band, Mr.
, until she stabs him in the hand, wins over his
mistress for herself, and finally redeems him by unsexing him. He is
allowed to stay on as a kind of assistant seamstress.
From the first letter, written by Celie to God, we learn that "Pan
won't leave his wife alone, even though she has just had her sixth
child and is deathly sick. ("When we have asked for love, we have
been given children," says Miss Walker in an essay.) When his wife
goes to visit a doctor, Pa rapes Celie, who is fourteen . ("A girl child
ain't safe in a family of men.") By the second letter Pa has managed
to kill his wife, by whose corpse he sits, dropping crocodile
tears-"don't leave me, don't go ." We also learn that he has stolen off
with Celie's and his baby, most likely to kill it, for Pa is the primal
ogre, the type of all men. By the third letter he has taken Celie's and
his second baby away, probably to sell it. More ominously still, "I
see him looking at my little sister." From the fourth letter we learn
that Pa has brought home a new wife, another teenager: "He be on
her all the time. She walk around like she don't know what hit her."
And little sister Nettie has got a new suitor, Mr.
, no im–
prove'ment on Pa and also a recent widower. His wife "was kilt by
her boyfriend coming home from church."
And so it goes, as Pa gives Celie to Mr.
; as Nettie runs
away from Pa and Mr.
to become a missionary; as Harpo,
in imitation of his father, Mr.
, tries to beat his wife, who
thrashes him soundly ("Oh, boo-hoo, he cry. Boo-hoo-hoo"); as Mr.
___'s mistress, Shug, moves in and gives Celie her first orgasm;
as Pa, who in a melodramatic twist turns out not to be Celie's Pa
after all, serves poetic justice by dying while on top of another
woman; as Celie becomes a sucessful designer of fancy pants for
women; and as all the persecuted maids (including Nettie, who in
another melodramatic twist has been raising Celie's children) come
together in the tremendously happy ending.
As for the men, with a few telling exceptions they are brutal in
the flesh because they are impoverished of spirit. They are pitiless
when they are not self-pitying. They are misogynist and they are
