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PARTISAN REVIEW
pedophobic ("he hate children and he hate where they come from") .
They are petty, spiteful, "hurtful," and treacherous. They are also
arrogant, complacent, lazy, insensitive, incompetent, vain, inartis–
tic, contemptuous of women, but quick to take credit for their work.
Above all, they are lechers, mechanical monsters of sexual appetite.
What makes men so awful we never learn. The male characters
in this novel, all black, are not, as we might think, made awful by
their mistreatment at the hands of whites. Nettie's letters from
Africa, where the men ate just as awful, make precisely that point.
("Wherever there's a man, thete's trouble.") We do learn that Harpo,
against the grain, is awful to women because that is what his father,
Mr.
, taught him to be . And then we learn that Mr. ___
is awful to women because that is what
his
father forced him to be.
Harpo, left to himsctf, would have been happy cooking, watching
the kids, doing the housework for his amazon wife. Even the for–
midable Mr.
, as he says, "use to try to sew along with mama
cause that's what she was always doing. But everybody laughed at
me. But you know, I liked it." Celie, in short, redeems these men by
giving them the courage to be women, by releasing the woman
already in them. But masculinity is unredeemable; masculinity is
radical evil, irreducible, the causeless cause of all that's wrong in the
world.
Such a view of men informs many recent novels and short
stories, tales of a woman who leaves an impossible husband or lover
or father, only to suffer further indignities at the hands of other
lustful men, finally to find happiness or at least health in the em–
brace of a career (usually artistic), or another woman, or, in a few
cases, in cohabitation wth a homosexual male, a man happy to grant
the heroine a room of her own, "preferably one with a key and a
lock,"
as Alice Walker puts it.
These fictions, written over the last twenty years, since about
the time Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar
was published, are an advance
over their womanist predecessors in at least one way: no glamorous
male is awarded to the heroine as a prize for her virtue; the rejection
of men and all their ways is at last explicit- is, in fact, the conclusion
and climax toward which everything else in these works tends . But
these works also, in a number of ways, revert to their predecessors,
to their narcissism, their sentimentality, their melodrama, their
championing of domesticity over the public world of masculine
power plays, and their nondenominational religiosity
(The Color Pur–
ple
is dedicated, "To the Spirit: without whose assistance neither this
