The Color Purple
Alice Walker (1982)
“A Black woman in the Jim Crow South finds her voice, her God, and herself through letters no one was ever supposed to read.”
Character Analysis
The most complete character transformation in American literary fiction. Celie begins as a girl who has been taught that her silence is survival — and it is, initially. The transformation is not miraculous but linguistic: sentence by sentence, letter by letter, her syntax grows more complex, more assertive, more capacious. By the end she has a business, a house, a God who looks like everything, and a voice. The voice was always there. Walker's argument is that it needed a listener.
AAVE grammar, phonetic spelling, short sentences that grow longer and more assured over the course of the novel. Drops copula ('She beautiful'), uses 'us' as subject ('us feel'), double negatives as intensifiers.