POOJA YANGALDAS

PROFESSOR SHIVAJI SARGAR

M.A Hons (Gender in Literature)
29th October. 2018

How gender operates in the novel?

Gender is the most important aspect of all the crises in the given novel. On the first page
itself we are made to face the harsh reality of how a father rapes his own daughter. We very
quickly realize that the man in the house oppress the weak who can’t raise their voice or
resist to any of his actions. We can’t even say they oppress the weak once until they die?
Celie’s mama is raising her voice to not indulge in sexual intercourse anymore when she’s on
the verge of dying because of child bearing. Men nearly don’t care about women’s suffering
at all in this novel and leave them to die just because they like to have the power they have
over other human beings. This power politics runs nearly everywhere. Black men want to
have power over black women. White women want to have power over black people. White
men want to have power over white women, black people and all the minorities. Alice
walker shows the structure of power politics so beautifully when it is describes how the
white women get bored sitting at home and cribs to have her own car. The mayor sure
fulfils her request but doesn’t let her use it. It’s like he brings her the dolls she asks for but
keeps it in the top part of the shelf so she can never play with it.

At present when I write this analysis in the 21th century, this novel is emotionally very
distressing because it not only deals with sexual harassment but mental harassment too.
Mr.__ addresses Celie as ugly, dumb and that she’s a liar and can work like a man or more
like a donkey. He is telling the man, she is going to marry, that she’s ugly. He is, like himself,
telling her husband-to-be to treat her like crap. He is internalising this notion in Celie’s mind
that she looks ugly and is not smart and is good for nothing in her mind, leaving her to feel
like shit all the time. Celie doesn’t only spend her teenage and youth getting sexually
exploited for several years but is also unknown to her own sexuality. She has internalized
the fact that she is ugly in such a way that she can never even consider her body to be
beautiful in anyway. Celie is attracted to Shug right from the beginning when she looks at
her picture. But the needed sexual awareness comes only when Shug helps her
acknowledge her sexuality and helps her love her body and care for it. She comes to term
with her being a lesbian when she writes in her letters that she doesn’t like frog (men) and
feels something down there only when she thinks about Shug. It takes her a lot of time to
understand what she wants but eventually we see her character going through change
taking all the rights she deserves.

Women in the novel especially Celie is completely objectified. She’s used as a sex object to
satisfy her father’s sexual needs. Then she’s used as a child care taker of her brother and
sisters till she’s married off. When she became a burden to her father and he had someone
else to have sex with, he advertised her for marriage by saying she can “work like a man”
and can keep house clean and will do anything without objection. Again she is used like a
slave who slogs all day and stays silent while her husband comes on top of her and shoves
his dick inside her till he pleases. There is absolutely no mention of love in the relationships
Celie has with men. While Sofie marries Harpo because she loves him but she soon decides
not to sacrifice her dignity or love. Sofie’s character is strong since the very start because
she was raised this way. Her brothers are always on her side maybe because their mother
must have thought them to respect women. Harpo after marriage expects obedience from
his wife just because she is a women. He wants her to listen to him unquestioningly which is
not acceptable to Sofie. Though Sofie does everything a wife is expected to do that’s still not
enough for Harpo. He wants to keep her under his shoes because that’s what he’s learnt
what masculinity is.

At the end of the novel when Mr.__ has changed for good and realized his mistake, he tells
Celie that “Shug act more manly than most men. She upright honest. Speak her mind. Shug
will fight, he say. She bound to live her life and be herself no matter what.” But Celie denies
this description of manly attributes and says neither Mr.___ nor Harpo has these qualities.
But Mr.___ is still not convinced. He says if Shug is not like men then she’s not like women
too. He has this perception because to him women’s characteristics are only to be shy,
quiet, submissive and dependent.
When Mary Agnes decides to go and sing Harpo cannot understand why she needs to go out
and sing and earn money when he’s providing her everything. Women’s feelings and their
passions are negligible in men’s opinion in this novel. Though we see men like Samuel and
jack (Odessa’s husband) and Adam who are supportive of their women and treat them in a
proper way.

On the other hand when we try to see women’s gender roles in Africa and America there is
not much difference. Black women in America if are wronged they somehow understand
her feelings and acknowledge the injustice that is been happening with them. But in Africa
women in the tribal areas they are made to think that their roles in life are to bear children
of men and take care of the household. These women don’t even know they are being
wronged because according to them they are not. African men definitely try hard to know
more than women hence they are sent to schools and made to learn. To them their tribal
identity and ancient culture is everything. Women are made to go through genital
mutilation (cutting of the clitoral glands and clitoral hoods which gives women pleasure
without depending on male sexual organs) so that they became completely dependent on
males for sexual pleasure and thus becoming their possessions for life.

On one instance Celie writes in her letters “Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and
writing to is a man. And act just like other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown”.
This statement implies that men are considered so superior and great that even god can
only be a man.

She also says “God all white too, looking like a stout white man work at bank” because all
superior and great powerful people are white.

In one of the letters that Nettie writes to Celie she says

“I think African are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the
centre of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.” Much to our
surprise the ideology of these African people more or less revolves around their culture and
traditional beliefs. They are ignorant and choose to be that. They deny taking the blame of
slavery on the grounds of culture and tradition even when it is so evident by the skin of their
colour. They pity missionaries because they have no safety. They say marriage gives women
a safe environment given by her husband and that’s how it should be. Women are not given
a chance to express their feelings in any circumstance.

Men in the novel are seen to have married multiple times and so have been women ( in case
of Shug) for example Alphanso marries Celie’s mama and bares multiple kids with her and
after she dies marries more women and keeps impregnating them and also complaining
about how sick they are and how useless they are because they don’t do their household
chores properly. After one women dies he marries another women to take care of the kids
from his previous wife and also to keep him sexually satisfied all the time. Celie acts as a
temporary wife fulfilling both these needs till she gets married. He keeps marrying all his life
even before he dies he has a wife only 15 years old to whom he also impregnates and leaves
her with two kids. This is the same case with Albert. He has kids with Annie Julia and after
she dies he marries Celie to look after his kids. If a woman dies, a man never will take care of
his children himself but hand over his kids to another woman. But if women separate from
their husbands they should always take their children with them (in case of Sofie) my point
here is how women don’t have any control of how their bodies have been used. Men want
to have sex irrespective of baring the consequences (multiple kids and poor health of the
women) and taking care of the children. They impregnate women just for pleasure and how
women have to bare the fruit of what they do and they not only spend their life taking care
of their own children but also their step-children. Basically women have to pay for what
men do all the time.

Sofie’s situation throughout the story is full of crises. She is a strong well-built and brave
women who has been struggling all her life. She had to fight her father her brother and her
uncles all her life for everything and after marriage he had dream of an easy lovely life for
herself. But acknowledging that even Harpo wants to keep her under control by beating her
she breaks down and leaves him but doesn’t let Harpo beat her. Even a brave woman like
Sofie goes through brutal assault for beating the mayor back for denying to work for him.
After everything that happens with Sofie she has to work for Mrs. Millie by sacrificing her
dignity to save her life. A woman with so much strength is taken down not only because she
was women but mainly because she was a black women. This is where gender, class and
racism intersect. Discrimination on basis of gender, colour, sexuality, nationality etc. came
to be known as intersectional feminism. The concept of intersectionality is intended to
illuminate dynamics that often been overlooked in feminist movements and theory. As
articulated by bell hooks, such an approach “challenged the notions that ‘gender’ was the
primary factor that determined a women’s fate” black feminists like Anna Julia Cooper
challenged this notion and stated that white women feminists were not the right
representation of an ideal feminist, the concerns of a black, poor or disabled women are
different from white middle class women. Third wave feminism notes the lack of attention
to race, class, sexual orientation and gender identity in early feminist movements and tries
to bring about a change in the social and political disparities. Sofie’s example in the novel
addresses these issues in a detailed manner. A psychologist Jonathan hadith said “ in
intersectionality the binary dimensions of oppressions are said to be interlocking and
overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, its victims cannot fight
their battles separately. They must all come to fight their common enemy, the group that
sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able- bodied
Christian or Jewish male.”

WORKS CITED:

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Wikipedia: The free Encyclopaedia