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Too Shame to Look:1 Learning to Trust Mirrors and Healing the Lived Experience of Shame in Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Kimberly S. Love
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Abstract

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I'm here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Gender and the Politics of Shame , Summer 2018 , pp. 521 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

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