Of Feminine Bodies, the Earth’s
Wounds, and the Marginalized Voice: An Ecofeminist Reimagining of The Color Purple
Dr.
Abdus Sattar,
Assistant Professor,
Department of
English,
Galsi
Mahavidyalaya,
Galsi, Purba
Bardhaman,
West
Bengal, India.
Abstract: The
feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir first proposed the idea of “Woman as Other”
in her pioneering text The Second Sex, a core concept in feminist philosophy.
She argued that the attributes given to women are not natural, but rather
socially constructed. It is the man who stands at the apex of being and
relegates the woman to the position of the other. She further
asserted that a woman is not born, but rather becomes; her identity is shaped
within a patriarchal society that convinces her of her inferiority. In such a
society, women are conditioned to forget their own rights, and make to believe
that mere existence is the essence of life. In the latter half of the twentieth
century, ecofeminism emerged as a branch of feminist thought, exploring the
intersection between the exploitation of women and the degradation of nature.
Ecofeminists questioned the parallel exploitation and control of nature and
women under the gaze of patriarchy. This paper seeks to highlight how nature
and women are parallelly wounded by the patriarchal forces and how resistance
has emerged from both these realms over time in Alice Walker’s novel The
Color Purple.
Keywords: Woman, Other, Nature, Patriarchy,
Exploitation, Oppression, Ecofeminism, Resistance
The history of
women’s suffering and subjugation stretches back to the dawn of humanity. In
the primordial tale of creation, Eve is portrayed as both inferior and frail.
The basis of oppression, repression and exploitation are inherent in the very
nature of society. Over the course of time, many
female critics and writers have tried to investigate the roots of women’s
subordination, and they have written about this in their writing. These
explorations would provide the groundwork for feminist thinking. The renowned
feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir reveals how women are given attributes
that identify them as the ‘Other’. In the prelude to The Second
Sex, she articulates, “She is defined and differentiated with reference to
man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential,
as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute - she is the
Other” (16).Yet it is Virginia Woolf, an early and pioneering feminist thinker,
who laid the cornerstone for feminist criticism in her seminal work A Room
of One’s Own. In this work, she boldly proclaimed that “men have treated
women, and continue to treat them, as inferiors. It is the male, she asserted,
who defines what it means to be female and who controls the political,
economic, social, and literary structures” (Bressler 104).
At the beginning
of human civilization, humanity enjoyed a delicate communion with nature, where
all living beings were intricately interconnected and interdependent. Humans,
in this primal state, were “neither better nor worse than other creatures
(animals, plants, bacteria, rocks, rivers) but simply equal to everything else
in the natural world” (Campbell 128).
However, this delicate balance was shattered with the human evolution
and the advance of science. Man’s bond with nature, along with his perception
of it, underwent a great sea change, particularly after the industrial
revolution. By the latter half of the 20th century, awareness about the
shattered relationship between humankind and the environment and the
repercussions it had grew, giving birth to a new field of study i.e. Ecocriticism aiming at rekindling an appreciation of the symbiotic
bond between humanity and nature. The movement found its roots in the
publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and soon blossomed in tandem with
the civil rights and women’s movements. During this moment of ecological
awakening, ecofeminism appeared in the 1970s as a social and political movement
focused on women’s connections with ecology.
Ecofeminists
assert that in this materialistic and patriarchal society, both women and
nature endure exploitation. Women are subjugated, while nature is ravaged under
the guise of progress and modernization. Francoise d’Eaubonnefirst introduced
the term Ecofeminism in her book Le Feminisme ou la Mort in 1974.Karen
J. Warren opines that “ecological feminism is the position that there are
important connections - historical, experiential, symbolic, theoretical -
between the domination of women and the domination of nature, an understanding
of which is crucial to both feminism and environmental ethics” (325). Susan Griffin argues that women are in fact unique in
proximity to nature, which men simply cannot reach, and the result is a
profound balance between women and nature. The core of ecofeminism is the notion
that all things are interdependent and interconnected where no hierarchies
exist but only share mutual respect. As a Black writer, Alice Walker seeks
to elevate the status of Black women by awakening them to their rights and
envisioning a world rooted in equality for all living beings. In her novel The
Color Purple, Walker explores the prevailing hierarchical structures of a
male-dominated society, exposing how binary oppositions position women and
nature as inferior and vulnerable to exploitation. Through her work, she
emphasizes the awakening of Black women’s self-awareness and their journey
toward autonomy. Walker envisions a utopian society where humans and nature
co-exist in peaceful consonance without disturbing each other that reveals
their interconnection as it intertwines the themes of race, gender, and nature.
In
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
conveys her deep and abiding concern for the oppression of Black women,
particularly as it pertains to their race and sex. In her writings, she
explores the world of women where they are considered as objects, not human
beings; devoid of rights and agency. Women are made to be passive victims of
patriarchy and male chauvinism, becoming such powerlessness that they cannot
even voice of their own sentiments to anyone else. Celie, the
protagonist of the novel, raped by her stepfather at the age of fourteen, and
then became a mother of two children. She had been continuously raped and
tortured by him, but she was unable to express it to others. She felt numb, emotionally detached, amid the looming
threat of violence and fear. She then started to write up her murky
experiences to God. The novel begins with a cryptic note that tells the inward
agony of Celie:
“You better not never
tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.” (03)
She had even
been raped during her period, and when she cried out in pain, she was silenced
with threats, left to endure the agony in silence. Her father advised her to
adopt to the ‘thing’, but she could not adjust. Following early sexual abuse,
rape, and incest she was sold to Mr_, a widower of four children. Her marriage
to Mr _ did little to ease her suffering or oppression; instead, it merely led
her into another form of captivity, where she acted as a sex toy and a laborer
within the confines of the household. Growing up in such a harrowing
environment, she began to think that this was the life for which she had been
destined. At this point, she could
not imagine anything beyond that existence.
Women in this
novel ended up victims of sexism as well as racism. Sofia, a courageous and
indomitable spirit, was compelled to surrender to the oppressive power of the
whites, both as a woman and as a Black person. She was savagely whipped and
thrown into jail, subjected to such brutal treatment that her very identity
became unrecognizable. Sheriff concluded “When I see Sofia I don’t know why she
still alive. They crack her skull, they crack her ribs. They tear her nose
loose on one side. They blind her in one eye. She swole from head to foot. Her
tongue the size of my arm, it sticks out tween her teef like a piece of rubber.
She can't talk. And she just about the color of a eggplant” (82). She had
renounced her identity as a resolute individual, embracing instead traits of
meekness and passivity.
With
Samuel and Corrine, Nettie came to Olinka to start their missionary work. She
gave Celie meticulous accounts of their experiences with Olinka culture in her
letters. She said Olinka society was deeply patriarchal, with female children
barred from school and women economically dependent on their husbands. As Olivia argued
that these traditions only served to constrain women’s freedom, with a direct
parallel to the discouragement of Black girls from schooling in America, where
white people sought to deny them an education. Walker
highlights the ingrained patriarchal practices in African society as manifest
in the Olinkas’ life through these observations.
African
parents’ views are inherently conservative and patriarchal. Women are expected
purely to look after the household in Olinka culture at home and primary
schooling is reserved for boys. Meanwhile, girls are taught the skills deemed
necessary to be good wives. A girl remains the “other”, distinct and separate
from a boy. Nettie remarked that Tashi’s father
had a similar attitude to their own father, who resented his daughters’ pursuit
of education. With this letter, Walker seeks to demonstrate that the oppression
of women is a global phenomenon, a common bond of subjugation that transcends
geographical boundaries.
Human
civilization has consistently relegated nature to an inferior position long
ago. The Holy Bible directly declares the superiority of human beings over
nature, stating that God has given man “dominion over the fish of the sea and
over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” (qtd in
Abrams 72). A similar perspective is evident in the ancient philosophies of Rome
and Greece, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, where human beings wielded
the position of apex of beings considering humans as the rulers and masters of
nature. This belief ingrains the notion that God created the natural world
solely to serve human needs. Consequently, humans exploit natural resources
indiscriminately, not to meet their basic necessities, but to gratify their
indulgent desires resulting in environmental
degradation which eventually leads to imbalance in delicate balance of the
ecosystem.
Walker
like other ecofeminists challenges male chauvinism and their dominion over
women and nature through the depiction of Olinka culture. Nettie kept Celie
informed about her life in Olinka, sharing detailed accounts of the village and
its culture. She described Olinka as once being a peaceful African village,
rich in natural resources and indigenous traditions. The people lived in a
“place without walls but with a leaf roof” (Walker 136), surrounded by “trees
and trees and then more trees on top of that. And big. They are so big they
look like they were built. And vines. And ferns. And little animals. Frogs.
Snakes too” (Walker 135). The
native peoples thrived in an ecological setting where nature and mankind lived
with each other in peace. However, that ecological balance and mutual respect
was disrupted with the arrival of white road builders, who cleared the forests
to build new roads by demolishing both animal habitats and human dwellings.
The
biological equilibrium was shattered with the loss of these habitats. The
people were even forced to buy water from the planters. The expansion of white
imperialism extended beyond Olinka to neighboring villages, with the goal of
transforming the area into the headquarters of the rubber industry, replacing
the forests with rubber trees. Ultimately, capitalism
took its firm stance into the rural life, and dismantled the very fabric of the
societal life of Olinka village. The traditional culture of Olinka, as
indigenous as before, was slowly losing its hold, a casualty of a more and more
industrialized society driven into a hole. In the name of modern civilization,
the white colonists wreaked untold havoc on the environment.
Walker portrays this dual and simultaneous plight of women
and nature within the same oppressive pressures in this novel. Both women and
nature are portrayed as the “other,” submissive, exploited, and ruled by men.
The novel also stresses the bond that women have with trees; trees are both a
sign of redemption and a refuge for women. The protagonist Celie, in her
moments of despair, finds herself in aligned with nature. In a moment of sorrow, she tells
herself, “It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself,
Celie, you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear man” (Walker 23). Here, Celie and trees are depicted on the same platform
having emotions and feelings, but incapable of expressing their pain. Shug
Avery shares a similar kind of affinity with trees. She believes that trees
possess feelings and should be protected, stating, “My first step from the old
white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when
I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come
to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew
that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed” (176).
In the novel,
the women realize the transformative power of sisterhood, which allows them to
evolve from innocence to maturity, and to liberate themselves from both
physical and psychological abuse. With the help
of Shug, the protagonist, Celie comes to grasp the true essence of God. At
first she passively suffers the brutality of her husband and resigns herself to
a life suffused with pain. But it is from the support of sisterhood,
Celie finds the courage to defy her oppressor. She finally resolves to leave
her husband, embarking on a new journey to Memphis with Shug, and for the first
time reclaiming her own self and identity.
Then I feel Snug
shake me. Celie, she say. And I come to myself.
I'm pore, I’m
black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But
I’m here. (187)
In this moment,
Celie not only leaves her husband but also asserts her independence and
discovers her own existence. Her act of resistance emerges when she recognizes
the significance of her own selfhood and the rights that belong to her. Celie’s transformation represents, in a sense, the
awakening of Black women’s consciousness and progress. In the village of Olinka
the women become increasingly aware of the importance of educating their
daughters. Even to face disapproval from society concerning girls being brought
up, as they come to realize that education is everything and girls can only be
nurtured and blossom by it. Defying patriarchal power, they start sending their
daughters to school, intent on shielding them from the constraining influence
of male chauvinism.
Every action,
however, carries consequences. The changes we
make to or disruptions we make to the natural order always leave an imprint on
our lives, good or bad. Susan Griffin explores this concept in her
influential work Woman and Nature:
We say every act comes back on itself. There are
consequences. You cannot cut the trees from the mountainside without a flood.
We say there is no way to see his dying as separate from her living, or what he
had done to her, or what part of her he had used. We say if you change the
course of this river you change the shape of the whole place. (Griffin 186)
The relentless
exploitation of nature by humankind inevitably invokes nature’s wrath, and as a
result, mankind finds itself ensnared by its own greed, enduring suffering and
hardship. That account of the Olinka people, who
get hurt by nature’s revenge made by their chief. The Olinka had depended on roofleaf
for generations, a sacred guardian that kept the tribe protected from the
ravages of rain and wind, sun and heat. It was not only a need that they
employed, it was something sacred to them and planted alongside crops like
cassava, yam, cotton, millet, and groundnuts. As the chief, however, driven by
unquenchable greed, was determined to grow more land, he wished for more ground
for crops to trade with the white men who lived near the coast. He took another
and another tract and demanded the people take down the roofleaf trees to make
way for cassava, millet, and groundnuts. As time passed, the precious roof leaf
disappeared, as did the safeguard it afforded. When the rainy season came, a
fearsome storm devastated the village and razed the roofs of each of its huts.
To their horror, the citizens found that to mend their dwellings, they did not
have roofleaf. So, the Olinka suffered a torturous ordeal, an ordeal that is
merciless and brutal, that was ripped from them by nature’s furious
retaliation:
Where roofleaf
had flourished from time’s beginning, there was cassava. Millet. Groundnuts.
For six months
the heavens and the winds abused the people of Olinka. Rain came down in
spears, stabbing away the mud of their walls. The wind was so fierce it blew
the rocks out of the walls and into the people’s cooking pots. Then cold rocks,
shaped like millet balls, fell from the sky, striking everyone, men and women
and children alike, and giving them fevers. The children fell ill first, then
their parents. Soon the village began to die. By the end of the rainy season,
half the village was gone. (138)
The
Olinka people, who had previously suffered all the fury of nature’s retribution
against them, were finally stirred into recognition of the importance of their
relationship with natural world. Through
their suffering, they realized the extent of their transgressions. In the end,
after all, weighed by the evil appetite of his own greed and the havoc it had
wrought, the chief was driven to leave the village behind and never to return
again. “On the day when all the huts had roofs again from the rootleaf, the
villagers celebrated by singing and dancing and telling the story of the
rootleaf. The rootleaf became the thing they worship.” (138)
The central
theme of ecofeminism in the novel culminates in a vision of wholeness, achieved
by the story’s conclusion. Women, once weak and oppressed, evolve into strong
and independent figures. Men, women and nature
evolve over time into an interconnected, interdependent entity. At the same
time, men seem to begin giving a greater respect to both women and nature,
undertaking jobs they had never before thought to perform - cleaning, cooking,
farming. They shed their old views, and no longer view women as lesser, or
‘other’, but as equals they are experiencing their new world together. Albert
specifically is completely different from his former self. He tells
Celie, “I’m satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural
man. It feels like a new experience” (236). This
is his rebirth, as he not only learns to respect women but, more importantly,
nature.He nurtures his mental growth in the comfort of nature and when he
starts a hobby collecting seashells, a special symbol to signify his individual
respect for the natural world.
In the end, the
novel unveils a vision of harmonious coexistence - between men and women,
humanity and nature, and even between black and white. Celie and Albert, now
altered, live as close friends in Celie’s home. Harpo and Sofia reconcile and
reunite, while Sofia forms a deep bond with the
white mayor’s wife, teaching her to drive. Celie, embracing inclusivity,
hires white workers for her shop, and the Olinka people, in reverence for the
roofleaf, live in harmony with nature. In this
sense, these moments act as reflections of the ethos of wholeness and
interconnectedness, which are at the heart of the ecofeminist ideal.
To sum up, as a black feminist, Walker critiques both
androcentrism and racism by envisioning a world in which men and women, black
and white, and humanity and nature coexist in harmony. In this novel, she
illustrated the main ideas that have shaped her ecofeminist perspective. Walker
also showed the natural world as an integrated community where human beings and
nature shared mutual respect and close harmony. Through the characters like Celie, Sofia, and Olinka
village women, Walker revealed both the systemic
oppression of women and the commodification of nature by patriarchal social
forces. She explored these representations of women and nature as both ‘other’
and inferior, belittled by the means of male oppression, the consequences of
which will lead to their exploitation. But ultimately both women as well as
nature reject these chauvinist attitudes toward men and crave their own
independence. From being regarded as the ‘Other’,
they slowly but surely transform into the empowered ‘Selves’, becoming
independent and individual in a society where hierarchical divisions no longer
prevail.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary
Terms. 7th ed., Thomson Wadsworth, 2004.
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory
and Practice. Prentice Hall, 1994.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley,
Jonathan Cape, 1956.
Campbell, SueEllen. “The Land and the Language of Desire: Where Deep
Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet.” The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by
Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp.
124–36.
Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature. Harper & Row, 1978.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014.
Warren, Karen J. “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.” Environmental
Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, edited by Michael E.
Zimmerman et al., Prentice Hall, 1998, pp. 325–44.