Overcoming Double Victimisation in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or the Self-healing Power of Writing Herstory

Abstract

The Color Purple,¹ Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, records the destiny of a black woman, Celie, from adolescence to old age, through the letters she addresses to God, and, later, to her long-lost sister Nettie. Through this epistolary form, this trauma narrative bears witness to the power of the written word to overcome a painful experience and bring redemption. As a pregnant means of exploration, discovery and the development of one’s self, the letters give form to a revising impulse enabling Celie to reappropriate her own past and to literally write herself into being.