COMMENTARY : EXAMINING TWO SHADES OF ‘PURPLE’

Delores S. Williams is a black feminist theologian who has taught women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School and is now a lecturer in the religion department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa.

Alice Walker’s book “The Color Purple” gives us a powerful feminist theology. Steven Spielberg’s movie “The Color Purple” separates feminist issues from religion and gives us a theology of old-time black religion.

Yet in both book and movie, the subject of the theology is the same: salvation. And, in both instances, Shug Avery’s actions, ideas and relationships are essential for determining who will be saved and the terms of salvation.

It is precisely at the point of the characterization of Shug that the book and the movie part ways in delivering their messages about redemption. Walker, in the book, presents a self-sufficient, bisexual, economically independent, liberated Shug Avery. She is the catalyst for Celie’s redemption from low self-esteem, economic dependency and domestic violence. Fully in control of her life and subservient to no man, Shug helps Celie (the central character) realize that redeeming oneself involves changing one’s consciousness.

Thus Celie, through conversations with Shug, changes her understanding of God, man and church. God becomes spirit and is in everything. Church is not the place where one finds God. Rather, one brings God into church. With regard to man, Celie says, “It is like Shug say. You have to git man off your eyeball before you can see anything a’tall.” This observation also applies to the man-god and does indeed cast aspersions upon the source of Christian knowledge about the man-god, the Bible. For as Shug says to Celie: “Ain’t no way to read the Bible and not think God white. . . . When I found out I thought God was white and a man, I lost interest.”

The characterization of the liberating relation between Shug and Celie leads to Walker’s larger message about the terms of redemption. That message is that women’s liberation also leads to men’s redemption. Celie’s new self-affirming independence causes the redemption of her husband, Mr---- who, in the past, brutalized Celie. He thought that “wives are like children.” They had to be beaten in order for men to keep the upper hand. Through the friendly conversations between Mr---- and Celie near the end of the book, Walker shows that his salvation has also necessitated a change in his consciousness. In a positive sense, he has changed his mind about male-female relationships, about love and sexuality.

As feminist theology, the god-talk in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” affirms feminist belief that women’s liberation is the key to the redemption of our society. This social redemption depends upon us changing our consciousness about the maleness of God, about divine validation of heterosexuality and about authority as it relates to the masculine and feminine dimensions of culture.

The movie “The Color Purple” tells quite a different story about salvation in the context of religion. Though Shug Avery is the vehicle for communicating the film’s messages about redemption, she lacks the moral autonomy and the liberated consciousness about God that Shug Avery in the book had in abundance. Thus the movie portrays Shug Avery as a half-vamp blues singer vying for the affection of her stern preacher-father, whose old-time black religion identifies her life style as sin. It is therefore Shug, herself, who needs to be saved.

Near the end of the movie in a church scene electrified by gospel music, Shug humbles herself before male authority (her father) and male-centered black religion as she admits she is a sinner. At intervals throughout the movie Shug tries to convince her father she is adopting a “more respectable” life style. Without cosmetics and in appropriate dress, she visits her father when he is alone in his church. He ignores her. On another occasion she holds up her ringed finger and says to him: “I’m married now!” Again he ignores her.

When Shug bursts into the church singing a gospel song, begging for acceptance, her father finally responds positively. These scenes communicate clearly the terms for woman’s salvation in this religion. She must relinquish her moral freedom before the harsh authority of the judgmental male god her father represents in this world. Contrary to the feminist theology yielded by the book “The Color Purple,” the theology of old-time religion projected by the movie affirms women’s obedience to a male god.

Since these scenes (with Shug seeking her father’s approval) do not appear in Walker’s book, we wonder why they appear in the movie. They do not add significant detail to the major concern of the movie, which is Celie’s salvation from sexist oppression and domestic violence. However, the scenes do reinforce negative stereotypical views that claim that black women--regardless of the degree of liberation they’ve achieved--want black males to have authority over some area of their lives.

These scenes also give religious validation to the heterosexual bias obvious throughout the movie. Thus we do not see clearly in the movie one of the major themes Walker makes clear in the book. That theme is women saving themselves from male domination by bonding sexually with other women. The book gives divine validation to this kind of sexuality when Shug tells Celie that God loves all their sexual feelings. When Celie asks if God thinks these feelings are dirty, Shug responds, “Naw . . . God made it. . . . God loves everything we love.”

The difference in the treatment of redemption by Walker’s book and Spielberg’s movie results from the different method each uses to bring contemporary feminist issues into relation with black culture. Walker subjects black culture to the authority of feminist issues. Spielberg’s movie subjects feminist issues to the authority of black culture.

The movie’s story line runs through rural, black Georgia during a specific time--from 1909 to approximately 1940. Therefore, Shug Avery, the other characters, their actions, interactions and religion must be realistic according to the cultural idioms in rural, black Georgia at the time. In the book, Walker does not establish a definite time span. Her characters have the full sweep of history, but the feminist issues and the consciousness of Shug suggest a time contemporaneous with our own. Thus it is not difficult to imagine the book’s Shug Avery circulating in rural, black Georgia sharing her emancipated ideas about God and sexuality with another woman.

Ultimately this method in Spielberg’s movie determines the criteria we use to evaluate it. We must ask such questions as these: Has the film’s writer successfully captured the black cultural idioms of the designated time span and place? The gospel music, the hell-fire preaching in the small, rural church, the juke joint are black cultural idioms amenable to the expression of a limited number of contemporary feminist issues. When the film’s writer chose to deal primarily with domestic violence, racism and female bonding did he choose those feminist issues that could most realistically be brought into relation with black culture of the designated time? Has the film’s director done the kind of casting that brings the black cultural idioms and the feminist issues to life in such a way that one does not cancel out the other?

Regardless of the way we answer these questions, Spielberg has given us a movie we will not soon forget. It challenges us to go inside the film’s story and let it speak to us rather than we to it. It presents a beautiful picture of black women bonding with each other in spite of pain and abuse. Quincy Jones’ classic song “Sister” reinforces this bonding. Whether we agree with all the movie’s ways of presenting the story, we black feminists leave the cinema knowing we have seen something painfully significant about ourselves, men, God and redemption.