Queen Bee, King Bee
The Color Purple and the Blues
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8896005 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jerry Wasserman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 301-316 |
| Publication date | 2000-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-s030-03-03 |
| OpenAlex | W2316890784 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple chronicles the life of an African American woman from rural Georgia during the first forty years of the twentieth century, a blues life of indignity and severe emotional poverty that is salvaged and ultimately redeemed, in part through the agency of the blues itself. On the opening page, warned by her stepfather never to tell anyone but God that he has raped her, Walker’s protagonist, Celie, erases herself. “I am,” she writes, striking out the word “am” and correcting herself, “I have always been a good girl” (3). She presents herself as “an absence, an erased presence” (Gates 243). Later her husband further (un)defines her: “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (Color Purple 176). From this condition of absence, of ostensible nothingness, Celie learns to make herself present and real. She achieves subjectivity and agency under the tutelage of Shug Avery, blues singer
Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Blues · Girl · Literature · Nothing · Psychoanalysis · Subjectivity · White (mutation · Chemistry · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,06 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2009 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |