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chapter 4 Rejecting God and Redefining Faith Portrayals of Black Women’s Spirituality from the standpoint of its revision of African American cultural perspective and interrogation of the ethos as it relates to the spiritual and trans-secular, The Color Purple (1982) is more complex than it may initially appear to be. On the surface, it seems to be clearly different because it is a bolder and more revolutionary text than The Cattle Killing (1996) and Beloved (1987), the two rich, innovative postmodern texts covered in the last chapter. It shows none of The Cattle Killing’s angst about the power of biblical textuality and its creation of a God textually complicit in oppression, but it paradoxically reflects the theological tradition in African American culture as it critiques and rejects it, somewhat like The Cattle Killing does. Through a crafty parody, Morrison’s novel revises the biblical and Christian and invests spiritual potential in black women. The Color Purple does not present the same kind of complex, thoroughgoing parody that uses biblical allusion and structural parallel that produces incongruity. It does parody the Bible and the patriarchy to empower black women as Beloved does, but this part of its critique is more straightforward. In these terms of comparison, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) is not a complex biblical parody like Beloved or one embedded with its own paradox like The Color Purple. It is an intricate, dense black woman’s text that through the process of its complicated narrative decenters the patriarchy and recreates the African American cultural tradition around black women. The novel’s complexity is a product of the broad-ranging inclusiveness of its cultural portrayal of the sacred, spiritual, and supernatural, which encompasses the 118 mythical/historical, the biblical/Christian, and the non-Christian/nonWestern religious and “pagan,” and the good, the evil, and the morally ambiguous . The text is so tightly interwoven thematically and structurally that parts become hidden in the obscurity of the culture’s mythical, spiritual, and supernatural reality that is its very source. The text presents a theory of its narrative that implies that structure and theme replicate what is obscure, abstract , and barely perceptible, although deeply felt, in the culture itself. Critics have focused on Mama Day’s subversion of male standards, which are grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the text of the Bible, but this is only one part of a vast, intricate exposé that at the same time shows the importance of the biblical/Christian as well as other aspects of the African American tradition that oppose it theologically and ideologically. The subversion of the patriarchy is infused interstitially throughout the novel’s structure in a fashion that makes its general effect somewhat indirect. Overall , this aspect of its political critique stands out, but the narrative also highlights diverse thematic features in a depiction of folk syncretism where disparate beliefs and practices often interrelate. This separates Mama Day from the more direct challenge of The Color Purple and even from the indirect but eviscerating critique of Beloved. In the scope of my analysis, the novel is important because of everything that it attempts to reveal about the sacred, spiritual, and supernatural in African American culture and also for the richness that it succeeds in showing. Celie’s story in The Color Purple implies a crucial problem for many who do not accept the Bible by faith or who think with a second mind beyond faith. The inferior status of women is inscribed in the essence of life through the myth of the Edenic beginning, particularly in the story of the fall from Eden, and is consistently written throughout the Bible. First, in Genesis 2:23, God creates woman from the body of man, but even more than this, in Genesis 3 woman is responsible for the introduction of sin into human existence and the consequent retribution of banishment from Eden. God’s punishment of woman is specific: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). In the Old Testament, this translates into a patriarchal story in which men almost always rule and are foremost and prominent in God’s sight. The dispensation of the New Testament changes little, if anything. Perhaps the most 119 rejecting god and redefining faith [3.15.3.154] Project MUSE...

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