Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple

83 LETTERED BODIES AND CORPOREAL TEXTS IN THE COLOR PURPLE Wendy Wall* In Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly describes how one ideological group establishes power by imprinting its traces on the bodies of other people. Imprinting, she explains, often involves invading, cutting, impressing, and fragmenting.1 In its depiction of rape, wife-beating, genital mutilation, and facial scarification, The Color Purple abounds with instances in which the human body is made to submit to and to register the forces of authority. In the text, a patriarchy maintains power by forcing the female body into a position of powerlessness, thus denying the woman's ability to shape an identity. During the course of the novel, however, Celie learns to reshape those forces of oppression and to define herself through her letters; these letters act as a "second body" that mediates her relationship to the power structure in such a way as to give her a voice. Writing becomes a means for her to define herself against the patriarchy and thus allow her to "reinscribe" those traces and wounds upon her body inflicted and imprinted by others. When Mr.____ sees Sofia giving Harpo orders, he predicts, "she going to switch the traces on you."2 Celie's development in the novel allows her to "switch the traces" made by others, the marks of authority that limit and define her by circumscribing her within a fixed frame. Although Celie initially writes her diary letters to heal the rift that has ensued from her sexual violation and to create an identity from fragmentation, the form of her text necessarily yokes together unity and disparity. The epistolary style divides as it unifies; it consists of a series of discrete entries that form a whole. Likewise, the "self" that emerges from Celie's development is a decentered one, precariously poised against and rift with a sense of Otherness. The novel presents a strange conflation of text and body both thematically and formally; the form and the main character's corporeal and social existence are disjunct entities with malleable, tenuous boundaries. Celie's texts are born when she is raped and silenced; the epigraph to The Color Purple consists of an unattributed, pervasive threat against speech. These stark words initiate the entire text: "You better not tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy" (p. 11). This external silencing forces a second mode of expression to unfold, Celie's diary letters to God. She writes to understand the violation that has threatened her identity. "I *Wendy Wall is a doctoral student in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published an earlier article on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in Criticism. 84Wendy Wall am" are words literally under erasure in the first page, thus revealing the instability of her existence and the threat of "I am not" that plagues her. She crosses out the present tense of the verb, replacing it with the past: "I -am have always been a good girl." Her texts seek to recover that "goodness" that would allow her to state her existence without the mark of erasure; she wants to receive a reciprocal sign that will order her life and thus constitute her as whole. Although Celie's letters provoke no reciprocal communication, her lettered plea creates a means for her to determine her identity. "Letter language" in The Color Purple is not merely, as Ian Watt suggests of the form, "the nearest record of . . . consciousness in ordinary life," or "instantaneous experience;"3 it is more than a window into the mental processes of the fictionalized individual (although Nettie's claim that writing allows her to release "bottled up" emotions suggests that this function is implicit as well). Celie's naivete and brutal honesty in self-presentation, however, negate the opposite critique of her letters as a series of concealments, erasures, or lies. Her writing is neither a pure channel of communication nor a duplicitous self-misrepresentation but a complex means of restructuring herself, an active process in which she moves toward a self-realization through the mediation of language. In her letters, she may not merely convey but reshape (by articulating in a form) her private internal experiences...