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Alice Walker's The Color Purple depicts a black woman who is sexually abused, verbally dominated, and physically beaten for almost thirty years. As an adolescent, Celie is repeatedly raped and twice impregnated by the man she believes to be her father. That unscrupulous violator sells her children, destroys her reputation while keeping his own untarnished, and barters her off to an older man who uses her as a surrogate mother for his four horrible children and as a receptacle for his passion. After twenty years of enduring abuse after marriage, Celie finds the strength to engage in a lesbian relationship with her husband's former lover, to leave the church and her home, and to start a pant-making business. This brief scenario of the novel traces a remarkable transformation from victimization to entrepreneurship, and it all seems wonderfully affirming. Yet the novel raises many questions about Walker's [portrayal] of black female character and about where it fits in the schema of development she had outlined for her works early in her career. Walker maintained in a 1973 interview that some of her earlier victimized women characters were at a sort of "cave woman" level of a process that would take them beyond destruction and into positive images of themselves. Her characters in future works, she said, would no longer go crazy, as Myrna does in "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?" or burn themselves up, as Mrs. Jerome Washington does in "Her Sweet Jerome"; rather, they would become the black-eyed Susans who would have found the soil most suitable not only to their survival but to their active nurturing.

A look at some of the women in Walker's earlier works, who, like Celie, are victims of sexual and communal abuse, and who are sometimes victims of their own minds, reveals that Celie is not substantially different from them and that the culmination may be the reaffirmation of many old stereotypes rather than the assertion of a new identity. In Walker's early...