16. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Color Purple is the story of Celie, an African-American girl who endures a series of disasters, recounted in a series of letters: she is raped by her step-father, has her children taken away from her, and is forced to marry a man she hates. Surprisingly, it ends happily. But why purple? At one point one of the main characters, the singer Shug Avery, says (during a discussion about God): 'I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.' The insistence on purple as God's favourite colour (as opposed to red, green, orange, etc) may be to do with something Walker wrote in a book called In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, in which she defines her experience as a ‘womanist’: ’Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.’ In The Color Purple, when one character is beaten, she turns ‘the color of an eggplant’; towards the end of the book Celie thinks of purple as a majestic colour, associating it with the garments of her lover, Shug Avery. Purple therefore seems to signify both the bruising defeats as well as the triumphs of African-American women.

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