Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker's Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple

Yet Walker does more than simply allow Philomela to speak within the confines of patriarchal discourse.(3) Walker's novel revises the myth of Philomela by creating a heroine's text that reconfigures the rhetorical situation of sender-receiver-message and articulates Celie's movement away from an existence as a victim in a patriarchal plot toward a linguistic and narratological presence as the author/subject of her own story. Walker's novel also rewrites the myth through its creation of an alternative discourse that allows for the expression of both masculine and feminine subjectivity--a language of the sewn that withdraws from the violence of patriarchal domination, of patriarchal discourse.(4) Celie's skills as a seamstress both retrieve and refigure the myth of Philomela, for unlike Philomela's tapestry/text, Celie's sewing functions as an alternative methodology of language that moves her away from violence and victimization and into self-empowerment and subjectivity. The novel also deliberately conflates the pen and the needle, thereby deconstructing the binary oppositions between the masculine and the feminine, the spoken and the silenced, the lexical and the graphic. Walker's reconfiguration of the myth of Philomela thus overturns the master discourse and the master narrative of patriarchal society. In Walker's hands Philomela's speech becomes the instrument for a radical metamorphosis of the individual as well as a subversive deconstruction of the power structures that undergird both patriarchal language and the patriarchal world itself.

Susan Griffin argues that "more than rape itself, the fear of rape permeates our lives.... and the best defense against this is not to be, to deny being in the body, as a self; ... to avert your gaze, make yourself, as a presence in this world, less felt" (83). Certainly, when Celie speaks of turning herself into wood when she is beaten or raped ("I say to myself, Celie, you a tree" [30]), the response described by Griffin is apparent; to avoid pain Celie denies her body and her presence. Walker's story begins in the familiar mythic way: Celie is told after her rape by her (presumed) father: "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy" (11). Celie is silenced by an external source, and like Morrison's and Naylor's protagonists, she experiences the nullification of subjectivity and internal voice allied with rape by the myth of Philomela. Celie's story starts with the fact that the one identity she has always known is no longer accessible: "I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl" (11). No longer a "good girl," Celie has no present tense subjectivity, no present tense "I am."

Like Pecola Breedlove of Morrison's The Bluest Eye, who ends the novel "flail[ing] her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly" (158), Celie appears to have been driven into semiotic collapse by the rape. Walker's text also uses bird and blood imagery to connect Celie with her mythic prototype, Philomela as well as to revise the mythic prototext. In Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how Procne and Philomela are transformed, a change that silences them as humans but does not erase their bloody deeds: "One flew to the woods, the other to the roof-top, / And even so the red marks of the murder / Stayed on their breasts; the feathers were blood-colored" (151). Throughout The Color Purple, Celie is associated with both birds and blood. Celie tells Albert that she loves birds (223), and Albert comments, "you use to remind me of a bird. Way back when you first come to live with me.... And the least little thing happen, you looked about to fly away" (223). Later in the novel, when Celie returns to confront her "Pa" (Alphonso) about his actions, she comments three times on how loudly the birds are singing around his house (164, 165, 167). The singing birds of the later scene recall Celie's earlier victimization, the way she was raped, bloodied, impregnated, and deprived of voice by Alphonso's statement that "she tell lies" (18).