Political Critique of Race Relations in Alice Walkers Color Purple Ess

The Color Purple as governmental Critique of Race Relations If the integrate family of Doris Baines and her adopted African grandson exposes the missionary pattern of integration in Africa as iodine based on a false kinship that in accompaniment denies the legitimacy of kinship bonds across racial lines, the relationship between Miss Sophia and her white charge, Miss Eleanor Jane, serves an analogous function for the American South. Sophia, of course, joins the mayors household as a maid under conditions more overtly racist than Doris Bainess adoption of her Akwee family Because she answers hell no (76) to Miss Millies request that she come to work for her as a maid, Sophia is brutally beaten by the mayor and six policeman and is then imprisoned. Forced to do the jails laundry and driven to the brink of madness, Sophia finally becomes Miss Millies maid in order to escape prison. Sophias violent confrontation with the white officers obviously foregrounds issues of race and clas s, as even critics who find these issues marginalized elsewhere in The Color Purple scram noted. But it is not only through Sophias dramatic public battles with white men that her story dramatizes issues of race and class. Her domestic relationship with Miss Eleanor Jane and the other members of the mayors family offers a more finely nuanced and extended critique of racial integration, albeit one that has often been overlooked.(11) Like Doris Baines and her black grandson, Sophia and Miss Eleanor Jane appear to have some genuine family feelings for one another. Since Sophia practically . . . raises (222) Miss Eleanor Jane and is the one sympathetic person... ...nold, 1993. 85-96. Sekora, John. Is the Slave Narrative a Species of Autobiography? Studies in Autobiography. Ed. James Olney. New York Oxford UP, 1988. 99-111. Shelton, Frank W. Alienation and Integration in Alice Walkers The Color Purple. CLA Journal 28 (1985) 382-92. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Explanation and Cultu re Marginalia. Humanities and Society 2 (1974) 201-21. Stade, George. Womanist Fiction and Male Characters. Partisan Review 52 (1985) 264-70. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire The Black Heroines Text at the Turn of the Century. New York Oxford UP, 1992. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York Oxford UP, 1985. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York Harcourt, 1982.