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“A View from ‘Elsewhere‘”: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Linda Abbandonato
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Abstract

By telling the story of the “invisible woman”—a character traditionally silenced and effaced in fiction—The Color Purple challenges patriarchal constructions of femininity and female desire and makes representation itself a compelling issue. Initially, the great twentieth-century cultural narratives of sexuality and socialization, Freud's oedipal theory and Lévi-Strauss's theory of kinship systems and the exchange of women, are played out in the drama of Celie's life. But this differently crafted, quilted novel is also differently sexual; it replots the heroine's text within an alternative framework of desire and disrupts the symbolic order with its carnivalesque celebration of polymorphously perverse pleasure.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 5 , October 1991 , pp. 1106 - 1115
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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