Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’ and Ralph Ellison’s ‘The Invisible Man’ both convey oppression throughout their novels. The Color Purple, written in 1982, is an epistolary novel told from the view point of Celie, a victim whose suffering at the hands of others is unequivocally cruel and unfair. The novel however is redemptive; the novel charts Celie’s journey towards self-discovery. Whilst, Ellison’s novel also centres on the concept of oppression, it is almost opposite to Walker in terms of its conclusion. Ellison’s 1945 novel has a paradoxical message that the nameless protagonist comes to an understanding of his identity only once he realises that he doesn’t have one. Walker conveys Celie’s path towards her awakening and self discovery through a series of letters that she writes to God and then her sister Nettie whereas, Ellison presents a man who looses his identity as the world doesn’t see him as anything but invisible. Both novels are set in America after slavery was abolished and during the time of Jim Crow laws where blacks were being lynched, murdered and falsely imprisoned on a regular basis. Both Ellison’s and Walker’s novels however have common themes of white oppressors, sexual abuse and identity.
Both Ellison and Walker explore the central focus of white male oppression during the early to mid 20th Century. Ellison portrays a narrator who lacks control and suffers at the hands of white men, who degrade and marginalise black people. Ellison focuses the reader on the protagonist’s ill treatment from the white men at the start of the novel at the boxing match. There is an array of “let me at that big ni**er!” “Tear him limb from limb”. The language reveals the status of black men during this period; they are there to entertain the white men who view them as animals. The instruction to “tear” each other is not only violent but metaphorically highlights the way their dignity is torn apart as are their chances of equality due to the way white’s viewed them. Furthermore, the boxing match is an extended metaphor for the treatment of black people during the early 1900’ s-1960. It is set during a time in America where separation between whites and blacks were heavily prescribed; the Jim Crow Laws were in operation, segregation laws within the Southern United States that were enforced until 1965. The boxing match conveys how white people would regard the black people in America as lower class and put them in the same category as animals; therefore allowing them to fight one another conveys how Ellison viewed America during this time. Invisibility and blindness can often be depicted in a metaphorical manner throughout the novel, however at this point; the idea is presented in a literal way. The narrator describes the way he was “Blindfolded, I could no longer control my motions. I had no dignity. I stumbled like a baby or a drunken man”. The men who are standing naked and blindfolded convey the vulnerability of black people. Ellison’s narrator outlines how this degradation makes him feel and Ellison exposes the injustice; the men are infantilised and belittled. Alejandro Lopez Miralles’ essay on the novel further develops the idea that the blindfolds are a metaphor for black oppression. “The boys’ blindness is stressed because they allow themselves to be blindfolded, accepting their racial stereotype of submission.” Miralles emphasises that not only are they mistreated but, furthermore, they suffer from internal colonisation; they believe in their own inferiority and are incapable of recognising the humiliation that they are forced into. He goes further to explain; “Thus, they are invisible as human beings as much to the whites as to themselves.” Lopez’s analysis of the black men accepting the oppression is not only clear throughout the entirety of ‘The Invisible Man’ but also in ‘The Color Purple’ through Celie telling Harpo to beat Sophia, conveying the unquestioning acceptance of abuse. Ellison deliberately opens the novel in this way; by ‘blindfolding’ the narrator and his peers he emphasises their lack of individuality and their status as fodder for white pleasure.
Similarly to Ellison, Walker conveys the hardships black people went through because of white people in the ill treatment of Sophia. Sofia shows a different side to oppression than the narrator in The Invisible Man. Sofia (Celie’s sister in-law) is asked to work for the mayor (who is white) and his family. Unlike the submissive narrator in The Invisible Man, Sophia asserts herself and says “hell no” and then proceeds to fight back when she is slapped publicly. However heroic, Walker like Ellison shows the futility of fighting back when she describes the damage done to Sofia by the police. Not only is she imprisoned; she is barely alive, they “crack her skull, crack her ribs…blind her in one eye”. The repetition of the word “crack” highlights the desire to break Sofia’s spirit. Sofia too, like the boys at the boxing match, is blinded and degraded; the message is clear, both writers convey it is not possible to fight back and win as a black person. However as Pi-Li Hsiao argues, “The Color Purple does provide a context where Sofia can articulate her hidden emotions. Walker’s writing threatens the power structures of gender and race from within”. Perhaps Sofia conveys the change that Walker wanted in women. Some would consider Sophia as a symbol of one of the first women in Literature who revolutionised the treatment of women and thus “threatens the power structures” by challenging the stereotype. Arguably Walker’s vision is more hopeful than Ellison, Sofia doesn’t die and she encapsulates an important message that it is important to maintain the pride that the narrator sacrifices so willingly and misguidedly in the opening of The Invisible Man.
Both works show the consequences of oppression on black women and the treatment of women by men within the African American community. In ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘The Invisible Man’ we see the way that the oppressed becomes the oppressor through the characters of Pa in Walker’s novel and Jim Trueblood in Ellison’s. In its own way the opening chapter of The Invisible Man is as shocking as Walker’s opening of The Color Purple where the narrator Celie, describes the ritualised abuse that she experiences at the hands of her father. In the opening of The Color Purple Celie’s description of her father’s sexual violence depicts her as a victim. Walker does this to convey the normality of rape culture within the African American community and also that Celie’s rape by Pa is normal for her, which conveys how Celie is born oppressed. It is interesting that the reader only finds out that the man who is abusing her is not her father, much later on in the novel when the horror of Celie’s abuse has already impacted Celie. She vividly describes the way that “he start to choke me, saying you better shut up and git used to it”. This bold, graphic opening combined with the casual tone that Walker creates in Celie serves to encapsulate the black women’s plight. The image of “choking” reflects the silencing of not only Celie but also other Southern black women that she represents. The notion of unquestioned slavery is portrayed in his command that Celie should “shut up and git used to it”. Celie’s story begins in rural Georgia in 1915, just after the abolition of slavery when the black people were still working the cotton fields. In Walker’s depiction of the men in the novel, she points to the unconscious result of slavery; the oppressed becoming the oppressor. When Celie’s child that she bares (with her father) goes missing she tells her dying mother: “I say God took it. He took it while I was sleeping. He kilt it out there in the woods. Kill this one too if he can”. Through the words “I say God took it” Celie conveys how the man strips all of the importance from a women, including the main role of women at this time- to have children. She is stripped from her natural role in life and therefore lacks any identity other than the identity of a victim. Celie’s relationship with “God” reasserts her position as a casualty of male abuse; she derives no comfort from God, instead he takes her children away from her. Marta Lysik describes how “it is in the context of sexual pressure that she begins to experience first hand the cruelties of slavery”. It is because of slavery that Celie has been trapped in her own kind of slavery, her marriage and her relationship with Pa which indicates clearly the beginning of her identity being stripped from her as were her children. Just as Trueblood’s daughter in The Invisible Man is abused by her father after his treatment as a slave, Lysik points out the connection between slavery and the sexual abuse of women post slavery because of the poor treatment they experienced as slaves, which has carried through to the treatment of their women.
Just as Walker conveys the subsequent pain Celie goes through at the hands of Pa, Ellison depicts a similar tragedy through Jim Trueblood’s rape of his daughter. Ellison makes use of religious imagery when the narrator and Mr Norton visit Jim Trueblood who describes his horrifying fornications with his daughter. The narrator notices a “hard red apple stamp out of tin” when they’re waiting to be told the story which relates to the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. The “red apple” conveys how they already know Trueblood has eaten the forbidden fruit by sleeping with his daughter and is shunned by society as were Adam and Eve banished from the Garden of Eden. Trueblood explains how because he was dreaming when he raped her he is “trying to hold her down to keep from sinnin’”. His use of “sinnin’” conveys his religious ‘guilt’ for raping her however Ellison portrays how his ‘dreaming’ was really his excuse for wish fulfilment as he describes her as looking “like the ole’ lady did when she was young” conveying his use of religion as an excuse for his “forbidden fruit” sin with his daughter. Trueblood also illuminates how his wife starts to swing an axe at him “then all of a sudden like somebody done reached down through the roof and caught it”. The “somebody” stopping her from killing him refers to the angel that stopped Abraham from sacrificing Isaac in the bible. Trueblood conveys how God intervened in the act to stop him from dying just like Isaac. God in The Invisible Man is who saves Trueblood from dying after he rapes his daughter and is who Celie can confide in after being raped by her father by directing her letters to God. Her letters are directed to God to convey the innate patriarchy in her culture, he represents all the repression she undergoes at the hands of men. Celie starts to write to Nettie once she feels a sense of self worth that God no longer controls her and the men in her life. Eventually Ellison intentionally includes this important chapter in the novel to convey how White people wanted to help the Black people who did wrong, as Trueblood is given money for repercussions of his evil act. The narrator depicts Ellison’s question, “how can he tell this to white men, I thought, when he knows they’ll say that all Negroes do such things?” Ellison conveys how White people assumed that all black people were the same, and when one person acted badly it would reflect poorly on the community and therefore Trueblood conveys the people who did the most damage to the image of the African American population during the mid 1900’s which inevitably caused the views on blacks to move slower and oppression to stay at large.