In her memoir The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (Reference WalkerWalker 1996), Alice Walker chronicles her journey into international acclaim after Steven Spielberg's blockbuster adaptation of her novel, The Color Purple (Reference WalkerWalker 1982). In the epigraph of this essay, taken from the preface to The Same River Twice, Walker negotiates the sense of shame that her magnum opus stirred within readers and viewers.Footnote ² Mirrors, important objects in Walker's memoir and novel, symbolize histories of black representation across various visual and literary platforms. Too often, depictions of black people in art are entangled with, and become the basis for, racialized stigmaFootnote ³ as well as anti‐black violence. Despite these harmful phenomena, Walker suggests that using art to face challenges within black communities is essential to collective healing for black people. According to Walker, black people have responded to the media's role in producing harmful images of black people by finding solace in reflections that avoid the shame that deeper looks into black communities may cause. Marking black people's encounters with histories of misrepresentation as an injury, Walker explains that shame pierces the souls of black folks and prevents black people from honest self and communal assessments.

This internal suffering is described in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Reference Sedgwick and FrankSedgwick and Frank 1995), Adam Frank and Eve Kosofsky's condensed study of psychologist Silvan Tomkins's four‐volume study of affects in Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (1962). To establish that shame pierces the inner reality of humans more intensely than other primal affects, Tomkins explains, “While terror and distress hurt, they are wounds inflicted from outside which penetrate the smooth surface of the ego; but shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth” (Reference Sedgwick and FrankSedgwick and Frank 1995, 132). This “sickness of the soul” is a pervasive contagion in black culture, spreading dis‐ease around representations of black people. To contend with the injury of shame, Walker offers a counterintuitive solution that looks in the mirror in order to achieve wholeness. The Color Purple forces readers to face collective shame at the risk of further humiliation.

In the following discussion, I examine the role of shame in shaping the formal and aesthetic structure of The Color Purple. The novel is composed of letters that Celie writes to God and her sister Nettie and that Nettie writes to Celie. In these letters, Celie introduces readers to a cast of characters who model her development, primarily Shug, her husband's mistress; Sophia, her husband's daughter‐in‐law; and Mary Agnes (called Squeak), Celie's stepson's second lover. The epistolarity of the text has remained unsettled; many critics have considered the ways in which Celie's written forms of communication transcend the genre of letters and resemble prayers and diary entries.Footnote ⁴ Expounding on this discourse, I argue that the epistolary framing of The Color Purple and Walker's transgression of genres suggest that the author presents a crisis in the development of Celie's self‐consciousness. The first section of this essay uses Celie's first letter to describe the fractured state of her consciousness due to domestic abuse and neglect. In the first set of letters that Celie addresses to God, I propose that Celie writes to an entity who is herself but whom she cannot fully address because of the paralyzing and self‐annihilating impulses of shame. I build on Alfred Stern's articulation of Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existence as “being‐in‐the‐world” and “being‐for‐others”Footnote ⁵ as well as recent work in the study of emotions to argue that the epistolary form fundamentally expresses the lived experience of Celie's shame as an existential disruption.Footnote ⁶ To articulate the relationship between shame and Celie's existential disruption, my essay is organized around three phrases in the text that mark the phases of Celie's evolution: “I am,” “But I'm here,” and “It mine.” These statements chart Celie's maturation in the following ways: first, “I am” marks Celie's splintered self‐consciousness; second, “But I'm here” articulates Celie's placement and positionality in the world; and third, “It mine” connects Celie's self‐consciousness to a usable past, allowing her to mobilize the generative potential of shame and claim herself. To claim herself, Celie looks in the mirror. Refusing to dissemble and look away from her reflection, she rejects the quintessential shame response. Following Celie's perspective, I hold a mirror to Celie's shame to suggest the ways in which the essential dynamics of the emotion—the gaze, confession, and natal forms of exposure—signal Celie's transition from fractured self‐consciousness to evolving wholeness. I use these dynamics of shame to express how Walker envisions a new love ethic for the building and sustaining of communities. This love ethic offers an alternative to black familial pride and forms of racialized social shame, which I examine in the conclusion of this essay by considering the novel's emergence during the Cosby/Reagan era.

The Letters of Shame

It is no surprise that discussions of The Color Purple have looked primarily to God, Celie's step‐father Pa, and her husband Mister to explain why Celie begins to write letters (see Reference hooks and Bloomhooks 2000, 54). These patriarchal figures undeniably influence Celie's decision to transcribe her experiences. Tellingly, the only nonepistolary statement in the novel acts as an epigraph to The Color Purple in which Pa commands Celie, “You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 1). By writing, Celie seems compliantly to follow Pa's directive, addressing her first letters to God and literarily disclosing those experiences about which Pa demands that she never speak. In the first letter that introduces readers to Celie, she writes to God about being a fourteen‐year‐old girl whose father impregnates her twice and gets rid of the babies; whose mother dies after years of abuse and neglect; and whose sister Nettie seems next in line to endure a similar fate. In writing to God, Celie seems to “tell” a figure of authority whose presence augments the authority of Pa.

Though Celie's letters can be read as Celie's acquiescence to Pa, Nettie, Celie's sister, identifies shame as an alternative motivation for Celie's letter‐writing. Turning to Nettie to explain why Celie writes is not to suggest that Celie does not comply with Pa; it is to decenter Pa's authority and turn to the (often frustrated) correspondences between Celie and Nettie to locate another framework to interpret Celie's letters. Prioritizing the exchanges between women in the text illuminates the psychosocial landscape of Celie's transition from what Walker marks as “soul injury” in the epigraph to internalizing the love ethic that I will explain in the conclusion of this essay. By foregrounding the circulation of emotions between the characters in the text, I discover the fecundity of the emotional content of Celie's epistles.

Nettie identifies the central role of shame in Celie's development as a writer. In a letter to Celie, Nettie writes, “I remember you said your life make you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them, which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart. I am so lonely, Celie” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 130). Nettie's letter to Celie encapsulates the lived experience of shame. Nettie describes shame as feeling bad and entrapped—closed into oneself and suffocating from internal feelings that metaphorically disconnect one from a life‐source. Trapped in the self, Nettie describes herself as choking on her own heart, the vital organ that here is imagined as the center of Nettie's thoughts and emotions. The emotional confinement that Nettie describes reflects the internalization of negative judgment that produces shame. In other words, Nettie describes shame as a threat to her life, but she also suggests that shame can have life‐giving possibilities. Nettie's shame, like Celie's, prompts letter‐writing, which generates the development of consciousness. In other words, Nettie reveals how letters increasingly allow Celie to develop self‐consciousness against the debilitating impulses of shame as Celie documents her experiences and connects these experiences with other women in the text.

“I Am”

Nettie reveals Celie's letter‐writing as a response to shame rather late in the novel, but the lived experience of Celie's shame is introduced in the first letter where Celie writes, “I am fourteen years old. I am. I have always been a good girl” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 1). Celie's striking out of “I am” renders shame semiotically, as “I am” not only represents Celie's self‐abnegation but also demonstrates a breach of her subjectivity. The two renderings of “I am,” one signaling presence and the other marking absence, identifies shame as an existential disruption. As Celie's perspective shifts from present tense to present perfect, “I am” separates Celie from who she is (a fourteen‐year‐old girl) and who she is becoming (a sullied girl). In other words, Celie has always been good, but “I am” frustrates the continuity of Celie's self‐perceived goodness. Therefore, Celie's first set of letters to God materializes her shame, but the letters can also be likened to a shame response because Celie writes to avoid complete self‐contempt and self‐abnegation. A common response to shame is to exhibit a posture that covers the face and turns the body inward to avoid further exposure to a real or imagined other. External markers of a shame response, such as a hung head or downcast eyes, signal the internal warring of the self and the self's negotiation with a being who stands in judgment and or contempt.Footnote ⁷ Celie semiotically marks this response to shame in the transition from “I am” to “I have always been.” She casts the internalized judging other as God, a deity whom she initially imagines as a “stout white man” (92–93). The imago dei she recalls resembles the white man at the bank, which connects Celie's initial concept of the divine to institutions of socioeconomic disempowerment, much like the patriarchal family and the institution of marriage for Celie.

The men in the text, primarily Celie's father and the church minister, use God as a source of patriarchal authority. For these men, God is an instrument of shame, which is evident in the epigraph to Celie's first letter in the voice of her stepfather, who commands Celie never to name him as the father of her children, but permits Celie to tell God. Despite the overwhelming nature of God as a figure who affirms the absence that Celie writes in “I am,” Celie redeploys God to leverage agency. Celie tells her mother that the child she conceives with her stepfather belongs to God (2). She promises to protect her sister Nettie from rape “with God help” (3). And, as Celie and Nettie reflect on Celie's death as a potentially advantageous alternative to living with Mister, Celie affirms her existence through God: “long as I can spell G‐O‐D I got somebody along” (18). Celie appropriates God in her initial set of letters, indeed in the very first, to defend against the alienation and denial that the men in the text use the language of the divine to enforce.

God, then, has a dual function in the text, and readers should not overlook the self‐validation that occurs in these letters before Celie reevaluates the image of God under Shug's tutelage. Womanist theologians such as Karen Baker‐Fletcher demonstrate the importance of black women's ability to project their own image onto the divine in order to transform their suffering.Footnote ⁸ In “The Strength of My Life,” Baker‐Fletcher explains, “There is something within Black culture that recognizes the holistic nature of God, which identifies with humanity in its fullness as male and female. Such recognition resonates with the first creation account of humanity in Genesis and with both traditional and Christian African religious understandings of the nature of God. Such understanding must be lifted up without shame. To be ashamed of it is to be ashamed of the fullness of God and of ourselves as women created in the likeness of God” (Reference Baker‐Fletcher and TownesBaker-Fletcher 1997, 126). Baker‐Fletcher acknowledges that shame obscures the love of God and therefore the love of self, as self and God are interconnected. She suggests the primal nature of shame in black women's lives, especially women who have internalized Western Christianity's conception of God as male. It is no surprise that Walker, who articulates womanism,Footnote ⁹ created a character whose inability to see herself in God and as God illuminates the psychological cost of black women's separation from the great I am.

Therefore, Celie's writing to God simultaneously and counterintuitively represents a split—of consciousness—and a suturing—of self—as Celie comes into an understanding of herself as part of the great I am through her letters to the divine. This awareness arises in Celie's first group of letters to God alongside the paralyzing impulses of shame. Admittedly, Celie's letters get more introspective in later letters as the novel progresses. I contend that though Celie strikes out and revises the initial “I am” statement, it still suggests that Celie's first letters stimulate the development of Celie's self‐consciousness. This reading offers a slightly different reading of the text than those of scholars before me.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead of break and transition, I suggest that there is flow and connectivity between Celie's initial letters to God and her later letters to Nettie and an all‐encompassing concept of the divine.

“But I'm here”

Through the epistolarity of The Color Purple, Walker conveys Celie's sense of separateness from God as an existential dilemma. I borrow from Sartre's theory of existentialism and emphasize his argument that “our self‐consciousness exists only because it exists for another person. In other words, self‐consciousness emerges through a recognition of existence through the gaze of the other” (Reference SternStern 1953, 93). The gaze of the other, which Sartre calls “being‐for‐others,” fosters shame and an eternal conflict between the gaze of the self and the gaze of the other. Sartre continues to explain, “I can regain my own freedom and transcendence using my gaze to transcend the other person's freedom and transcendence … . But then the other self can look again at me and transcend and enslave my freedom and transcendence. And so on” (98). The insurmountable separation between the subject and the object enables this link between shame and self‐consciousness.

By writing to a God who is the supremely distant object, Celie not only incurs the shame that is rooted in self‐consciousness, but she also experiences an existential disruption, or a fractured self‐consciousness. It is this existential disruption that characterizes Celie's letters as epistles rather than journal/diary entries. In “‘Trying to Do without God’: The Revision of Epistolary Address in The Color Purple,” Carolyn Williams identifies the similarities between Celie's letters and other forms of self‐writing. She explains, “For Celie, the practice of addressing God simply reaffirms her solitude, she is essentially writing to herself. The Color Purple is thus an example of an epistolary novel with close affinities to the journal, diary, or autobiographical confession” (Reference Williams and BloomWilliams 2000, 81). Although I agree that Celie is writing to herself, I further suggest that shame entraps her self‐consciousness, and she is unable to identify herself as the addressee of her own letters.

To make literal the artificial separation between Celie and God, Walker manipulates the I–you relationship of the epistolary form. The separation between the writer (Celie) and the addressee (Celie/God) reflects Celie's fractured self‐consciousness. Janet Gurkin Altman discusses the significance of the I–you, or sender–receiver, relationship in Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form: “the interpersonal bond basic to the very language of the letter (I–you) necessarily structures meaning in letter narrative. Those works that we perceive as being the most ‘epistolary,’ as cultivating the letter form most fully, are those in which the I–you relationship shapes the language used, and in which I becomes defined relative to the you whom [she or] he addresses” (Reference AltmanAltman 1982, 118). In the body of her first group of letters, Celie makes two direct addresses to God as “you” that indicate God's absence. This deficiency resembles the shame that Celie signals by writing “I am.” In the first letter of the novel, Celie appeals to God as “you” for a sign that she never receives. In the final letter to this God, Celie writes “you must be sleep” to indicate God's nonresponsive nature before she begins addressing her letters to her sister Nettie (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 178). Due to this relative lack of a reified addressee, or separately embodied “you,” I read the God of Celie's letters as both “I” and “you.” Simply put, Celie is both “I” and “you,” but she doesn't recognize herself as the “you.”

Celie's self‐consciousness matures through her ability to affiliate with other women in the text, women who are more proximate interlocutors than God. Unable to connect with God, Celie commingles with other women through “talk” and “telling,” motifs that mark narratives of confession and undermine Celie's stepfather's command that she “better not never tell nobody but God” (1). The talk and telling among Celie, Shug, Sophia, and Squeak foster a method of confession that shame theorists have offered as a way to counteract shame.Footnote ¹¹ During these scenes of confession that use the language of talk or telling, Sophia encourages Celie to get mad and feel angry in order to resist patriarchal authority (41–42).Footnote ¹² After her conversations with these women, Celie “act just like” the defiant and assertive Sophia (122). Celie discovers that Mister has been hiding Nettie's letters from her. Trying on the character of Sophia in a fit of rage, she considers killing Mister. Intervening in Celie's decision to kill Mister, Shug confesses her own history of familial disgrace, a history that echoes Celie's experiences (122). Squeak foreshadows Celie's coming into self‐consciousness when she tells Celie and other women and men about her white uncle, the jail warden, who rapes her. Although men are privy to Squeak's confession, only the women are allowed to speak. After her full disclosure of the experience, Squeak verbalizes her name as “Mary Agnes” to affirm her subjectivity, telling her male lover, “Shut up … I'm telling it” (97, 99). Rejecting the name “Squeak,” she refuses a diminutive nickname that previously identified her with an ill‐defined and inarticulate voice. These confession narratives often culminate in laughter, singing, or quilt‐making (42, 100). Lending insight into the importance of these exchanges in Shame: The Exposed Self, Michael Lewis proposes, “In a sense, confession is like laughter. The degree to which people confess their transgressions to others is the degree to which they join in with the others in observing themselves. This allows the self to move from the self, that is, from the source of the shame, to the other” (Reference LewisLewis 1995, 132). Although the development of Celie's consciousness begins in the first letter, she realizes her full existence, or what Sartre defines as “being‐in‐the‐world,” through her relationship with other women. Drawing on Martin Heidegger, Sartre's theory of being‐in‐the‐world determines “existence is being now and here” (Reference SternStern 1953, 9–10). Writing and speaking the words, “But I'm here” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 210), Celie locates her existence. She writes these spoken words in her fourth letter to Nettie. This letter corresponds to Nettie's previously examined fourth letter to Celie in which Nettie describes shame as the impetus for Celie's writing. Although these fourth letters don't reach each other through the conventional expectations of epistles, the sequencing of these letters in the novel indicates that Celie acknowledges her “being‐in‐the‐world,” and the epistolary address is complete. The placement of these letters matches Celie's placement of herself in the world and reconciles the previous I–you split of Celie's self‐consciousness; the phrase, “But I'm here” in Celie's fourth letter to Nettie recuperates the self‐abnegating gesture of “I am” that Nettie describes as shame in her fourth letter to Celie.

“It mine”

The generative potential of shame emerges in Celie's ability to mobilize the emotion within her marriage and circumvent its paralyzing influences. Celie dramatizes her role as a mediator of shame in a letter that describes her allegiance to her husband and his mistress. Mister's father had previously forbidden his son to marry Shug because she is a fatherless woman, unattached to the power and privileges of patriarchy. As the daughter of a domestic worker, Shug is not only a sexually “loose” woman with “illegitimate” children, but she is also a social outcast without links to a respectable family history. Therefore, Mister's father, who maintains legal ownership of Celie and Mister's dwelling place, visits their home to evict Shug from the premises and Mister's life once again.

Mister's father visits their home to shame these characters into conforming to proper social conventions, but Celie intervenes. With pseudo‐compassion, Mister's father laments, “Celie … you have my sympathy. Not many women let they husband whore lay up in they house” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 55). Celie shifts her father‐in‐law's contemptuous attention and scathing gaze away from Mister and Shug and onto herself through a performance of domesticity, bringing water in and out of the house and preventing her father‐in‐law from entering into the domain she shares with Mister and Shug. Playing the role of a generous host, she emphasizes her acceptance of Mister and Shug's affair, ensuring that Mister's father remains on the porch. Despite her father‐in‐law's ownership of the house, Celie constructs a position that grants him provisional access to her home. On the one hand, this location on the porch leaves Mister's father's words of condemnation outside—open for any passerby to overhear. On the other hand, this arrangement allows Celie to protect Shug from hearing Mister's father derisively discuss Shug's family history. Celie writes, “Through the window I hear Shug humming and humming, practicing her little song. I sneak back to her room and shet the window” (54). Celie closes the window to shield Shug from overhearing the ridicule that her father‐in‐law uses to enforce his authority. Keeping the conversation on the porch, Celie becomes the object of shame in order to prevent Shug from humiliation. This scene reflects that, although Shug is represented as a shameless woman in the text, she is not impervious to shame; rather, her ability to mobilize the emotion empowers her, a capacity for emotional agency that Celie also learns to negotiate.

Although Celie expresses her allegiance to Mister and Shug and evades her father‐in‐law's attempt to leverage shame against her marriage, the arrangement among Celie, Mister, and Shug is emotionally distressing. The letter that describes Celie's masturbation is commonly used to theorize Celie's sexual awakening, but it is important to consider that Celie's sexual liberation ends with Celie crying at the sound of Mister and Shug copulating in the next room. The letter reveals that Celie's awakening—to sexuality as well as to self—cannot be separated from histories of pain and suffering; in fact, her development relies on these abject experiences. This letter also demonstrates the ways in which the visual logics of shame can be mobilized toward a new ethic of love that is rooted in exposure.Footnote ¹³ As Tomkins reminds us, in shame, “We may then not look too closely at each other because we cannot be sure how we might feel if we were to do so” (Reference Sedgwick and FrankSedgwick and Frank 1995, 147). According to Tomkins, shame motivates people to avoid further contact with the other, but shamed individuals actually desire to reject the shame response and be exposed. Before Celie masturbates, Shug urges Celie to look at herself in the mirror, saying, “What, too shame even to go off and look at yourself? And you look so cute too … All dressed up for Harpo's smelling good and everything, but scared to look at your own pussy” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 79). Celie follows Shug's instructions, pulls up her dress, and exposes her vagina. Instead of following Shug's suggestion that she associate what she sees in the mirror with beauty, Celie affirms, “It mine” (79). This form of exposure does not directly move Celie into the new ethic of love. Instead, “It mine” connects Celie's emerging selfhood and sexual expression to the debased histories that her emerging consciousness engenders, much like the metaphor of the mirror in the epigraph to this essay. As “I'm here” reconciles the I–you split of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness, “It mine” inaugurates the development of Celie's sexual expression through its connection to histories of abjection. In this way, abjection and shame are intimately linked, and they mutually bring Celie into a fuller expression of her existence.

Celie and Shug experience a mutual liberation from the shame and disgrace that are often associated with their sexual identities. They expose their family histories to each other, intervening in the culture of silence that often perpetuates these experiences. In so doing, these women renegotiate shame as individual experiences as well as historical legacies and practice a love ethic rooted in rejecting the shame response and accepting exposure. Tomkins explains that denying the shame response fosters love: “This love is romantic because it is continuous with the period before the individual lovers knew shame. They not only return to baby talk, but even more importantly they return to baby looking” (Reference Sedgwick and FrankSedgwick and Frank 1995, 147). Celie and Shug realize this natal period in scenes of intimacy. This natal period dismantles the parasitic structuring of relationships that stems from the master and slave dialectic of slavery, which Orlando Paterson describes as “natal alienation” (see Reference PattersonPatterson 1985, 5–13). In contrast to the social death that marks natal alienation, Celie describes combing Shug's hair as a nurturing, intergenerational, emotional exchange, writing, “I work on her like she a doll or like she Olivia—or like she mama. I comb and pat, comb and pat. First she say, hury up and git finish. Then she melt down a little and lean back gainst my knees. That feel just right, she say. That feel like mama used to do. Or maybe not mama. Maybe grandma … ” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 53). In this moment of bonding and exchange of emotions, Celie summons Olivia, the baby she conceives with the man whom she believed to be her father. She connects this shameful experience of incest with memories of matrilineal care through touch. The namelessness of “mama” and “grandma” not only represents Celie's foremothers but also a legacy of women who have endured similar experiences. Later, when Celie discloses to Shug the trauma of her rape, the confession culminates with Shug “listening holding, kissing, and touching Celie” (115). Celie indicates the return to a natal period, explaining that “way after while, I act like a little lost baby too” (115).

The natal period that emerges through Celie and Shug's intimacy accords with Tomkins's suggestion that romantic love obviates the culture of shame through an ontological transformation “before the individual lovers knew shame” (147). Building on the relationship Tomkins identifies between a natal period and love, I contend that The Color Purple redefines love through the characters’ childlike wonder and feelings of youth. Redefining love creates an ethic that extends beyond dyadic relationships and encompasses the community. My reading of love responds to scholars who have argued that beyond personal relationships, the sexual politics of the novel have no bearing on the outside community and pander to hegemonic sexual and social conventions.Footnote ¹⁴ As previously demonstrated, Celie and Shug practice the reformed love ethic of the text. However, it is Mister who pronounces this love ethic: “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things an asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones …. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder … the more I love” (288). This commitment to perpetual acts of wonder resonates with Sara Ahmed's vision of feminist pedagogy in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. According to Ahmed, feminist pedagogy manifests in acts of wonder that spark new epistemologies. These acts of wonder “open up the world … not as a private act, but as an opening up of what is possible through working together” (Reference AhmedAhmed 2004, 180–83). The novel ends with characters working together to build a new community based on an ethic of love that obviates the previous culture of shame. James Baldwin's theory of love in The Fire Next Time parallels this new love ethic and helps to explain its significance to community‐building. According to Baldwin, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth” (Reference BaldwinBaldwin 1963, 95). Baldwin's metaphor of the mask can be likened to the shame response. Although Baldwin does not use the language of shame explicitly, his theory of love resonates with the novel's ethic of love that is rooted in disavowing the urge to dissemble in the face of challenging relationships. His love ethic requires that individuals refuse to rely on artificial disguises to protect themselves from shame. Love, according to Baldwin, requires an epistemological reconsideration of the self‐centered, covetous ways in which love is often imagined in an American context.

Celie, Shug, Ahmed, Baldwin, and Mister reveal that to live without shame is to live with love, exposed to the perils as well as the triumphs of a natal existence that is continuously in formation. As previously examined, Nettie's letter describes shame through feelings of alienation, suffocation, and defeat, “locked up” in the self and “choking” on the self. In contrast, Celie articulates a new existence for herself and Nettie within community in the final line of the novel that finds relief from shame in a communal orientation: “And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 294). This fledgling community embodies the communal and all‐encompassing God of Celie's last epistle and symbolizes Celie's connection to herself as well as to everything around her. It also confirms Baker‐Fletcher's emphasis on God‐in‐self‐and‐God‐as‐self. As she states, “If the likeness of God is within us, surely we can find God in ourselves, realizing empowerment and our full potential as we learn to love God and ourselves. Such love is the first order of business before we can go on to love others …” (Reference Baker‐Fletcher and TownesBaker-Fletcher 1997, 126). In contrast to the I–you split of Celie's “Dear God” epistles, Celie returns to her original addressee in the last letter to affirm a God, without shame, that unites: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (Reference WalkerWalker 1982, 291).

Two Sides of the S(h)ame Coin

After the publication of Walker's novel and release of Spielberg's adaptation in the 1980s, many black people recoiled from Walker's depiction of the familial, political, and economic matrix of black familial social ills. As one responder commented, some black people thought that The Color Purple was “an airing of black people's dirty laundry” (Reference BoboBobo 1989, 336). Readers often criticized the text (and later the film) as shameful. Such responses resonate with visions of black familial arrangements in the 1980s American imagination. During this time, the most significant representations of black families were Bill Cosby's The Cosby Show and Ronald Reagan's exploitation of black kinship arrangements for his political agenda, two depictions that seem disparate. Responders to The Color Purple who used the language of shame failed to realize, however, that the logics of black familial pride and black familial degeneracy are two sides of the s(h)ame coin. These different ways of envisioning black families have a common origin, emerging from discourses of pathology that have surrounded black family arrangements since the turn of the twentieth century.

Considering The Color Purple's emergence during the Cosby/Reagan era demonstrates that notions of black familial pride and black racial shame are mutually constituted. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the shameful accusations against Cosby as a sexual predator and his “call‐out” lectures throughout the country that scolded certain segments of black communities as moribund in the early 2000s begs readers and scholars to look again at the role of shame in the making and sustaining of black community social ethics. Brittney Cooper explains a common ethos regarding the politics of shame that surrounds Cosby as a public figure: “Black people by and large agreed with Cosby. We internalized the shame that Cosby pedaled over our inability to get our men to act right and marry us, our penchant for having more babies than marriages, and our love for children named sometimes after what we perceived to be top‐shelf liquor” (Reference CooperCooper 2015, 4). As Cooper suggests, shame maintains a corrective, often disciplinary function in black communities that keeps black people striving toward proper American middle‐class social ethics and relationships.

The Cosby Show, which began airing two years after the release of The Color Purple, demonstrates the consonance between black familial pride and black racial shame. In a thirty‐minute sitcom, the Huxtable clan manages palatable middle‐class family drama and school‐related angst. Through its eight‐season run, Heathcliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby's character, became one of America's greatest dads. However, as other scholars have examined, the success of The Cosby Show was double‐edged.Footnote ¹⁵ On the one hand, it introduced “positive” images of black family and culture into the mainstream, but on the other hand, it legitimated theories that blamed lower‐ and working‐class black populations for social and economic disparities. Lower‐ and working‐class black families account for the underside of The Cosby Show's vision of proper middle‐class black family values. Ronald Reagan, and later George H. W. Bush, criminalized and exploited lower‐ and working‐class black communities in order to dismantle social welfare programs in the late twentieth century, many that were instituted during the Civil Rights era.

Both The Cosby Show and the Reagan/Bush regimes responded to the renewed sociopolitical emphasis on black family life in the 1960s, most especially the cultural atmosphere Daniel Patrick Moynihan created in his seventy‐eight‐page report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” released in 1965.Footnote ¹⁶ Moynihan highlighted increases in welfare dependency, crime, and unemployment rates and the “instability” of matriarchal family structures. Although Moynihan identified white racism and historical disenfranchisement as sources of lower‐class instability, he is most often remembered for stigmatizing black families as caught in a “tangle of pathology.”Footnote ¹⁷ This “tangle of pathology” links lower‐ and working‐class black families to black social deviance, abjection, and abnormality—the stigmatizing shame of black culture. The language around black familial pride, then, not only works to reconstitute sordid images of black life but also to avoid the shame that lower‐ and working‐class black families represent. Images of lower‐ and working‐class black families shift the nation's collective gaze from the realities of violence and disempowerment that permeate all classes of black life.

An alternative to the logics of respectability and degeneracy arises in another comment on The Color Purple that draws on the motif of talk and telling from the novel: “We don't always have to pretend that everything is hunky‐dory. It could be that if I tell somebody and they tell somebody else then maybe I can get some answers to some problems I have” (Reference BoboBobo 1989, 336). As this responder suggests, intervening in the link between black familial pride and black familial degeneracy begins with telling—a commitment that Walker and other black women writers of the 1970s and 1980s made not only to reflect the American sociopolitical landscape but also to redeem collective racialized identities from shame through honest looks in the mirror.