It was the fall of 1985, and Alice Walker was in London when she received an “urgent call from Steven.” She had spent much of the past summer on Steven Spielberg’s set, in North Carolina, as a consultant and as an awed bystander amid the wounding process of adapting her novel to film. The name is not a secret Celie has always known it. In the novel’s twenty-third letter, Shug lies abed in his home, barking orders at someone called Albert, a name Celie doesn’t recognize. Shug knows Celie’s husband, too, but not as Mr. We hear breathlessness, for example, when she learns that “Shug Avery is coming to town!” That Shug Avery-the sharp and singing Queen Honeybee-knows exactly who she is. Yet, in a world ruled by men, Celie provides our perspective even their speech must flow through her pen. _ in wedlock, though her sister, Nettie, is the one he really wanted. _.” She has passed from one man’s domain to another’s, handed off by the only father she knows to live with Mr. For much of the book, Celie, the narrator, refers to the epistolary novel’s principal patriarch (aside from the God to whom she addresses her letters) only as “Mr. “The Color Purple” is a novel about women, but one man takes up precious room. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
