Others in the class agreed.Īside from being a tone-deaf conception of Celie’s sexuality, readings like this fail to take into account the novel’s commentary on compulsory heterosexuality. During a class discussion about the book, a fellow classmate talked, at length, about how Celie must find comfort in Shug and have an aversion to men as a result of being sexually assaulted and physically abused by men. In addition to being the only work featuring a lesbian relationship written by a woman to win a Pulitzer, “The Color Purple” was also the only such work assigned to me in high school, and thus far in college.
But to downplay Celie’s lesbianism, which is significant for furthering and understanding the conversation around all these other topics, is to downplay how deeply intersectional Walker’s novel is, created at a time when it was dangerous to put this kind of work out into the world. Given how many other themes “The Color Purple” grapples with - race, class, gender, sexual assault, domestic abuse, religion, the South - some might shy away from calling it a lesbian novel, which would seem to suggest that it is a book only about lesbianism. Spielberg was criticized for this omission, but has also said he wouldn’t do it differently if he could. While the book is explicit both about the sexual encounters between Celie and Shug and the fact that they are in love with each other, Steven Spielberg’s 1985 cinematic adaptation reduces their relationship to one kiss. Subsequent endeavors, however, have tried to erode the significance of protagonist Celie’s romantic relationship with Shug, her husband’s mistress who pushes her to break free from the cycle of oppression and abuse that has worn her down. While Walker has never openly conformed to any one label under the “women-loving-woman” umbrella, she was openly and romantically involved with the singer Tracy Chapman in the 1990s, telling the Guardian, “(It) was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.” Even now, “The Color Purple” is the only Pulitzer-winning novel to feature a lesbian protagonist and also be written by a woman. Even now, the precedent set by that first 1918 prize has been hard to shake. If I wasn’t world-weary when I made this decision, I’m certainly world-weary now. And 31 years after that, when I was 15, I made it my personal mission to read as many Pulitzer Prize-winning novels as possible. Sixty-five years later, in 1983, Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” made her the first Black woman to win the prize. The first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, then known as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, was awarded in 1918 to a book by a white man about white people.
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