An important joint in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when Celie first regains the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie.

An important joint in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when Celie first regains the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie. This discovery not barely signals the introduction of a recently made known narrator to this epistolary novel unless also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie trys to puzzle out the markings onward her first envelope from Nettie provides a conglomerated illustration of both Celie's particular horizon of interpretation and Walker's chosen approach to the epistolary form:

Saturday morning Shug set Nettie letter in my lap. Little fat queen of England stamps in succession it, plus stamps that got peanuts, coconut rubber tree and say Africa. I don't know where England at. Don't know where Africa at either. thus I stir don't know where Nettie at. (102)

Revealing Celie's ignorance of level the most rudimentary outlines of the larger world, this passage clearly defines the "domestic" site she occupies as the novel's main narrator.(1) In particular, the difficulty Celie has interpreting this wrapper underscores her tendency to understand facts in terms of personal ends rather than political categories. What matters about not knowing "where Africa at" - according to Celie - is not knowing "where Nettie at." from clarifying Celie's characteristic angle of vision, this passage highlights the intensely personal perspective that Walker brings to her tale of sexual oppression - a perspective that accounts in large part for the emotional power of the text

But Walker's privileging of the domestic perspective of her narrators has also been judg to have other issues on the text. Indeed, critics from various aesthetic and political camps have commentaryed on what they perceive as a tension between public and private discourse in the novel.(2) Thus, in analyzing Celie's representation of national identity, Lauren Berlant identifies a separation of "aesthetic" and "political" discourses in the novel and decides that Celie's narrative ultimately emphasizes "individual rectified portion in false opposition to institutional history" (868) Revealing a extremely different political agenda in his attacks forward the novel's womanist stance, George Stade also points to a tension between personal and public ultimate parts in the text when he criticizes the novel's "narcissism" and its "championing of domesticity athwart the public world of masculine power plays" (266) Finally, in praising Walker's handling of sexual oppression, Elliott Butler-Evans argues that Celie's personal alphabetic characters serve precisely as a "textual strategy by dint of which the larger African-American history, focused in succession racial conflict and struggle, can be marginalized by way of its absence from the narration" (166)

By counterposing personal and public discourse in the novel, these critics could be said to have problematized the narrative's domestic perspective by means of suggesting that Walker's chosen treatment of the constricted viewpoint of an uneducated geographical division woman - a woman who admits that she doesn't steady know "where Africa at" - may also constrict the novel's ability to analyze issues of "race" and class.(3) Thus Butler-Evans finds that Celie's "private life preempt the exploration of the public lives of blacks" (166) while Berlant argues that Celie's family-oriented point of view and manners of expression can displace race and class analyses to the point that the "nonbiological abstraction of class relations virtually disappears" (833) And in a vehemently worded rejection of the novel as "revolutionary literature," bell hasps charges that the focus immediately after Celie's sexual oppression ultimately deemphasizes the "collective plight of black people" and "invalidates . . the racial agenda" of the slave narrative tradition that it draws on the subject of ("Writing" 465).(4) In short, to many readers of The Color Purple the text's ability to lay open sexual oppression seems to advance at the expense of its ability to analyze issues of race and class.(5)

But it appears to me that an examination of the representation of race in the novel leads to another conclusion: Walker's mastery of the epistolary form is revealed precisely by means of her ability to maintain the integrity of Celie's and Nettie's domestic perspectives level as she simultaneously undertakes an augmented critique of race relations, and especially of racial integration. In particular, Walker's domestic novel engages issues of race and class between the sides of two important narrative strategies: the unravelling of an embedded narrative line that tenders a post-colonial perspective on the action, and the use of "family relations" - or kinship - as a carefully elaborated textual figure of speech for race relations. These strategies enable Walker to foreground the personal histories of her narrators while placing those histories firmly within a wider connection of race and class.

Both the novel's so-called "restriction of focus to Celie's consciousness" (Butler-Evans 166-67) and undivided way in which Walker's narratology complicates that perspective are illustrated by the agency of the passage quoted above. Celie's difficulty interpreting the covering sent by Nettie at first simply seems to support the claim that her domestic perspective "erases" race and class bear upons from the narrative. But if this short passage delineates Celie's particular angle of vision, it also introduces textual features that invite readers to resituate her narration within a larger discourse of race and class. For where Celie papal courts only a "fat little queen of England," readers who recognize Queen Victoria immediately historicize the passage. And if the juxtaposition of the sum of two units stamps on the envelope - England's showcasing royalty, Africa's whole with rubber trees - remind ofs to Celie nothing but her concede ignorance, to other readers the pair images serve as a clear reminder of imperialism. Thus Africa, mentioned according to name for the first time in this passage, pierces the novel already situated within the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of colonialism. Importantly, Walker remains veritable to Celie's character even as she recontextualizes the young woman's perspective, because the features of the case Celie focuses upon are entirely natural individuals for her to notice, plane though they are politically charged in ways that other features would not be (for example, Celie might have been struck on more purely personal - and more conventional - details, as it is as the familiar shape of her sister's handwriting). Embedded everywhere The Color Purple, narrative features with clear political and historical associations like these complicate the novel's point of view by way of inviting a post-colonial perspective forward the action and by creating a layered narrative line that is used for different technical general intents and thematic purposes.(6) That Celie herself is not always aware of the glutted political implications of her narration (although she becomes increasingly in like manner as the novel progresses) no more erases the critique of race and class from the sentence than Huck's naivete in Huckleberry Finn constricts that work's social criticism to the boy's opinions. This individual alphabetic character from Nettie thus provides readers with a textual analogue for the novel's larger epistolary form, illustrating individual way in which the novel's domestic perspective is clearly "stamped" with signs of race and class.