Political Critique of Race Relations in Alice Walkers Color Purple Ess

The people of color Purple as Political Critique of Race Relations If the integrated family of Doris Baines and her adoptive African grandson exposes the missionary pattern of integration in Africa as one based on a false kinship that in fact denies the genuineness of kinship bonds across racial lines, the relationship between Miss Sophia and her white charge, Miss Eleanor Jane, serves an analogous function for the American South. Sophia, of course, joins the mayors household as a maid under conditions more than overtly racist than Doris Bainess adoption of her Akwee family Because she answers hell no (76) to Miss Millies request that she come to work for her as a maid, Sophia is brutally crush by the mayor and six policeman and is then imprisoned. Forced to do the jails laundry and driven to the brink of madness, Sophia finally becomes Miss Millies maid in stage to escape prison. Sophias violent confrontation with the white officers obviously foregrounds issues of race and c lass, as even critics who find these issues marginalized elsewhere in The Color Purple have noted. provided it is not only through Sophias dramatic public battles with white men that her story dramatizes issues of race and class. Her domestic relationship with Miss Eleanor Jane and the other members of the mayors family offers a more finely nuanced and extended critique of racial integration, albeit one that has often been overlooked.(11) Like Doris Baines and her black grandson, Sophia and Miss Eleanor Jane appear to have some genuine family feelings for one another. Since Sophia very much . . . raises (222) Miss Eleanor Jane and is the one sympathetic person... ...nold, 1993. 85-96. Sekora, John. Is the Slave Narrative a Species of Autobiography? Studies in Autobiography. Ed. James Olney. New York Oxford UP, 1988. 99-111. Shelton, Frank W. Alienation and Integration in Alice Walkers The Color Purple. CLA Journal 28 (1985) 382-92. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Explanation and Culture Marginalia. Humanities and Society 2 (1974) 201-21. Stade, George. Womanist Fiction and Male Characters. Partisan Review 52 (1985) 264-70. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political entrust The Black Heroines Text at the Turn of the Century. New York Oxford UP, 1992. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York Oxford UP, 1985. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York Harcourt, 1982.