frighteningly evident. For example, in a January 1986 review in the New York
Times, E. R. Shipp summarizes why people are mad at Walker, particularly her
"mephistophelian" collaboration with Spielberg. First, they charge Walker with
gross historical distortion. Second, they fault her for misrepresenting blacks,
especially black men in America, even to the point of denying them agency. And
third, they accuse Walker of collusion with white oppressors in order to blame the
victim--black people (A13). ¹

Other critics were equally vociferous, turned off, as it were, by the seeming
ribaldry and impieties in Walker's writing. Courtland Milloy was particularly upset
over what he saw as a calculated and insidious attempt by Hollywood film-makers,
aided and abetted by Walker herself, to cast the black man in his most sexual
incontinence and moral turpitude. He declared: "As far as I'm concerned, I don't
have to see this movie to write about it" (B13). ² In a somewhat strident argumentum
ad hominem review of The Color Purple as film, Pauline Kael accused Walker of
"rampant female chauvinism" (69). John Simon's rhetoric was even more
opprobrious. To him, the Spielberg film was nothing but "an infantile abomination,"
and the novel itself an overvalorized tinsel literary work "unable [finally] to
transcend the two humanly legitimate but artistically burdensome chips on its shoul-
ders feminism and Black militancy" (56). In a fit of vituperation, David Demby
described The Color Purple as a "quick, heart-pounding read," a "candy passing
itself off as soul food" (56). The movie version faired no better; Demby called it "a
hate letter to Black men" (56). William Willimon was equally upset, insisting that
the novel could "only have been created by a writer more interested in writing a
polemic than a novel" (319). Spike Lee, commenting on the parallel ends of
Walker's and Ntozake Shange's writings, suggested that perhaps the only reason
The Color Purple was selected by Hollywood was precisely that it perpetuated the
long-standing Euro-American imaging of black men as "one-dimensional animals,"
adding that "the quickest way for a Black playwright, novelist, or poet to get
published has been to say that Black men are shit. If you say that, then you are
definitely going to get media, your book published, your play done--Ntozake
Shange, Alice Walker" (qtd. Glicksman48).

And yet, judged by every conceivable set of dialectic canons, Walker's
escutcheon remains mightily unscathed. Few people would deny that Alice Walker's
singular achievement as a writer rests inarguably, and perhaps immutably, on her
articulate capacity to inscribe black womanism, the discourse of which some of her
vitriolic critics might have wished had remained an immanent token in the
"transcendent" logos of a patriarchal and racist culture. She herself had said that her
one overriding preoccupation was "the spiritual survival, the survival whole of my
people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the
insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women" ( O'Brien192). She once
spoke candidly of her solidarity with a number of women writers, such as Bessie
Head, Kate Chopin, the Brontë sisters--Charlotte and Emily--Simone de
Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, and of course, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, and of her
admiration for their courage and their vision, the vision to rise above their
oppression by searching unceasingly for a kind of deliverance. For Walker the path

-2-