toward the full development of one gender but toward the recuperation of male and
female, toward the "survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female."
Within its parameters, it encompasses love, joy, music, artistic pleasure, and,
above all, the reattachment of humankind to a cosmogonic worldview where
everything is part of everything else, a world that would give importance to all
living creatures, big and small, for they are expressions of the divine. To Celie,
who objects to Shug's use of It in referring to God, Shug replies:

don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't something you can look at apart form anything
else, including yourself. I believe God is everything. Everything that is or ever was or ever
will be. (166-67)

It is Celie's conviction that she herself is part of God's design and forms
one with all beings. This conviction will carry her in the final stage of her voyage
of self-discovery. No longer a shadow in the light, she has rejoined the community
of men and women; she has found herself, her own place in the great chain of
being and is able to marvel at the creation, at life itself:

Now that my eyes are opening, I feels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my
yard, Mr.__________'s evil shor shrink. (168)

Celie's final letter is a song of glory, the revelation of a newfound
harmony between the heroine, the universe within and without: "Dear God. Dear
stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God," wrote Celie
(242). And this is the true meaning of The Color Purple, which is a quest and a
celebration, a song of sorrow and of joy, of birth, rebirth, and the redeeming power
of love.

Beauvoir Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshely. New York: The Modern
Library, 1968.

Blalock Hubert M. American Pluralism. Ed. William M. Newman. New York: Harper,
1973.

Sartre Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Pocket
Books, 1956.

Walker Alice. "Alice Walker Is a Free Woman". Sojourner, January 1983: 13-14.

_____. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1983.

_____. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Weiss Frederick A. "Self-Alienation: Dynamism and Therapy". Man Alone. Ed. Eric and
Mary Josephon. New York: Dell, 1962.

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