SOURCE: Selzer, Linda. “Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple.” African American Review 29, no. 1 (spring 1995): 67-82.

In the following essay, Selzer discusses Walker's confrontation of race relations and class distinctions through the underlying text in The Color Purple.

An important juncture in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when Celie first recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie. This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this epistolary novel but also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie struggles to puzzle out the markings on her first envelope from Nettie provides a concrete illustration of both Celie's particular horizon of interpretation and Walker's chosen approach to the epistolary form:

Saturday morning Shug put Nettie letter in my lap. Little fat queen of England stamps on it, plus stamps that got peanuts, coconuts, rubber...