The Color Purple

Letters serve in the novel as Celie’s only form of self-expression and as the only means by which Celie and Nettie maintain any connection to each other. At the start of the novel, Celie begins writing letters to God because her stepfather threatens her if she tells anyone about how he rapes her. Celie’s letters serve as testimony to her trauma and all that she survives, so they are important to her ability to survive and reflect on her own life.

The letters are not prayers, however, an indication of how Celie sees God and her relationship with God. God is a remote figure who is incapable or uninterested in providing succor to Celie through her difficult trials. Celie eventually begins writing letters to her sister Nettie, a shift that symbolizes her rejection of institutional Christianity and increasing emphasis on relationships with others and living in the present as alternative bases for her faith.

As Celie shifts to seeing herself as a person with will and autonomy, she begins to use her writing and letters to assert herself and assert an identity. She uses letter writing to maintain a relationship with her sister, even once she hears false news that her sister has died. She uses writing to communicate authentically about the pain Shug’s decision to have a fling with someone else causes her. Finally, Celie signs her name as the owner of Folkspants, Unlimited, a signature that shores up her identity as a creative, financially independent woman much like Shug.

Celie’s sewing of quilts and pants are forms of crafting that symbolize her care for others, her connections to other women, and her creativity, which is central to her identity. Celie’s rapprochement with Sofia after Sofia takes her to task for telling Harpo to beat her occurs over quilt-making, for example, and Celie’s decision to ask Shug to help piece the same quilt shows that she has come to recognize how essential engagement with other women are to her own survival and mental health.

Celie eventually take up making pants. Initially, making pants is a form of self-care and therapeutic work Shug suggests to help Celie manage the dangerous anger she feels as she recognizes the depth of how Albert has wronged her. Celie’s desire for color and work for her hands becomes something more than that, however, when Celie begins engaging her imagination to create designs and mix colors that take the pants from being utilitarian pieces of clothing to being art objects that are in demand enough that Celie can monetize them. By the end of the novel, the pants are symbols of Celie’s identity as an autonomous woman.

The roofleaf is a plant that symbolizes Olinka culture. When Nettie arrives among the Olinka, they tell her the story of how they once almost lost the roofleaf after a greedy chief destroyed its habitat to plant cash crops to trade with Europeans. The near-extinction of the roofleaf shows that Olinka culture has been under threat from European colonialism for a long time. History repeats itself when an English rubber company seizes the Olenka’s ancestral lands and destroys the roofleaf entirely. The destruction of the roofleaf shows that old-style European imperialism has been superseded by a new colonialism that is so efficient that it can destroy entire cultures in a matter of years.

The roofleaf is also an important symbol of African spirituality. Hearing the story of the roofleaf allows Nettie to understand why the plant is sacred to the Olinka and accept that their other paths to spirituality outside of institutional religions like her own.