Essay on Race and Class in The Color Purple by Alice Walker An important moment in The Color Purple by Alice Walker is reached when Celie recovers for the first time the missing letters from his long-lost sister Nettie. This discovery not only marks the introduction of a new narrator in this epistolary novel, but also begins Célie's transformation from writer to reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie struggles to decipher Nettie's inscriptions on her first envelope provides a concrete illustration of both Celie's particular interpretive horizon and Walker's chosen approach to form. letter: Saturday morning, Shug placed Nettie's letter in my lap. The little fat Queen of England stamped on it, plus stamps that depicted peanuts, coconuts, rubber trees and said Africa. I don't know where England stands. I also don't know where Africa is. So I move, I don't know where Nettie is. (102) Revealing Celie's ignorance of even the most rudimentary contours of the larger world, this passage clearly defines the "domestic" site she occupies as the novel's primary narrator.(1) In particular, the difficulty that Célie's interpretation of this envelope underlines her tendency to understand events. in terms of personal consequences rather than political categories. Whatmatters ab...... middle of paper ....... 99-111.Shelton, Frank W. "Alienation and Integration in Alice Walker's 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. “Women's fiction and male characters”. Partisan Review 52 (1985): 264-70. Tate, Claudia. Domestic allegories of political desire: the black heroine's text at the turn of the century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Conceptions: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Walker, Alice. The color purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982.