Political Critique of Race Relations in Alice Walkers...

The Color Purple as Political Critique of Race Relations If the integrated family of Doris Baines and her adopted African grandson exposes the missionary pattern of integration in Africa as one based on a false kinship that in fact denies the legitimacy of kinship bonds across racial lines, the relationship between Miss Sophia and her white charge, Miss Eleanor Jane, serves an analogous function for the American South. Sophia, of course, joins the mayors household as a maid under conditions more overtly racist than Doris Bainess adoption of her Akwee family: Because she answers hell no (76) to Miss Millies request that she come to work for her as a maid, Sophia is brutally beaten by the†¦show more content†¦Sophias feelings for Miss Eleanor are of course more ambivalent. When she first joins the mayors household, Sophia is completely indifferent to her charge, wonder[ing] why she was ever born (88). After rejoining her own family, Sophia resents Miss Eleanor Janes continuing intrusions into her family life and suggests that the only reason she helps the white girl is because shes on parole. . . . Got to act nice (174). But later Sophia admits that she does feel something for Miss Eleanor Jane because of all the people in your daddys house, you showed me some human kindness (225). Whatever affection exists between the two women, however, has been shaped by the perverted kinship relation within which it grew - a relationship the narrative uses to expose plantation definitions of kinship in general and to explode the myth of the black mammy in particular. Separated from her own family and forced to join the mayors household against her will, living in a room under the house and assigned the housekeeping and childraising duties, Sophia carries out a role in the mayors household which clearly recalls that of the stereotypical mammy on the Southern plantation. However,Show MoreRelatedEssay on Race and Class in Alice Walkers Color Purple1622 Words   |  7 PagesEssay on Race and Class in The Color Purple  Ã‚     Ã‚   An important  Ã‚  juncture in Alice Walkers 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