SOURCE: Proudfit, Charles L. “Celie's Search for Identity: A Psychoanalytic Developmental Reading of Alice Walker's The Color Purple.” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 1 (spring 1991): 12-37.

In the following essay, Proudfit refutes the critical opinion that Celie's emotional development and actions in The Color Purple are unlikely literary contrivances, and uses psychoanalytic theory to argue that Celie's personal growth is realistically constructed, given her horrific childhood and adolescence.

It is my belief and my faith that whenever you are trying to convey a sense of a common reality to people, they will want to read and hear about it.

—Alice Walker, “The Eighties and Me”

Since the publication of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, both novel and author continue to elicit a wide range of praise and censure from an increasing number of black and white, female and male reviewers, literary critics, and general readers. At one extreme are those who...