The Colour Purple
AO2: Why would a writer choose to write in non-Standard English?
● Standard English - 1) source for words to be derived from 2) dangerous when asserting that
it’s the correct form of language - value judgement on dialects
○ Evolution of language should be a reason to celebrate diversity
● Regional: Scouse, Geordie, Brummie /Global: Jamaican patois, Triniadadian English Creole,
American Black English (Ebonics + AAVE)
○ AO3: Psychologist Robert L Williams in 1973 combined ‘ebony’ +’phonics’ to form
Ebonics = literal meaning of “black sound” ~ trace back to US civil war
● VERNACULAR: informal spoken language of region/culture/group - Used by writers:
Characterisation, Scene setting (convincing sense of time + place), Relatability
○ EFFECT: social comment - rejecting literary rules + understand characters -
authenticity, representation, tolerance
● AAVE: we’re outsiders being given direct access into 1st person thoughts
○ AUTHOR: Writes in ancestral dialect to honour their legacy + “folk speech”
○ READER: Political commitment on our side to understand story + language
● AO2: Non-standard pronoun ‘us’ for ’we’ + phonetic spelling ‘ast’
● AO3: ‘Coming in from the Cold’ - essay in response to attempts to bant text from schools -
she couldn’t have avoided the explicit language - would have betrayed Celie’s language
● AO4: Walker’s prose is easier to read than novels of American South by William Faulkner
● AO4: Scottish dialects: Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Douglas Stuart / Irish dialects: Roddy
Doyle / Black British English: Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Mendez / AAVE: Toni Morrison,
Sapphire / Black Country dialect: Liz Berry
● AO5: Debbie Taylor - “Reading work in dialect demands a commitment on the part of the
reader, which is as much political as it is artistic.”
● AO5: Chi Luu’: “It’s ironic that Black English speech is still dismissed and devalued as being
linguistically broken, and at the same time as one of the sources of lexical innovation in Eng.”
● AO5: Toni Morrison: “The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve
it.” (James Baldwin: ‘a little white man deep inside of all of us.’)
CELIE’S LANGUAGE NETTIE’S LANGUAGE
● Frank, limited vocab, everyday diction, addressed to ● Declarative sentence, Religious diction, frequent 1st
God, Vernacular, Declaratives, sparse/reduced lang, person, missionary style, epistolary form, naive,
language has immediacy and impact, vernacular, frequent use of rhetorical questions
dialect, childlike expression, elliptical (ellipsis),
uneducated, non-standard forms/spellings, curt
observations, frequent 1st person, naive, focus on
immediate people/relationship/events, dialogue is
vigorous/convincing, some figurative lang, explicit
slang, epistolary, taboo topic, short/simple sentence
AO2: Structure
★ Epigraph: alludes to song by Stevie Wonder in which a boy’s mother forbids him from
performing but he does anyway and is very successful - CP: characters break free from
society’s restrictions = suggests we need a role model to show us what to do eg. SA for C
○ LINK: letter 61 - “Hotter than July” + Celie: “What they look like, I wonder.”
★ Setting: Walker situates Celie’s birth only fifty years after slavery abolished (1865) = still lives
in a society where economic + social structures of slavery still evident
★ Anachronic structure - non chronological structure is found in both ‘Top Girls’ + ‘Colour Purple’
★ Firm Structure: dramatic opening, middle: conflict/endeavour, happy ending - starts w/
breakup of family + ends w/ reunion ~ echoes Victorian melodrama
★ Elliptical Method: undated letters = we calculate passage of time + BILDUNGSROMAN
