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.17 (In fact, although it would beimpossible to prove, it seems to me that the novel would not have beenso wildly successful had it merely abandoned rather than satisfied itsown requirements; the more conventional the story, the less forgivingreaders tend to be of lapses in narrative logic.) While the particularitiesof The Color Purple s approach render its success unique, I will ultimatelyargue that central elements of its negotiation become the foundationsof the 1980s and 1990s feminist depiction of static time.The Color Purple begins with its heroine in a state so abject thatmany have found it unbelievable, bordering on offensive: poor, nearlyilliterate, with her powerless sister her only ally, heroine Celie by agetwenty has had two children by her stepfather (who she thinks is her 126 POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORYfather) and has been married off to an abusive man for whom she isnothing more than a servant and a sexual convenience.As Lisa MariaHogeland points out, dismissals of the negative presentations of Celie sworld and the men in it often echo those applied to women s liberationnovels like The Women s Room, especially complaints that such novelsviolated the conventions of realism because men can t be that bad. 18 Theprimary difference, Hogeland suggests, was that white mainstreamreviewers did not seem nearly as invested in defending black men frombiased and unrealistic presentations as they were in defending white malecharacters in novels like The Women s Room.19 Such critiques arose fromother political camps as well for example, Trudier Harris argues thatmany black women readers had a feeling of uneasiness about the novel,a feeling that was often associated with heroine Celie s unimaginable near-total victimization.20 As the echoes in the negative reviews suggest,the first half of The Color Purple offers a vision of totalized oppressionfamiliar from novels like The Women s Room, in which the ideologicalclosure of the heroine s world appears complete: every statement Celiehears only seems to reiterate her worthlessness, and she feels so trappedit is as if she is already dead and buried in fact, she thinks, it wouldbe better if she were dead because if [she] was buried, [she] wouldn thave to work. 21 In this horrific representation of both epistemologicaland temporal closure, the novel depicts Celie as trapped in an especiallydire experience of static time.As in Meridian, however, this experience of intense suffering is locatedin the past rather than the present specifically a past that is associatedwith poor, rural African American communities in the South.WhileMeridian was able to transform this past through the regionalistchronotope, which allows an isolated region to embody the past withinthe present, The Color Purple at first seems to have taken on a moredifficult job.Lodged in a historical past rather than merely a regionalbackwater, Celie seems to have even less chance of exiting static time thanthe women s liberation heroines who preceded her.In particular, becauseThe Color Purple associates totalized oppression with the past, it can tpresent feminist transformation as existing in that period withouttransgressing its own definition of the period.Once the past is defined asthe zone in which the burdens of history were much greater, there appearsto be no way for it to take part in a form of openness specifically associatedwith a later chronological moment.If static time arises when the worldappears too totalized to admit change, The Color Purple intensifies thisperception by focusing on a historical moment when such changes couldnot even be expected.To produce historical change out of its time wouldseem to defy the conventions the novel itself has constructed. ALICE WALKER S HINDSIGHT 127It is precisely this transgression of historical chronology that hasled so many critics of The Color Purple to condemn both itsanachronism and its fairy-tale logic
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