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The Color Purple features gender conflicts, racial politics, and issues of African American heritage that have become part of their more recent cultural dialogue. It begins with a warning. Celie is punished by not being allowed to speak or to be spoken about. Black women as “outsider twice over” excluded both from the mainstream and from the ethnic centers of power, some of these women are, moreover, trice muted, on account of sexism, racism, and a “tonguelessness” that results from prohibitions or language barriers. So their needs for self-expression are obvious. In using the epistolary style, Walker is able to have Celie express the impact of oppression on her spirit as well as her growing internal strength and final victory. Although her letters provoke no reciprocal communication, her lettered plea creates a means for her to determine her identity. Writing allows her to keep self intact, to unify the rift that has been inflicted upon her, to remember her violated body and ultimately to preserve her subjectivity and voice through language.
The women in this novel build a wall of camaraderie around themselves. They share each other’s pain, sorrow, laughter, and dreams. They are sisters in body as well as in spirit and the spirit cannot be broken. They find God in themselves and they love her fiercely. For Celie, Sofia, Shug, their bonds with one another and their new-found strengths result in part from helping one another to become more financially secure. Once they achieve that security, they are able to shed the chains imposed upon them by the men and male institution in their lives. Also, Walker uses manual skills, particularly those of domestic or hand-craft labors, as liberation techniques. In this novel, both sewing and language become media for self-definition, self-expression, and self-sharing. By sewing, Celie actually narrows the gaps between the sexes, making pants for both men and women.
Celie’s repossession of her body encourages her to seek selfhood and then to assert that selfhood through language. During this process, Celie learns to live herself and others and even to address her letters to a body, her sister Nettie, rather than to the disembodied God that she has blindly inherited from white christian mythology. Celie’s movement from monotheism to pantheism parallels her movement from feelings of isolation and inferiority under male authority figures, into a new sense of bonding with other woman and appreciation of herself. God is no longer a He, but an It, erasing the male connotations she previously connected with God. Walker's text urges a truly global community liberated from the brutalities and constrictions of masculinist culture. Walker’s womanism is committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Walker avoids easy binary oppositions of male/female, olonizer/colonized, white/black, European/African, and good/evil.