MAPPING THE MARGIN: DOMESTIC SPACES AND GEOPOLITICAL REALITIES IN SULA AND THE COLOR PURPLE

Abstract

Abstract

In A house in Sula or The Color Purple, the little ghetto is never simply where public history has gone missing. It is a place where land fraud and racial segregation, wage dependence and sexual authority, migration and imperial travel are made familiar enough to look like home. This essay considers the in-and-between as it moves from one domestic room through to broader political space, reading Morrison's Bottom alongside Walker's rural Georgia. The Peace house makes kinship an unruly work of the community, while Nel Wright home trains a child in the respectability that segregation pays for. Celie's letters start in a household defined by rape and slavery; later, sewing and property and letters change what a room can allow. In particular, Nettie African letters not only expand the map of the novel. They show missionary domesticity and colonial displacement as contiguous to, but not identical with, the male imperative Celie discerns at home. The comparison elaborates the notion of the margin as a produced space rather than an external limit. Acts, margins, roads, kitchens, bedrooms, workplaces and disciplinary codes marginalize people. But Morrison and Walker also show margins deploying otherwise—as witness, improvised affiliation, economic invention; as secret speech that outruns the authorities trying to contain it.