Almost every American of Gen X through Gen Y read The Color Purple in high school, but I was not among them. If I recall, my AP Literature class divided into smaller reading groups, and I ended up with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, which I cannot regret as it turned out to be one of my favorite books of all time, and gave me the opportunity to give an in-class presentation as a mute with a limp (Leah Forever!). That said, I knew that The Color Purple was one of those essential texts that I had to read eventually. It is certainly one of the most canonical American novels, and I the fact that I hadn’t read it was becoming a bigger and more shameful secret the longer I put it off.
What struck me immediately was how familiar it all seemed-- the prose style, the epistolary narrative structure, the approach to race and gender-- and that was initially a disappointment. How could a novel that walked such a well-trod path be put on such a pedestal? But of course, it finally dawned on me that The Color Purple, having been published in 1982, felt familiar because its themes and style have been so often imitated Every post-1982 novel dealing with race and/or gender has likely been influenced in one way or another by Alice Walker, and her approach to her subject and her wielding of language feel familiar because of how deeply ingrained they have become. Reading fiction out of its cultural context can be something of a challenge, for this very reason. I’ve been struggling through the audiobook of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another book treading in racial politics, although with no subtlety whatsoever. The Color Purple is canonical because of its formal elements as well as its subject matter; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the other hand, is canonical only because of its subject matter and its influence on public perception.
I’m very curious as to how other readers out there parse out this tension between a novel’s cultural value/context and its readability, especially outside of the realm of academia. How should we read books of cultural importance for pleasure? Is it even possible? Or should we be reading them out of a sense of duty? Share your thoughts!