Essay on Race and Class in the Color Purple An important moment in The Color Purple by Alice Walker is reached when Celie first recovers the missing letters from her missing sister Nettie for a long time. This discovery not only marks the introduction of a new narrator in this epistolary novel, but also begins Celie's transformation from writer to reader. In fact, the passage in which Celie struggles to decipher the writing on her first envelope sent by Nettie provides a concrete example of both Celie's particular interpretative horizon and the approach chosen by Walker to the epistolary form: Saturday morning Shug put the letter to me of Nettie on my lap. There are stamps of the fat little Queen of England, as well as stamps that say peanuts, coconuts, rubber trees and say Africa. I don't know where England is. I don't even know where Africa ate. So I don't know where Nettie is. (102) Revealing Celie's ignorance of even the most rudimentary contours of the larger world, this passage clearly defines the "domestic" place she occupies as the novel's primary narrator. (1) In particular, the difficulty Celie has in interpreting this envelope highlights her tendency to understand events in terms of personal consequences rather than political categories. What matters is... half of the paper....... 99-111. Shelton, Frank W. "Alienation and Integration in Alice Walker's The Color Purple." CLA Journal 28 (1985): 382-92. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia.” Letters and Society 2 (1974): 201-21.Stade, George. "Feminist fiction and male characters". Partisan Review 52 (1985): 264-70. Tate, Claudia. Domestic allegories of political desire: The black heroine text at the turn of the century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Drawings: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Walker, Alice. The color purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982.