Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Sewing and Quilts
In general, sewing in The Color Purple symbolizes
the power women can gain from productively channeling their creative
energy. After Sofia and Celie argue about the advice Celie has given
Harpo, Sofia signals a truce by suggesting they make a quilt. The
quilt, composed of diverse patterns sewn together, symbolizes diverse
people coming together in unity. Like a patchwork quilt, the community
of love that surrounds Celie at the end of the novel incorporates
men and women who are bonded by family and friendship, and who have
different gender roles, sexual orientations, and talents. Another
important instance of sewing in the novel is Celie’s pants-sewing
business. With Shug’s help, Celie overturns the idea that sewing
is marginal and unimportant women’s labor, and she turns it into
a lucrative, empowering source of economic independence.
God
In the early parts of the novel, Celie sees God as her
listener and helping hand, yet Celie does not have a clear understanding
of who God is. She knows deep down that her image of God as a white patriarch
“don’t seem quite right,” but she says it’s all she has. Shug invites
Celie to imagine God as something radically different, as an “it”
that delights in creation and just wants human beings to love what
it has created. Eventually, Celie stops thinking of God as she stops
thinking of the other men in her life—she “git man off her eyeball”
and tells God off, writing, “You must be sleep.” But after Celie has
chased her patriarchal God away and come up with a new concept of
God, she writes in her last letter, “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees,
dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God.” This reimagining
of God on her own terms symbolizes Celie’s move from an object of
someone else’s care to an independent woman. It also indicates that
her voice is now sufficiently empowered to create her own narrative.
