"Looking at the Back of Your Head": Mirroring Scenes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy

Lynn Pifer

Although Alice Walker insists that Possessing the Secret of Joy is not a sequel to The Color Purple, she has chosen to recast various characters in the later novel. The novels are also alike in that their protagonists, Celie in Purple and Tashi in Joy, are women who experience epiphany-like moments that lead to a fuller, more coherent sense of self. In these moments the presence of a literal or metaphoric mirror enables the protagonists to move from an experience of fragmentation to a vision of a more unified state of self-possession. As Daniel Ross notes, this transformation resembles Jacques Lacan's mirror stage theory.(1)

According to Ross, in The Color Purple there are several mirror scenes that are crucial to Celie's development of selfhood. Before these scenes, Celie endures a barrage of rapes and brutality that causes her to experience her body as fragmented and as being possessed by others, namely her victimizers. At age fourteen, Celie already questions her self-image as a result of her abusive father's repeated rapes. She begins a letter to tell God that she is a good girl and immediately strikes out the word "am," and revises her sentence to say, "I have always been a good girl," demonstrating that she no longer feels certain of her goodness or her identity (1). Celie's violent, loveless marriage to a man she calls "Mr." is no less damaging than her "relationship" with her incestuous father. In her best moments with her husband, Celie imagines herself as the beautiful, grinning Shug Avery and puts her arm around him as she supposes Shug might. Of more dangerous times, particularly when Mr. is beating her, Celie says "It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree" (23). Celie detaches herself from her identity because of her intolerable circumstances. Shug's arrival marks Celie's first opportunity to look, both literally and figuratively, at herself. Just as the living Shug replaces the photograph that Celie carries, Shug's mirroring helps Celie to replace the void left in her by her troublesome past.

Ross suggests that "The repossession of her body encourages Celie to seek selfhood through spoken language" (70). He finds that once Celie can recognize and appreciate her body as complete and belonging to herself, she is able to express love verbally for herself and others. Her apparent desire for selfhood, he further argues, is initiated in a crucial mirror scene in which Shug Avery helps initiate Celie's desire for selfhood. The scene unfolds as an anatomy lesson for Celie under Shug's direction. With Shug's encouragement, Celie's self-reclamation begins as she sees her own genitals for the first time:

   I lie back on the bed and haul up my dress. Yank down my bloomers. Stick
   the looking glass tween my legs. Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be
   black. Then inside look like a wet rose.

   "It a lot prettier than you thought, ain't it?" [Shug] ask from the door.
   It mine, I say. (82)

Here Ross suggests that "Celie's immediate response abnegates her previous annihilation and ignorance of her body: `It mine, I say'" (71). Although she previously cared little about herself or her sexual feelings, and even referred to sex with her husband as nothing more than him doing "his business," she now recognizes her genitals as one enjoyable part of a complete sell "I look at her and touch it with my finger. A little shiver go through me ... just enough to tell me this the right button" (Purple 82). Her response is like that of a child in Lacan's mirror stage. It closely resembles Tamsin E. Lorraine's explanation of the stage in that Celie has moved from a premirror experience of passivity and fragmentation to a "jouissance (joy) of fusion with a Gestalt of the human form" (32). In other words, she now recognizes and reclaims the fragmented parts of her body, taking pleasure in that reclamation.

After Celie successfully leaves Albert to live with Shug and begin her folk pants business, Shug inadvertently provides Celie with the opportunity to test her personal growth. Shug runs off on a "fling" with a nineteen-year-old blues musician, leaving Celie on her own. At this point in the novel Celie is able to recognize and appreciate her self without Shug's help. Standing before a full length mirror, Celie decides that there is "Nothing special here for nobody to love," and yet her new sense of self does not deteriorate (Purple 266).(2) Ross writes, "This scene provides the test that proves Celie's psychic growth has continued unchecked, that she will not regress in a crisis" (82). Here it seems that Celie has successfully moved through the mirror stage and is now able to function within the postmirror stage of symbolic language, that is, language that she can use to represent any perceived lacks.

According to Lacan, the need for symbolic language in the postmirror stage points to the fact that all subjects remain split. Meconnaissance allows a subject to believe in his or her wholeness, but this is simply an illusion one might carry for life. As Ross argues, however, such misrecognition serves an affirmative purpose for Celie. He proposes that:

   Lacan's view of the unattainableness of whole selfhood finds a more
   optimistic revision in Walker's novel. The Color Purple, in fact, endorses
   another view prevalent in modern thought--that such illusions are not
   destructive but are positive accommodations that allow one to find meaning
   in life. (73)

This whole self that Celie finds in the mirror is certainly healthier than her previous notion of herself as fragmented and belonging to others. When her co-worker, Darlene, tries to persuade her to speak Standard English in order to avoid sounding "dumb," Celie refuses, concluding, "Look like to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind" (223). Rather than allowing others to own individual parts of her, such as her sexuality or her language, Celie now owns and enjoys her total self.

Similar to Celie's early experience of fragmentation, Tashi, the protagonist of Possessing the Secret of Joy, lacks a unified vision of selfhood. Here again we find Walker using mirroring scenes, this time primarily metaphoric ones, to help Tashi re-possess her self. But if The Color Purple offers a revision of Lacan's mirror stage theory, Possessing the Secret of Joy tenders still another vision. Rather than reveling in a mirage of unity as Celie does, Tashi, the protagonist in Joy, recognizes her self as divided, and she willingly accepts that division.

In the beginning of the novel Tashi's self-image is clearly fragmented. She has willingly chosen to have a ritual circumcision performed as a mark of her loyalty to her native Africa, but her American friends view the ritual as genital mutilation.(3) The resulting scarification, as well as her failing marriage and repressed memories of her sister's death from the same ritual, has placed her in a state much like that of an infant in the premirror stage. Olivia, a friend of Tashi's, describes her as "passive.... No longer cheerful ... slow ... studied," with a smile "which she never seemed to offer you without considering it first" (65). Olivia seems to understand the extent of Tashi's wounding, noting: "That her soul had been dealt a mortal blow was plain to anyone who dared to look into her eyes" (65). Clearly the trauma of the mutilation, which caused her sister's death, took away her sexuality, and arrested her emotional and verbal expression, also inflicted great psychic damage on Tashi. Her condition here resembles the premirror stage in that she "watches and listens to the world around [her]" (Lorraine 30). Indeed, she is forbidden to speak or cry about the loss of her sister. When Olivia and Adam first see Tashi upon entering the Olinka village, she is standing behind her mother, silent tears running down her face. Even this quiet expression is too much for the village elders: "They were always saying You mustn't cry!" (15) and she and her mother leave the village until she can control her emotions.

Tashi's difficulty with language is obvious. Unable to speak directly about her painful life circumstances, she instead tells stories to represent her situation. Before we even meet Tashi, she tells the story of Lara, Baba, and Lala, three panthers whom we later find symbolize herself, her husband, and Lisette, her husband Adam's lover ("co-wife" in the story). Lara believes that Baba and Lala are completely happy without her and only acknowledge her because it is their duty to their co-wife. At this point she is "unwanted, pregnant ... and ill, ... devastated" (4). Her husband's disregard for her, as well as her deep sense of internal defect, causes her to feel unloved, and she spends her time isolated and alone: "Days went by when the only voice she heard was her inner one" (4). Her state, here, resembles the premirror stage in that she has "neither individuality nor subjectivity and ... watches and listens to the world around [her]" (Lorraine 30). She is unable to value her inner voice as part of her self and acts as an observer rather than a participant in life. Indeed, her response to her own inner voice demonstrates that she feels fragmented, that her inner voice, always referred to as "it," is something outside of herself. Eventually, Lara begins to listen to her inner voice:

   Lara, it said, sit here where the sun may kiss you ... Lara, it said, lie
   here where the moon can make love to you all night long ... Lara, it said,
   one bright morning when she knew herself to have been well kissed and well
   loved: sit here on this stone and look at your beautiful self in the still
   waters of this stream. (4)

She listens to and obeys her inner voice and finally appears to believe it: "Calmed by the guidance offered by her inner voice, Lara sat down on the stone and leaned over the water. She took in her smooth, aubergine little snout, her delicate, pointed ears, her sleek, gleaming black fur. She was beautiful!" (4).

Similar to Celie's experience, the panther views parts of herself in the stream's reflection as a means of coming to an appreciation of her whole self. And it does seem that she gains a unified vision of self when she recognizes that "She [is] beautiful!" (4). But, whereas Celie continues to envision herself as complete, Lara does not. Her inner voice remains a fragmented part of her self, something that calms her with its guidance rather than becoming a part of the total, beautiful her.

Certainly, the conclusion of the story points to the possibility that Lara remains consciously fragmented. Her inner voice continues to assure her of her beauty and yet she cannot grasp that she is beautiful: "Each day it seemed to Lara that the Lara in the stream was the only Lara worth having" (5). The incomplete Lara so longs to unify herself by fusing with her reflected image that she "lean[s] over and kisse[s] her own serene reflection in the water, and h[olds] the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream" (5). Here Tashi's story of Lara resembles Ovid's story of Narcissus:

   ... How often He tries to kiss the image in the water

   ...

   He watches, all unsatisfied, that image Vain and illusive, and he almost
   drowns In his own watching eyes. (Humphries 70-71)

Unlike Lara, however, Narcissus dies after acknowledging that the boy he has fallen in love with is, in fact, his own reflection: "I know / The truth at last. He is myself! I feel it, / I know my image now" (71-72). Tiresias's prophecy that Narcissus would only live to a ripe old age, "if he never [knew] himself," (68) holds true. Narcissus fades away and dies at the water's edge, leaving only the flower that bears his name. Here self-knowledge induces unhealthy obsession and untimely demise. Though her death is not preceded by self-knowledge, Lara's pursuit of a complete self also ends in a narcissistic suicide; her attempt at self-possession, doomed by her misrecognition of the "mirror" image, results only in self-negation. Since Lara's tale is the opening story we hear from Tashi, we have a clear indication that the quest for selfhood will be more complicated and costly in this novel than it was in The Color Purple.

Fortunately Tashi's end is not as abrupt as Lara's. Unlike the panther, she eventually moves to a state beyond the mirror stage. But the vision that Tashi accepts is unlike Celie's. Tashi, who seems more complex than either the panther or Celie, works through her extensive psychic damage and begins to celebrate her different selves rather than pursuing the unified vision of selfhood that Celie and Lara cling to. But similar to the other two, she needs mirroring experiences in order to move from her experience of psychic pain to a place where she can find and enjoy her diverse self.

Tashi comes to recognize the different parts of her self in at least two mirroring scenes. Unlike other instances, however, the mirrors with which Tashi views her fragmented parts are metaphoric. Rather than seeing her own reflection, Tashi discovers her self as she views Mzee's grainy black and white films related to the ritual mutilations that she and her sister Dura took part in. These scenes also differ from Celie and Lara's in that Tashi's extreme psychic damage causes her to recover severely repressed memories over an extended period of time rather than instantly accepting parts of her self--the memories--as representative of a whole.

The first mirroring scene, in which Tashi views the beginning of a circumcision ritual, helps her to recall her repressed memories of her sister's death. Mzee narrates the film he took during a trip to Africa when he interrupted some kind of ritual ceremony: "The children on the ground in a little row, lying close together on their backs ... there was a large fighting cock (which we now saw as it stepped majestically into the frame) and it walked about ... crowing mightily" (70-71). Upon seeing this part of the film, Tashi falls into a dead faint. Although the adults in the film realize the intrusion and do not perform the ritual for Mzee's camera, the initial scene is enough to trigger Tashi's deeply repressed memory of her sister's death. Tashi was a small child when her sister died at the hands of M'Lissa, the woman who performed Dura's and, eventually, Tashi's circumcision. Olivia notes that:

   [Dura] bled to death. That was all Tashi had been told; all she knew. So
   that if, while we were playing, she pricked her finger on a thorn or
   scraped her knee and glimpsed the sight of her own blood, she fell into a
   panic, until gradually, she played in such a way as to take no risks....
   But she forgot why the sight of her own blood terrified her. (8-9, emphasis
   added)

During the film Tashi begins to remember why the sight of her own blood frightens her. As she views the film and subsequently begins painting a series of increasingly large fighting cocks, later adding a foot and finally the hem of a dress to her paintings, she slowly recalls the details of her sister's death:

   As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had
   crept ... to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror ...
   and I knew instantly that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside
   the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled
   my heart. (73)

Tashi continues, recalling that "Abruptly, inside, there was silence," and that following the silence M'Lissa exited the hut and from between her toes flung Dura's excised clitoris at a hen, not a cock, waiting nearby who "in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down" (73).

What Tashi recovers here is an important memory about Dura's death. She discovers that she was, in fact, present as her sister died. Further, contrary to her previous belief that no one was responsible, that her sister simply died, she now assigns to M'Lissa the blame for what she calls Dura's "murder." Rather than repressing painful emotions as she formerly did, she experiences those emotions fully as a natural self-expression: "I felt a painful stitch throughout my body that I knew stitched my tears to my soul. No longer would my weeping be separate from what I knew" (81). Unlike the child who could not cry about her sister's death, Tashi now mourns her losses in a healthy manner. She realizes how she has become fragmented from her past--and, although she has reunited her memories to her emotions, it is a repaired union, with the painful stitches marking both the place of division and the place of healing.

Tashi regains the vision of at least one other thing--the fragment of her child self that she lost when she became afraid of taking risks. Once she recalls the details of Dura's murder, she flies to Africa to confront M'Lissa. It is in Africa, before the confrontation, that we find Tashi reclaiming the bold child-like spirit that she once had. Although she realizes the danger inherent in expressing her anti-government opinions, Tashi chooses to risk that danger in order to declare her beliefs. By taking that risk, Tashi discovers a child fragment of her self. She recalls:

   when the plane touched down all I saw were the billboards shouting out to
   the people that they must buy Fanta and Coca-Cola and Datsuns and Fords and
   chocolate.... And I thought: Of course! This excrement is the reading
   matter of the masses. I am only one old and crazy woman, but I will fling
   myself against the billboards. I will compete. (107-08)

The following day she does compete. And it is in this competition that she reclaims the spirit of her child-self: "I felt happy sitting on my red Chinese pigskin suitcase.... Scribbling my big letters as if I were a child" (107). With these signs she not only expresses her political beliefs, but also regains her risk-taking childhood self.

Tashi's anti-government signs also prove her successful passage from the mirror stage into the postmirror stage. According to Lacan's theory, her new ability with language signifies her successful entry into the symbolic. She is now able to voice her perceived lacks. As Lorraine suggests, "Words, because of their power to represent what is absent, help [one] to compensate for ... the pain of separation" (34). What Tashi finds herself separated from--and thus lacking--is the culture that she previously held great faith in. Again, her decision to be circumcised was a symbol of her loyalty to a native land that makes her proud. What she discovers and expresses in her signs, however, is a country in which, as she writes on the signs, "If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it" (106). Circumcision, much like ritualized practices of unnecessary dieting and cosmetic surgery, is upheld by patriarchal figures who claim that women enjoy such rituals, and by extension their painfulness. And indeed they feel justified. For, like Tashi, it is frequently women who insist on their own participation in the rituals.(4) As Janette Turner Hospital notes, Walker is depicting, "the collusion that exists between oppressor and oppressed--a collusion on which the oppressor's tyranny relies" (12).(5) What the patriarchy cannot see, however, is that the absurd demands they place on a woman's physical being, in combination with their awesome social power, are the actual reasons behind the continuation of the rituals. The signs Tashi creates protest this phenomenon.

Late in the novel Tashi recognizes other parts of her divided self in a final mirroring scene; thus she does not have the illusion of unity. This scene differs, however, in that the parts she recognizes are segments of her being that she can no longer access. Particularly painful to Tashi, she finds that she cannot recover her sexuality or the grace she possessed before the circumcision.

Tashi's discoveries come as some of her friends and family show her a film which depicts the "dark tower" of a termite village. As she subsequently recalls, the "necessity" of her circumcision was transmitted to her at a young age by a code in which women were equated with a termite queen.(6) Following the film, she has a flashback and remembers being present, as a child, while the elders of her village discussed women in terms of their connection to the termite queen. The village elders' conversation clearly suggests that a woman, like the queen, is made to be "stuffed with food at one end ... and [to have her] eggs ... constantly removed at the other" (227). In order to ensure that a woman will not resist the necessity of procreation, "God is merciful.... He clips her wings" (231). Mercifully for the male elders, their society "clips" women's "wings" through circumcision practices in which the women actively participate.

As Tashi recalls the end of the elders' conversation, she recognizes that her sexuality has clearly been taken away from her. She now remembers that the elders believed that women are circumcised because, "God liked it tight! ... God likes to feel big" (232-33). And, like God, so too do these men: "What man does not? (Laughter)" (233). As a result they reinforce the circumcision tradition. And, as they do, they "drink to the Queen who is beautiful, and whose body has been given us to be our sustenance forever" (233, emphasis added). Here they clearly possess women's bodies by commandeering their sexuality. Because Tashi now understands that her sexuality has been irrevocably seized, she recognizes that she can never be a completely unified person.

At the close of her flashback, Tashi recognizes another fragment that she cannot recover. In the child self she sees, as "she kicks a stone ... [t]here is grace in her aim and no hesitation in her thrust" (234). But the circumcision destroyed that grace and for years filled her with little more than hesitation. She cannot run gracefully as she once did; the circumcision makes nothing more than shuffling possible now. And the hesitation, caused mostly by her repressed memories and her physical condition, lasts most of her life. Indeed, the only things she seems not to hesitate about are her confession to M'Lissa's murder as well as her own execution. And in her lack of hesitation there is an attempt at escape. As she says to Olivia, "it would kill me to get any older. There is nothing more of this life I need to see. What I have already experienced is more than enough. Besides ... maybe death is easier than life" (249).

Clearly Tashi understands that she is divided. But what is equally clear is that she honors that division. Even as she embraces death, she affirms and enjoys her fragmented self. Although she begins each chapter by signifying herself as simply "Tashi" or "Evelyn," (her American name), and, at times "Tashi-Evelyn" or "Evelyn-Tashi," at the close of the novel she recognizes her self in all of its parts. Rather than signifying herself with a single name, she now refers to herself as "Tashi-Evelyn-Mrs. Johnson" (272). Moreover, there is evidence that she believes her death will also supply her with a fragment of her self as she finally adds "Soul" to her list of signifiers, "Tashi Evelyn Johnson Soul" (278). She also deletes the hyphens and the "Mrs.," freeing herself from the constraints of punctuation and social titles. As she faces death, she recognizes this final fragment of herself and finally, she is "satisfied" (279). Tashi's final list of signifiers also echoes and inverts Celie's affirmative opening to the last letter in The Color Purple, "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God" (292).

Mirroring scenes have obviously played an important role in both Celie and Tashi's self-discovery. In an interview with Paula Giddings, Walker herself points to the importance of such scenes. To Giddings she says, "I don't think you can do anything without help. In order to see the back of your head, you need a mirror to look into" (102). These mirrors, literal or metaphoric, serve to present us with a vision of selfhood that is either unified like Celie's or divided like Tashi's. And although Lacan's theory suggests that we all strive to achieve an illusion of a unified self, and in The Color Purple this unity is both achievable and rewarding, in Possessing the Secret of Joy, Walker's revision of Lacan's theory suggests that a recognition of our fragmentation is a healthy alternative to that illusion.

Notes

(1.) See Ross pp. 69-84. Lacan's theory suggests that infants move from a narcissistic premirror experience of fragmentation and lack of sense of self into the mirror stage (also narcissistic) which is marked by the subject's (infant's) belief that she is whole and ideal when, for example, the infant sees her reflection in a mirror. The subject's image of wholeness is, of course, a misrecognition (meconnaissance), an anticipation of the stages yet to come. In the postmirror stage the child finds that she is not entirely self-sufficient and that objects she previously wished to fuse with (such as the mother) can, in fact, make themselves absent. Here the father and language enter and compensate for what the child lacks. See Lacan's Ecrits: A Selection (Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977 pp. 1-7) for further explanation.

(2.) Ross refers readers to Sharon Hymer who states that people who rely on what she calls "narcissistic friends" for the formation of their identity must eventually "develop an identity apart from the friend" (qtd. in Ross 82).

(3.) From the novel's description, it is likely that Tashi had a pharaonic circumcision. In her book, Prisoners of Ritual, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein notes that the procedure "consists of clitoridectomy and the excision of the labia minora as well as the inner layers of the labia majora. The raw edges are then sewn together with cat gut or made to adhere to each other by means of thorns. The suturing together is done so that the remaining skin of the labia majora will heal together and form a bridge of scar tissue over the vaginal opening. A small sliver of wood or straw is inserted into the vagina to prevent complete occlusion, and to leave a passage for urine and the menstrual flow" (33).

(4.) Hanny Lightfoot-Klein notes occasions where women persist in continuing such rituals: "I talked with one physician of a small girl who ... had been given a mild form of sunna [the slitting or removal of the prepuce of the clitoris, leaving little damage]. She had experienced so much shaming by her peers for this that she was constantly bothering her mother to be "properly circumcised" like the others ... [another] physician told me he found the practice of circumcision totally indefensible on medical grounds.... He had five daughters by his two wives, and finding himself in a dilemma, had withdrawn from the decision of what was to be done with them. The grandmothers had decided, and four daughters had been pharaonized ... he said, `it is women's business.' He ... said he would not oppose [his mother], not even to intercede on behalf of his remaining uncircumcised daughter" (8-9).

(5.) Walker herself writes, "And though one is struck by the complicity of the mothers, even the complicity of the grandparents, one must finally acknowledge ... that those who practice it are, generally speaking, kept ignorant of its real dangers--the break-down of the spirit and the body and the spread of disease--and are themselves prisoners of ritual" ("Legacy" 55).

(6.) For further discussion of the termite hill as a clitoral symbol, see Walker and Parmar's Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, pp. 84-85 and 187-89.

Works Cited

Hospital, Janette Turner. "What They Did to Tashi," The New York Times Book Review. June 28, 1992: 11-12.

Humphries, Rolfe. Trans. Ovid's Metamorphoses. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955.

Lightfoot-Klein, Hanny. Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa. New York: Harrington Park P, 1989.

Lorraine, Tamsin E. "Lacan and Object Relations." Gender, Identity, and the Production of Meaning. Boulder: Westview, 1990.

Ross, Daniel W. "Celie in the Looking Glass: The Desire for Selfhood in The Color Purple." Modern Fiction Studies 34 (1988): 69-84.

Walker, Alice. Interview. "Alice Walker's Appeal." By Paula Giddings. Essence July 1992: 58-62+.

--. "A Legacy of Betrayal: Confronting the Evil Tradition of Female Genital Mutilation," Ms. Nov./Dec. (1993): 55-57.

--. Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

--. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1990.

--. and Pratibha Parmar. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.

Lynn Pifer is an associate professor of English at Mansfield University, where she teaches American, African American, and women's literature. She has published essays on Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, and Margaret Laurence. This essay was co-authored with her student, Tricia Slusser, as part of a Faculty-Student Research Project at Mansfield University.

Tricia Slusser is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, where her work focuses on nation, identity and celebrity in varying combinations of queer / working-class / racially "other" cultures. This essay was co-authored with Dr. Lynn Pifer as a Faculty-Student Research Project at Mansfield University.

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