“DEAR WILLIAM WORDSWORTH”: OPPRESSION REINSCRIBED AND RESISTED IN EPISTOLARY WRITING By Maria Bell

“DEAR WILLIAM WORDSWORTH”:
OPPRESSION REINSCRIBED AND RESISTED

IN EPISTOLARY WRITING

By Maria Bell

The novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker and the poem
“To Mr. William Wordsworth, Collector of Stamps for
Westmoreland” by Lorna Goodison have one fundamental and
unusual feature in common: they both take on the epistolary form of a
black woman writing down her emotions and memories and
addressing them to a symbol of white male dominance. Walker’s
character Celie and Goodison’s speaker could have written the same
words in diary form, but they don’t. In both cases it is impossible for
the writers to physically send these letters to their recipients, but they
address these figures anyway. I argue that the speakers in The Color
Purple and “To Mr. William Wordsworth” can be seen to, in
part, reinscribe the racial, patriarchal hierarchy through the value
they put on writing and their choices to direct their letters to symbols
of this oppressive hierarchy. However, these letters ultimately
transcend that reinscription with their inarguable power. Alice Walker
and Lorna Goodison craft characters who reclaim their voices and
assert their own agency through the act of writing itself, and also
through confronting these white patriarchal symbols.
Literacy’s power to dominate has everything to do with the
value a culture puts on it. One can argue that literacy matters in the U.S. because white settlers decided it mattered. In the opening pages
of The Color Purple, Celie writes out of desperation, trying to make
sense of a world constructed in terms of people dominating other
people, with her at the bottom of the chain. She pours herself into her
writing, inscribing it with almost sacred importance. When Celie says
goodbye to her sister Nettie, writing is the one thing she orders her
sister to do: “I say, Write. She say, What? I say, Write. She say,
Nothing but death can keep me from it” (Walker 19). This brief
passage illustrates the great value these young, impoverished black
women living in the segregated American South put on writing. While
this makes sense, it raises questions of where this value comes from—
likely not from their African ancestors with their oral traditions, but
from their white oppressors who withheld literacy from their slaves to
keep them oppressed. Dominance and literacy are irreparably
intertwined. Valerie Babb touches on this idea when she observes,
“Since writing can be a tool of racial and sexual dominance, it is not
surprising that Celie perceives it as she does God, all-powerful, and
feels it is the only form of expression which is able to alleviate her
confusion and shame” (109). It is difficult to separate Celie’s views
toward writing from the racial and gendered power structures she’s
caught within—writing to her is associated with agency and power,
because it came from the white man. With this line of reasoning, it
follows that Celie’s act of letter-writing is to some degree a
reinscription of a historically oppressive value system.
In “A Small Place” Jamaica Kinkaid poses the question, “Isn’t
it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is
in the language of the criminal who committed the crime?” (31).

While Kincaid is talking about the English language, not writing
specifically, the same reasoning can apply. In Lorna Goodison’s poem
“To Mr. William Wordsworth, Collector of Stamps for Westmoreland,” the speaker’s act of writing down her great-grandmother’s oral poems is not actually motivated by a belief that written poems are superior, but rather by an understanding of its
utility. The majority of the poem works to elevate oral poetry to equal
status with written poetry, as Goodison’s speaker asserts that her
great-grandmother who couldn’t read or write is a poet like William
Wordsworth. Yet in the last three stanzas she shifts gears, recounting
how she collected up all her great-grandmother’s songs and poems
“from where they fell on banana trash” (46). The last stanza
concludes, “And I’ve written them down for her, / Summoned them to
stand, black-face type / Against a light background, Mr. Wordsworth.
/ Please tell Miss Leanna her poems are now written down”
(Goodison, 46). This act is motivated by the knowledge that this tool, even if it is a tool white men wielded to oppress her own great-
grandmother, is the only one she has to preserve her great-
grandmother’s poems—poems that may very well have expressed her experiences of that oppression. Writing does more for Celie and Goodison’s speaker than it takes away from them, but it is worth
reflecting on why writing and personal agency are so tightly linked—
why it is we put such a high value on literacy. The tool of the
oppressor can be used against that oppressor, but we should also
recognize it for what it historically has been.
Since literacy is the marker of someone with agency, it has
also become the proof needed to assert one’s own humanity. Anne
Bower writes, “Just as the individual writers of slave narratives had to
prove themselves literate to claim full humanity… Walker’s Celie
writes letters to demonstrate the legitimacy, literacy, and humanity of
herself and her vernacular” (68). By feeling the need to write in order
to prove that she is someone who matters, Celie reinscribes the values
of the white patriarchal system. Nonetheless, the fact that Celie is able
to demonstrate her own legitimacy and humanity is significant. Celie
and Nettie both know literacy is the precursor to freedom: “Us both be
hitting Nettie’s schoolbooks pretty hard, cause us know we got to be
smart to git away” (Walker 19). The Color Purple is in large part the
story of Celie asserting her voice, her agency, through her writing.
She begins confused, hurting, and, letter by letter, gains confidence.
She becomes more and more assured of what she believes and who
she is, unapologetically writing down her sexual feelings for her
friend Shug, her anger at Mister and at God, her love for Nettie and
her children, all her low points and her high points. By the last letter
in the novel, Celie is a force to be reckoned with. By mastering and
modifying writing, “Celie and Nettie change it into an implement that
is no longer solely the property of men and whites, but one used by
black women to gain a greater awareness of themselves and to
preserve their oral history” (Babb 108). Celie takes the written word
and molds it into something that helps her become a victor instead of
a victim.
Babb’s observation that black women have adopted the
implement of men and whites in order to preserve their oral history
reflects what Goodison’s speaker does in “To Mr. William
Wordsworth.” As I pointed out before, she has to buy into the value of the written word first established by white colonists in order to save
her great-grandmother’s poems, but the result is she is able to save
them. The speaker’s rescue of those poems is achieved by writing,
“which allows the older woman’s spoken words to continue to
perform and stand out in the dual contexts of the White culture in
general and its page-bound production in particular” (Chukwu and
Gingell, 61). Words, no matter how important, are likely to be
forgotten if not written down, and the speaker uses her ability to write
to make it so that Wordsworth and the other members of the white
literary canon will not be the only poets remembered in the future; so
that someday her great-grandmother and those like her can be right up
there with them, considered to be poets as valid as Wordsworth or
Keats. In her book on epistolary fiction, Bower writes, “These letter
novels present heroines who gain power over themselves and the
circumstances not through another’s intervention nor through luck,
but through their power to (re)write” (15). Goodison’s poem and
Walker’s novel are two such works that illustrate how black women
can use writing to first establish their presence, and second, alter the
way they are perceived. It is possible, for writing to reinforce the
connection of literacy to power and embody a powerful act of
resistance simultaneously.
Just as the act of writing itself works as both a strategy of
resistance and a reinscription of a patriarchal value system, so does
the choice of writing to a symbol of white power and patriarchy. I
have discussed how Walker’s characters and Goodison utilize writing,
but I have not yet touched on a crucial element—to whom they direct
their writing. In her book on identity politics, AnaLouise Keating
makes the point that as a society we rely heavily on oppositional
structures like “margin/center,” “oppressed/oppressor,” and
“colonized/colonizer” (89). Everything comes back to a relation
between those who have power and those who don’t. Celie’s letters to
God—a figure she imagines as the most powerful and divine white
man—form that sort of relation. From the start, the oppressive
patriarchy is influential in Celie’s decision as to who she writes. The
first line of The Color Purple reads: “You better not ever tell nobody
but God. It’d kill your mammy” (Walker 3). This is the threat seared
into fourteen-year-old Celie’s brain by the man who rapes her, first
prompting her to write down her story in letters to God. And as Celie
articulates to Shug, her image of the God to whom she is confessing is
that of a white man. After her conversation with Shug about the black
community’s adoption of the white man’s God, she writes, “Well us
talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old
white man out of my head” (Walker 176). Walker suggests that white
domination is so deeply embedded in Celie’s life that it has been
integral even to her personal writing.
This oppositional relationship can also be seen in “To Mr.
William Wordsworth,” where Goodison’s speaker, a black Jamaican
woman, addresses Wordsworth, one of the greatest symbols of the
white male literary canon. Are these pairings, to any degree,
reinforcing our oppositional, domination-obsessed societal structure?
Keating would likely say yes, as she writes, “Despite our intentions,
we generally use these [oppositional] terms in ways that subtly draw
on and replicate our status-quo stories and the existing power
structures these stories reinforce” (89). We continually replicate these power structures in our writing because writing is not solely self-
generated—what we write is influenced by the contexts in which we are writing. Bower addresses this when she says, “identity like
meaning, is not intrinsic but situational and relational… what we
define as individual experience is shaped externally as well as
internally” (15). Celie and Goodison’s speaker are writing from a
context defined by oppressive relationships, and so they both claim
and articulate their identities by situating themselves in relation to
dominant symbols—God in Celie’s case, and Wordsworth in
Goodison’s speaker’s.
To some extent Celie and Goodison’s speaker reinscribe the
existing power structures Keating comments on in addressing these
white male symbols, but in writing to these symbols they do more
than just perpetuate the status quo. In Goodison’s third stanza, her speaker turns to Wordsworth and asks, “Sir, did you pass my great-
grandmother?” She then tells him about her: “Like you she lived in Westmoreland, / She rode upon a grey mule, / She could not read or
write, she could not buy stamps / But great-grandmother was a poet /
She wrote her lyrical ballads on air, / Scripted them on her tongue /
Then summoned them to return to her book of memory” (45). The
speaker transgresses several hierarchical lines in this poem. First, she,
a black woman from a Caribbean island, is speaking straight to a key
figure of the white, male literary canon, and furthermore, she assumes
that this figure and her illiterate great-grandmother, “laughingstock of
the West Country,” share the same space, able to easily brush
shoulders in “the spirit world” (Goodison 46). Bower argues that
letter-writing female protagonists present “a personal self-definition
that contradicts, supersedes or supplements the identity others have
assumed her to have,” and this is exactly what Goodison’s speaker
does on behalf of her great-grandmother (14). In writing to
Wordsworth, Goodison’s speaker upsets the traditional order of things
and challenges the view of her great-grandmother as an unintellectual
nobody, suggesting to Wordsworth that he is no more of a poet than
her great-grandmother is.
When, in the middle of The Color Purple, Celie turns on God,
declaring, “Let him hear me… if he ever listened to poor colored
women the world would be a different place let me tell you,” she
upsets these same traditional views of identity and hierarchy
byspeaking rudely of God and suggesting that black women might
have the best insight on how society should run (Walker, 172). For a
time, Celie gives up writing to God at all, disrupting the
oppressed/oppressor relationship. But then she does something more
powerful—she writes to God again, but she changes who God is to
her, following Shug Avery’s assertion that “God is inside you and
inside everybody else” (Walker 175). Her letter opens with, “Dear
God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything.
Dear God” (Walker 252). Celie rewrites God’s identity, and through
that, alters her relationship to the white patriarchy God used to
represent. Hankinson observes this when she writes, “The novel’s
conclusion emphasizes Celie’s discovery that God is in everything,
and therefore everything is holy, a concept that defies any sense of
hierarchical structure” (327). The implications of who one decides to
write to are not simple—in the case of The Color Purple and “To Mr.
William Wordsworth,” the writers’ choices of addressees reinforce oppressed/oppressor dichotomies to some degree while at the same
time questioning and upsetting these dichotomies.
As I conclude, I want to complicate things a little further. In
The Color Purple, Celie writes, “Dear Nettie, I don’t write to God no
more, I write to you” (Walker 173). This is the point where Celie’s
letters stop being addressed to God and begin being addressed to
Nettie. But I would argue that this is not the first time Celie writes to
her. In fact, the whole time Celie is writing to God, she is also writing
to Nettie. Whether or not Celie is aware of it herself, this is another
act of resistance. Just behind this symbol of racial and sexual
domination stands a black woman, the true beneficiary of Celie’s
story. This is true in Goodison’s poem as well. The closing lines of
the poem read: “Mr. Wordsworth. / Please tell Miss Leanna her
poems are now written down” (46). She addresses Wordsworth,
asking him to pass on that little message. But in reality, the entire
poem is the message. As the speaker shares her memories of her
great-grandmother with Wordsworth, she is also, more importantly,
sharing them with her great-grandmother. When she says, “But, sir,
whenever she would sing / Even the solitary reaper’s voice was stilled
/ as her wild mystic chanting issued / over the cane brakes and hills.
Only Keat’s nightingale / could compete with her guinea griot style”
she is telling Miss Leanna, look, I remember (Goodison 46). I haven’t
forgotten. I know how gifted you were . You matter. Goodison’s
speaker pours out her heart not to Wordsworth, but to this black
female figure. Yet it does raise the question, why is there a symbol of
oppression between these two women? Why does Celie not write
straight to Nettie from the start, and why is Goodison’s poem not
titled “To Miss Leanna?” I think the answer lies in the context of their
world.
As Bower said, identity is situational and relational (Bower
15). By crafting black female characters that choose white male
figures as recipients, Walker and Goodison make a point about the
world in which they live, a world that has taught these women that
whiteness and masculinity are what makes someone important,
someone to whom you would write a letter. And thinking about it
literally, Celie can’t write to Nettie at the beginning because she’s
been ordered not to tell anyone except God what is happening to her,
and Goodison’s speaker can’t write to her great-grandmother because
her great-grandmother can’t read. Because of who they are and the
time they live in, there are barriers in their way, preventing them from
writing directly to those close to them. In some sense, Walker and
Goodison are intentionally reinscribing the status quo power
dynamics in order illustrate their reality. Yet even as they do this, they
go far beyond it. There is an audacity to this act of black women
directly addressing such venerated figures, making it clear they feel
they deserve to be heard even by the “greatest of the great.” There is
also an audacious quality to how Celie and Goodison’s speaker
summon these figures in order to then talk right through them to the
black women whose opinions of them they care about much more
than God’s or Wordsworth’s.
Celie and Goodison’s speaker perpetuate power structures in
placing their true addressees behind symbols of oppression, but their
act of writing to these symbols is also an act of resistance. The fact
that they are not writing to these symbols alone but also to the women
they love is an act of resistance as well. Walker and Goodison deftly
illustrate how their speakers canexpress their resistance from within
the confines of oppression. This means that to some degree they
reinscribe existing power structures by relying on writing, the original
instrument of the oppressor, and by addressing symbols of white
patriarchy, but they do so because these strategies do much more than
reinforce a status quo—they give these women agency. Writing letters
to these symbols and to the black women just behind them helps them
question the contexts and confines in which they write, and begin to
change them.

Works Cited

Babb, Valerie. “Writing to Undo What Writing Has Done.” Phylon,
vol. 47, no. 2, (1986), pp. 107-116.
Bower, Anne. Epistolary Responses: The Letter in 20th Century
American Fiction and Criticism. University of Alabama Press,
1997.
Chukwu, Hannah and Gingell, Susan. “Our Mothers’ Kitchens and
the Domestic Creative Continuum: A Reading of Lorna
Goodison’s Turn Thanks.” ARIEL, vol. 36, no. 3-4, (2005), pp.
43-66.
Hankinson, Stacie Lynn. “From Monotheism to Pantheism: Liberation from Patriarchy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” The
Midwest Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, (1997), pp. 320-329.
Goodison, Lorna. “To Mr. William Wordsworth, Collector of Stamps
for Westmoreland.” Turn Thanks. University of Illinois Press,
1999, pp. 45-46.
Keating, AnaLouise. Transformational Identity Politics from
Transformation Now!: Toward a post-oppositional politics of
change. The University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Kinkaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1983. Phoenix, 2004.

Maria Bell is an English major in the Class of 2019 with a correlate
in Sociology. She grew up in Minnesota with goats, horses, and
chickens she named with care. Any assumptions made from this
information are probably correct. She is the frazzled editor of
Vassar’s student literary magazine and nerds out about books with
students at Fishkill Correctional Facility where she tutors. At Vassar,
Maria can reliably be found in one of three places: on her bed
watching dubiously-legal streams of baseball games with her rabbit,
absorbing gossip in the English office where she technically does office assistant things, or in a tree.

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