Epistolarity in The Color Purple

While Walker's novel is recognized as a part of the twentieth-century extension of epistolary fiction, the criticism of The Color Purple veers toward Walker the writer, her influences, womanism, the address to God, or the 1985 Steven Spielberg film adaptation of the novel.  In Special Delivery, Kauffman designates Walker as the first African-American author of an epistolary novel, noting Walker's "generic debt to the slave narrative" (184-5).  Similarly, in "'Trying to Do Without God': The Revision of Epistolary Address in The Color Purple" Carolyn Williams focuses on Walker's "womanist revision of God" stressing Walker's closure of the novel and how if frames the text "as if it had been one long letter to the reader" because of Walker's reference to her power as a female artist as somehow mediated through a higher power (283-4).   Wendy Wall's article "Lettered Bodies and Corporeal Texts in The Color Purple" takes up more formal epistolary issues, focusing on the letter-body conflation, a trope that Smith also uses, with different results.  Wall astutely links the fragmented lettered form with bodies fragmented by abuse and violation.   Yet within this sampling of criticism, Walker's novel is never addressed as specifically southern.  In short, criticism of Walker's The Color Purple often falls into the trap that has been justly called "the greatest shortcoming of southern literary scholarship... --its reluctance to accept black southern writers as part of the southern canon" (Hobson 81).  As a racialized text, the novel is often problematically placed outside the traditional bounds of southern literature.