“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (post 5): Celie's ugly, rape, and tree issues may come from author’s traumatic experience from age eight to fourteen.

Multiple personality is a psychological way of coping with traumatic experiences in childhood. When Alice Walker was eight years old, she was accidentally shot in the right eye with a BB gun, causing her to lose vision in that eye and to be disfigured until age fourteen, at which time she had surgery and got a prosthesis.

She has said of the whole experience, “It was very like a rape” (1, p. 40) and “For a long time I thought I was very ugly and disfigured” (1, p. 43).

In the previous post on Celie’s mediumistic experience, she says that her first message “seem to come to me from the trees.” So it is interesting to learn that when Alice Walker got shot in her right eye, “The sturdy trunk and sprawling limbs of a tree growing in the yard would be the last image the eye would ever discern” (1, p. 37).

1. Evelyn C. White. Alice Walker: A Life. New York, WW Norton, 2004.