ISSN: 2581-8651 Vol-4, Issue-1, Jan- Feb 2022 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/jhed.4.1.22 Peer-Reviewed Journal Journal of Humanities and Education Development (JHED) https://theshillonga.com/index.php/jhed 219 The Color Purple: Reflections on The Second Sex and Gender Issues Koyel Dasgupta Department of English, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India Email- koyeldasguptaa@gmail.com Received: 02 Jan 2022; Received in revised form: 14 Feb 2022; Accepted: 22 Feb 2022 ©2022 The Author(s). Published by TheShillonga. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Abstract In this paper, we shall look at Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in the light of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and analyse Celie’s transformation from the ‘Other’ in De Beauvoir’s terms to ‘Self’ in the course of the novel and how she grows up to speak for herself from being apparently silent under the oppression of her step-father and then her husband. We shall however question as to whether her ‘voicelessness’ can be considered equivalent to silence as she never stops from recording her experiences and emotions in her diary which is also a mode of expression. We shall also compare and contrast Celie, Shug, Sofia and Nettie in the light of The Second Sex. We shall also evaluate how Alice Walker has portrayed Celie’s liberation from the domination of the men through the lesbian relationship between Shug Avery and try and briefly observe Walker’s representation of the ‘Black Lesbian’. Simone de Beauvoir has talked how women have been considered below man for centuries but we shall question in the light of the novel that how can we differentiate between the two genders and can that with which we are born in between the two legs- a phallus or a vagina be the sole criteria to determine who we are, what we should do, what we should wear and how we should behave or in other words can the phallus or the vagina only define our gender? Keywords— Self, Other, oppression, liberating, transformation, Black Lesbian, gender, voicelessness, silence. Our prime attention in this paper shall be to observe Celie’s transformation from the ‘Other’ to the ‘Self’ in terms of Simone De Beauvoir’ ‘Self -Other’ dichotomy in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and in the course of it analyze the other female characters- Nettie, Shug and Sofia according to the ‘Self-Other’ binary and look at some other aspects of the novel in the light of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. We shall also look at how her lesbian relationship with Shug Avery liberates Celie and briefly at Walker’s representation of the ‘Black Lesbian’ and finally question the differentiation of humans on the basis of the presence of a phallus or a vagina. Simone De Beauvoir’s pioneering text The Second Sex laid the foundation stones for the development of feminist theories in the Western Europe and America in the 1960s. In the illustrious introduction of her book, De Beauvoir states that Masculinity is fathomed as the “absolute human type” (16). She argues that women have over centuries been denied to exert their authoritarian selves when it comes to the question of formulating a decision about their own lives (Vintges 135). The central argument of The Second Sex is that women has always been considered to be the ‘Other’ whereas man has been the ‘Self’ or the subject and this has eventually led to the subordination of women throughout the cultural history. According to her, “He is the Subject, he is the absolute- she is the Other” (Beauvoir 16). Alice Walker’s The Color Purple narrates the story of Celie, a young black girl who is repeatedly raped by a man who she addresses as ‘Pa’ and who later is unbosomed to be her stepfather. This man takes away both of her children, pushes her into an unhappy and a loveless marriage and then she is also segregated from her beloved sister. Eventually, she meets the glamorous and flamboyant singer Shug Avery and her life changes, she gets transformed, her spirit gets liberated and the novel ends with Celie reuniting with those she loves including her sister and children. Throughout the course of the novel, we meet Celie through her letters to God and to her sister Nettie. As a young girl who is raped, who fails to keep her children to herself, she truly appears as the ‘Other’, the subordinated one as compared to her stepfather Alphonso who is the ‘Absolute’. Alphonso’s ‘Absoluteness’ is so