something i'm saying at the moment

Walker's theory of embodiment is a theory of process, emphasizing gradual stages or elements of a dialogic experience, or a circular experience: it spirals in on itself and back out, emerging gradually. Celie enters her body first by being singled out and loved, first in small doses, with Nettie and with Sofia; then in a flood of closeness with Shug, who sings the song that Celie “help scratch out” when she was taking care of Shug at home (53). Even before their affair makes the power of love so explicit, Walker suggests that the creative production of music follows upon a friendly and intimate moment of caretaking. When Shug calls out "Miss Celie" at the juke joint, naming the new song after her and describing its loving origin publicly, Celie emerges from a sulk about not being noticed to hum along and note this novelty: “First time somebody made something and name it after me” (73). These segments of gradual awareness—told in brief sentences that narrate small events and pass quickly into describing other people’s activities—build upon one another to illustrate how a slow and reliable experience of love and affection can gradually release the protective boundary Celie has established around her emotional life.

Walker's model also emphasizes the centrality, and mutual reinforcement, of safety and commitment. Shug decides to stay and protect Celie from physical violence—in other words, to commit her love to Celie’s safety and security. It is important to note that Celie's spiritual teacher is not self-sacrificing, just giving: although her decision to stay is a loving act, it is not a selfless one; she can sing at the juke joint and she loves Mr. ____'s company and their routine, satisfying sex. Walker argues that love, support, and intimacy need not go along with self-sacrifice, contravening the demands of the salvific wish. At the same time, Celie develops a sort of sisterly friendship with Squeak, mentoring her to try to stand up to her husband. The novel turns into a story of Celie’s development when the feeble signs of intimacy she carried with her into her marriage blossom into a true friendship through the healing stages of embodiment.

Chronologically, Walker links Celie's ability to connect with the entire extended family with Shug's direct encouragement of Celie's sexuality. In turn, when Celie gets to know her own body and mind, she becomes involved in a more intimate and committed romantic and sexual connection with Shug. Walker argues in The Color Purple that healthy black female embodiment is a dialogic and cumulative process that builds upon the intersections of physical, emotional, and social health—of external awareness and internal consciousness, of getting to know yourself as an other and as yourself:

“I lie back on my 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? she say from the door.

It mine, I say. Where the button?

Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little.

I look at her and touch it with my finger. (78)

As Celie recognizes herself in the mirror, she can move on to see herself in an other; her first contact with her clitoris is when she looks at Shug, as though this central experience of pleasure is linked with her ability to connect with another woman. Shug, as the one who supplies the mirror and keeps a lookout for the men in the house, literally guards the door and provides the reflection for Celie to become comfortable with her most intimate self. The obvious homoeroticism of this passage is equalled by its auto-eroticism: what is most interesting to Celie is herself. Throughout the novel, Celie’s body becomes more her own, gradually. What began in an experience of of recognizing herself through halting sentences, brief moments, and mirrored reflections, concludes with Celie's complete self-reliance and immersion in her community. She is even, at novel's end, living in the rehabilitated house of her trauma and reunited with her sister, suggesting that the original wounds of her embodiment have at last been healed.