Perceptions of Power: Discipline and Punishment in Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices and Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Perceptions of Power: Discipline and Punishment in Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices and Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Perceptions of Power: Discipline and Punishment in Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices and
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
Kate O’Brien’s bildungsroman The Land of Spicesdeals with the topic of homosexuality
only briefly in the narrative. In an elliptical passage, a young Helen Archer caught Etienne and
her father “in the embrace of love” (165). The reference to homosexual intercourse led the
Censorship of Publications Board to ban the novel. While the Censorship of Publications Act of
1929 makes no clear reference to the Catholic Church’s influence on the censorship of books, the
concepts for the language of the act came from the church. Also, the specific reference to the
influence on the legislation. The novel itself demonstrates the influence the Church had on
people primarily through education. The process through which the laws on homosexuality, such
as the Censorship of Publications Act were enforced were more complex than the legislature
passing a law and someone burning the books. The Land of Spices did not directly deal with
these levels of discipline and punishment at any rate. The novel offered the opportunity to
examine how individual people exercised power and produced a certain reality. In addition to
the punishment of homosexuals, the novel dealt with how Ireland disciplined women’s bodies.
Later in her life Mère Marie-Hélène, Helen Archer, would change her view of how she punished
The formation and activities of the Censorship and Publications Board had an interesting
history. A brief discussion will help direct this article away from being a mere piece of boiler
plate bashing Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church--however much they had merited a
bashing. The Minister of Justice of Ireland in 1925, Kevin O’Higgins believed the state did not
need a formal apparatus for monitoring publications and banning them if necessary. According
to the Irish National Archives, however, O’Higgins faced a wave of pressure from the “public”
that disagreed that Irish censorship laws were inadequate to stamp out obscenity and moral
corruption. O’Higgins appointed the Committee on Evil Literature composed of three lay people
and two clergy (one from the Catholic Church and one from the Church of Ireland) to collect
evidence and make a recommendation. The Committee concluded that laws were inadequate to
protect Ireland from moral corruption, and the Ministry of Justice appointed the Committee on
evidence to the Committee on Evil Literature, but the fact that the general public pushed for a
formal censorship mechanism was a notable one. The push most likely came in support of the
formation of an “Irishness,” and to prove that the Irish state had the power to regulate its own
affairs. The enforcement of the bans required the participation of the public as relays of the
state’s power.
A different kind of discipline and punishment took place in Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple. In the 1930s, African American men and women faced discipline from the state and
whites in order to maintain their political disenfranchisement under Jim Crow. Walker’s novel
especially focused on the discipline of women and their bodies usually in violent ways. The
violence on the body violated Foucault’s finding that a great shift had taken place in criminal
justice after the eighteenth century, from inflicting punishment on the body to reforming the soul.
Why does Walker’s narrative contradict Foucault’s findings? The answer lied in race and the
lower socio-economic status closely linked to it. With increasing political enfranchisement,
white women such as Helen Archer had the legal means to redress their grievances. Political
empowerment laid farther on the horizon for African Americans and Africans.
The horde of heartless nuns were absent from O’Brien’s novel. The abusive nuns were
there, but Mère Marie-Hélène through the course of the novel more clearly realized the links
between politics and religion and how the notions of discipline and punishment from both
harmed the relationships within her life. Michel Foucault advocated minimizing negative
language about the repressive effects of power. Rather than strictly repressing people, the
decision makers created a system of norms and coercion that produced a certain kind of reality.
The reality that Anna and Helen lived in included the politically powerless bodies of women. A
number of factors played into Helen’s decision to enter the religious life. She never expressed
sexual interest in any men, so that limited her professional options. Even if she attempted to
have a career of her own, she would be expected to marry. The religious life allowed her to
pursue her religious vocation, which she seemed earnest about for the most part, and educate and
mentor younger girls without having the peer pressure to marry. Her experiences of both the
religious and personal life would change in the course of the novel, however.
Early in the novel, Helen, as the superior of the order’s convent in Ireland, wrote to her
superior in order to be relieved of her duties and be assigned somewhere else. She blamed
herself for her inability to understand Ireland and her own weaknesses of character. Specifically,
she cited the irresistible rising tide of nationalistic ideas that are “narrow” and “textbook in
nature” (302). O’Brien illustrated how the nationalism affected how people regarded Helen, the
English head of a French convent in Ireland. The parents of the children who the order educated,
some of the nuns themselves such as Mother Mary Andrew, and even the otherwise kind priest
Father Conroy regarded Helen with a high degree of suspicion. Father Conroy’s discussion with
Helen was an attempt to influence the Order’s pedagogy. He wanted a shift from training girls to
be “suitable wives for English Majors and Colonial Governors” (97). Both Father Conroy and
Helen acknowledged that the Order exerted significant influence on the girls it educated by the
time they left its shelter for the world. Father Conroy saw the opportunity to produce women
who would be the wives of Irishmen and “meet the changing times.”
I expected to find the most horrific part of the novel in the “Marks” chapter where each
girl stood before the entire school and had her performance for the past week publicly evaluated.
Foucault devoted a significant amount of time to discussing the role of the examination in
establishing a “norm” and producing “docile bodies.” He listed the five functions it provided:
quantitatively the nature of individuals, introduction of the constraint of conformity, and creating
the limits of the abnormal (182-83). The regimentation of the daily schedule, examinations, and
devices such as the paperweight established a system that maximized the application of
individual bodies at school work. The entire process was appropriate and is still used today.
Unless students are extremely lucky or wealthy, the workplace will reproduce the same
strictures, and the education merely served as due preparation for entering the home or the
workplace. The public examination of the “marks” had the ability to shame, yet no one could
recall life changing consequences such as expulsion: “no one ever remembered it to have
happened” (76). A little later, Helen shockingly admitted “ that in her nine years as a teaching
nun, in Vienna, Turin, and Cracow, she had never deducted a solitary mark from the maximum of
any pupil” (80). Her reluctance to use punishment at a crucial moment threatened the system of
power, but she considered the marks more of a measure of the other nuns, who usually deducted
The need for discipline and punishment and Helen’s own distaste for it due to her
relationship with her father caused the internal conflict. Helen’s religious education taught her
that homosexuality was a sin, and that moreover, since he had had sex outside of marriage, he
had committed adultery. O’Brien wanted the reasons for Helen’s entry into the religious life to
remain a mystery, so she never adequately explained the reasons, until the passage that earned
the book a ban. In the “Vocation” chapter, O’Brien wrote that Helen admitted the reason “to no
other human being” and described the incident that produced the decision as a shock in a neat
piece of free indirect discourse (19). Ideally, a punishment should clearly link to the crime to
ensure that the offending parties realize they must amend their conduct and that others learn from
the mistake. If Helen believed that her father’s sexual act destroyed the familial bonds, she
destroyed her bond with her father by turning her back on her life and her relationship with him.
She entered the convent. On the interpersonal level, Helen’s punishment for her father failed, as
he remained totally unaware of the injury he had inflicted on her. On the larger level it
Helen spoke of the pure hate she felt for her father for years. By the time her father was
old and dying, however, she came to realize that punishment for her father was a bad reason to
enter the religious life. She reaped rewards from the decision, but she experienced some
cognitive dissonance between the hatred she felt for her father and the love and respect that her
religion commanded her to have for her father. Instead, it was her father who forgave her. In the
novel, the personal, the political, and the religious were entangled in postcolonial Ireland. The
cause at the time was to produce an independent Ireland and religion and education provided the
means to that end. As an accomplished writer, O’Brien would have been well aware that
homosexuality was a taboo topic in Ireland. The fact that the book became banned only
underscored how Irish and Catholic culture coerced people into the heterosexual norm through
Overall, the thematic of the novel was primarily ambivalent in its judgments towards the
institutions of the novel. Only in its feminism does the novel truly seem progressive in the face
of the perhaps somewhat conservative established social order of Ireland. Mère Marie-Hélène
herself described the Bishop as progressive in an early passage in relation to his attitude toward
the order’s pedagogy. Progressive, in this sense, meant getting the school behind the cause of
Irish nationalism, a cause that the Reverend Mother did not understand and privately expressed
some contempt for. The Bishop seemed to have the similar chauvinistic attitude toward women
as Father Conroy: “He believed in education--up to a point, or when they seemed worth it--of
women. He said that, when they had brains, which was seldom, these tended to be fresher and
more independent than the brains of men” (265). In a truly revolutionary move, Mère Marie-
Hélène cites the Bishop as the winning salvo in her war with Anna’s grandmother over Anna’s
scholarship to the University College. She perhaps slightly misrepresented the Bishop’s opinion
when she agrees that the Bishop “expects” Anna to take the scholarship because she has “won”
it, in the sense that she earned it (276). Mrs. Condon, Anna’s grandmother, acknowledged that
she failed to keep up with current trends. O’Brien showed that there were people more
conservative than even the Bishop, who as a church official and man would have been more
educated than Mrs. Condon. Until she encountered a more progressive opinion from a respected
church authority, she did not consider changing her point of view on the education of women in
Ireland. Education and worldliness figured as remedies for the myopic nationalism of Irish
I disagree on a minor point with Clare Wallace, that “the characters who espouse Irish
nationalism in the novel, namely the Bishop and Father Conroy, are portrayed without
sympathy” (22). The Bishop’s support for Anna showed his somewhat progressive nature. Mère
Marie-Hélène quickly repented of her harsh attitude toward Father Conroy after he gracefully
handled Anna’s question of what adultery was. The moment was crucial, because he could have
permanently traumatized the girl and totally distorted her view of sexuality. His response was
conventionally Catholic, but it was preferable to the infamous retreat sermon in James Joyce’s A
raised for a time in Belgium, and then living and working in Italy, Austria, France, and Poland in
the pursuit of her religious vocation. Wallace attributed the ambivalence of the text to Mère
concept among contemplatives, Wallace described it in secular terms, that of seeing oneself from
the outside. As the Bishop mentioned, the Saint Famille was not a contemplative order, but the
Reverend Mother surely would have encountered the concept at some point in her religious life,
if not her earlier education. Certainly she benefited from the religious life and enjoyed it despite
its troubles. O’Brien would later pen a biography of the mystic St. Teresa of Avila, published in
1951. Instead, the text’s ambivalence arose from the Reverend Mother’s own realization that she
had judged her father too harshly and estranged herself from him. Also, she realized her own
complicity in the programs of the Catholic Church to censure homosexual activity and the
subordination of women to men. She had lived her life convinced of the rightness of her hatred
for her father, but a number of changes in her circumstances caused her point of view to change.
Mère Marie-Hélène’s relationship with the young Anna Murphy probably produced the
biggest change on her in the novel. She noted similarities between herself and Anna, calling her
a “mirror” of herself. They were both intellectually gifted, but had troubled home lives. Anna’s
parents were poor, her father the stereotypical Irish alcoholic, and so her grandmother financially
supported her and the rest of her family. Helen lost her mother when she was young and had her
world turned upside down when she discovered her father’s homosexuality. Breen pointed out
that O’Brien used the language of psychological trauma to describe Helen’s mental state in the
days after the discovery. Rather than stand up to her father and confront him, or stand up to the
Church’s teaching on his sexuality, she submitted to the neat morality the Church packaged for
her and cut herself off from her father. Anna demonstrated a similar passiveness in her
confrontation with Mother Mary Andrew over the examination which was to win her Emulation,
as Wallace pointed out. Helen exorcised her own timidity into something productive after her
encounter with Anna’s grandmother. Allowing Anna to witness the confrontation might have
affected her own passiveness as well. In Anna, Helen sees the potential that she turned her back
on because of her own acceptance of the Church’s attitude toward her father. Her acceptance of
the life within the convent was also mostly ill-suited for her talents and demeanor, but it served
the purposes she desired at the point in her life when she made the decision to enter the convent.
Helen ultimately came to regard the religious vocation as a “strange thing” (258). The
title of the novel alludes to the George Herbert poem “Prayer.” For him, prayer is the “land of
spices, something understood.” Her entry into the land of spices only really occurs near the end
of the novel when she reconciled with her father and experiences a real spiritual awakening
through mostly secular means. When Anna expressed distress over dealing with the grief from
the death of her brother Charlie, rather than say a prayer, the Reverend Mother advised Anna to
recite the poem she had memorized and recited for the Reverend Mother when she was younger.
The moment and advice was significant since Helen’s father Henry was a man of letters who had
worked in the field of literature and had schooled Helen in it. She had fled from that life in an
attempt to punish her father, but she saw the value in it after her father’s death. While Helen was
not at the side of her father’s death bed, their low-key reconciliation occurred, perhaps
posthumously. The lack of the key emotional moment that readers expected led to the criticisms
The kinds of coercion demonstrated in the exercises of power in The Land of Spices
contrast sharply with the deployment of power in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. While the
efforts to establish and maintain a norm of heterosexuality and Irish identity caused negative
effects, no one stood in mortal danger due to the punishments meted out to them. The great shift
in punishment came about at the end of the eighteenth century, when the focus of legal
discourses moved from men’s bodies to their souls. Despite the shift in criminal justices
discourses toward affecting men’s souls, the body remained the site of trauma and punishment in
The Color Purple. The main factors to account for the differences between the two novels were
the socio-economic statuses of the main characters. The Land of Spicestook place up until 1916,
and the campaigns of the suffrage movements within the novel attested to the fact that women
were not fully enfranchised voters until 1928. Nevertheless, Helen Archer enjoyed a substantial
education and managed to enter a profession that provided for the basic needs of her survival
without the support of a husband. Celie, the protagonist of Alice Walker’s novel attended school
until she was forced to leave when she became impregnated after her step-father raped her.
The rape served as a kind of discipline to prepare Celie for her life serving the needs of
her husband. Her stepfather said: “You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t” before he raped
her. When she cried, he “start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it” (1). The
first of many beatings that Celie mentioned came in the first few pages of the novel, establishing
the pattern of punishment that would continue for the majority of the rest of her life. Cheung
saw the shutting up of Celie as imparting a disability of speech, while the narrative transformed
that disability into a “felicity” (162). The possibility of rape became linked for Celie with other
“wifely duties,” so that she becomes sick whenever she cooks. Her stepfather firmly established
the system of gender difference where men perform certain tasks and women usually fulfilled
domestic tasks. Unlike Helen Archer, who could exercise some control over her destiny and
actually used her choices to punish her father, Celie was more clearly marked as property traded
from her stepfather to Mr. ______ alongside a cow. Frederick Douglass wrote about the
degradation of men and women being traded alongside livestock and Walker clearly invoked the
same kind of self-empowerment and the ability to earn her own living that Helen enjoyed. Her
transformation began when she finally left Mr. _____ and then finally found her vocation in
sewing pants for other people, who enjoyed them enough to evidently pay her for them. Only
through greater independence in her choices in life and her economic prosperity in particular,
could she live her life in a way that she found personally fulfilling. In a letter to her sister Nettie
she wrote: “I am so happy. I got love, I got work, I got money, friends, and time” (218). The
extreme methods of discipline that Celie overcame in order to assert her own African American
How then can readers reconcile modern punishment, which has displaced the older model
that directly altered or destroyed the body, with Alice Walker’s narrative? Why are African
American bodies rather than souls the sites for discipline and punishment rather than their souls?
The answer appeared to lie in the issue of race. The purpose of punishment within The Land of
Spicesaligned neatly with Foucault’s guide that modern punishment directs itself to the subject’s
soul. The purpose of Helen’s decision to enter the convent was to reform her father. She hoped
that he would acknowledge his faults, how he hurt himself and the rest his family and amend his
ways. The discipline of the girls in the school was to “educate our children in the Christian
virtues and graces,” according to Mère Marie-Hélène (97). The history of whites in America
disciplining and punishing slaves certainly played into the punishment of the African American
body in The Color Purple. Alice Walker offered another and perhaps more controversial source
Nettie, Celie’s sister, took care of Celie’s son Adam while working as a missionary in
Africa. Adam developed a romantic interest in a Tashi, a girl from the Olinka tribe that Nettie
works with. In order to become a woman, Tashi must receive the customary marks on the face
that all women in the Olinka tribe received and also to undergo the female rite of initiation--
female circumcision. The practice has been relatively common in some areas of Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia, but has not been practiced as widely among Anglos. In the novel, the
facial marks and the lack of the practices among Anglos played an integral role in the formation
of an African subjectivity, especially on the terms of opposition to Anglo norms. The facial
marks serve as a visible sign of difference and also a marker of the more private body
modification. In another work Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual
Blinding of Women, Alice Walker more clearly attacked the practice as an attempt to discipline
women’s bodies and affect their sexuality. Celie failed to have an orgasm, despite the times she
engaged in sexual intercourse with Mr. _____, until her sexual encounters with Shug. Celie’s
body became marked from having children, but she did not have her genitals cut like Tashi. But
her experiences with intercourse in her marriage are similar to the effects desired from
circumcision, according to Walker. The poorer and more disenfranchised the person within
Walker’s novel, the more their bodies became the direct target of discipline. The Olinka no
longer had any land to call their own or the plants they traditionally used to build their homes.
They had to buy sheet metal to construct their homes and work for the rubber company in order
For Celie, the soul was a private space of resistance against the discipline of men and
whites. As demonstrations of her faith, Celie addressed most of her letters to God and after a
brief crisis of faith, ended each letter with “amen,” making each letter a prayer but also making
each letter a proper epistle. I used the word to specifically refer to the biblical texts. In her
preface, Alice Walker described The Color Purpleas a journey or transformation in personal
faith. Even though men could punish Celie’s body and take the Olinka’s land, they could not
affect an individual’s soul. Walker wrote: “no one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious
connection to All That Is. Not the poor. Not the suffering. Not the writer sitting in the open
field. Not the suffering.” Celie came closest to the experience that Walker described when she
smoked marijuana. While under its affects, Sofia heard a humming, and soon, everyone else in
the room heard it. They tried to find the source of the noise, but do not see anything.
I say, Everything.
Hankinson has pointed out the importance of Celie’s spiritual transformation from monotheism
into a kind of pantheism to her personal growth (320). The passage referred to an altered state of
observation or experimentation. Drug laws and their related punishments disallow the
marijuana. The institutionalization of the criminal justice system and the prevalence of
surveillance preclude such possibilities, hence Grady and Mary Agnes have to move to Costa
In an attempt to deal with discipline and punishment differently, Alice Walker and Kate
O’Brien imagined woman-centered spaces that are structured differently from patriarchal
societies and exercise power in a different way. Celie’s ability to forgive Mr. _____ for the years
of abuse pushed the boundaries of believability for readers. Despite the beatings, the verbal
abuse, and the worst injury to Celie personally, the withholding of Nettie’s letters for years, by
the end of the novel, she can stand beside him on the porch and share the special moment of the
return of her own long lost children and sister. Alice Walker and Kate O’Brien do not desire to
punish the men who have coerced women into submission, instead, they produce an alternative
space where women can labor and support one another and exercise power in alternate ways. In
The Land of Spices, the space was the convent school, where the women had the authority and
guided the girls on the path to maturity. The patriarchal figures of the priest and the bishop
existed, but the Saint Famille enjoyed a great deal of independence. Mère Marie-Hélène herself
was mentored by a woman in the process of her spiritual formation. Only a man could
administer the sacraments, but the most important life lessons were passed between women.
Helen helped Anna to deal with her grief over the death of her brother Charlie while Anna served
as a kind of daughter, giving Helen the experience of the parent-child relationship that had been
destroyed in her own life. The convent space was very much a separate space set apart from
patriarchal influences, the desire for which had its origins in early twentieth century feminist
Alice Walker’s The Color Purpleimagined a space where men could be freed from their
need to dominate women. The Mr. _____ at the end of the novel has changed from the
occupation). For most of the male characters in the novel to improve, they experienced some
kind of feminization. Due to compulsive eating, Harpo’s stomach became swollen as if he were
pregnant, and later puts on a skirt He asked Celie to marry him again, but she declined so that
they could enjoy their relationship as friends and not have to fall into the exploitative pattern of
their marriage again. Celie provided employment, a key to her own happiness and success, for
Sofia. Shug returned at the end and all the other people important to Celie were nearer to her at
the end of the novel. Helen never really had a chance to properly reconcile with her father, while
Celie reunited with her family and friends. The most pleasurable intercourse Celie had in the
novel was with Shug, but a lesbian relationship between the two remained a distinct
impossibility due to the setting. Martha Cutter saw Celie’s ability to liberate herself from the
social and linguistic forces of domination, but few things happen perfectly (Cutter 161). The
power for that liberation came from the changes the women realized in the men, essentially
Kate O’Brien and Alice Walker showed how power has traditionally been exercised in
Irish and American societies and also entered into the feminist discourses of which course of
action would be best for the empowerment of women. They both believed economic
independence was crucial for a woman’s happiness and that men would benefit from learning
from women. Walker’s novel, however, points out how Foucault’s ideas might not be universal
and blind to race. Through the course of O’Brien’s novel, readers traced the developments of
Anna Murphy and Helen Archer. The methods of discipline and punishment in Kate O’Brien’s
The Land of Spices, within an educated white bourgeois context neatly aligned with Foucault’s
model for modern discipline. Alice Walker’s The Color Purpleshowed how discipline and
punishment was still very much concerned with the African American body, particularly within
the community itself. Even Sofia who spent time in prison and therefore might seem to fit the
Foucauldian model, has her punishment expiated through Mary Agnes’s body. Sofia’s
Breen, Mary. “Something Understood?: Kate O’Brien and The Land of Spices.” Ordinary
People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien. Ed. Eibhear Walshe. Cork: Cork UP, 1993
Cheung, King-Kok. “’Don’t Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman
Cutter, Martha. “Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker’s Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. 1977. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random,
1995.
Hankinson, Stacie Lynn. “From Monotheism to Pantheism: Liberation from Patriarchy in Alice
Quinlan, Tom. “Ferreting Out Evil: The Records of the Committee on Evil Literature.” Irish
<http://www.nationalarchives.ie/topics/evil_lit/article.htm>
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1982. New York: Harcourt, 2003.
Wallace, Clare. “Judgement in Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices.” Back to the Present
Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History Since 1798. Eds. Patricia A. Lynch,