What is the importance of the color purple in the novel, The Almost Sisters?

The color purple is used as a motif throughout The Almost Sisters, supporting and emphasizing the above theme of dichotomy. Jackson uses purple to symbolize both rage and innocence, protection and naïveté. Violet and Lavender are connected by their purple themed names. At birth, Lavender is described by Leia as a “wrinkly purple apple” (58). The innocence of Violet is echoed by Lavender. Her parents fight is the first big negative event in her sheltered life. She is clueless about teenage boy intentions, believing Hugh to be a friend and not realizing his budding manhood and corresponding hormones. Leia draws the comparison between Violet and Lavender; “Put this kid in a yellow sundress and there was page two Violet—bunnies, birds, and all” (122). This connection is strengthened by the fact that Lavender does in fact wear a yellow sundress in a following scene.

The color purple is also linked to Violence. Her unitard is purple-black and her hair is also “crazy purple” (42). A purple shadow also denotes her presence in Leia’s comic, she “is a purple shadow in the center of a blaze, like the wick of a candle flame” (153). Violence embodies her name, her rage dictating her movements, eating “men like they were snack cakes and was never, never sorry” (35). Violence symbolizes action and is a protector of the innocent. Her power and violence places her in contrast to Violet and Lavender. She is the darker side of purple.

Leia finds herself embodying Violence’s qualities and her rage. She links herself to her vengeful antihero, using the purple motif; “That pulsing, purple urge to act went through me again, pushed hard by my heart and carried in my blood. It zinged through my limbs, and it had no place to go except back to my center, where my relentless heart sent it rushing back through me again” (308). Purple is the color of action, of defending the weak. When Leia swaps Birchie and Wattie’s DNA sample she states that she had been “filled with pent-up purple action this whole time” (314). She notes a similar rage and need to act in her grandmother, linking her too to her antihero; “I realized she was boiling with it, too, this deep purple desire to make it all stop” (311).