The Search For Self-Acceptance in the Color Purple by Alice Walker

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Recommended: Literary analysis of the color purple

If any woman had to answer if she ever had trouble accepting herself, the response would be yes. According to Susan David, “All healthy human beings have an inner stream of thoughts and feelings that include criticism, doubt, and fear” (125-128). Depending on the person Alice Walker has as the recipients of Celie’s and Nettie’s letters, the text alters. The Color Purple is about a girl named Celie, who grows up in the south during the early 1920’s, surrounded by racism, sexism, and abuse from her father and husband. Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple in epistolary style and it traces Celie’s journey of finding her identity and path of finally accepting herself. On her journey she encounters a couple of women including one named Shug Avery, who helps turn Celie’s life around. Throughout The Color Purple, Alice Walker uses the epistolary structure to demonstrate self-acceptance in women.
Celie, the main character in The Color Purple has trouble figuring out who she is, and accepting herself because of the terrible life she had and still has while growing up. Her struggles begin when her stepfather says, "better not never tell nobody but god", after raping her (Walker 1). Not only does this make her feel violated and helpless, but she also has no one to talk about it with; The emotional pain lingers inside. Celie’s purpose of writing to God is that "Celie is willing to talk to anyone/anything that will listen to her" (Hammamsy). The people who surround her are either too young to understand her dilemmas or are the ones causing her emotional pain. The abuse she receives results in the beaters self-consciousness because he needs to prove who has the power. Being surrounded by people who do not have respect for themselves infl...

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...er commonalities amongst themselves that are shared.

Works Cited
Averbach, Margara. "The Color Purple." 1999. Novels for Students. Ed. Sheryl
Ciccarelli and Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 5. Detroit: Thomson-Gale,
1999. 59-62. Print.
Boynukara, Hasen, and Bülent Cercis Tanritanir. "Letter-Writing as Voice of
Women in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple." Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences 15.1 (2011):
279-98. EBSCO. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
David, Susan. "Emotional Agility." Harvard Business Review 91.11 (2013): 125-28.
EBSCO. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.
Hamamsy, Walid El. "Epistolary Memory: Revisiting Traumas in Women's Writing."
Alif: Journal of Comparitive Poetics 30 (2010): 150-75. EBSCO. Web. 5
Feb. 2014.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Orlando: Harvest-Harcourt, 1982. Print.

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