Redemption in The Color Purple
Alice Walker grew up in rural Georgia in the mid 1900s as the daughter of two poor sharecroppers. Throughout her life, she has been forced to face and overcome arduous lessons of life. Once she managed to transfer the struggles of her life into a book, she instantaneously became a world-renowned author and Pulitzer Prize winner. The Color Purple is a riveting novel about the struggle between redemption and revenge according to Dinitia Smith. The novel takes place rural Georgia, starting in the early 1900s over a period of 30 years. Albert, also known as Mr._____, and his son Harpo must prevail over their evil acts towards other people, especially women. Albert and Harpo wrong many people throughout their lives. To be redeemed, they must first learn to love others, then reflect upon their mistakes, and finally become courageous enough to take responsibility for their actions. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker effectively develops Albert and Harpo through redemption using love, reflection, and responsibility.
Through the course of the novel, Albert is an appalling husband, father, and person. He treats his wife, Celie as if she is his slave from the beginning of their arranged marriage; he expects her to cook three meals a day, and take care of his many children from his previous marriage. Albert does not begin to realize the pain he is causing, or at least try to make himself change until Celie leaves him. “You a lowdown dog is what’s wrong, I say. It’s time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body is just the welcome mat I need…” (Walker 207). It took words as powerful as these for him to become aware of the fact that he did not love or resp...
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In The Color Purple, Alice Walker efficiently develops Albert and Harpo through three key aspects of redemption: love, responsibility, and reflection. Albert and Harpo are both practically forced to recognize how they were treating people; Albert with Celie’s speech, and Harpo with the way Sofia beat him up. Next, the two reflect on their errors in life. How they both mistreated their wives, and suppressed them. Then they gain the bravery to apologize to the people they realized that they really do love, and be forgiven (Walker 231). Albert and Harpo learn a valuable lesson throughout the years; one they will surely never forget. Alice Walker proficiently shows the development of two new people, through redemption using love, reflection, and responsibility.
Works Cited:
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1982. New York: Pocket, 1985.
Empathy is used to create change in the world by reaching out to the emotions of people and attending to them. It is used to help others learn and decide on matters that would not be reasonable without feelings attached to them. Empathy helps bring together communities that would have long ago drifted apart, but instead welcomed all who were different. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This attribute of human-beings really allows us to not only attend to situations as if they were our own, but it allows us to feel most of what others feel because humans are very much alike in some ways. In many of the articles and novels that we have read this quarter, characters from different pieces of context have portrayed empathy whether it was toward
Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999
“Empathy has been defined as the process of entering into the world of another: “an understanding and appreciation of the thoughts, feelings, experiences and circumstances of another human being”, as stated from this weeks lecture. However this is just the tip of the ice burg. Empathy is dynamic, flowing and changing with every circumstance.
Alice Walker is the pride of African Americans, who are considered as the most suppressed community within United States. She was born on 9th February 1944 in Georgia. She started her career as a social worker activist, followed by teaching and writer. She has secured many awards for her unprecedented works. The third novel of Alice Walker “The Color Purple” was published in 1982, which gave the real flight to her publications; as she received massive credits from around the world. Her works basically include short stories, novels and essays that are always evidently centered on the struggles and adversities of black women particularly in United States. Walker uses the writing as her standard to spread her voice and to process experiences of
Alice Walker’s writings were greatly influenced by the political and societal happenings around her during the 1960s and 1970s. She not only wrote about events that were taking place, she participated in them as well. Her devoted time and energy into society is very evident in her works. The Color Purple, one of Walker’s most prized novels, sends out a social message that concerns women’s struggle for freedom in a society where they are viewed as inferior to men. The events that happened during and previous to her writing of The Color Purple had a tremendous impact on the standpoint of the novel.
Burton defines empathy as the ability to not only recognize but also to share another person’s or a fictional character’s or a sentient beings’ emotions. It involves seeing a person’s situation from his or her own perspective and then sharing his or her emotions and distress (1). Chismar posits that to empathize is basically to respond to another person’ perceived state of emotion by experiencing similar feelings. Empathy, therefore, implies sharing another person’s feeling without necessary showing any affection or desire to help. For one to empathize, he or she must at least care for, be interested in or concerned about
Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations: Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publisher, 2000. Print.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker is the story of a poor black woman living in the south between World War 1 and World War 2. This was at a time when, although slavery had ended,many women were still virtually in bondage, and had to put up with many conditions that was reminiscent of the days of slavery. The problem was that they had to endure being treated like an inferior being by their own families sometimes, as well as from the white people that lived there. It was a life that was filled with misery for many black women, and they felt helpless to do anything about their situations.
Throughout, “The Color Purple” Walker shows much understanding of struggle and realizes that her life is filled with pain and struggle of all sorts. Her husband and love of her life is mostly the cause of it. By the time she realizes it jus becomes to too late to find a turning point to it. So, therefore she chooses to live with it. “Love, as much as Walker celebrates it, is never an unconflicted garden of earthly delights, mystic, romantic, lush. It is, rather, learned, often fought for, birthed in pain”(Pamela A smith). Basically, smith describes that walker has gone through much pain in life then happiness ...
Women have battled for centuries to be equivalent to men. In “The Color Purple," Alice Walker illustrates the theme of women’s heartache, racist acts, and complications of a day to day woman. The Color Purple took place during a demeaning era to not only African American women but African Americans in general were treated inhumane. African American women submitted themselves to controlling men due to the belief of that’s how it should be. During this time, women were used for manual and sexual labor. They were referred as one’s property, hardly spoken of or treated like human-beings. Women faced lack of self-love and identity therefore the definition of love was clouded.
In southern place of Rural Georgia there were racial issues. Walker discuss stereotypes that Celie went through as the daughter of a successful store owner, which ran by a white man Celie did not have no right to. The black characters and community were stereotyped through their lives to have human rights (Walker 88-89). Walker engages the struggle between blacks and whites social class, blacks were poor and the whites were rich. This captures the deep roots of the south discrimination against blacks. African-American women went through misery, and pain of racism to be discriminated by the color of their skin. Another major racist issue Hurston represent in “The Color Purple” is when Sofia tells the mayors wife saying “hell no” about her children working for her, Sofia was beaten for striking back to a white man (Walker 87). Racism and discrimination in the black culture did not have basic rights as the whites instead they suffered from being mistreated to losing moral
The bleak tone of this story takes a particularly sad and disturbing tinge when the wife illustrates a scene from early on in her marriage where she tries to get her husband to satisfy her desire and provide her with mutual satisfaction, only to have him rebuke and reprimand her. In fact, the husband responds in such a particularly brusque and hysterical manner that the reader can see how traumatized the wife would have been at ...
Virginia Woolf, in her novels, set out to portray the self and the limits associated with it. She wanted the reader to understand time and how the characters could be caught within it. She felt that time could be transcended, even if it was momentarily, by one becoming involved with their work, art, a place, or someone else. She felt that her works provided a change from the typical egotistical work of males during her time, she makes it clear that women do not posses this trait. Woolf did not believe that women could influence as men through ego, yet she did feel [and portray] that certain men do hold the characteristics of women, such as respect for others and the ability to understand many experiences. Virginia Woolf made many of her time realize that traditional literature was no longer good enough and valid. She caused many women to become interested in writing, and can be seen as greatly influential in literary history
Empathy is the ‘capacity’ to share and understand another person’s ‘state of mind’ or their emotion. It is an experience of the outlook on emotions of another person being within themselves (Ioannides & Konstantikaki, 2008). There are two different types of empathy: affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is the capacity in which a person can respond to another person’s emotional state using the right type of emotion. On the other hand, cognitive empathy is a person’s capacity to understand what someone else is feeling. (Rogers, Dziobek, Hassenstab, Wolf & Convit, 2006). This essay will look at explaining how biology and individual differences help us to understand empathy as a complex, multi-dimensional trait.
Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from other authors of her time. The unique characteristics of her works such as the structure, characterization, themes, etc are difficult to imitate and cause a strong impression in her literary pieces. “Virginia Woolf’s works are strongly idiosyncratic, strange, a surprise to ...