The Color Purple by Alice Walker was a particularly enjoyable book. One reason is because the book relates to my own life in some ways. The main character, Celie, feels isolated because her father abuses her. She writes letters to God because she has no one else she can connect with. “Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along” (Walker 17). Celie writes to God because she feels loved by him and she needs a companion or a friend to talk to. I, myself, am a Christian and I feel the same way. Although I am not abused, I feel her sense of loneliness. Sometimes I feel as if I have to go through all of the stress of school and studying alone, but then I realize many of my peers are feeling the same way. This book reminds me of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Both of these books consist of the theme of survival. For instance, the protagonist, Celie, in The Color Purple suffers trying to survive bullying, rape, and abuse. “He start to choke me, saying, ‘You better shut up and git used to it.’ But I don't never git used to it” (Walker 1). This quote is when Celie is raped by her own father; the quote represents the suffering and pain Celie has to endure …show more content…
The overall message of the book is that woman should stand up to men if they are being oppressed by them. Celie learns that she can be who she really is instead of shying away from reality. "Celie, she say, Do you love me? She down on her knees by now, tears falling all over the place. My heart hurt so much I can't believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this? But I'm a woman. I love you, I say. Whatever happen, whatever you do, I love you” (Walker 250). A woman named Shug is brought into Celie’s life and they have a deep love and respect for one another. Shug really cares about Celie and she helps Celie learn how to love herself. Feminism is a key theme of The Color
The woman in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and the woman in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire both struggle with discrimination. Celie, a passive young woman, finds herself in mistreatment and isolation, leading to emotional numbness, in addition to a society in which females are deemed second-rate furthermore subservient to the males surrounding them. Like Celie, Blanche DuBois, a desperate woman, who finds herself dependent on men, is also caught in a battle between survival and sexism during the transformation from the old to the new coming South.
1) The major theme of the book is respectability. In the 1950 's Rosa Parks became the symbol for black female resistance in the
In novels the complexity of the relationships between characters helps illuminate the underlying message. Often times the bond between the protagonist and a foil character help establish the theme the best. In the novel, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the protagonist, Celie, is verbally, physically, and sexually abused by several men in her life. Because of the despicable experiences with men Celie feels she has no one to turn to; however, she is able to find confidence in various women that cross her path. Sofia, a strong and confident woman, serves as a foil to Celie in the novel by contrasting Celie’s shy and passive behavior with bold and brassy personality. The relationship between these two women illuminates the importance strong female relationships from their looking out for each other and the drastic contrasting personalities of the two women.
Sisterhood does not only bring women together, it also helps make women stronger individuals in a patriarchal society. For instance, The Women of Brewster Place is an African American novel by Gloria Naylor that takes place in 1982 in Brewster Place. This novel contains several stories which focus on the lives of each of the seven women that live there. These women come to Brewster Place to find comfort. Eventually, the women build bonds that help them deal with the negativity of the society that they live in. In addition, The Color Purple by Alice Walker is an epistolary novel that takes place in rural Georgia during the 1980’s. Celie, who is the protagonist in The Color Purple, is a poor and uneducated fourteen year old African American girl. She is constantly physically and mentally abused by the men in her life. She forms strong friendships with women whom she idolizes and women who stand up to the social norms of society. In the end she gains confidence and becomes a stronger individual. The women in the novels The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place have shown that the only way to survive in a patriarchal society is through sisterhood.
Celie, the main character in the film The Color Purple, suffers through isolation and abuse largely because she chooses to endure abuse. At first, she lacks the courage and resoluteness to challenge her abusive husband; she remains a servant who obeys her husband’s every wish and command. With no one to confide in and nobody to care for her, she keeps to herself, responding to violence with silence. Once she meets the outgoing, and friendly Shug, Celie realizes the simple fact that she can create friendships if she chooses to extend herself. She realizes that she has chosen to endure Albert’s abuse because she never chose to face her fears and face him. Once she stands up for herself, and extends herself towards others, she enjoys the life she could have had she chosen independence from Albert early on.
Women haven’t but recently really been consider equal to men. In the past it was even worse, not to even mention if you were a black woman you were even less so then the white women. The Color Purple is about a story of two sister that were separated when they were young , they were once best friends. Celie was the older sister that was abused by her father and what considered ugly and sent to marry and man to clean and cook for him. Netti the younger sister was considered a prize a beautiful girl that all the men wanted. One day they got separated by Celie’s abusive husband and didn’t see each other for over twenty years. During this time there was lots of
The Color Purple is a biased, unbalanced view into the life of black women during the early to mid-nineteen hundreds. While it is obvious that a woman who in her own right is racist, chauvinist, and ignorant to the way that the world really works wrote the novel, it has been requested that the class write a paper on the story. Whilst this writer does not agree with this novel or anything that Alice Walker thinks or feels, obligingly this paper is been written. The Color Purple and the Joy Luck Club had many similarities, the most notably the presence of weak, ill bred, and quite frankly embarrassing male characters.
What would it be like to live in a world where you don’t have any say in what goes on in your own life? While The Color Purple doesn’t ask think question directly it really causes its viewers to begin to wonder what it would have been like to live in the world that Alice Walker creates with her novel. In this story the main character is Celie. She is a black woman who never has had a choice in her life. From a young age her father abused her and then sent her off to marry a man who he did not know at all. Her father also got her pregnant two times and both times her forced her to give away her children. Mister was just as abusive as her father had been to her and she was still never given a choice. This begins to change as she meets people in the story like Shug and Sofia. Both Shug and Sofia are strong willed women who don’t let men control their lives because they have their own agendas and they will not let people get in the way of that. One of the hardest things that she has to face is her sister Nettie leaving her because Mister kicked her out of his house. After this Celie is basically alone and she doesn’t hear from Celie again for a long time because Mister always gets the mail and he will not let Celie go and get the mail. Throughout the story you see how Celie is constantly shut down, but one day she gets the courage to stand up for herself and it is one of the turning points in the story. With a story as dramatic and powerful as this one there are a lot of scenes that impact viewers as the watch the movie. There are so many pivotal moments that change the story that you almost have to watch it twice just to pick up on everything. In The Color Purple by Alice Walker my three favorite scenes are when Shug and Celie begin ...
that Jane is unhappy and it is evident by the way she hides behind the
It was as if Celie was reborn as a different person. A person who not only had the courage to tell Albert off, but someone who left her husband to go with Shug to Memphis to start a pant factory, with two girls working under her. The book is truly a book about self-discovery and learning to love. Celie's path is an expression of all people's quest for self-sufficiency. The novel is the story of a timid woman finding herself.
In the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the main character, Celie, grows from being a scared and obedient wife to a strong and confident when her sister Nettie, Sofia and Shug Avery show her that she is a person worth of love and happiness by giving he strength and confidence. First off, Nettie is one of the first people to help Celie to realize her worth. Since they are sisters, Nettie has been teaching Celie things her whole life. One of the best things that Nettie has done for Celie was teaching her to read. By trying to teach her reading, she gave her something that no one could take away: knowledge. This knowledge also served as a statement in a sort of rebellious way because women, let alone women of color, were not supposed to
She was so young and scared. Her dad favorite Nettie more than her, so he decided to hurt her. He got Celie pregnant and gave the baby away to a preacher and his wife. Living in that house was like hell to Celie, she hated every minute of it. Even though it was slave days, her own father made her his own personal slave around the house. She had to cook supper every day, clean after all of those kids. Celie got recognized by this man at church named “Mister” and her father gave her to him because he did not really want Celie anymore. Celie, had been through a lot staying there with mister. The only way she could escape from her problems, was by writing in her diary (Wall). Although Celie initially writes her diary letters to heal the rift that has ensued from her sexual violation and to create an identity from fragmentation, the form of her text necessarily yokes together unity and disparity” (Wall). Mister hates Celie just because she is a woman. He claims women are not equal to men and that they should serv...
In this paper the author analyzes the contents of the color purple. He attempts to answer the question of what makes Alice Walker’s most popular literary work a feminist novel. First he points out the stigma that involves nearly all of the male gender depicted throughout the story. He takes the time to address the rape that was involved and the manner in which it was implemented. Then the paper discusses how in the color purple women are depicted as being oppressed. And also it talks about how Celie grows as a woman thanks to the aid of two strong female companions.
Certain key events in Celie’s life made her the character she is, for example: her continual rape by her stepfather; the subsequent pregnancies and the loss of her children; the death of her mother; and the loss of her sister, Nettie. However, through the course of the novel, Celie finds that she has managed to form close relations with the female characters of the novel, she finds love and friendship and is finally reunited with her sister and children who were taken from her.
“Every time they ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I act like I’m you. I jump right up and do just what they say” (88). This line conveys how obedient Celie is towards others, which she learns from her own people. The black community degrades black women to make it difficult for them to become independent (Tanritanir and Aydemir 438). Alice Walker experiences this and understands the need to express the struggle of the black woman to the world. She, along with other black female writers, coins the term womanism to explain the idea of prevailing over this struggle. By having Celie overcome the oppression she faces, Alice Walker illustrates the theme of womanism in her novel The Color Purple.