The Color Purple Essay

Spielberg’s Erroneous Adaptation

The Color Purple is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning 1982 feminist novel by Alice Walker that centers on relationships amongst black women in the 1920s and their ever-running battles with race issues and the patriarchy. Stephen Spielberg’s film adaptation of this book turns a modern black feminist novel into a people-pleasing blockbuster due in part to his discomfort with some of the key topics of gender and sexuality. The major changes due to Spielberg’s discomfort are circled around interactions amongst female characters and others, chiefly around the character Shug Avery and her relationships: spiritual, sexual, and platonic.

With The Color Purple being one of the first and most accredited black feminist novels it is important for the reader to gain context and insight into the period in which it was written, the conservative time of the 1980s. The 1980s was a time of third wave feminism and a time where, after many years, black feminists began to come out of the woodwork. Although a “few articles about Black feminism that have made it into the mainstream press either lament the lack of formal Black feminist organizations” or “question the need for feminism in Black women’s lives” some scholars like Joan Morgan argue that “strongblackwomen” need to be recognized in a good light (Springer 7). The term “strongblackwoman” signifies “the transformation of a [negative] stereotype into an accepted and recognizable identity trait for Black women” (Springer 12). In The Color Purple, Walker illuminates the need for strong black women through the characters of Shug and Sofia, who refuse to accept anything below their high standards.

Sofia and Shug are strong women and Celie depend...

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...-audience Hollywood film” (Digby 161). Without the direction of a big-name Hollywood Director like Stephen Spielberg many people would not have seen this film. Walker knew this while choosing a director for the adaptation and was willing to sacrifice some crucial scenes in order to get the main messages of the book to a wider audience. Although this is true and the movie did reach a large audience, the film adaptation also loses the real feminist issues and experiences explored in the novel. The addition of Shug’s search for happiness through the predominantly white and patriarchal church, the additional screen-time of Mister, the loss of Celie’s voyage to Memphis with Shug, and the downplay of Celie and Shug’s intimate relationship hindered Spielberg’s adaptation. Due to this hindrance Spielberg’s film version of The Color Purple is not a successful adaptation.