Introduction The Color Purple is a novel written by an American author Alice Walker and was published in 1982. It won numerous awards in literature and film as it had many musical, film and radio adaptations, particularly the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It primarily involves the subject of feminism and addresses issues in sexism and racism in the early 20th century in the United States. The story is all about a girl named Celie, a black woman who lives in the Southern part of US. It tells about how Celie’s life became a very hard one because she had undergone severe maltreatment, abuse and sorrows which started on her adolescent years until her married life. This essay will tackle the subject of feminism inspired from the story of Celie and how she was able to transform herself from a weak and vulnerable girl into a brave and self-sufficient woman who could prove her abilities to cope life’s struggle and became aware with her equal rights in the society.
Feminism Definition Accoring to (Morris, 1993), feminism is a political perception based on two fundamental premises: first is that gender difference is the foundation of a structural inequality between women and men, by which women suffer systematic social injustice; and second is that the inequality between sexes is not the result of biological necessity but is produced by the environmental construction of gender differences. Feminists believe that the
Alice Walker had been inspired by “...the role of women of color in history, culture, and society... in addition to... writers such as Zora Neale Hurston” and wrote the award winning book, The Color Purple. Zora Neale Hurston not only influenced the public’s opinion through her own work, she also inspired other writers to continue to give Black’s a
The Color Purple by Alice Walker should be kept in school libraries because it conveys the importance of family, shows examples of overcoming hardship and discusses serious topics such as rape and death. The Color Purple is an inspiring, beautiful, and powerful read for teens. The Color Purple is important for teens to read because its most prominent theme is how family sticks together through thick and thin, and it talks about the value of it as well. Within the first 20 pages of the book, Celie is separated from her sister, Nettie.
Throughout her accomplishments, she became one of the best-selling novelist that was known by her book The Color Purple. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) is about a fourteen-year-old, Celie who has been abused by her own father, Alphonso. The novel starts with Celie as she continuously writes to God about her abusive father, Alphonso. Alphonso has impregnated
Alice Walker is considered a Revolutionary for many people because of the struggles she fought through as an African American woman, novelist, and activist living in the mid to late 1900’s. Alice Walker shows how women have struggled in America with having similar and equal rights to white men. She also shows how African Americans struggle with the same problems when it comes to achieving similar or equal rights to a white male. In the novel, “The Color Purple”, written by Alice Walker, the main protagonist, Celie, learns to find her own voice and own self worth through a series of obstacles that she had to overcome throughout her journey; similar to the way Alice Walker also had struggles of being an African American woman during the mid to
The Color Purple: A Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. she talks about womanhood by stating how women are being submissive to their which leads to sexual assault and oppression. They are being forced to get marriage at the age of fourteen. The article also looks at one of the main character of the paper “Cellie” who was sexually assaulted by her own father and two children taken from her.
The Harlem Renaissances light on the Color Purple The Harlem Renaissance was when African-American literature, art, music, dance, and social commentary began to flourish in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the early 1900s, especially in the 1920s. With the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance spreading, it inspired many people and that got into their writings, making the characters reflect off of it. An example of this would be Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple. A impoverished, black woman from the South in the early to mid 1900s named Miss Celie sees her life change as important historical events occur during her lifetime.
It is a novel which can be read crossing all the cultural boundaries, as bell hooks praises “it is truly popular work-a book of people-a work that has many different meanings for many different readers.” (454) The color ‘purple’ teaches the world of women that they have endless potentiality not only to the black women but to all women who get ready to fight for their
Alice Walker was a social activist, born in 1944. She is very popular for her novel “The Color Purple” that was published in 1982. Before that, she wrote “Everyday Use” in 1973. It is a short story about a family that branches out in their own way throughout the years. She shows us that the daughters were being directed into two different pathways.
The Color Purple is written by Alice Walker, and was later made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg. The Color Purple focuses on a woman who is going through struggles in life, such as her father raping her as a child and her oppressed marriage. In the end she learns to deal with life through God and to take everyday as a blessing. Not only does the film and book speak about life struggles but also they share the points of happiness in the book, and love, in the film through the plot structure, the mood, and the journey to womanhood.
Literary Analysis: The Color Purple Every individual learns something new or different every day, whether it is somebody’s favorite color or learning something new about yourself. Many people can either learn from their hardships and past experiences, while others may learn from other people’s past through stories or guidance. Throughout the novel, The Color Purple written by Alice Walker, the main character, Celie, learned how to love herself, that everyone makes mistakes, and face her fears.
Could you imagine living a life that is, in fact, not your own? Such is a day in the lives of the female characters of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Feminism is one of the core values in Walker’s novel, as it follows Celie’s path to happiness and freedom to live a life of her own. The book opens with Celie trapped in a series of male-dominant relationships, unable to stand up for herself, but along her journey, she learns from and of other women in similarly constricting situations, some of whom rise above all attempts by men and society to put them down.
Alice Walker give power to the female characters via female bonding, which enables them to discover their talents. It is imperative to notice that Walker female characters achieve psychological strength after overcoming oppression, but the male characters realize psychological wholeness and health when they recognize women’s pain and admit that they have a role in it. Walker constructs a characterization of blues women (blues singers and single women) who continue defining their sexuality in The Color Purple that cast the characters in the role of conjure women who transform and redefine black female sexuality through the alternative view of womanhood. Blues women did not resist the 19th-century ideology but simply disrupted it for different values that overthrew the Puritan ethic.
in The Color Purple, a period drama, based on a book with the same title by Alice Walker, women are categorised by the society they live in. Spielberg is able to convey Celie’s vulnerability though the use of camera angles. Whenever Celie talks to her father or her husband the angle either shows the men standing over her or her looking up at the men. This shows that the men have control over Celie. ‘one day my daddy come and say to me “We gonna’ do what your mumma wouldn’t,” now I got two children by my daddy’.
Oppression is an act of authority or power,cruel, or unjust manner. Resistance is the act of fighting against something that is happening to someone, or refusing to accept something. It is also used to represent a movement considered legitimate. So to face oppression, there must be a resistance to take an action. Resistance can be accomplished by individual or groups in many forms such as active or passive, private or active, barbaric or timid.
Monika Pareek Professor Dasgupta Women's Writing 7th April 2016. Exploring the idea of 'womanism' in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker (b. 1944) is a novel of celebration of black women who challenge the unjust authorities and emerge beyond the yoke of forced identities. It is situated in Georgia, America, in 1909 and written entirely in the epistolary form, mainly by Celie, the main protagonist and her sister, Nettie.