The Color Purple (Alice Walker)

In the novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker writes about people she has known, people who lived in the part of the country where she was raised, and she reflects the conditions of those people and the values they represented within the larger context of American society. They constitute a subculture shaped by particular economic and social forces. The subject matter is the mistreatment of black women by their men, and in exploring this theme, the book has takes place in the mind of a particular victim of this kind of life, expressed by her through letters that fairly cry out for help and for a different life. Celie is the young black girl living in Georgia who has never known any life but one with male violence in it. That violence has been created in large part by the economic and social realities of being black in America, but from the point of view of one black girl, all that matters is that she is on the receiving end of the blows.

The novel is set in a period around the turn of the century, and thus the lives of these characters are much closer to the pivotal issue that placed them in this setting and that created the tensions which have left them downtrodden, with the males fighting back at the only target they have, their women. That issue is slavery, and though physical, sanctioned slavery was outlawed at the end of the Civil War, the social attitudes inherent in slavery, with one race of people elevated over another, persisted. These are people living in a new

Related Essays

The Color Purple and Remains of the Day Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day describe very different milieus and very different kinds of characters. .... (1398 6 )

Alice Walker .... saves lives (Winchell 3). This can be seen clearly in The Color Purple as Celie .... Smith, Pamela A. "Alice Walker's Ecospirituality." www.aril.org/smith2.htm. .... (1294 5 )

Color Purple Alice Walker's The Color Purple is an excellent account of the life of poor black women who must suffer not only social ostracism due to gender and skin color .... (1281 5 )

The Color Purple .... Spielberg, Steven. The Color Purple. Universal, 1985. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square Press, 1982. (2005 8 )

Alice Walker's Views of Her Work .... saves lives (Winchell 3). This can be seen clearly in The Color Purple as Celie .... Smith, Pamela A. "Alice Walker's Ecospirituality." www.aril.org/smith2.htm. .... (1294 5 )

Category: Literature - T