Essays on The Color Purple

Sexism is, at its core, a product of gender roles. In the early twentieth century, discrimination against women through the overt use of gender roles was highly prevalent amongst men and women. In a patriarchal society, women are expected to submit to men in all...

The theme of color is very broad, and reaches strands out to many different emotions and feeling of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple such as sadness, desire and hope. Color also is central to the society that the novel is set in – the color...

Abstract This paper discusses early american feminism in the 1910s as portrayed in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”. The novel draws strong parallels to Virginia Woolf’s theories and introduces the true meaning of the feminist notion. As stated in Woolf’s critical essay “A room of...

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple holds immense historical and societal relevance among a thirty year spectrum of time periods and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the gradual development of both civil and women’s rights, the destruction of rich African civilizations by European companies, and the...

Celie has been a victim of female oppression throughout her life, never believing in herself, and living in fear of men. However, when Shug Avery enters her life, Celie’s quality of life starts to improve on the whole, and her newfound self-belief allows her to...

“It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how I know trees fear man,” (23) uttered the protagonist of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Such words of meekness were characteristic of Celie’s...

‘Examine the developing relationship between Shug and Celie, from the moment Shug arrives to Sofia’s arrest’ From the first moment that Celie sees Shug (which is in picture form) she is immediately mesmerised by her, describing her as “The most beautiful woman I ever saw”....

Gender roles are learned mainly through social interaction rather than biologically. When people are born, they are supplied with very little knowledge of gender. Certain behavior is taught by means of social interactions and through relationships with others. Additionally, the way that children are raised...

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Shug Avery introduces the novel’s protagonist, Celie, to the concept of religious embodiment. Critic Anne-Janine Morey, in her book Religion and Sexuality in American Literature, defines embodiment as “the unreconciled relation of body and spirit” (3). In Western theology,...

Internalization and Externalization of Color In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Pauline experiences the beauty of life through her childhood ‘down South;’ extracting colors in which translate into her most fond memories. This internalization of color serves as a pivotal action, providing insight into Morrison’s...

If asked, most people would say women are strong, passionate, loving, but not all of these positive traits truly define who they are. Their nature is deemed the most difficult to define because they have negative aspects that contribute to their strength, passion, and ability...

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker tells a story of a young girl named Celie. The book is formatted as an journal so that daily experiences can be shared through the voice of Celie. In the beginning, readers learn that she lives in a life...

Female marginalisation is a major theme in The Color Purple, with Celie’s emancipation from repressive male patriarchy being the culmination of the plot. When discussing the way narrative method and perspective are used within the novel to address these themes, it is useful to make...

During the early 1900s, an emergence of new forms of music such as blues and jazz brought a host of new musicians, many of them female. These female performers, even when wildly successful, were constantly subjected to unfair scrutiny and judgement due to their sex,...

Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, written in 1982, emerged from the appearance of Feminist writers in the 1970s, when specific gender issues were no longer being suppressed by a patriarchal society. This allowed for the growth of personal freedom within the cultural legacy of both...

Throughout the years, people have had many different experiences in the United States. Differences in people, the era, and many other factors cause the ways of life to change in a country giving us different perspectives about what the United States used to be like....

The ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres are often held as two separate entities, both representing opposing positions of social freedom or restraint. Whereas the public realm is the more conformed-to and socially hegemonic of the two, the private is associated with an unseen process of identification,...

Contrary to common belief, slavery as broadly defined was not abolished after the Civil War and is still around to this day. White lawmakers in the postbellum South strived to create a system in which prisons could lease out inmates, especially black inmates, to private...

Alice Walker, most famous for her novel The Color Purple, is the first African- American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction (Alice (Malsenior) Walker). As well as writing bestselling books, Walker is a staunch defender of human rights, racial equality, and respecting all...