Alice Walker's The Color Purple

In my bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the protagonist, Celie, develops psychologically throughout the book by facing painful times in order to find the road to self-discovery. Even with her lack of education, further into the novel, Celie begins to mentally grow and realize that she is not an object to be walked all over nor to be pushed around. From the age of fourteen years old until she was in her mid or late forties, Celie let herself be abused and mistreated, and no thoughts of standing up for herself occurred to her. When she was young, she did not live in a family that told her to defend herself or not to be afraid, she actually grew up being mistreated by her father. Therefore, she never had anyone to tell her how
She realizes that she has the power to stand up for herself, that she’s not afraid and that she has had enough of the abuse and mistreatment that her husband had given her.
Celie says to Mr.____, “Until you do right by me, everything you even think about gonna fail.” After those forty awful years, Celie had put her foot down and decided that enough was enough.
It was just that one moment that had shaped the novel, and the meaning of it, as a whole. When Celie stood her ground, that was her coming of age; she had slowly begun to realize that she was her own person and no one else could control her, although it took her forty years to finally understand what it meant to have courage. The novel was about finding the strength to be able to live the life that Celie wanted, to be able to escape the horror and nightmare that was her life. After standing up for herself, Celie has mentally matured. She opened her eyes to see that she was not an animal, that she was a human being who deserved as much respect as the next human being, and that single moment is what shapes the meaning of the work as a