Female Empowerment in the Color Purple

In The Color Purple, Alice Walker illustrates the lives of a female African American before the Civil Rights Movement. A novel that describes female empowerment, The Color Purple demonstrates the domestic violence women faced in the South. Walker tells the story through Celie, a young African American girl who faces constant hardships until she stands up for herself with the help of her closest friends – other women undergoing the same difficulties. Even though men controlled females in the South, the author emphasizes the strength of female empowerment because females struggled to survive during this time. Told through a series of letters to God, Celie shares her story. Impregnated twice by her father, Celie’s children are taken away from her as she is forced into an abusive marriage. The women in The Color Purple remain in friendships that allow them to survive and overcome the everyday battles with the strength of each other. The female relationships throughout the novel are motherly and sisterly, all of the women care deeply for one another. Celie’s letters offer her a place of refuge where she removes herself from the aspects of daily life, which consists mostly of doing exactly everything the male presence in her life tells her. Mary Daly explains this in her writing. The Color Purple abounds with instances in which the human body is made to submit to and to register the forces of authority. In the text, a patriarchy maintains power by forcing the female body into a position of powerlessness, thus denying the woman's ability to shape an identity. During the course of the novel, however, Celie learns to reshape those forces of oppression and to define herself through her letters; these letters act as a "second body" that mediates her relationship to the power structure in such a way as to give her a voice. (Daly).
Daly understands the letters to be Celie’s escape from the torture and pain, and the only means of discovering Celie’s

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