Preview

Summary: The Color Purple

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
668 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Summary: The Color Purple
Amy Naaman
BioLit
Mrs. Nahlik
August 26, 2015
ELA banned books: The Color Purple The Color Purple written by Alice Walker was written to show us how thing were during 1910-1940 around the world, especially for women. The author showed us that women living in male dominated ed world and the feelings they had to live with. Walker has done a great job of showing us the past for black women around the world through the main character and the writer of the letters named Celie. The Color Purple discusses prejudice and by analyzing Celie’s use of symbolism—of the God, the pants and the color purple.
When Celie finally stands up for herself to Mr.__ and the patriarchal society she is part of , she becomes a person rather than a dog that's
…show more content…
At the beginning of the book, Celie was unaware of the color purple. She has such a horrible life she had nothing to enjoy—she’s just surviving. By surviving, she’s emotionally dead, but is physically alive. Shug is person who showed Celie the theory of the color purple. Shug says that God does little things for people, like creating the color purple, just to make people happy and give them pleasure in their lives. God want everyone to enjoy beauty of his/her creation. Enjoying all of God’s creation, including sex, is important according to shug. Shug shows Celie to embrace and enjoy life as God wants us to do. It’s a way to show our love and gratitude for God. Celie decoratesher bedroom in her own home in all purples and reds as she learns to love …show more content…
The symbolism of God, the pants and the color purple, used in the book has really showed the past through the eyes of black women. The theme of sexism and racism is so graphic, sickening, disturbing, but yet realistic and truthful, this maybe the reason that this book was placed on the ALA Banned Book List. They may think the exposure of the content is inrproperiot for students to read. But The Color Purple is a book that has very real things about the past that we should know because sexism and racism may never go

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Life in Southern America as we know wasn's the easiest in the past, where the patriarchy ruled and women found themselves under appreciated. kind of left at the mercy of men. Some chose to fight back and stand for themselves, but most ended up lost as slaves to their husbands. Celie clearly belonged to the second group. In such tough life, she always was a follower, she never stood up for herself. A total opposite of that, belonging to the 1st group, was Shug. Celie first came across to know Shug from a picture she found. Ever since that first glance she felt a sudden burst of admiration. In her eyes she was a role model. Shug was what Celie forever dreamed of being. Later on when she actually met Shug that admiration didn't disappear but it…

    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Color Purple is organized into letters towards God and focuses on the life of the oppressed, abused Celie. Celie feels she cannot talk to anyone but God about the events occurring in her life. This is her way of expressing herself when she is unable to speak to anyone about it.…

    • 310 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Most commonly known for her work, The Color Purple, Alice Walker has been a prominent figure in both the African American and American community. Born on February 9, 1933 in Putnam County, Georgia, Walker, in many of her pieces, covers the telling experience during the Jim Crow Era. As the youngest of eight, family had been a major factor in her life. Her parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker were very hardworking people who tried their best to provide their children with a sense of pride and responsibility. While her had father worked as a sharecropper, Walker’s mother worked seventeen hour shifts as a maid to help send Alice to college.…

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Colour Purple,” Alice Walker uses symbolism, and imagery to affect the reader’s interpretation of the novel through very complex themes of religious influence, oppression and emotion developed from these literary devices. This has a profound influence on the reader’s interpretation of the novel as it suggests certain opinions and points of view to them as well as giving them deeper insight to the emotions of the protagonist…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Color Purple Shag Quotes

    • 744 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In “The Color Purple”, Shug Avery has a positive impact on Celie. This empowers Celie to become independent and confident. The author describes the positive impacts when Shug meets Celie during her illness and develops a strong friendship with her. Shug is an independent and strong woman. These are two qualities Celie does not posses. However, when Shug is introduced in the novel, she influences Celie to become a more independent woman. Shug helps Celie with her mental problems, which has been an issue since her early childhood. She was told she was ugly as expressed in the quote “She ugly. He say” (Walker, pg. 10). Shug also had some problems with her appearance and was told she was a prostitute by the preacher. This is expressed in the quote;…

    • 744 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, when Harpo approaches Celie about how to control Sofia, Celie is bitter about the pity she sees in Sofia’s eyes so she tells Harpo to “Beat her” (p.36). After Harpo attempts to beat Sofia to make her listen to him and he instead is the one who comes away injured, she finds out that it is Celie who told him that it was the appropriate course of action. When questioning Celie about how she could encourage the abuse of another woman when she herself has been abused, Celie responds with, “I say it cause I’m a fool, I say. I say it cause I’m jealous of you. I say it cause you do what I can’t….Fight.” (p.40). Sofia exposes to Celie that the world is not binary and that women can fight back against abuse or oppression. Celie admires Sofia for her ability to be assertive and have a will that is not entwined with that of her husbands. However, this does get Sofia in some trouble when she is confronted with racism from the mayor’s wife and as a result ends up with a jail sentence of 12 years. While in jail Celie observes how different Sofia is and serves as a brutal reminder of the difficulties that come with fighting racism and resisting society’s perceptions of what is…

    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novel, The Color Purple, the author Alice Walker gives several ideas in letter forms, such as, friendship, domination, courage & independence. She impacts readers by looking at the story through the eyes of Celie and Nettie. The book describes the life of a young black girl in the 1920's to the 1960's. The story of how a 14 year old girl fights through all the steps of an abusive life and finally she is in command for her own life. Celie is the young girl who has been constantly physically, sexually, and emotionally abused.…

    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sexism In The Color Purple

    • 1235 Words
    • 5 Pages

    What is tragedy and triumph in Alice Walker “The Color Purple”? It all starts with aggressive behavior at home. Aggressive behavior is behavior that causes physical or emotional harm to others, or threatens to. It can range from verbal abuse to the destruction of a victim's personal property. People with aggressive behavior tend to be short-tempered, thoughtless, and fidgety. Yet, while the term infers a regular picture of abuse, we must understand that individual cases of aggressive behavior at home continuously vary. The Color Purple is a Pulitzer-winning novel by Alice Walker, relates to how a poor Black lady's long lasting battle with abusive and sexism behavior at home. The novel unravels in a Georgian farmhouse among the mid-1900s, where…

    • 1235 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    “In her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry she confronts bluntly the history of the oppression of her people...” (“Winchell, Donna Haisty. "Alice Walker: An Annotated Bibliography."). “The Color Purple” is written in diary format from the view of Celie, who is a prime example of an oppressed Negro woman, who not only only oppressed for her color, but also for her gender. She writes her letters to God, feeling that is the only way she can express herself and what she may want in life, though she’s even scared to admit that in that format. After years of oppression by the men around her, she doesn’t know what she could possibly want; her will is weak after years of being beat upon, emotionally and physically. “When Nettie tells her to fight, Celie responds, ‘But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.’ Her letters, however, provide a record of her growth out of this initial passivity into self-affirmation.” (Winchell, Donna Haisty. "Alice Walker: An Annotated Bibliography."). “The Color Purple” is repeatedly banned in school settings due to a variety of things, including, “...the work's "sexual and social explicitness" and its "troubling ideas about race relations, man's relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality." ("Banned And/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th…

    • 921 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Think of the person who means most to you in life. Now imagine what life would be like if you never saw or heard from them again. This is what happens to Celie, the main character in the novel The Color Purple written by Alice Walker and the movie The Color purple directed by Steven Spielberg.…

    • 648 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Color Purple

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Once Celie is married off she begins her growth of becoming more than just someone to be abused, and to be walked all over. Celie had the bleakest of circumstances when she was growing up, yet she still had some choices and some freedoms, only she didn’t realize this. This realization came slowly from all the women that she meets. First is when she sees a woman with money,…

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    A life of abuse, sexual exploitation, and social exploitation is what young uneducated Celie encounters in Alice Walker's ¨The Color Purple¨. Without knowing her true genealogy poor vulnerable Celie is left to write letters in her idiosyncratic english to her god who she feels is the only person that might heed to her plight for help. Though all the mistreatment Celie still yearns to find love to heal and strengthen the broken community of which the story takes place.…

    • 1292 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The reason Celie is quiet, tries to be invisible and does not stand up for herself is because the way she is treated. Celie is constantly told she is ugly, worthless and was abused by her stepfather Alphonso and then by her husband Mr. (Albert). “But I can let you have Celie… She ugly. He say. But she ain’t no stranger to hard work. And she clean. And God done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it (Walker 7-8).” “He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's…

    • 1084 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Color Purple

    • 264 Words
    • 2 Pages

    This novel is dealing with real life situations that no one would talk about. Alice Walker’s prize winning novel “The Color Purple,” turned into motion picture in 1985. In the beginning, the film caused a wide range of controversy. People who wrote hate letters and organization’s who threatened to boycott the whole production. The Black women’s story was told to millions of people by Hollywood. Another explanation for the movie was how many black people were illiterate, and some did not go to school. The movie influences the audience by showing how what can happen behind closed doors and expresses how that color is the same no matter what the color may be. The film also shows how men over powered women. In a movie-based novel there is always question of becoming a Hollywood movie. Hollywood is notoriously insensitive to the concerns of women and people of color. Years after the release of the movie “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker expressed her opinion on the movie in the book “The same river twice” published in 1996. The book includes a draft of Alice Walker’s original screenplay, and some aspects and thoughts on the making and the reception of the film, which became the original story of “The Color Purple.”…

    • 264 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Being a woman and black in the south during a period of brutal discrimination and lack of civil rights worked to bring down the characters in The Color Purple.Overall, the novel depicts hidebound ideals of gender roles in respect to their position in society. The effects of the discrimination by sex is further enhanced by the ethnicity of the characters in the novel; which, goes hand in hand with their economic status. The characters of the novel where at the bottom of the social ladder; which, contributed to the behavior and problems between marriages and different races. The Color Purple is marinated in prejudice due to sex and ethnic origin which contributes to their position in society but as the story developed, many are able to break…

    • 332 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays