The Color Purple Patriarchy Essay

Gabriela Contreras
Ms. Gardner
AP English Literature
28 January 2013
The Power of Female Nurturing to Challenge and Change the abuse patriarchy make a person reshape through the Silent of their Voice
The Color Purple by Alice Walker portrays a black woman who starts off in the narrative as a powerless object and who later on becomes a woman with a strong identity. In setting of the novel is in the early 1900, Jim Crow is the time. Black women were treated poorly by whites and by the black men within their community. In The Color Purple, Walker demonstrates the woman as an object treated badly by whites’ society and her own. Celie is the novels protagonist that suffer a life time of abuse by the stepfather, she use the pain to write to
God. Celie is only fourteen years old when she gets raped by her stepfather and ends up having two kids, in which her stepfather gives away. Celie believed her whole life it was the sociality moral way to be powerless for a black women. Celie even grew up thinking it was okay to get beat up because she told Harpo her brother to beat his wife.” Well how you aspect to make her mind? Wife’s is like children. You have to let 'em know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do that better than a good sound beating."(Walker 42). Celie conform to the being powerless because she does not fight back to the people who take advantage of them. Within The Color Purple , Alice Walker present the transformation of the powerless girl, Celie into a strong woman, by telling the narrative through her voice, and the voices of the woman that strengthen her, in order to argue for the power of female nurturing to challenge and change the abuse patriarchy.
Letters show the reshape of Celie character by writing her feeling to God. The historical significance of writing letters as a female is postmodern epistolary novel. The act indicates the political significance of the letters-writing/sending function in regard to nation, family and home. Finding that in The Color Purple, Celie letters to God are the diasporic narrative longing from home and Nettie’s letters as missionary letters. (Tokizane) Celie words to God are to open the novel to begin an impact on her voice but the novel opens to the remarks of a threat “You better not never tell nobody but God” (Walker 1). Celie is only left the only opinion to appeal to God. However God reminds silent and without a response to her. The processes of Celie writing the letters have made her well self-realization and have gained the independence that has her develop and transform. (Tokizane).
The Color Purple shows the relationship between a women and a man within a black rural society.
Celie is dominated by her stepdad and her husband creating her to think of men as bad. Celie creates a relationship with her husband mistress Shug. Their relationship is significant because it help Celie enhance a sexual relationship with Shug. “Then I feel something real soft and wet on my breast; feel like one of my little lost baby’s mouth. Way after a while, I act like a lost baby too”. (Walker109) Walker evokes Celie to build confident in herself and her body. “The sexual correspondence with Shug metaphorically restores the familiar and definitively female relation.” (William) Shug affection for Shug creates a motherhood primary because Shug acts like a mother to Celie. Creating a love that helps Celie find herself and to become a stronger person because of Shug influence. The Color Purple portrays there understanding on two women who are spiritual and a server to their God (MacColl). Celie believes in a God, shouldn’t marriage or sexual actions should be between a man and a women? “The faith of her people and her love for another woman in the paradox that a church whose member is mostly should be governed by men.”
(MacColl)