Their oppositional lifestyle is one they develop and expand in Celie. As Celie’s sense of feminism of develops and allows her to be independent, her happiness with her life grows. She is able to live outside of the expectations set by her abusers, proving that her feminism is directly correlated with her inner contentedness. It is the fulfillment in life through the employment of a feminist mindset that is main theme in the novel written by
She gets abused by her husband in law, Mr.. Celie’s children grow up without knowing about their birth mother. The only phrase to describe Celie’s life in The Color Purple is messed up. Celie’s inherent freedom is plundered by the abusive men around her. For the entirety of Celie’s youth, she believed that Pa, the father to her two children, was her father. Pa and mammy, Celie’s adopted parents have repetitively engrained in Celie and her sister Nettie that Pa was their father.
Celie lives with her Younger sister Nettie and a brood of half brothers and sisters. She lives a life of abuse and moil with a mother who is sickly and worn out with childbearing and soon dies, and Alphonso, whom she thinks is her father. But who later turns out to be her stepfather. Celie lives like a slave- cooking, cleaning and looking after the other children. She is denied to go to school, because according to her stepfather, she is ‘too dumb to keep going to school’ (CP 9).
Celie, the protagonist and narrator, is a poor, uneducated, fourteen-year-old black girl living in the American South. She writes letters to God because the man she believes to be her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her and impregnates her and abducts the children away. Celie later gets married and is treated badly by her husband, Mister, and his children. One of Mister’s son, Harpo, falls in love with an assertive girl named Sophia and marries her who refuses to submit to Harpo’s attempts to control her. Themes of sexism and racism are prevalent in the entire novel, probably as a reflection of the social contexts surrounding the novel’s setting.
Celie is forced into a marriage with a man who has no feelings of affection towards her and goes on to become the next abuser in Celie’s life. Her husband is never mentioned by name, and is only referred to as Mr___ which only reinforces the power he has (Selzer 2011, p. 13). By being nameless, he almost
It aims at building up a new ground for expressing female voice. The text is in complete conversational format rather than being a narration of events. Through her letters, Celie tells her audience something that they already know. She primarily subverts, deconstructs and eventually reconstructs the mainstream patriarchal discourse that has kept her and many of her kind at the periphery. The letters create a productive space where the hitherto oppressed voices are finally heard.
Trapped in a gridlock of racist and sexist repressions, Celie struggles to be independent. Celie is considered as an invisible woman in the first part of her life. Celie, as well as her sister have the disadvantage of not only being women but also being black women, luckily her sister was given the opportunity to get education. Celie on the other hand, was taken out of school because of her first pregnancy at the age 14. Both young women, over time learned how to express their thoughts atleast on paper.
In the novel, Walker uses the inspiration and influence of other strong female characters to act as the change stimulants in the journey of Celie’s transformation. Highly inspired and influenced by Sophia, Celie is able to establish her independence from her abusive husband. Celie understands the faact that she is manipulated and controlled by Mr. ___ and acknowledges this when she ”think ’bout how every time (she) jump when Mr.____ call(her)” (Walker, The Color Purple, 38) we can justify Celie’s weakness considering that male domination has always been a part of her life. However, when she witnesses the relationship between Sophia and her
The main themes of The Color Purple are female authorities, female narrative voice, female acquaintances, and vehemence. Female authorities is Walker’s manner of portraying women’s space. She set free Sofia from passivity, making her to face
The Color Purple depicts a story of Celie – an African American woman who fights for acceptance and fulfilment in her marriage and as well as within her community. She is victimized by racism and sexism at the same time which means that in the novel there are some instances in which the dimension of intersectionality is noticeable. Confined by the patriarchal stiff rules, Celie gradually begins to make her voice heard. She does not want to be a passive observer of her own life. Obviously, it does not happen in the blink of an eye.