Brief Summary And Symbolism In Alice Walker's The Color Purple

ALICE WALKER

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author and activist. She was born on February 9, 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia. Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather, Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old. In 1952, Walker was accidently wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Due to delay in treatment, she became permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. But she realized that her traumatic injury had some value; it had allowed her

It won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. 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, as the main protagonist and narrator, shows some form of internalized oppression. Racism as an issue is seen in how Sofia was imprisoned and violently beaten for rejecting the white mayor’s wife’s offer to be her maid. Nettie (Celie’s sister who had ran away from the ill-treatment), in her letters, also indicates her reflecting the racial stereotypes held by American Blacks against their African counterparts. Many characters in the novel break the boundaries of traditional male or female gender roles. Throughout the novel, Walker wishes to emphasize that gender and sexuality are not as simple as we may