The Color Purple Consolation in Female Bonding - 2117 Words

Copyright: Martina Diehl June 2012 The Color Purple: Consolation in Female Bonding Celie’s road to trusting and loving herself Abstract This essay is about the love affair in The Color Purple, a novel by Alice Walker in which, thoughts on racism, incest, rape, love and family affairs are provoked. The reader learns about these subjects through the letters that Celie, an uneducated black woman, writes to God and through the letters that her sister Nettie and Celie write to each other. I would like to discuss how Walker raises the issue of love between females, which involves trust and understanding, two aspects that the men in the novel don’t possess. The reader witnesses how the women are being oppressed and abused in this men’s†¦show more content†¦These two novels are set in the same time period and both take place in the South of the United States, both novels show the sexual and racial abuse of women as a second sex between 1910 and 1963. Women in white society were gaining power while black women still had none. During the twentieth century black women began to travel more and saw more of the world and therefore this change in dominance in society. They would no longer tolerate the power that men had over them. The oppression that Celie was part of. Celie does not write of her husband by name, he is part of the system joining God and her father in â€Å"an unholy trinity of power than displaces her identity.† (Abbandato 1111) Fear of standing up to the dominant sex Celie is afraid to stand up to her husband. She does not want to get a beating and is traumatised by the events she went through before she left home to be with Mr. ____. Her mother passed away and she is left with a stepfather who raped her and whom she thought dumped her babies in the woods. Celie is continually silenced by her stepfather and Mr. ____ and has no choice in the marriage. She is only an object to the men and is required work around the house and care for them. She does not like to write down or talk about the names of the men who she knows, she prefers to call them Mr. ___ or ‘Pa’ and refers to them as ‘Him’, like God, these men have more power over her than she has over herself. (Tucker 84) She does not know theShow MoreRelatedThe Color Purple: Consolation in Female Bonding2102 Words   |  9 PagesCopyright: Martina Diehl June 2012 The Color Purple: Consolation in Female Bonding Celie’s road to trusting and loving herself Abstract This essay is about the love affair in The Color Purple, a novel by Alice Walker in which, thoughts on racism, incest, rape, love and family affairs are provoked. The reader learns about these subjects through the letters that Celie, an uneducated black woman, writes to God and through the letters that her sister Nettie and Celie write to each other. I would like