Throughout the novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker juxtaposes Celie and Shug Avery to demonstrate the variety of roles women had in the nineteen hundreds. These two women had many similarities, but their few differences lifted them into different levels of society. Celie, for example, was a black woman who faced much adversity starting at a young age. Celie grew up abused by her father only to be forced into an abusive marriage. Shug Avery, on the other hand, was a confident and bold Jazz singer who had a complicated relationship with Mr. Blank, Celie’s husband. While Celie is immediately perceived as a weak and subjugated young girl and Shug Avery is seen as a confident and all empowering woman, it is their relationship that allows both women to grow. Due to their friendship Celie gains the confidence to break free from societal oppression and Shug Avery grows into a kinder and more emphatic women. While Celie and Shug Avery are foil Characters it is their relationship that frees both women from various forms of oppression and allows them to grow. Celie is immediately introduced to the audience as a young fourteen year old girl with no ambition and many questions about her purpose in the world. She questions God by constantly writing him letters. She believes she is a good girl and does not understand why so much pain exists in her world. She lives with a daily fear of her father and with the constant reminder that “[she] better not never tell nobody but God. It 'd kill
Celie practically struggled for happiness her whole existence. Her father sold her to a man who had no intent of loving or caring for her. Celies’ husband whom she refers to as Mr. physically and verbally abused her. Mr. felt that the only way to keep a woman in check was to beat her and he did just that throughout the movie. Like any woman would though the abuse Celie lost herself and respect for herself. Living with Mr. was a life full of darkness and hatred. Life with her husband was no better life than life with her stepfather. It took years for Celie to become brave enough to fight back for what she accept as true and gain understanding of how to convey amusement and have little outlook on life. After years of abuse, Celie no longer was afraid of Mr. She no longer cared for her husband or the
In The Color Purple, Alice Walker illustrates the lives of a female African American before the Civil Rights Movement. A novel that describes female empowerment, The Color Purple demonstrates the domestic violence women faced in the South. Walker tells the story through Celie, a young African American girl who faces constant hardships until she stands up for herself with the help of her closest friends – other women undergoing the same difficulties. Even though men controlled females in the South, the author emphasizes the strength of female empowerment because females struggled to survive during this time.
Celie is not a typical protagonist. In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, the main character Celie is an ugly, poor girl who is severely lacking in self-confidence. However, Celie transforms throughout the course of the novel and manages to realize herself as a colorful, beautiful, and proud human being. Celie becomes a powerful individual.
In the beginning of this novel, Celie is a young and naive adolescent. She is
Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple begins with a young girl experiencing hardships of rape and incest, and continues to narrate the life of this girl as she becomes a woman capable of love and overcoming her long lived need of dependence. The person that catalyzes her transformation is Shug Avery, a provocative singer. Throughout the novel are little splashes of color that give a deeper meaning and further illustrate exactly what effects Shug Avery has on Celie. Shug Avery facilitated Celie’s change from submissive to independent as evidenced by the color symbolism throughout the novel.
In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie leads a life filled with abuse at the hands of the most important men in her life. As result of the women who surround and help her, Celie becomes stronger and overcomes the abuse she experienced. The three most influential women in Celie’s life are her sister Nettie, her daughter-in-law Sofia, and the singer Shug Avery. These are the women who lead Celie out of her shell and help her turn from a shy, withdrawn woman to someone who was free to speak her mind and lead her own independent life.
Celie is able to accept her past and establish a clear vision of herself and fulfillment through the acts of love. She meets other women who tell her that she should stand up for herself and fight, but Celie feels that it’s better to survive than to fight and risk not surviving. However, there are certain triggers that lead Celie to stand up. Like a true fighter, Celie proves herself to be willing to stand up for the people she loves. Even as a downtrodden victim of her Pa, Celie sacrifices herself and offers herself to her father so that he keeps his hands off of Nettie. As mentioned in this quote, where Pa is sexually abiding Celie, “First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it. ” (Walker, 4). Celie has the potential by putting her efforts into other people, but not realizing she is able to stand up for herself the same ways he does for Nettie. Relating it back to the novel, “Beloved”, Sethe does the same representation when she is trying to save Beloved even though the idea is bizarre of her killing her own child, but she only does it so that she would not have to suffer the way Sethe did. Celie is introduced with Shug Avery a blues singer, who she was first found “rude”, but as the story moves along, Shug Avery becomes the reason Celie learns to love herself. Because Celie is finally opening herself up by loving someone, Celie becomes more lovable. Through Shug’s love, Celie begins to realize her own self-worth, from the minute when Shug Avery wrote a song for Celie, as said in this quote: “This song I'm bout to sing us call Miss. Celie's song.”(Walker, 73).By the end of the novel, Celie loves more
When the reader first meets Celie, she has little self-worth and views God as a confidant and a protective companion. Initially, Celie has almost no self-esteem; her circumstances gave her few chances to develop any. Her father rapes her, beats her, and tells her she is ugly and stupid. When she marries Mr._____, he does not treat her any better. To
Though The Color Purple is a historical novel, it never refers to any factual events. Because of this, we presumably follow Celie through thirty or forty years of her life, from the age of fourteen up until her hair is gray. The setting of the novel is primarily rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. As a poor black woman in the rural south, Celie’s bad treatment is largely ignored which was the norm in this time period. Celie leaves Georgia to live in Memphis with Shug. There, Celie lives a life of luxury and empowerment. Living a poor, downtrodden life in the South, Celie had never stopped to consider her African heritage until Nettie sends
The Color Purple is the story of Celie’s life, starting from her adolescent years. At a very young and fragile age, Celie was deprived of her dignity as a woman, through the assault by her stepfather, the treatment she endured from her husband, and the disappearance of the one human she adored, her sister Nettie. As her days passed by with more worry and strife, Celie lost faith in love and resented all signs of a kind and honorable God. Shug Avery arrived in this small town to rekindle with her
In response to The Color Purple, critic Charles L. Proudfit alludes to the significance Celie’s female friends in shaping her identity. He explains that by bonding with the more outspoken and independent women, she learns to rely on herself and grow as a person. In the novel, Shug Avery comes into the scene and automatically draw towards Celie. Although they are polar opposites in every nature, they become fast friends. Shug begins to teach Celie about herself while questioning Celie’s choices. For example, Shug complains that “It’s scandless, the way you look out there plowing in a dress” (146). When Celie explained that Mr. _____ would not let her wear them, Shug points out that he was excited when she wore pants. Changing to a pair of pants was the turning point for Celie becoming an independent woman.
We are first introduced to Celie in 1909, when she is 14 years old, running and frolicking through the fields with her sister Nettie, then giving birth to her second child by her step-father. Soon after the newborn was taken out of her arms, an emotionless and
As a result of these tragic events, Celie writes to an unknown audience, resembling her unknown identity. In the beginning, the only person she can talk to is God. She writes her first letters to God shortly after her so-called father raped her. Each one of the letters is short, choppy and has a similar rhythm. The patterns found in her letters symbolize her state of mind; she feels depressed and weak. "Celie does not think of her letters as anything else than just that, as written documents saying the things she wishes to tell the recipients she cannot speak to in person”, making God the person she has always wished to communicate with (Boynukara). Her letters in the beginning are also mostly written to God and not signed off, illustrating her lack of identity. Her conception of God is a “Big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go barefooted” (Walker 195). Celie’s first letter proves that she has a low self-confidence when she writes, "Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me." (1). According to Janoff Bulman, “cognitive strategy used to make
Celie also values her sister Nettie greatly and protects her when it comes to their step-father, Alphonso raping the girls. Celie says “I ast him to take me instead of Nettie while our new mammy was sick.” the casual tone of the preceding line adds to Celie's lack of self-worth; she is so used to being raped by Alphonso that it no longer makes any difference to her. As Celie transitions to the Mister’s household, she is still treated with disrespect by the Mister himself and even one of his sons. In a letter to God, she writes “I spent most of my wedding day running from the oldest boy… He picks up a rock and laid my head open.” Celie grows older in this household and submits to more abuse from her new husband.
The Color Purple is a very moving and spiritual book. It takes a women who has nothing to speak of going for her and who is a victim to the world, and it takes her to a place where she is a strong individual who can voice her own opinions about things without people telling her what to do. She gets incredible power that grows inside her throughout the book. It is only fully released near the end of the book when her sister, Nettie, is about to come home. As for her, Celie, she just survives during her life, and takes what is handed to her. Until one fateful day when a woman named Shrug comes into the picture and comes to stay with them while she is recovering from a disease. From that day on, Celie could see that some women stand up for