The Color Purple by Alice Walker Summary, Main Idea, Conflict, Point of View, Setting and Tone.

The Colour Purple by Alice Walker is a story about two sisters, separated for decades, trying to get back to each other. On their respective journeys, they encounter everything from the cruelty of discrimination, to the warmth and comfort of love. Celie, the elder of the two, who had to endure rape and physical abuse from her father, marries a man much older than she is, only to beaten more by her new husband, all the while being torn away from the schooling which she so yearned to continue. She soon meets Shug Avery, Mr.____’s lover, and a lounge singer who causes Celie to question her own sexuality and teaches her how to control the path of her own life. Meanwhile, the younger sister, Nettie, after being rushed away from Celie and

The Color Purple elicits multitudinous generalizations upon bitter circumstances. The novel possesses a surfeit of themes. One of the major themes in The Color Purple is the sexual relationships between the male and female characters, sexism. Walker stages her story of the transformation of Celie from a female that is passive to one who eventually becomes an independent black woman in the culture of the rural society from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Celie is dominated by her father who turns out to be her stepfather at the beginning of the story. In the latter part of the anecdote her husband Albert takes over as her foreperson. Shug Avery`s relationship with Celie was the cause of Celie`s personality change. Celie wrote letters to God because her stepfather Alphonso, told her to tell no one but God of sexual molestations he inflicted upon her. Through the letters, Walker wanted readers to generate a taste of Celie`s actuality, which at first is discrete, but eventually becomes stable and independent.

Celie, the main protagonist of The Color Purple, is an uneducated and poor girl from a broken family. Ever since she was a little girl, Celie has been belittled, degraded, and sexually abused throughout her childhood and into womanhood. Because of this, she feels denied of control and ownership over her body. As she grows older, Celie becomes aware of being stripped of her basic human rights and freedom. But eventually, she starts sprouting confidence and courage with the help of her sister and friend. This newfound strength of Celie’s pushes her to leave her horrible husband behind and start anew. She decides to return home and open up a business and continue searching for her little sister, Nettie.

Within The Color Purple by Alice Walker, women are treated as inferior to men therefore they must obey them. Through the strength and wisdoms Celie gains from other women, she learns to overcome her oppression and realize her self worth as a woman. The women she has met throughout her life, and the woman she protected since young, are the people that helped her become a strong independent woman. Sofia and Shug were there for Celie when she needed someone to look up to and depend on. Nettie was able to push Celie to become a more educated, independent person. The main source of conflict in this book is Celie’s struggle with becoming an independent woman who needs not to rely on a man. Throughout the book we see her grow as a person and

The Color Purple by Alice Walker focuses on the life of Celie, a young African American woman, as she recollects her life through a series of letters to God. As a victim of rape and emotional abuse from her husband and father, Celie no longer feels any true emotions and lives in fear of men. When Shug Avery, a confident woman on the way to stardom, enters her life, Celie’s views on success and happiness are forever changed. Slowly, she begins to realize the value of independence and friendship as Shug shows her what the meaning of love really is. By learning to be self-reliant, Celie no longer has to depend on others for her own happiness.

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

Characters throughout Alice Walker’s The Color Purple can be evaluated and analyzed using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a five-stage model consisting of fundamental needs and growth needs. His theory states that the basic, lower tiered needs have to be met before the growth, higher tiered needs can be met, to ultimately reach the top tier, self-actualization. In The Color Purple, Walker shows the eventual progress to self-actualization through the protagonist, Celie. Celie’s growth is shown through her letters to both God and her sister Nettie. Celie fulfills her basic physiological needs when she gets married to Mr._ because she is finally able to escape her father’s abuse, beatings, and rape. It takes a while, but Celie gains safety and security when Shug Avery tells her, “I won’t leave… until I know Albert won’t even think about beating you” (Walker 76). The relationship that Celie forms with Shug helps Celie satisfy her belonging and intimacy needs. Their love for each other can be shown when Shug states, “cause she [Nettie] the only one you ever love… sides me” (120). As Celie begins her life in Memphis, she meets the respect/self-respect needs when she opens her own business making and selling pants. Celie feels so pleased and shows her character development when she says, “I got love, I got work, I got money, friends, and time” (218). Celie finally reaches self-actualization by the end of the novel. She has a successful business, is able to be independent in her own house, and realizes that she can bring herself happiness and that through every situation she needs to see the bright side. This is evidently shown when Celie is talking to Mr._ and says, “If she [Shug] come, I be happy. If she don’t I be content” (288). Celie’s evolution to reach self-actualization is clearly displayed in The Color Purple as Celie faces and overcomes hardships and learns to be confident in herself.

The Color Purple In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie was very neglected and abused by many people. She was raped and got pregnant by her father. Celie's mom died and she had to face her father alone while trying to protect her sister Nettie from him.

The Color Purple has really short chapters that are written as letters to God and explains Celie’s hardships in the simplest way possible. Celie expresses her thoughts with poor grammar and spelling, which emphasizes the point that Celie isn’t educated. This is shown when Celie says “He wake up while I’m in the field. I been chopping cotton three hours by time he come. Us don’t say nothing to each other” (Walker 26). In the beginning, Celie’s letters discuss topics briefly rather than being developed in long paragraphs. After Nettie and Celie reconnect, Celie’s letters get longer and more detailed. She expresses her joy by writing more. It also shows how she feels entitled to express her feelings more than she did before. Next, the setting affects how the characters act. Because the setting is in rural areas of the South and Celie is a poor black women, her bad treatment is ignored, and she has little exposure to education or the outside world. Celie lives most of her life very isolated and ignorant. Celie starts to learn more about herself and the world from people who enter into her life from different worlds than hers. Shug Avery comes from the city, where she lives a liberated life. Celie leaves home and goes with Shug to Memphis, where she also becomes more liberated. Celie’s world is expanded due to her sister’s travels in Africa. Living a poor life in the South, Celie never considered her African heritage until she finds Nettie’s letters

The Color Purple by Alice Walker sheds light on the hardships of Celie’s life as an African American woman in the early nineteenth century through letters and prayers written by Celie herself. Soon after birth Celie’s mother dies, and only Celie, her father, and her sister Nettie remain. As a fourteen year old girl, Celie is abused mentally and physically by her father in forms such as rape and beatings. Celie gets impregnated by her father, and when she gives birth to the child, her father kills the child in the woods. Mr._______ (Albert) comes along and wants to marry Nettie, but her father refuses to allow Nettie to marry. However, her father offers Celie, whom he calls the “ugly” one, up for marriage to Mr._______. Celie’s life changes drastically when Mr._______ brings his mistress, Shug Avery, home for Celie to nurse back to health. Celie immediately falls for Shug, and Shug shows Celie what real love looks like when she shows responding emotions to Celie. Being with Shug releases a sense of confidence that Celie has never experienced. Shug helps Celie figure out what happened to her sister, Nettie. Together, they discover that Mr. _______ has been hiding letters from Nettie to Celie for years. From the letters, Celie learns that Mr._______ is not actually her biological father. The letters also reveal that Nettie is living in Africa as a missionary. The reverend she married also adopted Celie’s two children she thought Mr._______ had murdered. Celie learns that

The Color Purple is a book that has been transformed into a movie. The Color Purple is about a woman named Celie who was abused and raped by her father until she is forced to marry against her will so her family can get a dowry to survive. The man she married, Mister, abuses and mistreats her throughout their marriage. Celie discovers a friend in Mister’s mistress Shug and eventually falls in love. With the help of Shug, Celie finds herself and her voice and leaves Mister in the hopes of starting a better life.

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

The main character in Walker’s “The Color Purple” is Celie, a black woman who is treated very poorly by the men surrounding her. In her early years she is abused and raped by her stepfather, Alfonso, who she has two babies from. It shows already at the beginning of the novel that there is a mixture of parent – lover, parent – children roles, which can prevent Celie’s rise and also noting their similar history will be a barrier in Precious’s life as well. Throughout the novel the strong relationships she builds with the other female characters around her have the greatest impact on Celie’s life. This ‘sisterhood’ gives her the strength to liberate herself from the oppression created by men.

From her father to Albert to society even everything was against her and she was always looked down on because she never had anybody in her corner to support her and help her fight the world that looked down on her. Although you can see that she lets everyone get to her at the beginning of the story when Celie opens her eyes and meets other female characters that aren’t living life the same way she was she thought she could make a change in her life and so she went out and did that. Celie left her abusive relationship with Albert while still forgiving him for what he did as well as started working on her own although the society looked down upon women in the workforce no matter what the task was she didn’t care though she went out and did what she thought was best. Faith in God can go a long way and although she was scared of God at first because she connected God with males and not everything she learned that God was much more than just a male or a skin color she learned that God is always around and is everything which helps support an alternative approach as Walker stated in one of his critical essays “The Color Purple reaches out to anyone who’s felt confused about the role of God and religion in their life and offers an alternative

Alice Walker is a beautifully well-spoken author that wrote The Color Purple, one of my favorite books. It touched me so much that I jumped at the chance to write about her. The more I learn about her life and what was happening at different times in her life, the more interested I become in her. She is not just an award winning author but also a professor, an activist, and a social worker.