7/4/2023 0 Comments Color purpleTheir Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.Along with having related characters and the same author, Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Color Purple are similar in showing the evils of girl child abuse and how culture and societal gender constructs affect individuals. She is married to Adam (also a character from The Color Purple) but their marriage and relationship is tried by the psychological problems Tashi has as a result of the trauma from going through those torturous cultural rites. Tashi is an African girl from a village called Olinka who moves to America after going through the cultural rites of facial scarification and female circumcision as a young woman. Alice Walker made Tashi, a minor character in The Color Purple, the protagonist of this novel, published in 1992. Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker. Let’s take a look at some of these works. There are some other books written by renowned black female writers that are similar to The Color Purple in showing the struggles of colored women and in addressing the themes of violence, injustice, violation, and abuse of women and the girl child in society. The Color Purple by Alice Walker Digital Art For instance, one of her subsequent novels, published in 1992 with the title Possessing the Secret of Joy, features characters from The Color Purple like Tashi and Adam. For instance, she declined the translation of The Color Purple into Hebrew as a way to show her lack of support for Israel, a country she claims practices apartheid.Īlice Walker continues to foster the legacy of The Color Purple through her other writings. In all, Alice Walker makes a wonderful blend of fiction and reality, which makes The Color Purple a captivating and relatable story.Īlice Walker has used the publication of The Color Purple to reinforce her stance on some global political issues. The character Nettie’s experiences in Africa were inspired by Alice Walker’s time as an exchange student in Africa. The character Sofia who gets blinded in one eye, is reminiscent of Alice Walker herself, who is blind in one eye. For instance, the character Anna Julia that was murdered by an obsessed lover was inspired by the story of Alice Walker’s grandmother, who was murdered by a man that wanted to be her lover. It is the third novel written by Alice Walker and it won her a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and a National Book Award for Fiction also in 1983.Īccording to Walker, The Color Purple is a manifestation of her desire to bring to the human consciousness the evils of division across gender and racial lines and hopefully liberate humans from these evils.Īlthough not a true-life story, Alice Walker in The Color Purple reflects some true-life struggles, some of which she experienced directly, and others that she heard were experienced by others. The Color Purple is Alice Walker’s best-known work. Climax: Celie’s enraged outbursts at Mister at dinnerĪlice Walker is a versatile writer who has written and published many collections of poems, memoirs, essays, short stories, and novels.Setting: Early 20th century Georgia and Memphis in the USA and a fictional village in Africa called Olinka.Genre: Epistolary Novel African-American Literature.The abuse and travails Celie suffers render her numb to life but she eventually begins to heal and triumph over her adversities through support from a strong woman named Shug Avery and the loving words of her sister Nettie who shows her different places in the world through her letters. She is later married off to an older widower who continues to rape and abuse her. The novel centers on Celie, a fourteen-year-old African-American girl who is constantly raped by her father but has no one to help her or to confide in and so resorts to writing letters to God as her only outlet.
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