Essays on The Color Purple

Novel adaptations into a film are quite a common practice seen these days. Cardwell (11) defines the term adaption as the process of adapting one text into another text. It is a process of modifying a thing so as to suit new condition. Many beautiful and award winning novels have been adapted in the films periodically by the Hollywood directors. It is a question of debate whether the original one is better or the adapted version is better. Among these several novels, one famous novel and the film adaptation is The Color Purple. A comparative analysis is done between ...

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr. This statement invokes a feeling that speaks of the fine line between living and dying. Right away a line from a favorite movie, the Shawshank Redemption (1994), comes to mind. The quote, spoken by Andy Dufresne, who is portrayed by Tim Robbins, goes “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” The quote is not too far from being similar to the words spoken by Dr. King, as they also speak to the necessity of staying busy and finding the time to care about life and what really matters. If a person simply sits and waits ...

Epistolary novel The Color Purple, composed by American author Alice Walker, illuminates life of African American women in the South parts of the US during 1930-s. This novel is considered to be one of the most controversial and censored literary work of Walker due to its explicit scenes of violence. Thus, in her letters to God main heroine, Celie, reveals true horrors of her life. Being, uneducated and poor fourteen-year-old African American Southerner, Celie faces constant physical and emotional abuse first from her father, Alphonso, who beats and rapes her and later from her husband, known as Mister. (Walker) ...

There can be no denial of the fact that the novel, The Color Purple, penned by Alice Walker goes on to delve deep into the concept of identity and existence via the portrayal of the character of Celie, the female protagonist of the novel. It has to be noted that the entire narrative of this literary work is aim at recreating the identity of the narrator who recapitulates the times of her past life and her hardships. The story progresses through the perspective of the protagonist, and the avid readers come to realize how the recapitulation plays a part ...

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The Color Purple is a novel written by Alice Walker. The story’s setting is in Georgia. It focuses on how African-American women were treated in the United States during the 90’s. It also addresses issues on racism, sexism, and incest, most especially the social culture of lower class people . In the story, most of the characters suffer many hardships especially poverty. Celie, the main character, had experienced a struggling family during her childhood. She together with her family lived in sub standard housing, separated from the Whites (litnotes.com). With this obvious division, ...

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Review and Analysis 1980s’ was a crucial time for America. Racism was high during the Reagan presidency. . It was during this time that, in 1982, Alice Walker wrote a book titled “The Color Purple”. Written in an epistolary form, the book tackled the issues of racism, violence and sexism in the USA. Born in Georgia in 1944, Alice Walker came from a struggling family. Her father was a farmer while her mother was working as a maid to support their family. As a child, Walker was inspired by the tales her grandfather told her. Her grandfather was ...

Introduction to Cinema

Anneke Smelik has regarded that cinema can be considered as a cultural practice wherein there are mythologies regarding women and the female gender; as well as men and male gender, which depicted legends concerning sexual differences that have been created, fabricated and epitomized (Smelik, 1998, p. 7). Smelik has identified the sexual differences as major obstacles that have been defied by women’s rights movements. As a result, several female directors have emerged to create a better understanding on how films and movies strengthens the folklores on sexual difference, and how it was magnified by some film theorists who symbolized women as ...

In the African-American community, the topic of education has long been one of some considerable controversy. To some, access to education has been seen as the way out of some of the most endemic social problems that the community faces. To others, education has been seen as a choice to assimilate with the majority culture (DeCuir-Gunby). In defiance to that, such institutions as the hip-hop culture have arisen, showing other ways (although more harmful) that members of the African-American community can make a name for themselves. This debate is not new; in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and “Everyday Use,” ...

- Introduction Danny Glover, prolific multitalented and multiple award holder, was born on the 22nd July 1946 and is famous actor, film producer and producer with a long career from the 1970s when there were very limited opportunities for African Americans. He is known for his roles in films like the color purple, the predator 2, witness, lethal weapon, saw, franchise and angels in the outfield. He has appeared in more than 70 films, more than 20 television appearances and won more than 15 awards in his acting career. In addition, Danny Glover has participated in theatrical productions albeit ...

When the volcano inside Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, the ash in the sky left the next summer very dreary and cold. When the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin traveled with her lover, Percy Shelley, to Switzerland to visit Lord Byron, the weather was so miserable that the group could never take part in the outdoor activities they had planned; instead, they had to amuse themselves indoors. After spending one evening talking about the possibility of returning dead bodies to life and reading German ghost stories, Lord Byron suggested a bet for the group – that each of them would write a supernatural story. ...

Alice Walker is an award winning American writer and activist. She has written material on racial and gender issues. Her works include poetry and fictional essays, which addressed issues, which faced African Americans at the time. Her most prolific work is The Color Purple, which won her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award (Baker 18). Robinson characterizes Walker, “as a womanist, a black feminist, and comments on how Walker became an author partially to cope with the isolation caused by a childhood injury (294).”

Walker is a native of Georgia from an area known as Eatonton (Baker 18). She is the youngest child ...

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a heroic story of a female protagonist Celie, who starts her journey as being a tragic heroine to finally gaining a voice and a sense of self-worth. By being surrounded by social outcasts such as Shug Avery, and being taught how to appreciate herself and her sexuality, by taking back the identity that has been cruelly taken away from her through abuse and sexual exploitation, by the end of the novel, Celie will emerge as the victor and sole owner of her own happiness. At the very beginning, the fourteen year old Celie’s finds herself ...

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a heroic narrative of an African American woman, who in a social context of intense agonizing relationships, eventually reaches safe grounds in issues of feminism and racial liberation. It is a bildungsroman of a female protagonist Celie, who commences her journey as being a tragic heroine to the final attaining of a heroic status, by utilizing an empowering subjectivity that will eventually resonate with all other African American women she is surrounded by. In the end, she will finally reach the “heroic selfhood [which] is achieved when the protagonist successfully subverts those conventions of the established social order ...

Women – Rats in a Trap

Alice Walker’s short story ‘Roselily’ was published in 1973 as part of her first published collection of short stories – In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. The collection was very favourably reviewed and helped bring Walker to the attention of the public. The collection also won the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of the Arts. Since then it has often been anthologized and studied in American schools, although not without controversy. According to Donnelly, “For its ‘irreligious’ stance, ‘Roselily’ was banned in California in 1994. Apparently Christian, Roselily is tied equally to folk beliefs and superstition, ...

Alice Walker is an influential writer who expressed her passion for tradition and heritage in the compelling short story, Everyday Use. This critically acclaimed tale is set in the rural South of the 1960s, a backdrop against which Mrs. Johnson and her daughters, Dee and Maggie, play out a parable about the struggle for cultural integrity and of remaining true to one’s nature. In Everyday Use, Walker would have us understand that keeping faith with oneself is the best way to maintain a link to the past.

Background

For Walker, that past can be traced to her native Georgia. One of eight ...

The color purple by Alice Walker, it’s a novel which discusses and narrates issues concerning gender inequalities, discrimination and racism within a community based in South America, in the early 1900’s. The main character in the novel “Celie” is a young black woman abused and violated by close members of her family such as, his father and his husband. In this case the novel raised questions to readers of the novel, making them eager wanting to know why didn’t “Celie” tell her mother what his father was doing to her? Another question triggered to readers is; did Celie really ...

Introduction

‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker is a novel which discusses and narrates issues concerning gender inequalities, discrimination and racism within a community based in South America, in the early 1900’s. The main character in the novel Celie is a young black woman abused and violated by close members of her family such as, her father and her husband. The novel raised questions to the readers, making them eager to know why didn’t Celie tell her mother what her father had been doing to her. Another question to readers is: did Celie really wanted to protect her sister or ...