Category: Alice Walker

In Alice Walker’s famous short story “Everyday Use,” Dee is perceived as an unsympathetic character. It is difficult for the reader to feel compassion for Dee since she possesses repelling characteristics; she is as authoritative, manipulative, and self-absorbed. Although “Everyday Use” provides brief glimpses into the past, it is nearly impossible for the reader to…

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence [1] and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [2] both paint a portrait American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This culture appears to be male, with no room for the female as any manifestation other than a trophy or a servant. However, in both cases an…

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple holds immense historical and societal relevance among a thirty year spectrum of time periods and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the gradual development of both civil and women’s rights, the destruction of rich African civilizations by European companies, and the onset of World War II. Over the course of a…

During the early 1900s, an emergence of new forms of music such as blues and jazz brought a host of new musicians, many of them female. These female performers, even when wildly successful, were constantly subjected to unfair scrutiny and judgement due to their sex, and at times also due to their race. Examples of…

“It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how I know trees fear man,” (23) uttered the protagonist of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Such words of meekness were characteristic of Celie’s speech ­ that is, in the beginning of the novel.…

The theme of color is very broad, and reaches strands out to many different emotions and feeling of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple such as sadness, desire and hope. Color also is central to the society that the novel is set in – the color of your skin defines who you are. However, Walker uses…

Celie has been a victim of female oppression throughout her life, never believing in herself, and living in fear of men. However, when Shug Avery enters her life, Celie’s quality of life starts to improve on the whole, and her newfound self-belief allows her to challenge societal expectations. Their relationship is based on storytelling, an…

Sexism is, at its core, a product of gender roles. In the early twentieth century, discrimination against women through the overt use of gender roles was highly prevalent amongst men and women. In a patriarchal society, women are expected to submit to men in all areas simply because women are supposedly “inferior” to and dependent…

In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Shug Avery introduces the novel’s protagonist, Celie, to the concept of religious embodiment. Critic Anne-Janine Morey, in her book Religion and Sexuality in American Literature, defines embodiment as “the unreconciled relation of body and spirit” (3). In Western theology, God (the Word) and the flesh are conceived as binary…

Contrary to common belief, slavery as broadly defined was not abolished after the Civil War and is still around to this day. White lawmakers in the postbellum South strived to create a system in which prisons could lease out inmates, especially black inmates, to private businesses for profit. This convict lease system resurrected the antebellum…