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The Color Purple Research Paper

Decent Essays

The Color Purple The Color Purple, written by Alice Walker illuminates the struggles African-American women face in the early twentieth century. They are all joined together through love, hatred and hard times in life. The narrator and one of the main characters, Celie, age fourteen lives in Georgia. Celie lives with her mother, father, siblings, and her own children. Celie has a hard home life, she is raped by her father and has given birth to his children. Her father sexually assaults her and abuses her, this even continues once her mother dies. Now she feels the burden of protecting her sister from her father's sexual ways not wanting her to have the same life she had. Throughout this whole time of living a horrible life Celie writes …show more content…

As she goes through life Celie marries to a man who abuses her like her father did. So Celie is living with her husband and takes care of his children while being abused by him, she gives them loving care yet she feels nothing for them and neither do they for her (Walker 5). Through her whole life Celie is at the bottom of the food chain. The African American males treat her badly. All she is to them is a sexual toy and a punching bag. She is expected to take the abuse and harassment they send her way, and continue cleaning their house, caring for the children, and feed the men. Women at this time are not allowed to defend themselves and talk back to the men. Celie kept quiet about everything that happened to her especially when she was young and was being raped by her father, mainly because he had told her “You better not never tell anyone but God. It’d kill your mammy” (Walker …show more content…

Celie now has the courage to yell at her husband about the situation and he tries to abuse her like he use to but she no longer has the low self esteem she did before he no longer can hurt her like he use to. She has become a happy woman who is now looking forward to life. Since during the time era black women were the lowest class of people, Celie was to respond to men and do whatever they wanted. White folk, and men were in control. She was expected to please men, she did this with her father, she allowed him to rape her and abuse her. She allowed it because she knew if she did not let her father do it to her, he would do it to her sick mother. It made her happy he was not abusing her mother. By the end of the book Celie appears as a strong independent woman. She found her voice and she fights back no longer taking anything from men. This can relate to a lot of African American women in this time period, right after slavery was done with. Many of the African American women were not really seen as people. They were the lowest of the low, then eventually they spoke up and fought for equality. This book and the way Celie responds to her life, growing as a person, really relates to real life women who found their voice and started fighting for

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