The Color Purple

Basic themes and overview of characters

Characters

Celie: The main heroine of our novel and the one who goes from being half dead to being empowered. Her journey from rape and abuse to sexual fulfillment and then economic independence. In some ways she is similar to our heroines from the 18th Century and even in The Pearl.

Characters

Celie: Her rape in the beginning by her step father and her violent mistreatment by other men is similar to the situations that were highly romanticized and fictionalize in our previous reading BUT the power and violence isn’t disguised at all.

Characters

She is exposed to the honesty that are more salacious reading refutes. This isn’t a fantasy life, this is the real consequences of sexual power for women, particularly women of color as black men weren’t necessarily open to treating their women at this time much better than society was treating them both.

Characters

Celie: However she accepts these incidents as normal until Shug Avery comes along and shows her a different possibility. Then she begins to develop a consciousness and to borrow a quote

from James Baldwin “To be black and conscious in America is to constantly live in a state of rage.”

Characters

Celie with this awareness and rage comes courage though and determination to reclaim her status as a human being---something she has to do beyond just racial tensions in the south, but also within her own community.

Characters

Nettie is the sister the Celie protected with her life and at most times, at great personal cost. She is the one who became a teacher and missionary and eventually married the minister/missionary she was assisting.

Characters

Nettie’s life is based on Walker’s own personal trip to Africa.

Nettie is the high culture heroine---the most that can be expected from someone raised in a culture of violence and misogyny.

Characters

Mr. _______- Celie's "Husband"-

He is a primary abuser who pays to have Celie become his wife and abuses her, rapes her and cheats on her. He treats her like a whore and an a slave without any thoughts or feelings or objectivity.

Characters

Shug Avery the most sexual and sexually free person operates outside of the margins of respectability by enjoying a bi-sexual relationships as well as some economic independence. She is similar to Fanny and Moll, because she has played the system and used it to her advantage. Even makes Mr.____ tow the line.

Characters

Shug Avery is a jazz singer who introduces Celie to sexual pleasure and their relationship is a real love story and Shug never forgets her promises to Celie and works to keep them and improve Celie’s life.

Characters

Squeak is someone who wants to be like Shug but has a role more like Celie’s. She is the compromise character between the two extremes of Celie and Shug.

Characters

Sofia tries to buck the system in more direct ways and ends up paying a high price for such disobedience.

She tries to achieve equality both racially and sexually and is silenced by the white community for her actions.

Themes

Sisterhood is the main theme of this novel and how it can be achieved and at what cost.

It also addresses the attempt of acceptance of different choices sexually, personally and politically.

Sisterhood

By the end of this novel, most of these women have come to terms of acceptance of the other’s women’s way of being. Which suggests a possible unification despite “sexual morality” is possible among women---a real community of acceptance of choices which is something yet to be achieved and pornography and reproductive rights dividing most women and feminists from each other.

Power

The most obvious theme of TCP. In this novel all kinds of power is wielded against these women and how they respond to the power determines their success. Most of them choose to skirt the margins of respectiabilty as the way of achieving success.

Power

Those who allow the power to take total control without ever discovering identity are the ones who die off. Sofia, Celie, Shug, Squeak and even to some extent Nettie all fight the power through less traditional margins.

Power

What is perhaps interesting about TCP is that the men who socially and culturally have more power over the women, have little social and cultural power themselves as mainly black sharecroppers in the south.

Power

If race wasn’t needed to prove the point in Pornography, then we wouldn’t have such violent examples of control and oppression both in pornographic film and in “high” culture.

Power

“This idea of power not just being in the hands of one group of people is brought to light in the novel. Nettie tells us that men listen "just long enough to issue instructions" and the women "look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground" when addressing men “—Matt Kane

Power

Walker offers us a solution to the struggle for power and in doing so blames neither white nor black people for the current injustices. The simple reason for the fact that white crush black is because "they was so mad to git throwed out and told they was naked" in the Olinka story of Creation in letter eighty-seven. From there they "made up they minds to crush us wherever they find us.“—Matt Kane

Power

Yet, we are reminded that this quest for power will mean that "everybody gon hate" the white people and in turn "they will become the new serpent." In short, animosity breeds animosity, and in advocating peace and not war, the Olinka suggest that the only way people will not be prejudiced is to regard everyone not as different, but as "one mother's children.“—Matt Kane

Themes

RaceEducationReligionNatureOppressionProgress vs Tradition

Symbols

AmenIn the first half of the novel the word "amen“ is both used to show discontent with how Shug acts by others as well as affirmation

Symbols

ClothesClothing is an important idea regarding the theme of identity.

Celie’s blue dress, Nettie wearing Corinne’s clothes the red pants—usually foreshadowing of events/roles to come.

Symbols

Letters

Serve as act of defiance to both her step dad and to Mr.___ since both of them wish to isolate her and silence her from the possibility of a community who will disapprove of their treatment of her.

Symbols

Letters

After first until she learns that Nettie exists, she writes to God and then to Nettie. Who has been writing her faithfully.

The letters make the experiences real despite the desire of those around her to cover it up.

Symbols

Can you think of another character who wrote letters?

Kuhn, authenticity etc…

Symbols

Needles, Pants, Pink & Purple

All of these are ways of achieving independence against men.

Needles and Pants—economic and social rebellion against men as well as seeing the colors of pink and purple as symbols of social autonomy against the roles and treatments men bring.

Symbols

Others include: Stars, Trees, Razors, Quilting, Stamps and the color Red.