Alice The Color Purple Research Paper

Alice Walker is “one of the country’s best selling writers of literary fiction,” according to Renee Tawa from the Los Angeles Times. Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She grew up poor, her father was a sharecropper and her mother worked as a maid. Although her family was poor, Alice Walker managed to attend Spelman College on a full scholarship in 1961. She later transferred schools and went to Sarah Lawrence College. She graduated in 1965. While living in Mississippi, Alice Walker became an activist for the civil and women’s rights movement. On March of 1967, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, and they became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi. Alice

Celie’s life revolves around racism, abuse, and sexism in the south during the early and mid-1900s. Celie is a poor, uneducated, and very submissive black woman. She has been raped and impregnated twice by her father, Alfonso. Her father has taken each child after they were born, so Celie is assumed that they are dead. At a young age, Celie is forced to marry an older man known as Mr.____. Their marriage is joyless, abusive, and horrific. Celie feels as if no one loves her besides her sister Nettie. Nettie comes to stay with Celie and Mr.____ but the stay is short due to the fact that Nettie won’t have sex with Mr.______. Mr.___ kicks Nettie out the house and Celie assumes her sister is dead because she never hears from her again. Celie has no one to turn expect God and continues to write him. Shug Avery, Mr.___’s former mistress, comes to stay with them due to her poor health. Shug is rude to Celie at first; they form a friendly turned sexual relationship together. Shug is the only person to show Celie any type of love besides her sister Nettie and stays with them for a while to protect her from Mr.__’s abusive ways. One day, Shug and Celie were talking to each other about Nettie and Celie expressed that she hasn’t received any letters from her. Shug tells Celie Mr.____ receives mail with weird stamps on them and he hides them. Celie discovers Mr.___ had all of Nettie’s

She wanted to share the stories that described the struggles of three generations of Georgia sharecroppers into a novel. Alice Walker accomplished this motive, but she put it in a female’s perspective. Since Alice Walker grew up with a sharecropper for a father, she knew first-hand what happened in her father’s workplace. She knew what it was like to grow up poor and having a parent to put faith in them to have a higher education. Alice Walker writes in her novel about Alfonso wanting Nettie to be a schoolteacher instead of someone’s wife. In The Color Purple, the novel mentioned racism. She wrote about how colored people would be treated when they went to the store and how white people were superior to the average colored person. When Nettie was in Africa, Alice Walker pointed out how the British didn’t care about the Olinka’s property because they felt like they owned it. Alice Walker knows about racism because she was married to a Jewish man, she was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and she grew up in the 1950s. People should read this novel because it explains what a colored wife could go through during the early 1900s. It shows how they were treated. Alice Walker characterized her characters so well that people can feel all of their emotions. The strength in this novel is the relationship between Shug and Celie. It was very bold of her to mention the type of love