The Color Purple Women

The Color Purple takes place around the 20th century in rural Georgia, 30 years before World War II. Walker’s literary works display the ways in which both women are objectified and treated unequally by men within their lives. According to Lauren Berlant in Modern Critical Interpretations of The Color Purple, Walker creates The Color Purple as a way to represent historical events. “The taking of lands, or the births, battles and deaths of Great Women” with the scene of “one woman asking another for her underwear" (Berlant 4). These issues through relationships and problems of women of color. Walker explores and provides insight into the issues that women of color experience through her works, The Color Purple an epistolary novel. Walker defines

In shows how a women is expected to submit under the authority of her husband and similarly How Much We Must Look Like Stars to Stars by Alysia Nicole Harris is a collection of poems expresses the radical abuse against women of color and using personal trauma to under gird the existence and acerbity of sexism. Within The Color Purple and How Much We Must Look Like Starts to Stars, and through the examination of Womanist theory. Physical appearance, gender-roles and sexuality will be explored throughout The Color Purple and How Much We Must Look Like Stars to Stars Walker and Harris show the lives of black southern women and the patriarchy in which they live. Walker wrote in the form of letters by Celie, a 14 year old black girl who does not like her physical appearance has been forced into adulthood by having to take on the responsibility of a wife and a mother to her husband’s children and grows up to find herself still in a place of submission and under the control of her husband. Celie is a fair-skinned young woman with nappy braids and does not appear to be what many may classify as beautiful or pretty. Mr.___, her husband originally asked their father for her sister Nette’s hand in marriage, however he declined and she is told that she is ugly by her husband, her father as well as her husband’s mistress, Sug Avery. Through verbal and physical abuse Celie does not perceive

Each of her poems are crafted around the normality of women and the tragic role that commodity plays within the history of women. The issue of objectification and rejection is addressed and carefully illustrated within her work. For example her poem entitled “Crow’s Sugar”speaks of the commodification of women through the issue of virtue and how it is seen in the eyes of men. Within her poem she states the following “The other boy said you wasn’t worth your salt if you wasn’t tasting me, I hid my virginity underneath my shirt” (Lines 20-21). Virginity and sex with a woman is not seen as a privilege it is seen as a right, to be taken and conquered rather than praised and appreciated. Being a Womanist is being able to take control of one’s body, identify with one’s sexuality, and take ownership of it and how it is to be handled. It is ones right and freedom of choice concerning the matters of how her body and the appropriation or the misappropriation of it. She then uses her poem entitled “famine” to highlight the role in which a mother and daughter are expected to play within the household as well as the issue of haven given birth to a child at a young age. In the poem, she describes the mother as a ghost, and plagues on the notion that the decisions and emotions of the mother is also felt by her, the daughter. For example, Harris writes within the “famine” that “We are now back when