Introduction This essay explores Alice Walker’s “the colour purple” novel, which was published in 1983. Alice walker was born in February 944 in Georgia. Walker grew up witnessing her parent’s experience oppressive share cropping system and the racism in the USA, most of her writing in the colour purple is influenced by it. The colour purple explores the struggles of the several black women of the rural Georgia in the beginning of the twentieth century. This essay will discuss the ways in which the two respective characters of Sophia and Shug Avery became empowered and disempowered through their circumstances and how each of these characters have an impact on Celies’s progression as a character. A specific reference will be made to the historic context of the novel and the portrayal of masculinity and feminism. With regards to the colour purple as a gynocritic novel. The historical context of the colour purple Alice Walker was active in the American Civil Rights Movement, a momentous effort, beginning around 1960, by blacks and others that sought to remake the nature of …show more content…
While men were said to be physically tough and ethically fragile, women were seen as being the precise opposite and devoted with duty to sustain the entire family’s mora moral goodness. For instance the women in Celie’s church wonder that Shug has a sickness skinny through sexual encounter. They call it “female infection”, even though men are correspondingly vulnerable to sexually spread diseases. The public considers sexual freedom, which symbolises a goal and prerogative for men, to be a sign for women. The assets of womankind included “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”. In the eyes of the society, women were unskilled to encounter the stresses of the external world. Securing a job or being ethically dynamic would only be harmful for a women and for society in general (Gilmore