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
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Although the Civil War had been over for nearly a century, many African Americans were made to experience humiliating and devastating discriminatory laws (Jim Crow laws), which made it impossible for black people to use the same water fountains, lunch counters, and bathrooms as white patrons. These laws also made it difficult for African Americans to obtain educations at white-dominated state universities, and to vote for (and indeed win) elected office. Written in the form of a series of letters, Alice Walker’s novel portrays the transformation of an African American woman from a physically and psychologically abused person to what Walker has elsewhere called a “womanist”—a strong and independent person who re-creates herself out of the legacy of her maternal