the color purple essay introduction

Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”: The Analysis Essay

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Introduction

Summary of the book, main characters, main themes, reference list.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker is an epistolary novel about African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s. It addresses some crucial issues, such as segregation and sexism. This work was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985 (Bay et al. , 2015, p.169). More than that, The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983.

The novel is written as a series of letters, that are not dated, and has a fascinating and thought-provoking plot. Its name comes from a character’s words, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” (Walker, 1982, p. 196). Walker writes in an uneducated language and southern style to create the atmosphere of an impoverished area and develop complex relationships between the main characters and the themes mentioned above.

The protagonist of the novel is Celie, a fourteen-year-old abused black girl who lives in Georgia and addresses her letters to God. Her father, Alfonso, repeatedly rapes his daughter and forbids her to tell anybody about what happened, except for God. Then, Alfonso marries Celie off to Mister Albert after her mother’s death. However, married life is also complicated and painful for the girl, as she has to bring up Albert’s children, do all of the housework, and suffer misery and hardship from him.

After Celie’s marriage, her younger sister, Nettie, gets the opportunity to leave her father’s household and move to Mr. Albert’s house. However, Celie’s husband kicks Nettie out after a while as she refuses to satisfy his sexual demands. Nettie promises to write to her older sister, but after she leaves, Celie does not receive any letters from her. The protagonist’s life changes only when Albert’s deathly ill mistress Shug appears in his home so that Celie will take care of her. Soon after Shug’s arrival, they fall in love with each other. For the first time, Celie can enjoy emotions, sex, and friendship.

Celie and Shug manage to find out why there was no news from Nettie for several decades. Mr. Albert appears to hide all of Nettie’s letters in the locked trunk. When the main character reads her sister’s letters, she opens up a new world and realizes all the abuses that she has suffered from her husband. That is why she decides to leave him and start a new life with Shug in Memphis. Furthermore, Celie learns that Alfonso is not her biological father and that her younger sister lives with the Reverend Samuel and his family in Africa. The girl also finds out that now she owns a house where Alfonso lived till his death.

In the end, Celie reunites with her sister, who returns from Africa with her husband Samuel and Celie’s children and maintains a close relationship with Shug. Besides, she keeps in touch with Mr. Albert as he changed a lot. Now Nettie and Celie are inseparable and happy so much that Celie writes that she has never felt so young before, though she is an old woman.

Celie is the protagonist of the book, who the author portrays as a victim through most of the novel. Her father and her husband rape her, she is deprived of any freedom and human rights, and she cannot take care of her children. The only person Celie loves – her younger sister Nettie – is also taken away from her. When she meets her husband’s mistress Shug Avery, a tipping point is reached. Shug encourages Celie to rebel against Mr. Albert and leave him. Celie becomes more self-confident and realizes all the extent of hardships she has suffered. More than that, thanks to Shug, she learns to love, feel emotions, and enjoy her life.

Nettie is Celie’s younger sister, who Mr. Albert is firstly interested in, but then, he agrees to marry Celie. Nettie is an educated and intelligent girl who loves her older sister very much. Nettie escapes from her father’s household to live with Celie. However, later, she has to leave because Mister tries to assault her. Nettie goes to Africa with the Reverend Samuel and his family as a maid. Throughout her travels, she writes regularly to Celie, but her older sister does not receive these letters because of her husband. Nettie returns to America with Samuel and two Celie’s children thirty years later.

Mr. Albert, Celie’s husband, is a character, who also experiences changes in his personality aside from Celie. In the beginning, he considers his young wife only a servant and “exercises socially superior power and gets benefit from the unpaid labor provided by Celie” (Abbasi and Hayat, 2017, p.184).Mr. Albert loves Shug, but he cannot marry her because of the public’s opinion. Besides, Mr. Albert hides Nettie’s letters from Celie and prevents their communication. In the end, he reconsiders his life and views and tries to forge relationships with Celie and other people.

Shug Avery is a famous blues singer and strong woman, who becomes a friend and, eventually, a lover to Celie. She teaches Celie to struggle and be independent and confident. Shug’s biggest problem is that she cannot stay with one person and does not have stable romantic relationships. Though sometimes Shug is also mean and selfish, she inspires people around her, brings entertainment, and becomes the protagonist’s loved one.

Violence, racism, sexism, and femininity are among the central themes of the novel (Lewis, 2017). In The Color Purple, readers can see how differently Afro-American female characters react to hardships and maltreatment. Celie is submissive; she suffers violence from her father and husband repeatedly and shuts down emotionally, while other female characters try to protest against abuse. Alice Walker also emphasizes the role of female relationships and their opportunities to fight for rights and challenge male oppression and dominance.

The novel The Color Purple raises crucial and global issues, such as women’s role and their discrimination by men in the twentieth century. Alice Walker illustrates the harassment a black woman has to go through, but she also demonstrates how a woman can struggle for self-confidence and respectful treatment. The Color Purple is a story about female strength, resistance, and fight, all fueled by love.

The Color Purple is an impressive piece of American feminist literature. Walker tells the readers about the lives of impoverished and humiliated women and considers complex social relationships. She uses different means to depict the atmosphere and the environment of the 1930s, such as the black folk language, and the first-person narrative. Despite being widely criticized for the use of language, The Color Purple has its actual historical background and continues to occupy readers’ minds nowadays.

Abbasi, M. and Hayat, M. (2017) ‘Marxist feminist critique: the socioeconomic position of Afro-American women in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple ’, Journal of Social Sciences , 8(2), pp. 180-200.

Bay, M. et al. (2015) Toward an intellectual history of black women. North Carolina: UNC Press Books.

Lewis, J. (2017) ‘Gender, race, and violence: a critical examination of trauma in The Color Purple ’, Sacred Heart University Scholar, 1(1), pp. 24-38.

Walker, A. (1982) The color purple . San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Bibliography

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The Color Purple

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Celie , a young girl who lives with her abusive father , her sick mother , and her younger sister Nettie , begins writing letters to God . In her first letters, she details how her father has been sexually abusing her. Celie becomes pregnant twice, and each time her father gives away the children.

A man named Mr. _____ begins courting Nettie. Celie encourages Nettie's marriage to Mr. _____ because Celie fears her father ( Pa ) will soon turn his sexual attentions toward Nettie. But Pa does not permit Nettie to marry Mr. _____, instead insisting that Mr. _____ marry Celie, since she is older and a hard-worker. Mr. _____ believes Celie to be ugly, but eventually is convinced to marry her, because he has several children by his previous wife (who was murdered), and Mr. _____ needs someone to take care of them.

Celie marries Mr. _____ and moves in with him. Nettie later escapes Pa and lives with Celie and Mr. _____ for a brief period. But Mr. _____ still has designs on Nettie, and Nettie flees to town, staying with the Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine , whom Celie once met, briefly. By coincidence, Samuel and Corrine have adopted Olivia and Adam , Celie's two children. Celie believed she recognized Olivia, when she saw her with Corrine in a shop. Nettie promises Celie she will write to her from her new home, but these letters never arrive.

Celie takes care of Mr. _____'s children, whom she considers "rotten" save for Harpo , the oldest, who marries a strong, hard-working woman named Sofia . Harpo becomes upset that he cannot get Sofia to obey him; both Mr. _____ and Celie (at first) recommend that Harpo beat Sofia. But when Celie sees how Harpo's attempts at beating have hurt both Harpo and Sofia, Celie apologizes to Sofia, and the two become friends.

Shug Avery , a lover from Mr. _____'s past, comes to town, sick, and stays with Mr. _____. They strike up their affair once more, with Celie's knowledge. Celie has been fixated on Shug since seeing a picture of her, on a playbill, when Celie was a girl. Celie and Shug become friends and confidantes, and, later, lovers. Shug begins to sing at a bar Harpo has built behind his shack, after Sofia leaves him (she is tired of being beaten and ordered around by Harpo). Celie tells Shug about her father's sexual abuse, and about Mr. _____'s beatings. Shug promises to protect Celie.

Shug and Celie discover that Mr. _____ has been hiding, for years, the letters Nettie has been sending to Celie. Celie reads the letters and discovers that Nettie, upon moving in with Samuel and Corrine, and their two children Olivia and Adam, began studying to be a missionary in Africa. Nettie then traveled with the family to Harlem, in New York City, on to England, and to various cities in Africa, observing the culture and traditions of the people there, before settling in a village of the Olinka people. Nettie works for Samuel and Corrine, aids in the education of Olivia and Adam, and comes to know a girl named Tashi , whose mother, Catherine , does not approve of Tashi being educated in the Western manner. Celie begins writing letters to Nettie rather than to God.

Corrine, it is revealed, believes that Samuel has had an affair with Nettie back in Georgia, and that Adam and Olivia are actually Nettie's children. This is why, Corrine thinks, Olivia and Adam so resemble Nettie. Nettie swears to Corrine that the two children are her sister Celie's, and Samuel corroborates her story, adding that Celie and Nettie's "Pa" is really their stepfather, and that their biological father was lynched, after his dry-goods store became too successful in the eyes of his white neighbors in Georgia.

Back in Georgia, Celie, spurred on by Shug, confronts Mr. _____ for withholding Nettie's letters for so many years. Celie, Shug, Shug's husband Grady (whom she has married in the interim), and Squeak , Harpo's second wife, move to Memphis, where Shug continues her singing career (Shug already has a house there). Celie begins making pants, a business she will continue for the remainder of the novel, and Squeak and Grady fall in love and move away. Sofia, who was arrested years back for attacking the mayor and his wife after they acted disrespectfully to her, has been serving as the mayor's family maid for twelve years. She is finally released to Celie's home toward the end of the novel. Her children, raised by Harpo and Squeak, no longer recognize her.

Meanwhile, the Olinka village is destroyed by British rubber companies, who plow over the Olinkas crops and hunting land, and charge the Olinka rent and a water tax. Dispirited by their inability to save the village, Samuel, Nettie, and the children return to England after Corrine dies of illness.

In England, Samuel and Nettie realize that they are in love, and marry; they tell Olivia and Adam that their biological mother is Celie, and vow to reunite the families in Georgia. After one last trip to Africa, in which Tashi and Adam are married, Tashi, Adam, Olivia, Nettie, and Samuel arrive at Celie's house in Georgia—the house she inherited from her biological father after her stepfather's death—and find Celie's family in good order. Shug, who had run away for a time with a young man name Germaine for a last fling, has come back to live with Celie and be reconciled with Mr. _____; Mr. _____ himself has found religion and apologized to Celie for mistreating her (he has even carved Celie a purple frog, as a form of apology) and Squeak, Sofia, Harpo, and the remainder of the family realize that, although a great deal has happened over the past thirty years, they, as a family, feel younger and more energetic than ever before.

The Color Purple

Introduction to the color purple, summary of the color purple.

Meanwhile, not seeing any other way out, Nettie, too, joins Celie. Mr. Albert asks Nettie to reward him if she wanted to stay in the house. So, Nettie escapes but is followed by Mr. Albert.  However, Celie presumes that Nettie is dead. Shortly after that Mister’s son, Harpo marries Sofia after having impregnated her. Despite his father’s fierce resistance to their marriage, he not only marries Sofia but also has five children from her. Yet, Sofia never becomes submissive before Harpo; rather she makes him dance at her tunes despite Celie’s instigations to Harpo, who finally submits to his father instead of his wife but when he again confronts Sofia, she not only retaliates but also confronts Celie for causing this instigation, making her seek an apology and join hands with her against the brutal duo.

Squeak, taking pity, asks Hodges, the sheriff for her release, but is raped by him after which she takes care of Sofia’s household. Sofia is released after some time. On the other hand, Shug helps Celie know about her sister, Nettie whom Mister has been keeping at a secret place. She comes to know later that she has gone to African with a couple, Corrine and Samuel, after they have adopted her son, Adam, and daughter, Olivia. However, Corrine becomes suspicious about her husband’s relationship with Nettie and tries to place restrictions on her.

Meanwhile, Celie learns about the edification of Mister whom she starts calling Albert yet she rejects his proposal. She leaves Albert and curses him while doing so. When Celie comes to know about Shug having left Germaine, she also feels that she can live without him. Celie starts living a financially comfortable life and Shug returns and decides on retirement. Nettie, on the other hand, marries Samuel and comes back to America , while Adam and Olivia, too, become adults after which Adam marries an African American girl. Celie ends the story with a letter on how happy she is at the moment!

Major Themes in The Color Purple

Major characters of the color purple, writing style of the color purple, analysis of the literary devices in the color purple, related posts:, post navigation.

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Introduction & Overview of The Color Purple

The Color Purple Summary & Study Guide Description

The Color Purple, Alice Walker's third novel, was published in 1982. The novel brought fame and financial success to its author. It also won her considerable praise and much criticism for its controversial themes. Many reviewers were disturbed by her portrayal of black males, which they found unduly negative. When the novel was made into a film in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, Walker became even more successful and controversial. While she was criticized for negative portrayal of her male characters, Walker was admired for her powerful portraits of black women. Reviewers praised her for her use of the epistolary form, in which written correspondence between characters comprises the content of the book, and her ability to use black folk English. Reflecting her early political interests as a civil rights worker during the 1960s, many of her social views are expressed in the novel. In The Color Purple, as in her other writings, Walker focuses on the theme of double repression of black women in the American experience. Walker contends that black women suffer from discrimination by the white community, and from a second repression from black males, who impose the double standard of white society on women. As the civil rights movement helped shape Ms. Walker's thinking regarding racial issues at home, it also shaped her interest in Africa. During the 1960s, a strong interest in ethnic and racial identity stimulated many African Americans to look for their roots in Africa. The primary theme of The Color Purple, though, reflects Walker's desire to project a positive outcome in life, even under the harshest conditions. Her central character triumphs over adversity and forgives those who oppressed her. This central theme of the triumph of good over evil is no doubt the source of the book' s great success.

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The Color Purple

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Character Analysis

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Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discuss the title of the novel. How does this title evoke important themes in the novel? Be sure to trace out as well how Walker uses the literal color purple to reinforce these themes.

Walker coined the term womanism to describe Black female identity that centers Black women’s experiences. What makes The Color Purple a womanist novel?

Discuss the significance of letter writing and writing in the novel. What impact does the epistolary form have on how you experience the plot and character development? What role do letters and writing play in the lives of the characters?

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The Color Purple Alice Walker

The Color Purple is an epistolary novel by Alice Walker. The Color Purple literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical a...

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The Color Purple Essays

The color purple: literary techniques employed by alice walker to develop celie's character hialy gutierrez, the color purple.

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Female Marginalisation Embodied in The Color Purple and The Yellow Wallpaper Patrick J P Harris

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Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence [1] and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [2] both paint a portrait American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This culture appears to be male, with no room for the female as any...

Internalization and Externalization of Color in The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple Anna Erickson College

Internalization and Externalization of Color

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Performing Despite Prejudice: Female Musicians in the Early 1900s and in The Color Purple Anonymous 10th Grade

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Historical Relevance of The Color Purple Anonymous 11th Grade

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Gender Roles and Sexism Dao Vu College

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Influences of Society on Gender in The Color Purple and To Kill a Mockingbird Zaneb Mansha 11th Grade

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Sewing for Freedom Stephanie Perez 12th Grade

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Childhood, education, and marriage

First writings, the color purple, later work and controversies.

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Alice Walker

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Why is Alice Walker significant?

A writer and feminist, Alice Walker is especially known for novels, poems, and short stories that offer great insight into African American culture and often focus on women. For the novel The Color Purple (1982), she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Alice Walker was born in 1944, the eighth child of African American sharecroppers. She was accidentally blinded in one eye, so her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores. After graduating (1965) from Sarah Lawrence College , Walker moved to Mississippi and began teaching and publishing her works.

Alice Walker’s most famous work is the Pulitzer Prize -winning novel The Color Purple (1982), which depicts the growing up and self-realization of a Southern black woman between 1909 and 1947. The novel was praised for the depth of its female characters, and it was adapted into a popular film and a musical.

Alice Walker (born February 9, 1944, Eatonton, Georgia, U.S.) is an American writer whose novels , short stories , and poems are noted for their insightful treatment of African American culture . Her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), focus particularly on women.

Walker was the eighth child of African American sharecroppers . While growing up she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores. In an interview with The New York Times in 1983 , Walker described her parents as “both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.” When she was eight years old, Walker was sent to live with her grandparents for a year in rural Georgia . In a TimesTalk interview in 2015 , she remembered them both as “so kind, so giving,” but they had had a turbulent past caused by her grandfather’s alcohol use . Her grandfather eventually recovered from alcoholism and changed his life for the better. (During her TimesTalk interview, Walker said that this experience led her to wonder “how could people who were so wonderful, when I knew them, be terrible when I didn’t know them?” Her wondering led her to write The Color Purple , because she “had to show what happened to them and why they were like that,” describing the experience of writing the novel as a form of “reclamation.”)

Walker received a scholarship to attend Spelman College , where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College . After graduating in 1965, Walker moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights movement . She also began teaching and publishing short stories and essays. She married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a white Jewish civil rights attorney, in New York City in 1967, after which they moved to Mississippi, becoming the state’s first legally married interracial couple. In her introduction to a collection of her journals, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire (2022), Walker wrote: “There was a long tradition of white men having Black mistresses in the South . That was not going to be my path. So I proposed to Mel, and he happily obliged . Apart from our love, it was important politically for us to be legally married.” They had one daughter, the writer and feminist activist Rebecca Walker , but their life in Mississippi was isolating and lonely, as Walker recorded in her journals. The family was subject to threats from the Ku Klux Klan , and Leventhal was often away working on legal cases involving civil rights throughout the state. The couple divorced in 1976.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

Walker’s first book of poetry , Once , appeared in 1968, and her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a narrative that spans 60 years and three generations, followed two years later. A second volume of poetry, Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems , and her first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women , both appeared in 1973. The latter bears witness to sexist violence and abuse in the African American community . After moving to New York City , where she worked as an editor for Ms. magazine , Walker completed Meridian (1976), a novel describing the coming of age of several civil rights workers in the 1960s. In 1981 she published the short-story collection You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down . It includes “Nineteen Fifty-five,” which addresses the exploitation of Black music by white musicians in the story of an older, female blues singer (modeled after Big Mama Thornton ) whose forgotten song from days gone by becomes the launching point to tremendous fame of a young, Elvis -like rock and roll singer. “The Abortion,” which was inspired by Walker’s own experience when she was in college and while she was living in Mississippi with Leventhal, tells the story of a young Black woman who has two abortions in the era before Roe v. Wade —the first a clandestine and traumatic procedure, the second quick and painless.

Walker moved to California , where she wrote her most popular novel, The Color Purple (1982). An epistolary novel , it depicts the growing up and self-realization of an African American woman between 1909 and 1947 in a town in rural Georgia. Its main character, Celie, survives rape and abuse at the hands of her father and husband and separation from her children and sister to find love with another woman. In the end she is reunited with her long-lost family. Through the book’s remarkable use of Black English Vernacular , the book also follows Celie’s changing views of God.

The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985, starring Whoopi Goldberg , Danny Glover , and Oprah Winfrey . A musical version produced by Winfrey and Quincy Jones premiered in Atlanta in 2004 and made its Broadway debut the following year. A film adaptation of the musical was released in 2023, featuring Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson , Colman Domingo, and Danielle Brooks.

Walker’s later fiction includes The Temple of My Familiar , an ambitious examination of racial and sexual tensions (1989); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a narrative centered on female genital mutilation ; By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), the story of a family of anthropologists posing as Christian missionaries in order to gain access to a Mexican tribe; and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005), about an older woman’s quest for identity. Reviewers complained that these novels employed New Age abstractions and poorly conceived characters, though Walker continued to draw praise for championing racial and gender equality in her work. She also released the volume of short stories The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) and several other volumes of poetry, including Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010), and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018). Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) collects poetry from 1965 to 1990.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

Walker’s essays were compiled in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (2006), and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way (2013). Walker also wrote juvenile fiction and critical essays on various women writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston . She cofounded a short-lived press in 1984.

Throughout her career Walker occasionally attracted criticism . Notably, some African American men strongly objected to the perceived negative portrayal of Black men in The Color Purple , to which Walker responded that such critics had clearly not read her book. Her coinage of the term womanist has also brought controversy. In her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens , Walker defined womanist as “A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, ‘You acting womanish,’ i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious , courageous or willful behavior.” To critics who claimed Walker was attempting to divide Black women from the larger feminist movement, she clarified to The New York Times in 2022 , “It has nothing to do with not wanting to be a feminist. But it is crucial for Black women to hold on to this very special tradition that we have, exemplified by Harriet Tubman , where you free yourself and you go back and you free other people.”

In later years Walker, who often spoke out against Israel ’s policies toward Palestinians , was accused of being anti-Semitic , with her support of conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier David Icke drawing particular attention. Her former husband, however, stated that during their marriage there was no evidence she held any anti-Semitic views.

In 2011 Walker published the unconventional memoir The Chicken Chronicles , in which she discussed caring for a flock of chickens and offered other musings on her life. The documentary film Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth was released in 2013. In 2022 Walker chose to publish Gathering Blossoms Under Fire , a deeply intimate collection of her journals, telling The New York Times , “I want the journals to be used so that people can see this working through of disappointment, anger, sorrow, regret. So in that sense, it’s a medicine book.”