How Purple Came to Be
Reviewed by Bao Dao
May 5, 2008
This epistolary novel will take you back in time and show you what is was like living in an oppressive and sexist society. It tells of an African-American woman living in the early 1900s and her struggles of trying to find herself in such a society. As we discover her discoveries, she will take you through some twists and turns that will leave you speechless.
What exactly is the color purple? In the epistolary novel The Color Purple, written by Alice Walker, the main character searches to answer this question. Alice Walker was born in a small town of Eatonton, Georgia. Her life and works were deeply influenced by her parent’s oppressing lifestyles and racism where she lived. In 1982, Walker published one of her most famous novels, The Color Purple, which received the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. A few years later, the novel became adapted into a movie screen production. This novel tells about the struggles of an African-American named Celie, who is the main protagonist and narrator of the story, from Georgia living in the early 1900s’.
In the novel, Celie’s father, Alphonso, is known to be have beaten and even rape his own daughter, while her mother is left very ill and eventually dies. Even after the death of her mother, Alphonso still insists on abusing his own daughter. Then one day, a man named Mr._____, wants to marry her sister Nettie. Refusing the proposal, Alphonso decides to offer Celie instead of Nettie because he thought that Nettie was smarter and would come in much handier than Celie would. So Mr._____ accepts the offer and takes Celie into a hard and unhappy married life. Once Celie gets taken into the married life, Nettie decides to run away from her father and come live with Celie. Although Celie is married to Mr._____, he is still attracted to Nettie. This causes conflict in the house and causes Nettie to run away again for her safety. Leaving without any word, Celie thought that Nettie had died. From her married life, Celie comes to realize that the men are oppressing women and women should stick up for themselves while becoming more independent. Mr. _____’s lover, Shug Avery also agrees with this realization. In the novel, both Celie and Shug Avery become best friends and sometimes even support each other from the abuses of Mr. ____. They also try to find opportunities in which they can become independent and empowered, later becoming the search for the color purple.
Just like that of the novella Pobby and Dingan, written by Ben Rice, the protagonist Ashmol is also looking for something intangible. In the novella, Ashmol searches for his sister’s two imaginary friends, Pobby and Dingan, to help prove his fathers innocence and to make his sick sister feel better. Ashmol searches the whole town for two imaginary friends that he can’t even see. In comparison, Celie searches for that color purple, which is also intangible. She believes that this “purple” thing was something that God had created and it was the most amazing thing that had ever been created, according to Celie. In the end of the novel and the novella, both the characters come to find these intangible objects. Just how is it that you find something that is intangible? Well, simple. All you have to do is believe. The theme in both of these works of literature is to believe and to keep on believing no matter how hard the situation is or what people tell you. However, in Pobby and Dingan, Ashmol was able to find Pobby and Dingan by beginning to believe in them as if they were real people. For Celie, she found that “purple” thing, only it wasn’t exactly purple.
The only flaw in this novel is that it is written like letters because Celie is supposedly writing to God about the things that are happening in her life. This makes the novel sometimes hard to understand due to Celie’s dialect in the beginning. But overall, this novel is a great read and is definitely recommended to teens because it has twist and turns throughout the novel that makes it so hard to put the book down. Also, we can all learn something valuable from the novel and that is to keep on believing and don’t stop just because someone told you too. So what is exactly the color purple supposed to be? Read the book and found out what Celie found the color purple to be.
