Themes In The Colour Purple
...devoted to the mistreatment of blacks and black women especially, The Color Purple is dedicated to black women's rights.
Much of the narrative in Walker's novel is derived from her own personal experience, growing up in the rural South as an uneducated and abused child. In short, the goal of this book and indeed all her writing is to inspire and motivate black women to stand up for their rights. Celie, the main character, undergoes an inner transformation, from a submissive, abused wife to an unabashedly confident and independent black woman and businesswoman.
There are other more secondary themes, such as the rejection of the traditional, Christian, "white-man's" God. Thanks to the influence of Shug Avery and Nettie, a new age kind of God is developed and is a great comfort to all three women. Even Celie's last letter is written to this vague kind of god-- a god of nature and stars and people
Race and domesticity in 'The Color Purple.'
An important juncture in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when
Celie first recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie.
This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this
epistolary novel but also begins the transformation of Celie from writer to
reader. Indeed, the passage in which Celie struggles to puzzle out the
markings on her first envelope from Nettie provides a concrete illustration
of both Celie's particular horizon of interpretation and Walker's chosen
approach to the epistolary form:
Saturday morning Shug put Nettie letter in my lap. Little fat queen of
England stamps on it, plus stamps that got peanuts, coconuts, rubber trees
and say Africa. I don't know where England at. Don't know where Africa at
either. So I stir don't know where Nettie at. (102)
Revealing Celie's ignorance of even the most rudimentary outlines of the
larger world, this...
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