I read Alice Walker’s pivotal novel The Color Purple for a Women’s Studies course called Gal Pal’s: Women and Friendship. I saw the movie, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, many years ago so vaguely recalled the story. The book is a beautifully written epistolary novel about the struggles of four women spanning several decades in the early 1900s. Celie, the female protagonist, tells her story first in letters addressed to God, then later to her sister Nettie. The story begins when Celie is twelve, and pregnant with her second child by her father who has told her she better not tell anyone except God, or it would break her mother’s heart.
Celie’s children are taken from her at birth and she is soon married off to local widower, Mister, in need of a woman to clean, cook and look after his children. Tragedy strikes when Mister preys on Celie’s younger sister Nettie. Not wanting Nettie to go through what she did, Celie helps Nettie get out, but is soon left alone to undergo abuse and neglect by Mister and his bratty children. The years pass, and Mister’s oldest boy brings home a bride, the feisty Sofia, who refuses to be a battered wife. This is Celie’s first opportunity to realize women do not have to be slaves to their men.
Although Celie is brutalized by the men in her life, she finds solace in the female friendships she forms, the “sisters” she bonds with and who together transform each other’s lives, giving Celie the much needed strength to fling off male oppression and stand on her own two feet as a strong independent woman.
The Color Purple is a truly wonderful read about the strength of female friendship and the redemption and reconciliation that can arise from true hardship.
Till next time, happy reading,
L J
| TBR = 5 | WPL = 11 |
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