The Color Purple

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The Color Purple

Alice Walker

Literature

Aug 20, 2018

"Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me." Those words belong to Celie, a poor African American girl in rural Georgia in the 1930s. Her letters, first to God and then to her younger sister, Nettie, make up the largest portion of The Color Purple (letters to Celie from Nettie, who escapes from the South and finds work with a missionary group in Africa, make up the rest). From the outset, the epistolary form of the book creates an intimacy that allows the reader to experience the intense emotions of this searing novel through Celie’s voice, by which she marks off in her letters the only space she can claim as her own within the brutal reality of her life. Although it’s often rightly celebrated for its forthright attention to racism and violence against women, Walker’s book has a moral and emotional power that is not defined solely by specific issues, for Celie’s experience in forging her character in threatening and often terrible situations is as perilous and profound as any soldier’s baptism by fire in a different kind of novel.

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