INTRO “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering ‘bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love” (Walker). While the existence of personhood is often questioned as an individual learns about life, The Color Purple provides critical insight to the growth of African Americans in The South. Alice Walker lived during the latter half of the twentieth century, in the rural South. Their work often reflects the trials faced in her adolescent. Specifically, their novel The Color Purple concerns an African American girl growing up in The South, dealing
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Like many of Walker's fictional characters, she was a sharecropper's daughter and the youngest of eight children. At age eight, Walker was fortuitously injured by a BB gun shot to her eye by her brother. Her partial visual impairment caused her to withdraw and begin writing to facilitate her solitude. Walker's third novel, The Color Purple was published in 1982, and this work won both a Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award the following year. Walker was also a contributor to several periodicals and in 1983 published many of her essays, a collection titled In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: A Collection of Womanist Prose. Walker worked on her fourth novel while living in Mendocino County outside San Francisco. Like Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, and other accomplished contemporary black novelists, Walker uses heightened, lyrical realism to center on the dreams and failures of accessible, credible people. Her work underscores the quest for dignity in human life. A fine stylist, particularly in her epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple, her work seeks to educate. In this she resembles the black American novelist Ishmael Reed, whose satires expose social problems and racial issues (Banks). Although extremely interested in the problems related to the whole of the black community, in the great majority of her works Alice Walker, as well as …show more content…
Certain unwritten rules of how a woman should look or deport are rooted in society and, interestingly, in such minuscule communities as the one depicted in The Color Purple these rules are even more consequential; a mundane woman in this society has to be gentle, humble, polite, devoted to her God and her husband. Thus, when scandalous singer Shug Avery enters the picture, the community becomes indignant with her. Shug Avery differs dramatically from the image of the impeccable woman the African American community of The Color Purple are acclimated to optically discerning; unlike the other ladies, the famous singer calls herself when to verbalize, what to verbalize and who to slumber with. Celie meets Shug when the latter gets sick and nobody in the town, except Mr. _____ desires to take care of her; even Shug’s parents and the church community call her a tramp, most likely having “some nasty woman disease” (Walker 41), whereas the town preacher introduces Shug as a woman, “singing for money and taking other women mens” (Walker
Like many of Walker's fictional characters, she was a sharecropper's daughter and the youngest of eight children. At age eight, Walker was fortuitously injured by a BB gun shot to her eye by her brother. Her partial visual impairment caused her to withdraw and begin writing to facilitate her solitude. Walker's third novel, The Color Purple was published in 1982, and this work won both a Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award the following year. Walker was also a contributor to several periodicals and in 1983 published many of her essays, a collection titled In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: A Collection of Womanist Prose. Walker worked on her fourth novel while living in Mendocino County outside San Francisco. Like Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, and other accomplished contemporary black novelists, Walker uses heightened, lyrical realism to center on the dreams and failures of accessible, credible people. Her work underscores the quest for dignity in human life. A fine stylist, particularly in her epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple, her work seeks to educate. In this she resembles the black American novelist Ishmael Reed, whose satires expose social problems and racial issues (Banks). Although extremely interested in the problems related to the whole of the black community, in the great majority of her works Alice Walker, as well as …show more content…
Certain unwritten rules of how a woman should look or deport are rooted in society and, interestingly, in such minuscule communities as the one depicted in The Color Purple these rules are even more consequential; a mundane woman in this society has to be gentle, humble, polite, devoted to her God and her husband. Thus, when scandalous singer Shug Avery enters the picture, the community becomes indignant with her. Shug Avery differs dramatically from the image of the impeccable woman the African American community of The Color Purple are acclimated to optically discerning; unlike the other ladies, the famous singer calls herself when to verbalize, what to verbalize and who to slumber with. Celie meets Shug when the latter gets sick and nobody in the town, except Mr. _____ desires to take care of her; even Shug’s parents and the church community call her a tramp, most likely having “some nasty woman disease” (Walker 41), whereas the town preacher introduces Shug as a woman, “singing for money and taking other women mens” (Walker