The Color Purple: The Fight from Domination to Self- Freedom
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But I dont know how to fight all I know how to do is stay alive. (Walker, 18) This quote taken from Alice Walkers novel The Color Purple opens the idea of struggle and fight throughout the story. Similar to many black women writers in the past twenty years, Walker is intrigued by examining black womens lives and writing about their hardships for self-determination. The Color Purple tells a story about a black woman who is sexually and physically abused, as well as verbally dominated for close the three decades. Walker has risked exploring subjects and talk about issues which are generally unacceptable to many readers. She seems to have no qualms about exposing any problems which stand in the way of peoples freedoms including sexism and racism.(Jamison-Hall, 2) Walker sees and portrays a world from inside out and uses the main character, Celie to do so. This surname-less abused woman records her experiences in letters to God as well as her younger sister Nettie. This story depicts external ideas to internal ideas from male control over females to women learning to control their own lives. In The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983, Walker takes a perspective or epic approach to characterize delineation and cultural reality (Thadious, 406). Alice Walkers novel The Color Purple uses dimensions of black womens oppression, racism, and sexism to show a young black womans fight against domination in order to find her own independence.
Walker uses many examples of deep oppression against black women through the entire story. She is critical of black man and their abusiveness towards black women. Walker is also concerned with any oppressive behavior, even that which black women use against each other, which stands in the way of individual and collective freedom. (Jamison-Hall,2) The oppression that Walker shows comes in many different shapes and forms including sexual, physical and verbal abuse. On the topics of violence,