Color Purple, The

Alice Walker, who wrote the novel The Color Purple, belongs to the generation of the authors like Toni Morrison and Paula Marshal who galvanized African American literature in the 1980s and 1990s, foregrounding in their novels the themes related to African American women. The Color Purple (1982) is the first African American epistolary novel. The narrator, Celie, is a poor African American girl from the rural American south. She is raped by her stepfather and bears two children whom he takes away from her. Celie's letters to God are the only outlet for her misery, since her stepfather forbids her to speak about her abuse. Nettie, her younger sister, teaches her to read and write but their bond is severed when Albert, a brutish sharecropper and the man Celie was forced to marry, makes Nettie leave.

Nettie goes to Africa as a missionary with the couple who adopted Celie's children. Her letters about the African Olinka tribe, their religion, culture, and language, provide an important insight for Celie's community into their African heritage and constitute a broader anthropological framework of the novel. Colonization of Africa and destruction of the Olinka on the macrocosmic level parallel on a microcosmic level the oppression of the African American community in the American south in the first part of the 20th century. Both sisters explore detrimental effects of the divisions among sexes, races, and classes in a patriarchal system. Celie witnesses numerous cases of oppression of African American women by the men in their community and by the white people, while Nettie describes oppression of women in Africa, particularly genital mutilation.

Celie manages to find strength thanks to the greatest influence in her life, Shug, a sultry female blues singer with whom she falls in love. Their lesbian relationship defies rules of the society and presents another form of female liberation. In the novel Celie functions as a catalyst, inspiring change in other characters. She becomes a successful businesswoman, sewing pants whose size symbolically fits all.