Comparision. The Protagonist in "The bluest eye" is Pecola and the protagonist in "The Color Purple" is Celie
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Introduction
What similarities would you make between the two protagonists at this stage in the novel? The Protagonist in The bluest eye is Pecola and the protagonist in The Color Purple is Celie. Both are young black females who come from a poor family and are both living in the early 20th century at which point in time slavery had been long abolished however there was still a significant difference in the way in which black people were treated, they were considered the bottom of the social hierarchy and the very bottom of that were young female black girls, and this is the message that Morrison and Walker are trying to portray and something that both Morrison and walker thought to be an almost untold story, it had been kept a secret from society as if it had just been brushed away and no-one wanted to speak of, this is evident in the opening of the novel The Bluest Eye ...read more.
Middle
was considered beautiful and anyone who didn?t abide to these attributes was considered ugly however it was not explicit in the northern states, nobody had told Pecola that she was Ugly explicitly however it was implied as she did not resemble the picture of beauty she deemed herself as ugly, Morrison uses the cultural icon of Shirley Temple and the popular children?s dolls of the 1940?s to illustrate this influence that mass culture has on young black girls. However in the south racism however things were very different in the south and Celie is explicitly told that she is ugly and then believes it. Due to this extreme racism in the south many black families moved from the south to the northern states in search of equality, jobs and a chance to own their own property as the Jim Crowe law in the south prohibited blacks from owning their own property, ?Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us the hunger for property? This quote reflects on how black families were marginalised. ...read more.
Conclusion
for her, this is backed up with the association she has of hands and autumn time, the hands provide a safe haven for her when she gets ill in autumn. In The Color Purple, Celie's original intended audience is a white, male God who does not listen to her prayers, and her letters remain anonymous. Celie explains that she stopped writing to God because he gave her 'a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister [she] probably won't ever see again.' Celie distrusts a white male God because he does not listen to 'poor colored women.' Shug encourages Celie to reject 'religious beliefs which reinforce sexist and racist domination' and insists on 'the primacy of a spiritual life'. If Celie looks for God in a white church or a white written Bible it is inevitable that she will encounter a white God, therefore she must look at her immediate environment for guidance. ...read more.
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