COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE DEPICTION OF CELIE'S STRUGGLE IN STEVEN SPIELBURG'S FILM VERSION OF 'THE COLOR PURPLE' AND THE NOVEL

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Francesca Selway

COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE DEPICTION OF CELIE’S STRUGGLE IN STEVEN SPIELBURG’S FILM VERSION OF ‘THE COLOR PURPLE’ AND THE NOVEL

        Innocence and naivety is portrayed instantly as the initial theme for “The Color Purple”, in both respects. Spielburg opens with the positive scene of the heroine, Celie, playing wistfully in the fields with her sister, Nettie. Similarly, the novel commences with the words,

        “I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl”. In both cases, the brief curiosity of youth is quickly driven out, as the reader and the audience are forced to realise the fate of this adolescent girl. This having been said, each media handles the topic in very different fashions. Alice Walker enforces explicit imagery of rape onto the reader, so as to comprehend some of this girl’s evident pain; on the other hand, Spielburg chooses to jump straight into a vision of an agonizing birth of Celie’s second child, hence showing the consequences of the terrible abuse she has suffered. Both interpretations are particularly disturbing and provoke interest from the audience or reader, considering the unequivocal, abusive language present in Celie’s opening letter, and the dreadful screams that we are to witness after only minutes of the film.

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        The novel elaborates on such events as the death of Celie’s mother, and the continuing abuse from her father. The reader also learns much more of the young girl’s naivety, influenced by explicit vocabulary of her developing pregnancy, and afterbirth with such statements like,

        “I got breasts full of milk running down myself”. Such detailed references were not supported in the film production of “The Color Purple”. Celie talks of her condition in a way by which the reader knows it is all first-hand experience, showing again her age and ingenuousness.

        Spielburg introduces the necessity and warmth of Celie’s ...

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