Essay on The Colour Purple

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In what ways does Celie’s character develop in ‘The Colour Purple’ and what are the influences on her that cause her to change?

This essay will describe how the character of Celie changes throughout the book The Colour Purple. It will also discuss how the letters she writes tell you how she feels; furthermore it will show how her language, punctuation and vocabulary gets better throughout the book and how this reflects her growth as a person.

In the beginning of the book, her second letter reflects exactly how she speaks. She uses incomplete sentences which are very short and she does not spell her words correctly. Celie’s vocabulary is very basic; she sticks to simple words and phrases. Adjectives are not really used in her first letter as she has nothing to talk about. She only describes what she does; she uses all verbs, like the phrase which only tells the audience what is happening to her, such as;

‘by time I git’ or ‘she scream at me’

Celie can not express the true meaning of her words so she repeats her words to express her ‘slave life’, which is considered a domestic routine. She repeats the words ‘He’ and ‘She’ that refer to her mother and father. The repetition of those words shows she has very little respect and has a lot of hate for them. In this letter the audience can also see that she really does not like men for the way she stresses the word ‘he’ which refers to her father, who she does not name as she does not like him since he has been raping her from as long as she can remember.

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In the story, the influence of Shug, Sofia and Nettie help Celie character to build up to become more bold. At the beginning she was nondependent, her husband would control her, she was abused by her father and saw things like when her husband would try and rape her sister. With these things happening to her she couldn’t focus and would end up being very quiet. Help from Shug, gave Celie the ability to find herself as a person. Shug told Celie that she was pretty, told her that she was beautiful and also told her that she is ...

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