The Colour Purple and Margeret Atwood

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    LTB4: compare and contrast the presentation of a similar theme explored through two genres

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The novel ‘The Colour Purple’ and the poetry of Margaret Atwood both explore the oppression of women. Select one aspect or role of the lives of the female characters in ‘The Colour Purple’ and Atwood poetry and say which is more effective in arousing sympathy for women.

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I feel Walker is more effective at arousing sympathy for women because the novel’s message is that women must stand up against the unfair treatment that they receive at the hands of men and that they can do this by helping each other.

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‘The Colour Purple’ is historical fiction. ‘The Colour Purple’ was written in 1982, in California by Alice Walker. It is an epistolary or confessional novel.

‘The Colour Purple’ addresses issues, with which Afro-American literature and the international women’s movement have been intensely concerned: issues of men’s violence against women, issues of sisterhood, women’s eroticism and lesbianism and issues of women’s economic independence. These issues have been addressed more openly during the eighties than ever before and Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ has been a significant contribution to that discussion.

Upon it’s publication, ‘The Colour Purple’ unleashed a storm of controversy. It instigated heated debates about black cultural representation, as a number of Afro-American critics complained that the novel reaffirmed old stereotypes about pathology in black communities and of black men in particular. Critics also charged Walker with focusing to heavily on sexism at the expense of addressing notions of racism in America. Walker could be seen as being to concerned with fulfilling her fairytale story line than showing real life problems that black people faced.

Both Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood are womanist writers and as Gretchen E Ziegenhals, said a womanist is one “who speaks out, speaks up, speaks against or in deference of something important – a women who loves herself, her culture and who is committed to survival.”1

Walker’s womanist credo seems exemplified in the words and passions of Shug. The blues singer Shug is the sassy sensual bounteous woman who awakens the brutalized Celie to her own strength and sexuality.

Always interested in civil rights, Margaret Atwood was active for several years in Amnesty International, which had an impact on the subject matter of ‘True Stories’. In this work, she bears witness to breaking down distinctions she herself makes between poetry (at the heart of her relationship with language) and fiction (her moral vision of the world).

According to Margaret Atwood, “novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted, not because they are perverse but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the ‘human condition’ and they do so using a medium which is notoriously slippery, namely language itself.”2

‘The Colour Purple’ is a historical novel, yet it explores universal themes, issues of men’s violence against women, issues of sisterhood, women’s eroticism and lesbianism and issues of women’s economic independence.

                      Celie speaks in first person through a series of private letters she writes to God and letters to Nettie. At first Celie’s letters focus on only what she does, hears, sees and feels, “I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl” overtime however, they grow to include more complex themes and insights, “I felt a little peculiar round the children.” Later in the novel, the narrative shifts between letters written by Celie and letters written by Nettie. However, the letters from Nettie are still read through Celie’s eyes.

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Walker arranges the letters of ‘The Colour Purple’ in terms of the Afro-American literary tradition. Robert Towers said that Celie’s letters convey “a sub-literate dialect into a medium of remarkable expressiveness, colour and poignancy.”3

The letter is a form of narrative that combines both the objective and the subjective. Feminist historians have used women’s letters as an important source of researching women’s history in its concreteness as well as in its subjective ramifications. Walker has adopted this genre so useful in history as a specifically female literary genre.

The tone of the book is very confessional and uninhibited, as Celie’s ...

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