How has Alice Walker explored the themes of love and friendship in "The Color Purple", and with what effect?

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IB English                                                                 The Color Purple

Victoria Ulett                                                                Essay

How has Alice Walker explored the themes of love and friendship in “The Color Purple”, and with what effect?

        Love and friendship are a necessity in life and in growing as a person. Love gives people the ability to connect with and feel for another person on all levels, it also gives us the ability to have and maintain friendships allowing us to be a part of another person’s life. A person without love and friendship has no form of emotion or feeling causing them to question their sense of self, and their ability to form personal relationships.

        In the novel The Color Purple, the main theme is that man we as humans often defeat our problems through the nurturing and growth of close relationships. From this, Alice Walker explores numerous themes of love and friendship between vast arrays of characters. One of the main forms that she addresses is the power of strong female friendships. Throughout the novel, Walker depicts this through the women’s needs to tell their stories of hardship, therefore giving these women their chance to survive the constant oppression and dominance forced upon them by males. The friendships of these women are so strong that they can gain protection, giving them the chance to share love in a difficult world full of male violence and dominance.

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However, these female relationships also take other forms involving a certain level of love; such as motherly or sisterly, teacher and student, and even sexual. The friendship between Shug and Celie allows for them to experience all of these forms as Shug often plays the role of mother, teacher, and friend to Celie, yet also aids her sexually, while Celie takes the passive role. However, Celie too plays the role of mother to Shug at times. At the onset of this epistolary novel, Celie’s world revolves only around colonialism by whites and exploitation by whites and males, however at ...

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