Examples Of Abuse In The Color Purple

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Abuse in The Color Purple
The Color Purple, written by Alice Walker, is an evocative novel, where a young woman encounters several hardships. Hardships that not only put her down but also challenge her. Living in a patriarchal society, she has become a victim of both her father’s and her husband’s abuse. Told from the perspective of a poor and uneducated black woman named Celie, the epistolary novel explains her everyday feelings and thoughts about the society she lived in. There were multiple forms of abuse that Celie endures that highly impacted the way she viewed men.
The novel begins with Celie at the age of fourteen. She encounters her abusive stepfather, who at that time she knew as her father. It was him that in the first letter abused …show more content…

Her comparison to nature shows the dehumanization of Celie, and how she no longer sees herself as a person but more like a tree. By Mr.___ dehumanizing Celie, it affected her individuality, her self-esteem, her personality, and her future actions. In the Breaking the Silence article, it states that “what Celie records – the degradation, abuse, dehumanization – is not morally repulsive, but it invites spectator readers to generalize about black people is the same negative ways they have gone on for centuries.” Not only does it show what Celie endures, but what the rest of the women around her did, and “Celie’s life symbolize[s] the more or less subtle operations of patriarchal power in the lives of women everywhere” (Sveinsdóttir 16). The dehumanization was achieved through the multiple forms of abuse. In the end, she demonstrated her capacity of being able to be an independent woman just like many.
Entering marriage, Celie was to give up everything. She was separated from her two children and Nettie and is left “…completely alone in a world where everyone she loves has been taken away from her and she is forced into a loveless and abusive marriage,” a marriage that does not allow her to have the right to speak up (Sveinsdóttir 13). Silence had devoured Celie and she is forced to not speak up. It was unusual and disrespectful for a woman to speak up or raise their voice to a man. This was one …show more content…

Throughout the novel, Celie was the one physically being abused, but she understood why and tells Harpo that “Wives is like children. You have to let ‘em know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do that better than a good sound beating” (Walker 35). She depicts the common use of cruelty and the normality of it in her society. Her acceptance proves that the “male qualities of power, dominance, and control” overrule women and allow them to create the “traits of submission, obedience, and servitude” (Abrams 29). In the society she lived in, it was traditional for women to be oppressed by men. “…It is [like] men that hold the power and women have to bend to that power”, Celie copes with the several hardships, and does what she is told (Sveinsdóttir

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