<p>Ever since it was published in 1982, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been celebrated for giving African-American women a voice and for challenging patriarchal structures in society, but it has also been criticised for being stereo-typical in its portrayal of African-American men and women. In this essay I claim that the novel in fact supports patriarchal American society. I discuss this by first looking at the parts of the novel that can be seen as challenging towards patriarchal structures, moving on to a more critical standpoint showing that the resistance towards patriarchal structures in the novel is not at all as strong as it may seem at first.</p>

Ever since it was published in 1982, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been celebrated for giving African-American women a voice and for challenging patriarchal structures in society, but it has also been criticised for being stereo-typical in its portrayal of African-American men and women. In this essay I claim that the novel in fact supports patriarchal American society. I discuss this by first looking at the parts of the novel that can be seen as challenging towards patriarchal structures, moving on to a more critical standpoint showing that the resistance towards patriarchal structures in the novel is not at all as strong as it may seem at first.

Feminism in the early 1980's in the United States revolved much around social and cultural matters such as sexual liberation, self- definition and self- realization for women. Derived from these ideas within feminism comes Alice Walker's Womanism, that is the writer's own definition of the strong and independent woman of color. This paper investigates the character Shug Avery, in The ColorPurple (1983), in relation to feminism and Womanism. It is argued that she is an empowered female because of the characteristics and attributes that come along with being a Womanist, despite moral,cultural and societal conditions that indicate marginalization for Shug and all women.

The Color Purple (1982) focuses on highlighting Celie’s journey throughout life as an oppressed black woman living in the South in the United States in the early 1900s. Celie is abused mentally, physically, and sexually by her stepfather Alphonso and her husband Mr. _____. This is the oppression she has faced, which holds back her search for her own identity. Black feminism, lesbian feminism and queer theory are explained and used in order to understand how to analyze The Color Purple. Gender performance, compulsory heterosexuality and lesbianism are all important concepts that are used to analyze Celie’s oppression and development. This paper highlights the factors that have aided Celie in her search for selfhood, which are motherhood, female solidarity, black lesbian shamelessness and especially her lesbian relationship with the singer Shug. The analysis concludes that Shug was both the catalyst and one of the driving forces which enabled Celie to find her voice.

<p>The Emancipation of Celie: The Color Purple as a womanist Bildungsroman</p><p>The purpose of this essay is to study The Color Purple as a Bildungsroman, focusing on the development of the protagonist, Celie. The Color Purple is related to both the traditional Bildungsroman and to the female Bildungsroman, but the essay shows that it can also be seen as a womanist Bildungsroman. Initially, Celie believes that being a woman inescapably means that she has to serve and obey men and she is oppressed by patriarchy. She is eventually introduced to another way of living by the strong female characters of Sofia and Shug who embrace her in a kind of sisterhood, which is vital for Celie as she has nothing else to help her liberate herself from the patriarchal values that keep her down. In conclusion, this essay shows how Celie has developed from being a young girl, forced to act in an adult way, into a woman who displays signs of all the criteria for having achieved a womanist development: she is grown up (not just acting as though she is), she is in charge of a business, a house and, in short, her life. She is serious, she has a universalist perspective, and most importantly, she loves. Furthermore, the essay highlights which characteristics of her development can be linked to the traditional and the female Bildungsroman and which characteristics can be seen as typical of a womanist Bildungsroman.</p>

The Emancipation of Celie: The Color Purple as a womanist Bildungsroman The purpose of this essay is to study The Color Purple as a Bildungsroman, focusing on the development of the protagonist, Celie. The Color Purple is related to both the traditional Bildungsroman and to the female Bildungsroman, but the essay shows that it can also be seen as a womanist Bildungsroman. Initially, Celie believes that being a woman inescapably means that she has to serve and obey men and she is oppressed by patriarchy. She is eventually introduced to another way of living by the strong female characters of Sofia and Shug who embrace her in a kind of sisterhood, which is vital for Celie as she has nothing else to help her liberate herself from the patriarchal values that keep her down. In conclusion, this essay shows how Celie has developed from being a young girl, forced to act in an adult way, into a woman who displays signs of all the criteria for having achieved a womanist development: she is grown up (not just acting as though she is), she is in charge of a business, a house and, in short, her life. She is serious, she has a universalist perspective, and most importantly, she loves. Furthermore, the essay highlights which characteristics of her development can be linked to the traditional and the female Bildungsroman and which characteristics can be seen as typical of a womanist Bildungsroman.

This narrative inquiry explores the implementation of multimodal, aesthetic responses to literature in my 12th grade English Language Arts classroom during the spring of 2018. Specifically, the study examines a unit of study for the novel The Color Purple, in which student received arts-based instruction from three different guest teaching artists and were asked to create multimodal final projects that expressed their understanding of the novel. Informed by social semiotic multimodality, the aesthetic theories of Dewey and Rosenblatt, and Bakhtin’s dialogism, this dissertation investigates the ways in which multimodal response to literature serves as a mechanism for making meaning and relevance for students. In light of the dominance of verbocentric modalities of constructing and expressing meaning within institutional schooling, this study explores the possibilities of non-verbocentric modalities and their potential role within the ELA classroom. Examining my data – field notes, audio recordings, video recordings, student surveys and student artifacts – through the lenses of the creation-reflection semiotic cycle (Dewey), and of modal affordances and modal fixing (Kress), I conclude that multimodal response can provide students with important mechanisms for understanding and engaging with literature. Specifically, I lay forth guiding principles for anchoring multimodal response to literary meaning, and for using multimodal response to invite students into the discourse community of the classroom.

The Color Purple (1982) is a well-known feminist work of literature written by the ‘womanist’ Alice Walker. This analysis sought to analyse Walker’s novel in order to identify and discuss the criticism of patriarchal power relations in the novel. This was done by looking closely at the character of Celie and the characters around her, focusing on, especially, the female characters’ empowerment but also on how the male characters are liberated from patriarchy. The observations were then analysed through a filter based partly on feminist criticism and partly on psychoanalytic concepts adopted and interpreted by feminists. The relevant narrative and story arcs were also analysed through the lens of Walker’s brand of feminism called womanism to explore the importance of female bonding and sisterhood for gaining power and overcoming oppression. In the end, it was concluded that the novel displays an overt breakdown of patriarchy as a destructive force and provides the ideology of womanism as an alternative to the patriarchal ideology.

In the novel the Color Purple (1982), the author, Alice Walker, highlights the oppression African American women had to endure in the South, during the 1920s. It tells the story of the protagonist Celie's life, from being a sexual abused girl, to becoming an independent woman. Through Celie's collection of letters, the novel is a documentation of an African American woman's transformation from a life of oppression to finding her voice. The analysis seeks to display the connection between Celie's fight against oppression to her becoming a "masculine female". In order to investigate Celie's transformation, in this paper I explore the cause of her transformation and look more closely at the factors that that resulted in her change. This is discussed by focusing on stereotypical gender traits, role models, motherhood, the elimination of male power, and lastly, multiple forms of oppression. In the end it is concluded that Celie's liberation from the patriarchy helped her find her new identity as a masculine female.

身為黑人女作家，受麗絲華克在小說《紫色姊妹花》中，犀利地揭露黑人女性遭受性別與種族歧視的迫害，藉此喚醒世人重視性別與種族的不平等，重賦黑人女性獨立的聲音。本論文旨在剖析華克如何顛覆文學與社會意識型態傳統，再次肯定黑人女性生存價值的信念。論文的第一章檢視小說申的書信體形式，除了分析其與小說主旨的關係，並探討小說中所使用的敘述觀點如何強化主題。第二章討論性別議題與小說中女性角色的錯綜關係，華克如何顛覆歐陸灰姑娘的神話，並加鋪述女性對裁縫（對文字的剪裁）的特殊才能。第三章研究父權制度與種族歧視的雙重壓力如何導致女性消音，並且抑制女性自我認同屬性，分析小說語言的運用，以及書名與小說結尾的意涵。華克呈現女主角從沈默到反抗的過程，並確立女性在文學的影響力。 / Being a black female writer profoundly concerned with the pling of black women, Alice walker sensitively exposes the impact of sexism and racism on black women in her novel The Color Purple, with a view to making the world aware of sexual and racial inequality and finding a voice that belongs to black women. The present study proposes to investigate how Walker subverts both literary and social conventions in her novel and to present her unwavering resolution to affirm the existence of all black women. The first chapter examines the epistolary form in the novel, with a detailed analysis of its relationship with the thematic messages of the novel, and discusses how the point of view in the novel reinforces the thematic concerns. Chapter II deals with gender issue and the structure of relationships among the female characters, focusing on female bonding, followed by a discussion of Walker's literary subversion of the European Cinderella Myth in the novel and female creativety, chiefly sewing. Chapter III explores how partiarchy and racism lead to black female sillence and pose a threat to the formation of self-indentity, and analyzes the use of language and the significance of the title of the book and the ending. Affirmatively, Walker succeeds in The Color Purple in portraying her female protagonist's development from a silenced woman to a rebellious one and in asserting female influence through literature.