The film director Steven Spielberg, who had been given the book by his collaborator, Kathleen Kennedy, saw it as a chance to demonstrate that he could make a serious drama and thus overcome a reputation established by his action and fantasy films, such as Jaws, E.T., and the Indiana Jones series. In 1984 music producer Quincy Jones bought the film rights to the novel, although Walker initially doubted whether it should be made into a movie. At the conclusion of the novel, Nettie returns to America, and Celie is reunited not only with her sister but with her grown son and daughter as well. There she achieves a satisfying measure of financial security and independence, and even makes a tenuous reconciliation with Mr. After the death of her stepfather, Celie returns to Georgia to live in her newly inherited house. She moves briefly to Shug’s residence in Memphis, Tennessee, and opens her own sewing business. Empowered by the existence of Nettie and her children, and strengthened by Shug’s love, Celie finds the courage to leave her oppressive household. Through the letters Celie learns that her two children, Adam and Olivia, are alive and have been adopted by Nettie’s benefactors, a preacher and his wife. Years of correspondence from Nettie detail her experience as a Christian missionary in West Africa. Together the two women also discover letters from Celie’s sister that Mr. Indeed, it is Shug who states, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”Ĭourtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Shug encourages Celie to honor her own desires and to praise God through admiration. Their relationship features both erotic and spiritual dimensions that not only defy social conventions but also culminate in a more self-affirming vision of existence. Yet Celie forges an unusual kinship with her husband’s former mistress, the blues singer Shug Avery. Further intensifying her loneliness is the fact that her prearranged marriage requires her to separate from her beloved sister, Nettie. Her letters detail the cruel emotional and physical abuse she receives from her husband. _” in order to care for his home and his four children. She is then forced to marry a widowed farmer named “Mr. When Celie gives birth to a second child by her stepfather, the infant boy is taken from her and presumably killed. Critics have often praised Walker’s forthright depiction of taboo subjects in the novel and her clear rendering of folk idiom and dialect through Celie’s written voice. The act of writing becomes a crucial medium of self-discovery for Celie, allowing her to divulgeher secret humiliation and pain while charting a growing awareness of the world around her. It’d kill your mammy.” This chilling preface initiates the journal entries that Celie writes and addresses as letters to God. Afterward he warns, “You better not never tell nobody but God. She has been raped and impregnated by the man she believes is her father (but who is really, she later discovers, her stepfather). The Color Purple opens just after the turn of the century, when Celie is fourteen years old. As a film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985, The Color Purple was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. The novel has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Published in 1982, Walker’s epistolary tale chronicles the startling tragedy and triumph of a poor Black woman named Celie in her struggle for self-empowerment, sexual freedom, and spiritual growth in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. The Color Purple is the international best-selling novel by Alice Walker, an African American writer from Eatonton.
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