The Color Purple Essay
The Color Purple Essays: Exploring the Many Facets
Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, The Color Purple by Alice Walker is a canonical text that is a part of every school and college curricula. Writing The Color Purple essay as your school or college literature coursework can be both an enriching and a challenging experience as the novel opens itself to a plethora of interpretations and explorations.
The novel explores the many disturbing questions that lie at the heart of not only the Afro-American life it pictures, but also in the recesses of every civilization. There are many number of Color Purple essays that can be written, each unique and equally insightful. We can help you with your essay assignment and offer a fresh perspective to the novel that potentially adds to the already exhaustive resources.
Having read the novel, The Color Purple, you may find yourself confused about the facets to explore in your essay assignment. Here are a few tips that will help you bring your best out of your reading and deliver an essay that is worthy of a good grade.
- Depiction of Women and the relationship between them
The novel explores all the possibilities of relation between women. Female relationships are shown to be friendly, sisterly as well as sexual. An interesting The Color Purple Essay can be written exploring these relationships between different characters with respect to the circumstances under which they spark off and evolve. Aspects like how women relationships help each character grow individually and resist oppression and dominance of their men folks can also be taken into account.
- The emotional development of the main character in the novel
All the characters, especially the main character Celie is depicted in E.M.Forster’s term as a ‘round character’. She grows as an individual throughout the novel and exclaims at the end of the novel that though she and Nettie are now old, she has never in her life felt younger. This awakening that brings forth Celie’s character development can also be taken up for evacuation in an essay.
- Class Conflict, Racism and Sexism
Issues like gender disparities, class conflict, racism are prominent throughout the novel. They are implied either through dialogue or action in the novel. Bring to light the scenes that shows Walker’s understanding of these issues and how does she see it improve or worsen in future.
- Walker’s Feminist approach as depicted through the novel
The novel has been a frequent target of censors and was considered the most challenging books. It’s feminist approach makes the novel’s disturbing read for many male readers. The issues of women questioning and subverting the gender roles, adoption of sisterhood, homosexuality are some of the aspects that clearly depicts Alice Walker’s approach to feminism.
- The Significance of the Title
Color is an important motif in the novel used by the author to communicate the themes of the novel effectively and aesthetically. The title of the novel is enigmatic and makes the reader look for significance of the color purple. One of your The Color Purple Essays can be taken to explore the significance of colors in the novel, with special respect to the color purple.




