Alice Walker, The Color Purple

• Alice Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia, the eighth and youngest child of a sharecropper. She was very unusual for her time in that she was able to go to Spelman College, and then Sarah Lawrence, a private liberal arts college, from which she graduated in 1965.
  
• She studied and eventually wrote about black women authors. The Color Purple was the first and foremost of her novels.
  
• It is written in the epistolary genre, as a series of letters, many of them to God, adopting a format from the historical experience of African Americans.
• Her writing style and the addressee of her letters changes over the course of the novel, from one addressing a distant, fearsome deity to one that is intimate with those around her. God begins as a fierce, white man, and evolves into a loving, immanent presence that pervades nature.
  
• The themes of the dark side include racism, sexism, classism,  heterosexism, and sexual assault.
  
• There is a complex relationship between traditional religion (Protestant Christian), the newfound spirituality of the protagonist Celie, heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
  

• What is the nature of divinity in the novel? How many kinds are there? Do they exist in a hierarchy?
  
• What is the nature of love? How many different kinds are there?
  
• What is the relationship between religion, spirituality, and sexuality?
  
• What is the relationship between social consciousness and individual awakening
  

Comparisons