Reading Notes:

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

1. What stories count? A tale of The Color Purple
        Zora Neal Hurston 1891- 1960
        Toni Morrison 1931 -
        Alice Walker 1944 -
            Putnam County, Georgia, mother worked 11 hours a day to earn $17/wk so Alice Walker could go to college.
            She went to Spelman College in Atlanta, then Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
            Alice Walker married a Jewish Civil Rights activist Melvn Leventhal 1967 and divorced in 1976.
            In the 1990s she had a romance with Tracy Chapman, a female African American singer songwriter.

2. The epistolary form of The Color Purple, which allows for multiple perspectives, intimacy, and vulnerability.

3. The nature of the story as a human story, a story about women, about African Americans and race, and African American women
4. Themes of: patriarchal religion (Celie's father), traditional religion (Shug's father, the preacher), African spirituality, rebellion against traditional religion (Shug), the spirituality of the color purple (Shug).
5. Evolution of Celie's view of religion
       God the white father, as a transcendent good; to something, someone more immanent, embodied, by way of her love shared with Shug,
       and her lesbian sexuality; to a sense of the divine permeating all of creation, nature, as in the color purple.

The Characters:

Celie:        Whoopie Goldberg
Nettie:       Akosua Busia (Celie's sister)
Albert:      Danny Glover (aka "Mr._____", Celie's 'husband')
Sofia:        Oprah Winfrey
Harpo:      Willard Pugh (Sofia's husband) (#1)
Shug:        Margaret Avery (Albert's lover; Celie's love)