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Submitted by blackcat on June 27, 2005
Category: English
Words: 1648 | Pages: 7
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In an essay of not more than 1500 words, explore the theme of the creation of women’s identities in The Color Purple and one other prose text from Literature and Gender, with a detailed examination of how the form of each fiction contributes to the impact of the narratives.
Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple has a rich array of female characters to examine when answering the above question. I feel that Louisa May Alcott’s short story, “Behind A Mask” offers an equally rich array of female characters to consider. Through the course of this essay I will show how Walker and Alcott used different narrative techniques and made different use of language and dialogue to create their characters; and how they each respectively created very powerful pieces of work, identifying with their characters and the problems and obstacles faced by them in their everyday lives.
The Color Purple is written in the epistolary style where the main character writes letters to God. These letters are like a diary where Celie tells her story. This diary technique contains Celie’s innermost thoughts and allows the reader to know the true Celie because she is able to completely open up in her writing. Walker writers the whole story thought Celie’s (female) perspective, which is particularly useful when we are given Celie’s impression main female characters in the novel, Sophia and Shug. We get a different view of Nettie because she writes her own letters to Celie.
Certain key events in Celie’s life made her the character she is, for example: her continual rape by her stepfather; the subsequent pregnancies and the loss of her children; the death of her mother; and the loss of her sister, Nettie. However, through the course of the novel, Celie finds that she has managed to form close relations with the female characters of the novel, she finds love and friendship and is finally reunited with her sister and children who were taken from...
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