Alice Walker Tone

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She worked as a social worker, teacher and lecturer, and took part in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Walker won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, and is also an acclaimed poet and essayist. She brought black women’s lives into primary focus as a rich and important subject for US American literature. Her landmark novel The Color Purple (1982), which drew upon her sharecropper family’s Southern roots. When Alice was eight, she was accidentally injured while playing with two of her brothers; the shot from a BB gun left her blind in one eye and physically and emotionally scarred. Feeling no longer lovely or loveable, she retreated …show more content…
In the opening sentences she is boastful about how nice the yard looks, but she quickly becomes defensive when she begins talking about Dee and then compares herself to her, describing herself as “In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather,” (Thakkar) yet even while she defends her own sense of self, she never slides into deprecation but maintains a tone of pride: “Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.” She is compassionate when she speaks about Maggie, but critical when she speaks about Dee and frequently sarcastic when she speaks to her. However, I think the author becomes somewhat critical of her narrator when, at the end of the story, she chastises Dee so severely and shows so little love for her while hugging Maggie close to her. The image is a harsh one—a mother hugging one daughter and, in effect, banishing the other. When Dee says, “You just don’t understand” to her mother, I believe we hear just a bit of Walker’s voice in that comment for the narrator’s understanding is not complete; she has no sympathy for the identity crisis that Dee, along with many other African Americans at this time, was …show more content…
Through the relationship between black men and black women, Walker portrays the prejudice that black women have to face. She paints this inferior female image and only through the sisterhood of women can the inferior female characters find freedom. Celie, the voice of the novel, is continually oppressed throughout the novel. She is condemned to a life of drudgery because she is so ugly, poor, black, and a woman. She is raped by her father and brutally beaten by her husband causing her to fear men. She admits in church that she looks at women because she is not scared of them, “All the men got they eyes glued to Shug's bosom. I got my eyes glued there too. I feel my nipples harden under my dress. My little button sort of perk up too. Shug, I say to her in my mind, Girl, you looks like a real good time, the Good Lord knows you do” (Color Purple). Sofia is another victim of this injustice. Although, unlike Celie, Sofia fights back and defends her rights. Harpo, her husband, often goes to his father and asks him how to make Sofia listen to him.
The setting of The Color Purple gives many subtle hints as to the meanings behind the story. Place, time, and social environment are not mere backdrops for the plot; rather, they are essential because they create the conditions in which characters interact. Without the

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