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Essay on The Color Purple
In The Color Purple, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the blues singer Shug is the sassy, sensual, bounteous woman who awakens the brutalized and silenced Celie to her own strength and sexuality. With loving song and tender touch, she opens Celie to her own loveliness and possibility and reveals a God who is not the "big and old and tall and graybearded and white" stern codger of Celie's old-time religion but, instead, an expansive God of trees, air, birds, people an erotic God who "love all them feelings," who "love everything you love," and "love admiration . . . just wanting to share a good thing." (Walker, 1982)
This same Shug reappears later in the book as matriarch and high priestess of the academic-turned-masseuse Fanny's womanist religion. Fanny, the granddaughter of Celie, propagates "The Gospel According to Shug," a series of twenty-seven macarisms, beatitudes, which all begin "Helped are those who. . . ." Fanny elaborates these maxims of "Mama Shug" into a womanist ethic of inner strength, generosity, resistance, inclusiveness, prayer, laughter, and love of stranger, Earth, and cosmos. She also willingly provides a summary, the shema or first great commandment of Shug: "Rule number one: Don't ever mess over nobody, honey, and nobody will ever mess over you." (Walker, 1982)
This movie is extremely effective film for men and women alike as well as children. It shows ugly human emotions as well as wonderful ones. Much can be learned from Celie and all that are around her. Celie's loss of her sister, her triumphs, Mister's abuse of Celie, Sophia's strength, Shug's honesty, talent and tenderness, the fall of Sophia. The absolute horror of Mister's father. The prejudice shown by the upper class whites is not dwelled upon as strongly in the book but it is a powerful force in this movie. (Walker, 1996)....
