Apsara Prabhakar
1313223

The Color Purple : Violence as a theme

The theme of domestic violence seems to be dominant throughout the novel, The Color Purple. We can see that the victims of  domestic violence in this novel are the black female characters who are beaten up, sexually harassed and verbally abused by the men to fulfill their sexual desire or to make the women feel inferior to them. In this novel, the two main victims of violence are Celie and Sofia.

The book unfolds in a farmhouse during the early 19003s where Celie’s step-father at first beats her mother and then soon begins to rape her. Celies’s father impregnates her twice. He takes away both the babies from her and makes her believe that he has killed them while he actually sells them in the town to get rid of the evidence. Celie tries to protect her sister, Nettie from him. Thus Celie and her little sister live in constant fear of their step-father’s emotional and sexual abuse.Her step-father then marries another young woman whom he abuses. Meanwhile, Nettie has a boyfriend Mr. __’s whose first wife was violently killed by her boyfriend in front of her children and her children continued to have nightmares about this event.

 Celie, who gets beaten up by her step-father because he thinks she has winked at a boy, wants her sister to marry Mr. __ so that she can escape from her step-father. However, her father disagrees to the marriage between Nettie and Mr. __ and marries Celie to Mr. __. Mr.__ beats his new wife, Celie, on their wedding day, a day that should been celebrated with love and passion. Mr.__‘s violent streak has been passed onto his children as they also begin to taunt and beat her. His 12 year old son throws a rock at her on the day of their marriage trying to kill her as he did not want a new mother. When Harpo, the oldest son of Mr.__ wonders why his father beats Celie, Mr.__ tells him that it is manly and a husband's duty to beat his wife. Therefore, he beats her as she is his wife, and also because he believes her to be stubborn and lazy. According to him these are the reasonable reasons for such brute violence.

Harpo secretly marries Sofia after impregnating her. Harpo admits to his father and Celie that he does not beat his wife Sofia. He asks them how he should make her do everything he asks and be the subservient wife he wants. Both his father and Celie tell him beat her in order to make her listen to him. Unfortunately, the next time he returns home with bruises of his own when asked about it he claims that he had fallen off a mule, however it was Sofia who had hurt him.  One day, Celie finds them fighting like two savage men on the porch of the house.  violence has developed in both of them, as they both want to have control over the other. Celie admits to Shug Avery that Mr.__ beats her. When she hears this, Shug is shocked and terrified,and then promises Celie that she will not leave the house until he promises not to hurt her. Shug is able to control Mr.__'s violent streak.

One evening at Harpo's, Sofia returns with her new boyfriend and when Harpo and her try dancing, Harpo’s new girlfriend, Squeak gets angered by this. The two women start to fight and Squeak is punched by Sofia in the mouth, knocking out two of her teeth.Sofia continues on her violent acts when she attacks the mayor in town. She could not be a white woman's maidservant and is angered when she is approached about such a position for the mayor's family. Before she could hurt the mayor, the guards catch hold of her and beat her up and she then is put into prison.

Again, domestic violence takes the form of rape, when Mary Agnes visits Hodges the warden to help Sofia. When he recognizes her, he sexually abuses her. For the first time in her life, Celie finds her own violent tendencies. When she discovers Nettie's letters that are  hidden by Mr.___, she decides to leave him. When he tries to prevent  her from leaving, she stabs his hand with a fork. Before she leaves, she curses him for the way he has treated her all these years and tells him he will be cursed until he changes his ways.

 Thus we see how different characters differ in their reaction to violence. On one hand, Sofia tries to defend herself from domestic violence by being violent herself. She stands up to her oppressor because of her size and her strength. Celie, on the other hand being physically, sexually and mentally abused from a very young age reacts to all this by shutting down emotionally and being very passive. However, later on she finds the strength and the willpower to start a new life and over come all the difficult conditions. She becomes a self-assured woman who knows she can be content without depending on anyone else but herself. In the course of Celie's search for truth, she realizes that the patriarchal culture she has endured in the South is abusive to all women. When she meets Shug Avery and escapes from Mr __, she learns that women can be equal to men in all spheres, in power, in knowledge, and in the matters of love and finance.

Reference: 

The novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker

http://www.studymode.com/essays/Is-Violence-The-Overriding-Theme-For-39278977.html

http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Color_Purple/Color_Purple35.html

http://www.bookrags.com/notes/tcp/top4.html

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmColorPurple109.asp

http://www.gradesaver.com/the-color-purple/study-guide/short-summary/