Love and Marriage

 Name: Srividya M

Register no. : 1313266

Class: 2^nd Year PSEng

TOPIC: Themes: Love and Marriage

Love

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead”

                                                                                                                               -Oscar Wilde

Love, in the color purple is not only romantic; it also exists within each family and between families. Celie first feels love for her sister and then for her two children who were separated from her at birth. Her love for her younger sister is shown through selfless sacrifice for her welfare. Most of her life Celie received love only from her sister and later from her lady love.

After her marriage Mr._____ gives her nothing but abuse and uses her to take care of his children.

“Everybody say how good I is to Mr._________ children. I be good to them. But I don’t feel nothing for them. Patting Harpo back not even like patting a dog. It more like patting another piece of wood. Not a living tree, but a table, a chifferobe. Anyhow, they don’t love me neither, no matter how good I is.” (17.10)

 Celie on the other hand feels no love for Mr.______’s children and she feels as though her soul is being sucked out.

Love takes its most complex form in this novel, a love pentagon gets created where celie is married to Mr.______ and both of them are in love with Shug, Shug is in love with Mr._____ but later gets married to a man named             but she leaves him and finds another man. The same thing happens to Harpo where he doesn’t understand the meaning of love, Celie helps him understand and realize the love in marriage instead of wanting loveless abusive marriage.

Celie is the key for many peoples realization of love and its beauty.

Celie finally finds love and realizes that she has to love herself first to be able to love others and others to love her. At the end of the novel Celie is reunited with her loved ones and lives happily ever after.

Marriage

“marriage may be the closest thing to heaven or hell any of us will know on this earth”

                                                                                                     -Edwin Louis Cloe

Marriage and love are intertwined in this novel. Like love marriage is treated as a careless institution, even if the characters fall in love, their marriage ends up in mess.

Marriage, although is all about love, care and understanding, but in this book marriage becomes all about sex.

“He come home with a girl from round Gray. She be my age but they married. He be on her all the time. She walk round like she don’t know what hit her. I think she thought she love him. But he got so many of us. All needing something.”(4.1)

This is one of the finest examples to prove that marriage is only a cover for sex and the partner is merely a person who takes care of the household chores and the n-number of children they produce together.

In the case of Celie, she isn’t in love with Mr.______ but yet marries him because he wants someone to manage his children. Although he prefers Nettie over Celie, he chooses Celie because Pa wishes to have Nettie for himself. Celie is sold off to Mr.____ like a cow, who wants her to take care of his house and work hard for him.

This book has characters trading their spouses and lovers with eachother. Harpo’s situation can be taken into consideration, he doesn’t really understand his love for Sophie and lets go of her and gets attached to another girl called Mary Agnes who later gets involved with Shug’s husband. The only stable marriage in this book is that of Nettie and Rev. Samuels but it isn’t better that the relationship between Celie and Shug.

References:

Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Color Purple." Shmoop.com . Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 27 Aug. 2014(accessed).  

Oscar Wilde. Binary Quotes. 27 Aug. 2014(accessed)

Edwin Louis Cloe. Binary Quotes. 27 Aug. 2014(accessed)