


Being a young black woman Celie has little to no education or exposure to the outside world that she lives in. The end of the novel, then, celebrates both the continuity of family, populated both by strong female characters and repentant male ones, and the fact that "families," and the roles within them, are fluid, often overlapping, and part of a long arc toward equality and greater understanding, even if that arc is often dotted with tragedy, abuse, and neglect.Summary: Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Color Purple, written in 1982 is a tale of a poor, uneducated fourteen-year-old black woman named Celie who is living in rural areas of the south known as the Americas Jim Crow south. Similarly, in Africa, Nettie manages both to achieve the gender role initially expected of her (by marrying the widower Samuel), and keeps working and forging her own path in life, eventually spending over twenty years as a missionary in Africa. _ realizes just how much he took for granted and how much he, and his son Harpo, have relied on the work of women throughout their lives. But after Shug and then Celie leave him behind, Mr. It is expected that black men of this time, especially in the South, work in the fields, and that women obey them absolutely. The men in the novel, however, experience a different trajectory. Celie and Squeak, Harpo's second wife, end up living with Shug in Memphis, and Celie is able to start her pants-making company. _ and begins to teach Celie about her body and about other ways of living, outside the control of men. Celie, meanwhile, has two children, whom Nettie then raises in Africa, coincidentally-Celie only leaves behind the drudgery of housework when Shug comes to live with her and Mr. But Nettie sacrifices the job generally reserved for women-motherhood-in order to educate herself and work for Samuel and Corrine during their missionary labors in Africa.

_, and Nettie, not wanting to do either, runs away. In the beginning, Celie is expected to serve her abusive father, and, later, her husband Mr. The novel is also an extended meditation on the nature of men, women, and their expected gender roles.
