Contrast and Comparisons between The Colour Purple and I...

In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, important aspects of the African American women’s experience in America in the early/mid. 1900’s are discussed such as the physical abuse and emotional abuse they endured and their social standing in society. In both novels you are able to witness the anguish and persecution that these women had to undergo. Maya from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Celie from The Color Purple are the main characters and we see that they are both differentiated against during their journeys of life. Men in their lives take advantage of both women and they are used for sexual pleasure, and as slaves. They are not treated fairly as they should be and people in their†¦show more content†¦The book The Color Purple has been called that name for certain reasons. Shanyn Fiske writes in Piecing The Patchwork Self: A Reading Of Walker s The Color Purple, The color purple is continuall y equated with suffering and pain. Sophia s swollen, beaten face is described as the color of eggplant . Purple is the color of Celie s private parts: the site of her sexual violation. (Fiske, 153) Since the average African American woman got beaten almost to death, and was sexually assaulted until they were not even recognizable, the novel’s name fits it quite well. Fiske tells us that the colour purple describes what Sophia and Celie looked like after they had been beaten and sexually abused so many times by the men in their lives. The Color Purple was a story that resembled Oprah Winfrey’s life as well. Oprah was â€Å"raped as a child, but there was more to come. She would be molested and raped, repeatedly, through early adolescence, by other grown men, including the boyfriend of a cousin who was living with Oprah s mother, and by her favorite uncle. ‘It was just an on- going, continuous thing,’ she has said; ‘I started to think This is the way life is. ’† (Flanagan) Oprah, along with many other African American women, began to think that it was normal for men to be abusing them in such a manner, which is not the truth at all. Some of these poor women did not know what was