In the novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker writes about people she has known, people who lived in the part of the country where she was raised, and she reflects the conditions of those people and the values they represented within the larger context of American society. They constitute a subculture shaped by particular economic and social forces. The subject matter is the mistreatment of black women by their men, and in exploring this theme, the book has takes place in the mind of a particular victim of this kind of life, expressed by her through letters that fairly cry out for help and for a different life. Celie is the young black girl living in Georgia who has never known any life but one with male violence in it. That violence has been created in large part by the economic and social realities of being black in America, but from the point of view of one black girl, all that matters is that she is on the receiving end of the blows.
The novel is set in a period around the turn of the century, and thus the lives of these characters are much closer to the pivotal issue that placed them in this setting and that created the tensions which have left them downtrodden, with the males fighting back at the only target they have, their women. That issue is slavery, and though physical, sanctioned slavery was outlawed at the end of the Civil War, the social attitudes inherent in slavery, with one race of people elevated over another, persisted. These are people living in a new kind of slavery, a slavery imposed by the fact that their opportunities are much diminished when compared with the white society surrounding them. Black-white tensions are portrayed peripherally in this novel, notably in the attitudes and actions of the Mayor, but such tensions are inherent in the situation and explain much of the damage done to the community.
Celie is lacking in any sense of self-esteem or self-worth. The first and most overt difference be...