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The Color Purple Analytical Essay

Decent Essays

Having something that is rudimentary and seen as an ordinary object may hold no value to people around you, but holds a deeper meaning when it can change you as a person and your life holistically. In Alice Walker’s, The Color Purple, Celie the protagonist undergoes trials and tribulations and along her journey she discovers objects that shape her to be a stronger and more independent women at the end of the novel. The symbolic objects consist of the pants, the quilt, and the letters. During the early twentieth century in the United States, it wasn’t the norm for women to wear pants. Pants were symbolic of dominance and men who wore them had control over his household. However, Sofia breaks the norm by wearing Harpo’s pants while in the process of manual labor. “I see Sofia dragging a ladder and then lean it up gainst the house. She wearing a old pair of Harpo’s pants. Got her head tied up in a headrag. She clam up the ladder to the roof, begin to hammer in nails. Sound echo cross the yard like shots. Harpo eat, watch her,” (62). Sofia is a sign to Celie that women aren’t inferior to men and women too can have power. This idea stays with Celie until she finally decides to leave Mr.___ and …show more content…

The quilt was made subsequent to the confrontation between Celie and Sofia regarding how Celie told Harpo to beat Sofia. After Celie apologizes to Sofia, they decide to make a quilt together including Shug Avery’s old yellow dress. The quilt represents unification because of the different people who were a part of the completion of the quilt. The sewing of the quilt later transformed to a successful sewing business that produced independence and happiness for Celie that was never present throughout most of her life. To some sewing may just be a hobby Celie indulged in to past the time, but on the contrary it led to her being an independent woman free from submission and

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