THE COLOR PURPLE

The Color Purple (1):
An Artistic Presentation of Some forms of Violence in America

By Mathieu Ndomba Ngoma

The Color Purple is a movie directed by Steven Spielberg and an adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel of the same name. Alice Walker is a womanist (2). She uses the experiences of African American women as an inclusive method or hermeneutics for analyzing reality. Thus, the story of Celie told in The Color Purple is more than a mere narrative. The experience of Celie opens the eyes to see some expressions and dynamics of violence. Capturing the story of Celie, Steven Spielberg offers a powerful movie which helps the viewers to see the dynamics of violence through the imagination and creativity of Alice Walker and the experience of an African American woman called Celie.

These lines analyze the forms of violence unveiled in the movie, The Color Purple. There are two parts in this analysis. The first part explains the plot of the movie. The second part points out the main expressions of violence underlined in the movie.


i. - Summary of the plot of the movie

The movie is mainly about the story of a rural African American woman called Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) between the age of fourteen and her old age. The story starts in the early twentieth century. In the first scene, Celie appears with her sister, Nettie (Akosua Busia), playing in a field of purple flowers. The first images contrast with the following scenes where, at fourteen years old, Celie gives birth. The viewers learn that the baby is a result of an incestuous act from the father. They also learn that the father takes away the baby as he did with the previous one. This scene gives the tone of the movie. At fourteen, Celie is a mother of two children taken away from her by her father.

Then comes a man, Albert (Danny Glover), asking to marry her in order to watch over his children. Albert is an evil man. He is so brutal and violent that Celie just calls him Mister. Celie turns to be for Albert a wife, a maid, and a slave. She is abused, beaten, insulted to the extent that she is ashamed to smile. She is so frustrated that she develops a kind of hatred towards Mister and has two possibilities: whether to leave him or kill him. The first possibility prevails. She leaves Mister, gains her freedom and happiness. She sets up a pant business. At the end she is reunited with her sister Nettie and her two lost children who, after growing up in Africa, speak two African languages: Lingala (3) and Swahili (4).

However many things happened between her enslaving marriage and freedom. The movie, following the novel, shows the journey to freedom through some characters brought into the story. The most prominent characters are: Nettie, Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), and Sofia (Oprah Winfrey). Nettie is the younger sister of Celie. Early in the story she goes to Africa as a maid of the missionary who adopted Celie’s children. She ends up marrying the missionary after the death of his wife. Nettie kept on writing letters to Celie, but Mister (Celie’s husband) kept on hiding them.

The second prominent character is Shug Avery. This is a beautiful singer with whom Albert (Mister) is in love. When she falls sick, Albert takes her to the house where he lives with Celie without caring about Celie’s feelings. When Shug meets Celie, she compares her ugliness to sin. This sad beginning however turns out to be the starting point of Celie’s liberation. Shug helps Celie to find the letters of Nettie hidden by Mister. After finding and reading the letters, Celie comes to know about the life of her children and her sister in Africa. Through Shug, Celie learns to smile again and to realize that she has a nice smile. There starts a healing process inside her. She learns that sex can also be an expression of tenderness and love. For the first time, somebody who is not Nettie expresses love to her. They even kiss. Shug makes money with her singing career and gets married. Later she helps Celie not to kill Mister. She also helps her to set up a pant business.

Sofia (Oprah Winfrey) is another important character in the story. She is Celie’s sister in law because she is married to Mister’s son by a first marriage. Sofia represents the female patriarchy. She is strong and treats her husband in a way closer to the way Mister treats Celie. This will work till the days she lands a blow on the face of the local white mayor of the town. She is shot, wounded, and taken to prison. She becomes later the maid of the mayor. When she goes back home, she is a psychologically wounded person. As a character, Sofia is the opposite of Celie. Celie is dominated in her marriage life. Sofia is the one dominating in her marriage life. Celie is vindicated at the end. Sofia is played down.

ii. - Forms of violence in America unveiled in the movie

Kathleen J. Greider defines violence as “force against persons, objects, or principles that intentionally or unintentionally injures, damages, or destroys.”(5) Violence is related to a violation of somebody’s integrity, freedom, well-being and dignity as a human being. The Color Purple underscores many forms of such a violation of human dignity and personhood. The most prominent forms of violence highlighted in the movie are: sexual violence (through incest, child abuse, and rape), physical violence, and psychological violence.

The first time Celie comes into clear view on the screen, she is pregnant from her own father. The movie opens therefore with sexual violence through incest, child abuse, and rape. In fact incest does not come alone. There are many other expressions of violence around incest. Celie is only fourteen when giving birth to a second child from her father. The violence of incest in the movie comes then with the violence of child abuse. Celie is not only sexually abused. Her father also abuses her by taking the children away from her. Celie is deprived of the joy of raising herself her children. Since at fourteen, we would hardly talk about consent on the part of Celie, therefore the incestuous act is also a rape case. The movie emphasizes the violence of rape not only through the incestuous act of the father, but also with two other scenes. First, the movie shows that sexual intercourse between Celie and her husband has a lot more to do with rape than with love. Second, Mister, Celie’s husband, tries to rape Nettie, his own sister-in-law. The Color Purple underscores three types of rape cases: rape by a family member (the incest case), marital rape (Mister’s sexual abuse of Celie), and the attempt rape of Nettie by Mister. This last case also applies to rape by a person who is not in the family circle.

The experience of sexual violence Celie undergoes, unveils a dramatic form of violence in America. In fact, according to Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), “Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted.”(6) Through sexual aggression, the movie is dealing with a serious form of violence in the American society.

More generally, physical violence comes with the way Mister treats Celie. Celie is beaten, insulted, humiliated all the time by her husband. This situation depicts marriage as a place for physical violence. If the experience of Celie is used as a window to see what is happening in society, then we may trust the statistics showing thousands of women who are victims of violence from their male partners. However the movie shows both male and female patriarchy. Domestic physical violence may come either from the husband or from the wife. On this point the movie gives a correct picture of society. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, “in 1991 nearly two-thirds of the women in prison for a violent offense had victimized a relative, intimate, or someone else they knew. Women serving a sentence for a violent offense were about twice as likely as their male counterparts to have committed their offense against someone close to them (36% versus 16%).”(7)

Whoopi Goldberg (in the role of Celie) is magnificent in showing the inability of Celie to smile. This powerfully unveils the psychological violence part. Celie is affected to the extent of lack of self esteem. She is unable to smile and unable to think of her life outside the horrible patriarchy of Mister. She needed a friend (Shug) to open her eyes to other alternatives. Incest is not only physical violence, it is also psychological. “Where incest occurs, the consequences for a girl may include neurotic symptoms, depression, disturbed self-evaluation, and mistrust of men, the latter often having an adverse effect on subsequent marriage.”(8) However incest is not the only cause of Celie’s lack of self esteem. Another important cause of this lack of self esteem is the fact that she is considered ugly. Mister finds her ugly and he says it without hesitation. Also, at first when Shug meets Celie, she says that she (Celie) is as ugly as sin. Her ugliness is then established both by men and women. Celie has then no reason to be proud of her body and her smile. Here the movie is unveiling a tremendous form of unseen violence. Today millions of women are victims of this form of violence because they do not meet the criteria of a beautiful woman. The society and especially the Medias seem to decide the features of a beautiful woman. The women who do not meet the criteria undergo the experience of Celie. The high number of women using cosmetic and plastic surgery today may confirm what Alice Walker is inviting to see through the declared ugliness of Celie.



These lines have shown that the forms of violence Celie undergoes in the movie, The Color Purple, are indeed the most common forms of violence in America. This defines artistic character of the movie. In fact, art is about using imagination in order to express ideas, feelings… As such, The Color Purple is a great piece of art revealing some of the worst forms of violence in the American society.

(1) A movie directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Quincy Jones. Screenplay by Menno Meyjes, based on anovel by Alice Walker. Music by Jones. Running time: 150 minutes. Classified PG-13. Year: 1985.
(2) For Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, “womanist thought requires that we engage skills and histories out of the lived experiences of African American women.” Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Misbegotten Anguish: A Theology and Ethics of Violence (St Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 9-10.
(3) Lingala is spoken in two African countries: The Republic of Congo and The Democratic Republic of Congo.
(4) Swahili language is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, The Democratic Republic of Congo.
(5) Kathleen J. Greider, Reckoning With Aggression: Theology, Violence, and Vitality (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), p.9.
(6)See www.rainn.org/statistics.html. This is the website of Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).
(7) David Throop, Violent female inmates and their victims, at www.menweb.org/throop/battery/studies/by-gender.html
(8)Elizabeth R. Moberly, “Incest,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, edited by James F. Childress and John Macquarrie (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986), p.295.