Alice Walker Essays

College

The Color Purple

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence [1] and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple [2] both paint a portrait American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This culture appears to be male, with no room for the female as any...

12th Grade

The Color Purple

If asked, most people would say women are strong, passionate, loving, but not all of these positive traits truly define who they are. Their nature is deemed the most difficult to define because they have negative aspects that contribute to their...

11th Grade

The Color Purple

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple holds immense historical and societal relevance among a thirty year spectrum of time periods and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the gradual development of both civil and women’s rights, the destruction...

College

The Color Purple

Sexism is, at its core, a product of gender roles. In the early twentieth century, discrimination against women through the overt use of gender roles was highly prevalent amongst men and women. In a patriarchal society, women are expected to...

12th Grade

The Color Purple

Sewing is often viewed as a proper pastime for married women to engage in, even if it can often be laborious to do for hours on end. Yet, the women in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple managed to turn this monotonous activity into something...

12th Grade

The Color Purple

Celie has been a victim of female oppression throughout her life, never believing in herself, and living in fear of men. However, when Shug Avery enters her life, Celie’s quality of life starts to improve on the whole, and her newfound self-belief...

11th Grade

The Color Purple

The main characters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple begin their stories as lonely and confined individuals battling between their own thought versus the pressures and expectations of society. They strive to be...

12th Grade

The Color Purple

As one grows and matures throughout their lifetime, countless relationships are created and changed. These shifting relationships help define who a person will ultimately be. Many of the reasons for relationship changes come from social situations...

11th Grade

Everyday Use

Universal among all human groups, from co-workers to entire nations, is a particular way of behaving. As we socialize and engage with one another, we develop characteristic methods of thinking, feeling, acting, and judging. This is what we know as...

Everyday Use

Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" is a tightly woven tale that brings together many disparate elements of the story to reinforce the thesis put forward by W.E.B. DuBois that black Americans are trapped in a double consciousness between...

Everyday Use

On the surface, “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker is on one level about a mother’s dynamic relationship with her two daughters, who have conflicting attitudes towards both family and cultural roots. It is also a depiction of the misguided and...