The Color Purple

This is a tough book. It addresses a lot of issues of the time, some of which unfortunately are still hot topics. But it's also a learn-to-love book. Celie was a simple girl, but she knew how to love, once she found people whom she could. Even if she didn't love, say, her husband, or some of her children, or some of the people in her life (who truth be told, did not deserve her love), she knew how to love the people she did love. Like her sister, her sister's family, this force of nature called Shug who blows through town and changes the way Celie approaches life forever- no longer meek and timid, Celie learns not just how to love...
but how to live. She makes the best of what she has, and she hasn't got anything- talk about something from nothing. Celie has nothing. But as aforementioned, she made the best of it that the possibly could, and in that she was a force of nature greater than anyone born to power, who had it easy from Day One.

SPOILAHHHHHHHH ALERT

So in The Color Purple, there's some...
incest. To say the least.
To start off what would later become a hard, work-worn battlefield of a life, Celie was raped by her father (who she later found out was her stepfather, saving her SOME grief... but nto much) at the age of 14- twice. The children were supposedly taken by her father/stepfather and killed. To think- not only a) does this terrible thing happen to her, b) it happens by the hand of her FATHER, but also she doesn't have these children. Maybe it would just be too dark a reminder of what happened, but Celie needs someone to love. Someone to care for. Not a husband who will beat her and abuse her.
More on relationships in this book: the man Celie is forced to marry, Mr. ________, is the man who loved Celie's long-lost sister, Nettie- what an auspicious start to a relationship. When Nettie left home, Celie was left unwanted by everyone- what family she had, any prospective husbands that there were out there...
So not only was she raped- by her FATHER- but she was always second-best (more like last, actually) and least loved by everyone in favor of her prettier, smart, independent sister.

Thanks Polly!

So I mentioned that it was an epistolary novel, and Polly wodnered why she wrote letters- did she have no one to talk to?
So to first address that, no. She didn't. Celie, letter-writer, really didn't have anyone to talk to. The letters were written to two- some to God. It was more like writing a diary, but sometimes it's easier to write something for real if you know you're doing it for someone's benefit (like if you're just doing it for yourself, you might not try so hard). And the other person to whom the letters were addressed were her sister Nettie. But Celie never gets any return letters from Nettie (but that's a horse of an entirely different color), so I guess she kind of diary-izes that, too.
So what I was thinking about is what if it was written in the more traditional form? How do the letters make the book more realistic? How would it be different?
I think that these letters, these letters to know one, symbolize and help to convey Celie's helplessness. Her life is pretty tough, and when you've got no one to talk to, it's even worse. So I think that these letters make the book possible and realistic, and make the reader more empathetic when they can really see that she has shown what her life is- and her everyday life is our worst nightmare, and that's what makes it so hard to read... but then it's a book where you HAVE to find out what happens, make sure everything will be okay, and even when it's not, Celie got through it by writing letters. And if she can do that, think of everyone with more opportunities and more everything than Celie, who had NOTHING, and how quick we are to complain about the smallest things...
...just a thought.