Book Description
Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.
Customer Reviews:
Issues of Feminism.......2007-09-21
"The Color Purple," involves struggles of women to achieve recognition as individuals deserving of fair and equal treatment, in face of male dominance. Both the book and the movie, of the same title, shed light on feminist issues.
The male dominance is in various forms and includes physical aggressiveness. Albert (Mr.) adamantly declares to Celie, "Men spose to wear the pants" (1982: 272).The narrator conveys by way of letters from one person (Celie) to another, the epistolary form. The feminist level of stance is powerful in the novel. Celie struggles to find peace and establish her worthiness. She was abused and raped by her "father," she was dispossessed of her infant children, she is forced to marry Albert (Mr___) who she does not want, she loses her sister Nettie because of her adulterous husband's sexual aggressiveness and philandering.
Women are heavily exploited, more so Celie who in the marriage is made to look after Albert's offspring, to toil on the farm, and to submit to all of Albert's demands and those of his offspring. Celie writes, "Mr...marry me to take care of his children. I marry him cause my daddy made me. I don't love Mr___and he don't love me" (1982: 64). The book dramatically displays how female inequality is rampant. The preacher condemns and attacks Shug for her looseness, whereas Albert's wanton infidelity is tolerated. Celie's relationship with Albert is unloving and vile. Mary Agnes solicits a white uncle to help get Sofia out of prison, the uncle rapes her. Albert attempts to force Nettie (Celie's sister) to submit to him, but she leaves after successfully fighting him off. Physical violence against the women is common, apparently even in relationships of lovingness, such as that between Harpo and his wife Sofia. Harpo beats Sofia because, as he says, "The wife s'pose to mind" (1982: 64). Harpo even considers it respectable to physically violate his wife.
The narrator conveys the message that woman must full-fledgedly oppose the treatment of unfairness meted on them by men, and that they should achieve this through uniting and helping each other. The women in the novel, often converge in taking a feminist stance. They band together to hold each other up in support and sustenance, even those with interest in the same men. Feminist bonds of sisterhood are borne out as important, these we see in Nettie and Celie, in Sophia and Odessa, even in Mary Agnes and Sofia, in Albert's sister and Celie. in Tashi and Olivia, and in Shug Avery and Celie. The latter, in their relationship, encapsulate the twin roles of sisters and lovers.
Some of the women, such as Sofia adapt to fighting for and defending themselves. Sofia is of strong character, she is not subservient, she is powerful and physically strong. She can be quite aggressive but this spills into a dreadful experience at the hands of the police after she had the nerve to talk back to the white mayor. Subsequently, Sofia is sentenced to be the mayor's servant; doing dull, irksome, and fatiguing work for many years. The sisterhood feminist bond between Sofia and Mary Agnes is stronger than their mutual interest of affection for Harpo. Mary goes as far as enduring rape on behalf of attempting to get Sofia released. And when Mary Agnes goes off to pursue a singing career, it is Sophia who looks after her child.
The most feminist liberated and independent-thinking woman, of them all, is Shug Avery; despite the verbal attacks meted on her by church elders because of her lifestyle. She is a career blues singer, an occupation that offers her much more freedom than the others who are under the confines of home, housework and bringing up children. Shug's stance on sexual freedom is stronger than that of many other women, she has numerous affairs. Her feminist strength still involves her strong belief in God, she does not worship or believe in the conventional way. Indeed it is the relationship between Shug and Celie that is the central theme in the novel. Shug will liberate Celie in numerous aspects of her life. Shug simultaneously becomes a sister, friend and lover to Celie as she guides her into emotional and financial independence. Shug's feminist stance stands out. Her gender and opinions do not preclude her from being humanly equal to everybody and possessing the integrity. She passes these qualities onto Celie. Paradoxically, it is the occupation of sewing, "a woman's job," that significantly gains Celie independence--but the product is trousers, to be worn by women. Celie becomes strong enough to point out to Albert that the qualities of honesty, integrity, and independence are valid for both genders. Celie criticizes Albert's contention that, "...Shug act more manly than most men. I mean she upright, honest. Speak her mind and the devil take the hindmost. You know Shug will fight...Just like Sophia. She bound to live her life and be herself no matter what" (1982: 270). This exemplifies addressing the issues of feminine and masculine temperament in the novel. The novel asserts that women, as people can be just as weak and strong as men, therefore gender should never be a yardstick for perceptions of human qualities.
The book is a complex weaving of events in a woman's life that are hard to completely represent in a movie. Nevertheless, the movie maintains most of the heartbreaking issues which mirror the hardships that happened in the author's life. Whoopi Goldberg artfully plays the shy and abused Celie, Oprah Winfrey is powerful as the strong and no-nonsense Sophia, Margaret Avery is the gifted and independent singer Shug Avery, and Danny Glover is the abusive husband who disallows Celie having contact with Nettie and others. The issues that were toned down or understated in this movie, such as the lesbian loving and the violence, would probably be more graphically played during this era. That was 1985, not that long ago, but film-makers were less blunt with their images. The "lesbian" (the word is not mentioned in the book) acts are not conceived as being lesbian at all, but as a means (for Shug) to show Celie that a person can be loved and not just used as a toilet for sex. Compared to the book the movie rendition can sometimes appear to be too glamorous, too glorified, and too sweet. Director Spielberg commendably images the brutality of a rape by showing hanging leather belts banging against the head of the shaking bed.
The actors performed their roles exceptionally well. These include Whoopi Goldberg who plays the shy and abused Celie, Oprah Winfrey who plays the strong, no nonsense Sophia, Margaret Aver as the gifted singer Shug Avery, Danny Glover as the abusive husband to Celie who goes to the extent of not allowing Celie to have any contact with her sister Nettie, among others. The movie depicts the female characters as generally good persons, not flawless. The women are of unique backgrounds, conditions and talents, and they weave together to help each other out, in feminism strength. The men are generally likeable, save for abusive Danny Glover (who, anyway, later redeems himself); so it is difficult to look at the movie and the book as an attack on black masculinity in the course of displaying black (or overall) feminist strength. Consider that Rev. Samuel the missionary adopts Celie's children; Buster the boxer dates and does not try to overrule the strong-willed Sophia; even Shug's husband, Grady (in the movie version) accepts Shug for who she is, despite knowing her past of licentiousness.
Both the book and movie turn out to be amongst the most powerful in addressing issues of feminism in everyday life. Alice Walker prevalently employs black English and black characters, but this is a book and movie that almost anyone, near and far, can relate to. The book offers much more in that sphere than the movie, but both declare that triumph in a woman's life often happens when misfortune and adversity are challenged by feminist unity and forthrightness in face of a male dominated world. Women's issues come in various shapes and sizes, as the book and movie illustrate, but strength is indeed in numbers, ambitiousness, education, and becoming outward looking other than insular. A woman is to significantly love and cherish herself, get rid of the oppression blocking her, before she can fully appreciate and enjoy herself as well as others.
Incredible.......2007-09-14
I have seen the movie a million and one times but this book did it in for me. Although the movie was amazing, you have to read the book. There was a lot in the book I felt should have been in the movie. Overall this is a great book to read.
Excellent product........2007-09-11
Absolutely loved this book. It was in almost perfect condition. Better than described. Thanks for the great book and the great price.
a timeless story about redemption and the power of forgiveness.......2007-09-05
This gem of a story is about Celie, an abused
woman that uses the magic of reading and writing
letters to help her overcome the abusive life
she lives with Mister, her husband in an arranged
marriage. Through her friendship with Shug Avery,
and her belief in God, she learns to stand up
and value herself as a human being. She eventually
forgives those that abused her when she realizes
that they cannot have power over her if she doesn't
let them.
Some have accused the author and the story of being
anti-black men but the story is anti- a system that
oppressed the meak, and that's something that
everyone can relate to if they are willing to open
their minds to this wonderful book.
Lovely Reading.......2007-07-13
This story is a captivating and wonderful tale of a family torn apart by abuse. It's lovely but may not be suitable for younger audiences because of some sexual content. I feel in love with this book once I got to the end. I wont spoil it but I greatly recommend it.
Book Description
How do women experience the vast, arid, rugged land of the American Southwest? The Story Circle Network, a national organization dedicated to helping women write about their lives, posed this question, and nearly three hundred women responded with original pieces of writing that told true and meaningful stories of their personal experiences of the land. From this deep reservoir of writing—as well as from previously published work by writers including Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez, Diane Ackerman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver—the editors of this book have drawn nearly a hundred pieces that witness both to the ever-changing, ever-mysterious life of the natural world and to the vivid, creative, evolving lives of women interacting with it.
Through prose, poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir, the women in this anthology explore both the outer landscape of the Southwest and their own inner landscapes as women living on the land—the congruence of where they are and who they are. The editors have grouped the writings around eight evocative themes:
- The way we live on the land
- Our journeys through the land
- Nature in cities
- Nature at risk
- Nature that sustains us
- Our memories of the land
- Our kinship with the animal world
- What we leave on the land when we are gone
From the Gulf Coast of Texas to the Pacific Coast of California, and from the southern borderlands to the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, these intimate portraits of women's lives on the land powerfully demonstrate that nature writing is no longer the exclusive domain of men, that women bring unique and transformative perspectives to this genre.
Customer Reviews:
A fitting tribute to the rugged complexity of the Southwest from women's pens.......2007-05-14
As the title makes clear, the editors gathered the works of women writers who have ventured to put the spirit of the Southwest into words. The editors wisely divide the 100 or so essays and poems into eight categories such as "Geographies" and "The Nature of Urban Life." This allows the reader to navigate with greater ease through these vibrant, evocative and often moving pieces.
In Sandra Ramos O'Briant's wry essay "The Green Addiction," the writer recounts how her paternal grandmother "didn't like it that Daddy had married a Mexican." After her parents divorced and she left Texas with her mother for New Mexico, she was introduced to the exquisite pain of eating chile, something her non-Mexican relatives "didn't have the cojones to deal with."
And in Nancy Mairs' moving "Writing West," we get a taste of what it is to live and travel in the Southwest in a wheelchair. Her prose is spare, tough and unsentimental.
Pat Mora's "Voces del Jardín" is a homage to both the legacy and pleasures of her walled garden, which, she notes, is a "design indigenous to Mexico ... brought to the Americas by the Spanish ... a tradition Moorish and Mexican."
And, of course, there are descriptions of nature, wild and free, as in Sandra Lynn's "Poem in Which I Give You a Canyon": "Notice that this canyon is comprised of / two strata of volcanic origin: / a dark bitter chocolate and an airy vanilla."
It is a daunting task to describe fully the contours of this anthology, because so many fine writers are represented here -- including Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez and Barbara Kingsolver.
"What Wildness Is This" is a fitting tribute to the rugged complexity of the Southwest from the pens of a diverse group of women writers.
[The full review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]
Nature and the hearts of women.......2007-04-04
Although I am a New Yorker by birth and now live in Pennsylvania, I am drawn to the Southwest by the stories in What Wildness Is This. Years before, I was attracted to that part of the country by the conferences and retreats held by Story Circle Network. When I opened the book, I turned first to the stories by women I've met through this organization. Then I searched the index for stories about places I've been: the Texas Hill Country, Austin, Phoenix, the Grand Canyon. Then I read about Utah where my husband lived for twelve years before we met and a place that remains a part of him.
Almost three hundred women sent personal stories or poems for this anthology and fifty pieces were chosen. The editors then added another fifty pieces of previously published work by writers such as Diane Ackerman, Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams and Naomi Shihab Nye. The result is a hundred pieces exploring the relationship of a woman's life experiences to a place, the American Southwest.
The works are arranged in eight sections: the way we live on the land (A Land Full of Stories;) our journeys through the land (Geographies: Journey Notes;) nature in cities (Home Address: The Nature of Urban Life;) nature at risk (Earth Is an Island: Nature at Risk;) nature that sustains us (The Sustaining Land;) our memories of the land (The Key Is In Remembering: Growing Up On the Land;) our kinship with the animal world (Eagle Inside Us;) and what we leave on the land when we are gone (What We Leave Behind.)
The poems, essays and memoirs I read drew pictures for me, taking me back where I've been and showing me new, yet unseen landscapes through the writers' eyes. These word artists showed me what the Southwest looks and feels like - big dangerous snakes; hot, humid summers; endless wind; parched desert; small deer and short trees; distant horizons. We only have one of those in Pennsylvania - the humid summers.
This is a rough, un-softened land unlike the Northeast where I've lived all my life. The writers' words made me want to see the river that flows through a canyon, to watch the blackbirds, to feel the "muscular wind" of Linda Joy Myers' Oklahoma ("Song of the Plains."). I want to eat tortillas in Santa Fe like Sandra Ramos O'Briant ("Chile Tales: The Green Addiction.")
My ethnic and immigrant roots pulled on me when I read about the hope of a young Jewish couple in Davi Walders' poem "Big Spring, Fifty Years After." A line from her poem "Jewish Oil Brat" could serve to summarize the whole book: "...courage rooted deep here, gushed high and fierce here..."
Reading, I pictured oil wells and gas wells and dogs in the yard. I felt what it was like to be the part-white child in an Indian school like Leslie Marmon Silko in "Not You, He Said." I laughed at the cunning of Patricia Nordyke Pando's grandmother in "Dumplings Come to Town."
So many other images remain with me: Ironwoods and cactus and dust and "the occasional elm." The lives in these stories and poems are lived outdoors, no matter the number of hours spent within four walls. The land colors everything, determines everything, and decides everything.
What makes this different from other anthologies of nature writing? Written entirely by women, the authors are an integral part of each story or poem. Kathleen Dean Moore says in the Foreword that they "break down the cultural constraints of ...European ideals of `man and nature'...and "Man as individual, ...distinguished by the presence of mind from all of nature, which is as lifeless as a millstone..."
Co-editor Susan Wittig Albert says that the editors were looking for writers who had experienced the natural world "not as Nature, objectively...'out there,' but in a deeply personal, intimate and self-revealing way `in here'."
This is a collection to celebrate not only because it adds so many beautiful female voices to the canon of nature writing but especially because our own Story Circle Network sponsored it. To paraphrase Barbara Kingsolver in "Not Long Ago," "I can't think of (a book I've read that gave me) such a clear fix on what it means to be human."
Amazon.com
The American South, it has been said, is the most European of the nation's sections in manner and outlook, distinct enough that it may be reckoned to have its own--slippery term--culture. Its literature, language, climate, economy, cuisine, and history are recognizably different from those of New England and the Midwest, and even today Southerners remember that their homeland was once an independent nation crushed by a foreign military power. These may be justifications enough to warrant this massive regional encyclopedia, although a few questions go a-begging. (What, for instance, would an encyclopedia of American culture writ large contain? Do the mountaineers of Tennessee share a culture with the Gullah-speaking farmers of the South Carolina coast? Just what does culture mean, anyway?) In any case, the editors have assembled a fine roster of contributors who write on sweeping topics--African American life, agriculture, literature, the "mythic South," and the like--elaborated on by short essays on narrower subjects. The book was rightly voted Best Reference Book of 1989 by the American Library Association.
Book Description
The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination, and the homeland of an array of Americans who consider themselves southerners. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends.
The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is "the first attempt ever" notes U.S. News & World Report, "to describe every aspect of a region's life and thought, the impact of its history and policies, its music and literature, its manners and myths, even the iced tea that washes down its catfish and cornbread."
There are many Souths, many southerners. The region's fundamental uniqueness, in fact, lies in its peculiar combination of cultural traits, a somewhat curious, often elusive blend created by blacks and whites who have lived together for more than 300 years. In telling their stories, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture ranges from grand historical themes to the whimsical; from the arts and high culture (William Faulkner and Leontyne Price) to folk culture (quilts, banjos, and grits) to popular culture (Gilley's and Gone With the Wind).
The Encyclopedia's definition of the South is a cultural one: the South is found wherever southern culture is found. Although the focus is on the eleven states of the former Confederacy, this volume also encompasses southern outposts in midwestern and middle-Atlantic border states, even the southern pockets of Chicago, Detroit, and Bakersfield.
To foster a deeper understanding of the South's cultural patterns, the editors have organized this reference book around twenty-four thematic sections, including history, religion, folklore, language, art and architecture, recreation, politics, the mythic South, urbanization, literature, music, violence, law, and media. The life experiences of southerners are discussed in sections on black life, ethnic life, and women's life. Throughout, the broad goal is to identify the forces that have supported either the reality or the illusion of the southern way of life—people, places, ideas, institutions, events, symbols, rituals, and values.
The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was developed by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Contributors to the volume include historians, literary critics, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, linguists, theologians, folklorists, architects, ecologists, lawyers, university presidents, newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and novelists.
Book Description
This collection of essays comments on the pre-World War II culture of the United States, when David O. Selznick produced
Customer Reviews:
Read if serious about "Gone With the Wind" as art.......1999-12-19
Pyron amasses a collection of critical essays on GWTW that, as far as I can tell, is unequalled. This includes early reviews of the book to modern-day criticism, which provides an interesting and helpful read. Check out Pyron's exhaustive biography on Margaret Mitchell too.
Book Description
Considered one of the original texts foretelling the black feminist movement, this collection of essays, first published in 1892, offers an unparalleled view into the thought of black women writers in nineteenth-century America. A leading black spokeswoman of her time, Anna Julia Cooper came of age during a conservative wave in the black community, a time when men completely dominated African-American intellectual and political ideas. In these essays, Cooper criticizes black men for securing higher education for themselves through the ministry, while erecting roadblocks to deny women access to those same opportunities, and denounces the elitism and provinciality of the white women's movement. Passionately committed to women's independence, Cooper espoused higher education as the essential key to ending women's physical, emotional, and economic dependence on men.
Customer Reviews:
The Role of Women in the Development of Society.......2000-06-16
Women are the important development of any society. Their position in society makes them important in development. She says "the position in society determines the vital elements of its regeneration and progress". she also say it is a woman "who must first form the man by directing the earliest impulse of his character. It is true that it is people with particular personality and character who achieve development and progress and that it is t he woman who generally socializes the individuals into appropriate behavior. So women are important as molders of people who in turn develop societies.
Customer Reviews:
Zora: a funny, fascinating story teller.......2007-08-06
I studied Zora Hurston in a Southern women's writer's class and fell in love with her wit, truthfulness, cattiness, and charm. She's one of the best, if not the best, black women writers of the past. She keeps her writing in the southern black dialect that makes it most appealing and real. I have all her books, words on cassette, and a video, "Zora is My Name." She makes a great discussion group topic. I've taught college lit classes about her and her works.
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The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures)
Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Manufacturer: University of Georgia Press
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The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family
ASIN: 0820316652 |
Book Description
Disturbing, ironic, haunting, brutal. What inner struggles led Flannery O'Connor to create fiction that elicits such labels? Much of the tension that drives O'Connor's writing, says Sarah Gordon, stems from the natural resistance of her imagination to the obedience expected by her male-centered church, society, and literary background.
Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination shows us a writer whose world was steeped in male presumption regarding women and creativity. The book is filled with fresh perspectives on O'Connor's Catholicism, her upbringing as a dutiful, upper-class southern daughter, her readings of Thurber, Poe, Eliot, and other arguably misogynistic authors, and her schooling in the New Criticism.
As Gordon leads us through a world premised on expectations at odds with O'Connor's strong and original imagination, she ranges across all of O'Connor's fiction and many of her letters and essays. While acknowledging O'Connor's singular situation, Gordon also gleans insights from the lives and works of other southern writers, Eudora Welty, Caroline Gordon, and Margaret Mitchell among them.
Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination draws on Sarah Gordon's thirty years of reading, teaching, and discussing one of our most complex and influential authors. It takes us closer than we have ever been to the creative struggles behind such literary masterpieces as Wise Blood and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."
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Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990
Patricia Yaeger
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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Inventing Southern Literature
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Flickering Shadows: A Novel
ASIN: 0226944913 |
Book Description
The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.
For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.
Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.
The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.
Book Description
The first of four volumes in the Women Writing Africa Project, this landmark collection presents two centuries of texts by African women and reveals a powerful cultural legacy. Ranging from communal songs and folk tales to letters, diaries, poems, -fiction, -interviews, court records, and other documents, the texts offer a vivid picture of African women's lives. Their work and families, their experiences of the cruelty of colonialism and war, and their struggles for civil rights are described in voices young and old, of diverse racial and ethnic identities. The volume includes Urieta Kazahendike, an early convert to Christianity, and Queen Regent Labotsibeni of Swaziland, as well as writers and activists such as Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Sindiwe Magona, and -Winnie Mandela.
Customer Reviews:
An aptly presented and profoundly insightful collection.......2003-06-12
Collaboratively compiled and edited by M. J. Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford, and Nobantu Rasbotsa, Women Writing Africa: The Sou-thern Region is an extensive, 554-page work detailing (from a distinctly women's perspective) the history, culture, social issues, and modern-day living conditions in the southern region of Africa. Countless personal testimonies form the core of this aptly presented and profoundly insightful collection. Women Writing Africa is enthusiastically recommended for African Studies and Women's Studies reference collections and reading lists.
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