The Color Purple by Alice Walker tells the story of Celie, a young, abused black girl. You follow Celie’s life through letters, which she addresses to God, and then eventually to her loved sister Nettie. I only found Sparknotes this year in Ap Lang, and it helped me understand a particularly peculiar book for me, Fahrenheit 451. The themes were beyond me, as well as some of the language. I agree with the statement that a student should first read a book. A student's grasp on the book on a personal level. There is nothing in the world compared to reading a book and connecting it to yourself and in your own mind. Books have the ability to take anyone who can read to a different state of mind, and by just reading Sparknotes you lose the feeling of reading.
Growing up I was a fairly sheltered child. The most disturbing thing that had ever happened to me was the passing of my dad, but my mom raised me up knowing and being familiar with a healthy love, and I’ve always known my dad loved me as well. It was very hard for me to jump into a character's mind that was abused, especially physically. I’ve never been harmed by anyone on purpose before, so for me to understand molestation, rape, and abuse and their affects on someone is very hard. Celie in my opinion is not a very complex character, and very numb. I find that numb people usually are found to be dull, shallow, and simple. I might make this connection because numb people often feel empty inside, and emptiness is a simple concept, simply meaning if something is empty, there’s nothing there. If there’s nothing there, comparing that back to a human personality, a “nothing” personality would be someone who’s simple. To understand why Celie is numb however, is what I myself struggle a lot to understand. When I read the book I was often frustrated because I could not understand why she would react to things in certain ways, such as her lack of care of Mr. ____’s children, such as “Everybody say how good I is to Mr. _____ children. I be good to them. But I don’t feel nothing for them.” (pg. 26) When I first read that it was such a strange concept to me to not love a child. Not loving Mr. ____ I understood, but Celie’s lack of care for even the kids, and the fact that she views them almost as just another chore she has to take care of, confused me. By this point, I knew I had to begin to understand how abused people work, and dive into Celie’s mind to actually comprehend this book, and to somewhat enjoy it. So I began to ask my mom questions about it, and ask her how someone could be so numb, and have so little heart. After that I learned that abused people are locked off, and often don’t care about anyone or anything, because anything they’ve ever cared about becomes stripped away. There’s still some part of me that will never be able to fully understand why Celie has such a lack of depth with her emotions, but after reading this book I at least have now began to delve into the minds of those who are abused.
Sparknotes states about Celie that near the end of the book, she becomes self-empowered and she evolves into feeling happiness. I read about her beginning to sew and I caught the fact that it made her happy, and she began to see a purpose to life, but I never saw it as something that had begun to heal her, or made her actually feel anything different towards the world. One thing that Sparknotes also began to analyze on was the vastly varying experiences of both Nettie and Celie, “Critics have faulted Nettie’s letters for being digressive and boring in comparison to Celie’s. Although Nettie’s letters are indeed quite encyclopedic and contain less raw experience and emotion, they play an important role in the novel. As a black intellectual traveling the world in pursuit of “the uplift of black people everywhere,” Nettie has a vastly different experience from Celie.” (SparkNotes) I think that it is important to note how blacks were treated in all parts of the globe, and how many of them were just as numb as Celie, and it was the culture and society at the time that made them this way. It is the same as today, how today’s society focuses on sports and social media, and can also make us appear to be numb, and uncaring people.
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