The Color Purple - Alice Walker

"Celie has been raped by the man she calls father; her two children are taken away from her; she has been forced into an ugly marriage. She has no one to talk to but God. Then she meets Shrug Avery, singer and magic woman, and Celie discovers not the pain of female rivalry but the love and support of women."

+  It is an epistolary, confessional novel.
+  It is written in the first person present tense by Celie.
+  Walker uses blunt, violent language and imagery -- Celie writes that her father "kilt [her baby] out there in the woods. Kilt this one too, if he can" -- to show how normalised this kind of behaviour is to Celie.
+  It's set in rural Georgia, America, between 1910 and 1940. The setting is vague and the novel (kind of) divorces itself from its context, with no dates or historical events mentioned and little sense of passage of time, which allows the story to be more accessible.

"Shrug say, Us each other's peoples now, and kiss me."

Walker presents the love between Celie and Shrug as far purer and more caring than the other examples of love and relationships in the novel; it is the only completely positive example of romantic love depicted. Shrug is the only person, other than her sister Nettie, to listen and appreciate Celie -- "you is a wonder to behold" -- and it is Shrug's love which helps Celie to grow as a person.

Shrug encourages her to take control of her own narrative, re-imagining God as an "it" that loves everything instead of a white patriarch "like all the other mens I know" and reinterpreting her sexual history to call herself a "virgin".     

"Us sleep like sisters, me and Shrug."

Celie and Shrug's relationship is at once intimate and sexual, and sisterly and familial, with Walker showing sexuality to be more complex than Celie first thought at the start of the novel.

"Hard not to love Shrug, I say. She know how to love somebody back"

Shrug is the first person, other than Nettie, to love Celie, and in The Color Purple, being loveable is about the ability to love other people. Another example of this is Mr.__ -- once he shows care for the people in his life, they reciprocate.

"They know I love Shrug but they think womens love just by accident, anybody handy likely to do."

Here Walker, through Celie, refutes the idea that homosexual love is somehow lesser than hetrosexual. The love Celie feels for Shrug is more powerful than anything she's known -- when Shrug tells her that she's leaving her for Germaine, Celie says "my heart broke... if words could kill I'd be in the ambulance." The simple language helps emphasise how simple and heartfelt her emotions are.

Walker also writes about unconditional love. Adam, despite his "initial stupid response" to the facial sacrificion ceremony -- "carving their identification as a people into their children's faces", carves "scars identical to Tashi's on his cheeks" to help ease her self-consciousness. Celie and Nettie, after being separated most of their lives, come together with an innate understanding -- "us totter toward one nother like us use to do when us was babies".

Relevant AS Quotes (Novels)

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit -- Jeanette Winterson 
+  "I love you almost as much as I love the Lord."
+  "I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed."
+  "These children of God have fallen foul of their lusts."
+  "She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies."
+  "As long as I have known them, my mother has gone to bed at four, and my father has got up at five. That was nice in a way because it meant that I could come down in the middle of the night and not be lonely."

The Bluest Eye -- Toni Morrison
+  "Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe."
+  "To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane."
+  "She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit."
+  "Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.'"
+  "What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter?... How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that?"
+  "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."

Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
+  "She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."
+  "The frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our [HH and Annabel] actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh."
+  "I broke her [Annabel's] spell by incarnating her in another."
+  "I knew that I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not forever be Lolita." 
+  "Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat."
+  "I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one."
+  Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.

The Millstone -- Margaret Drabble
+  "Lucky in work, unlucky in love. Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence, as Byron mistakenly remarked." ["Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love."]
+  "But I was not dead, I was alive twice over."
+  "I sat there looking at her... what I felt it is pointless to try to describe. Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life."
+  "'All women feel exactly that, it's nothing to be proud of, it isn't even worth thinking about.'"

Disgrace -- J.M. Coetzee
+  "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."
+  "It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman's company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage." 
+  "He existed in an anxious flurry of promiscuity."
+  He claims to be a "servant of Eros".
+  "Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it."
+  "He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive."
+  "Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core."

Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
+  "At the end they decided, as everybody knew they would, that the girl should go to Ogbuefi Udo to replace his murdered wife."
+  "Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper."
+  "But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you."
+  I will not have a son who cannot hold up his head in the gathering of the clan. I would sooner strangle him with my own hands.” [Achebe presents Okonkwo's love for his family and for his clan as incompatible.]
+  "'Our fathers never dreamed of such a thing, they never killed their brothers. But a white man never came to them. So we must do what our fathers would never have done.'"

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

"Pride and Prejudice follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters of a country gentleman, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England."

+  The novel is set in the fictional town of Meryton, Herefordshire, near London, in early 19th century England.
+  The novel is narrated through free indirect discourse, which means that the events of the novel are filtered through Elizabeth's perception.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

From the very beginning, love is seen as secondary to marriage; the security found in upholding societal norms is the most important thing. As Charlotte says, "Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance."

"'I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,' said Mr Darcy.

'Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.'"

Elizabeth takes an immensely pragmatic view of love and marriage, in stark contrast to the romantic ideals of her sisters. Her opinions could be based on her parent's ill-matched relationship, in which the "experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make [Mrs Darcy] understand [her husband's] character".  

"'Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.'"

Though men are still dominant in society, they are treated by the women as though they do not know their own minds. The way they presume to orchestrate the men's feeling, like their lives are a game could be considered a curious reflection of courtly love, when more thought is put into achieving the object of desire than the 'happily ever after'.

Types of Love

In the exam, you'll have to discuss how writers use form, structure and language to express their thoughts and ideas.

Different types of love that could be presented include:

+  Courtly love
+  Romantic love
+  First love
+  Unrequited love
+  Lust
+  Obsession
+  Platonic love
+  Familial love
+  Religious love