The story tells of one lady who, through fruition and hardship, discovers the proficient, content, and proud woman repressed inside of a young “shut-mouthed” girl. The Color Purple, the third novel written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker, has been both respected and berated in numerous essays and reviews. Although the critics agree to disagree about many aspects of this novel one thing is clear, The Color Purple affirms “the survival and liberation of black women through the strength and wisdom of others.” (Draper, 1810)
In Walker’s personal view, the black woman’s history falls into three stages; the woman suspended, the artist thwarted and hindered in her desires to create, living through two centuries when her main role was to be cheap source of cheap labor in the American society, and the modern woman. (Washington, 139) The feminist Alice Walker writes in a circulatory pattern. Her female characters move in a common three-stage cycle: 1)the suspended woman-cruelly exploited, and spirits and bodies mutilated, 2)the thwarted woman-desires most to be a part of mainstream American life, and 3)the modern woman-exhibits the qualities of the developing emergent model. Before Celie, our main character, makes her way into the cycle the story sets her as a child, eager to learn, love, and enjoying life. She and Nettie, her, sister attend school on a regular basis, complete all of their chores, and still make time to talk, to play, and/or to just spend time together. Then, just as Celie reaches womanhood, she finds her way into the first stage: the suspended woman.
The suspended woman plays the role of the inclement exploit with a warped spirit as well as body. Celie’s body is first desecrated through her stepfather’s sexual misconduct. Succeeding this comes continuing sexual and physical abuse by her husband Mr. ______. Here, Celie slips into the second stage: the thwarted woman. In this stage the character desires most to become a part of mainstream American society. In most cases, they are also victims of psychological abuse that alienates them from their roots and real contact to the world. The desecration and abuse her body survives, notwithstanding, her spirit is broken when not only have her children been taken away from her by her stepfather, but Nettie is forced, by Albert, to leave he and Celie’s house.
Struggle Between Excellence and Mediocrity in The Fountainhead
Struggle Between Excellence and Mediocrity in The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is a story of the struggle between men of greatness and men of mediocrity. An individualist to the core, Rand defines a man of greatness as one who is independent and uncompromising, one who derives his self-respect from his accomplishments and integrity rather than the approval of others. Rand defines a man of mediocrity, by contrast, as one who doesn’t care about actually being competent and upright so long as he appears that way to others. Rand refers to these mediocre men as second-handers, because they get their self-respect second-hand, from the approval of those around them. In The Fountainhead, a man of greatness, Howard Roark, must struggle against these men of mediocrity, who either, like Peter Keating, pretend to greatness, or, like Ellsworth Toohey, seek to destroy greatness itself. As she chronicles the lives of these men, Rand refutes the idea that life sometimes requires a man to compromise, to soften his convictions when they are no longer accepted or convenient. By the end of the novel, it is the independent man of greatness that has emerged victorious and the compromising second-handers that lie fallen around him.
Still, Rand doesn’t pretend that the success of the independent man comes quickly or easily. When the book begins, Peter Keating has just graduated with honors from the Stanton Institute of Technology, while Howard Roark has just been expelled from that same institute as a result of his refusal to compromise his artistic integrity by designing buildings that look like Tudor chapels or French opera houses. In the months that follow, Keating claws his way to the top of the prestigious Francon …
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