Shades of African-American Women's Experiences in Novels and Film-"Beloved" versus "The Color Purple"
Both Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's tale of Beloved chronicle stories of African-American women's experiences of triumph and suffering over oppression and discrimination. But while Walker and Morrison share a common literary heritage in the tradition of African-American women's writing, their works deviate substantially, in the fiction's narrative constructs, literary devices, and in the work's cultural and critical receptions after publication. Walker's novel was embraced as a popular feminist classic because of its account of Celie, a physically and sexually abused young woman, who found liberation through her relationship with Shug Avery, a feisty gin-joint singer. Morrison's novel about a mother who was haunted by the ghost of the child she killed rather than allow it to return to slavery became a literary classic and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Beloved is now widely read in high schools and colleges across the nation. In fact, one reviewer noted that the introduction to the paperback edition of Beloved proclaimed that he could not "imagine American literature without it [Beloved]!" (Taylor, 1998) In an ironic twist of literary fate, although Alice Walker's novel of Black life in t
Also, the Walker novel concentrates on difficult emotional relationships largely within the Black community, while Morrison's novel is openly confrontational about the horror of White, Southern slavery, which again may have made it less palatable to the public. Rather, he wrote: "without flinching or sugar-coating the truth. "(Taylor, 1998) Taylor stated also that the attitude of the film was somewhat patronizing to its Black as well as its White audiences-Black audiences wish to be entertained as well, as White audiences, not simply see images of victimization. Walker's novel is based upon a series of crimes perpetrated upon the protagonist, often by bad men, Morrison's novel is centered on a single lynchpin of an historically-generated event of collective guilt, the killing of Beloved, which the novel treats as a stream-of-consciousness narrative in the protagonist Sethe's mind. The director Steven Spielberg is allowed the luxury of not dwelling or physically showing the worst crimes of the Walker novel, because no single crime is as utterly central to the narrative, as is infanticide for Morrison. The actress playing the ghost seems, "as Beloved. Even lovemaking in Morrison's book, unlike the uplifting lesbian scene between Shug and Celie in Walker, is fraught with peril. Also, adopting Morrison's narrative technique of frequent, often seamless flashbacks in prose to film would not have been easy for any director: "Like the Toni Morrison novel it is based on, 'Beloved' does not tell this story in a straightforward manner. But Morrison's transplantation to the screen shows that in the wrong hands, and with insufficient directorial vision to adapt a literary work into the language of film, even a great classic can lose its sense of greatness and power. "They don't add anything to our understanding of the characters because they have taken the place of characterization. " (Ebert, 1998) James Berardinelli said that although the film of Morrison was "powerful," on some level it was "confusing to follow. (Ebert, 1998) "The flashbacks to the atrocities Sethe witnessed and endured at Sweet Home are presented to us in the manner of horror-movie shock cuts," and other ghost tales, rather than a historical drama.
Common topics in this essay:
Stephen Spielberg,
Jonathan Demme,
Color Purple,
James Berardinelli,
Roger Ebert,
Sweet Home,
Black White,
Beloved Taylor,
Silence Lambs,
Walker Morrison,
taylor 1998,
color purple,
morrison's novel,
walker's novel,
roger ebert,
jonathan demme,
ebert 1998,
berardinelli 1998,
ebert 1985,
film color purple,
wrote roger,
wrote roger ebert,
beloved taylor 1998,
alice walker's novel,
|
Acceptance Essays
