it does not appear so on paper. The responder believed that The Color Purple "...is not a story against black men, it is a story about black women." Personally I cannot agree with either, I believe that the novel takes both parties into account, and it is not just about women (as the title may imply). To prove this I will explore Walker's Characterisation of men and women in the novel.
             To begin, the first black male we are introduced to is Alphonso, a paedophile, who on numerous occasions rapes the then 14 year old Celie, the first introduced black female. However he is not the biological father of Celie, which voids Tony Brown's rather defensive comment that "...some black men have raped their daughters...the vast majority have not." This clearly does not relate to anything in the book or film, this also shows that Alphonso's label of 'incestuous' by the Responder was erroneous. Alphonso is one of the male characters that never seems to develop, he is undoubtedly selfish in the way that he only considers his own feelings when Celie's mother dies. Whether his cries of "...don't leave me, don't go" are of true grief or out of fear of responsibility is hard to tell. Yet we know that throughout the book, Alphonso remains a sad specimen of a human being. We discover his unchanged lack of caring on page 206 when his very last partner, Daisy, says to Celie in reference to Alphonso's supposed land "When your mama died, it passed on to you and your sister...I don't know why Alphonso never told you that." So this blatant disregard is clearly an exceedingly bad reflection of a black male character, and of course this doesn't stop with Alphonso. As somewhere along the line he passes Celie on to Albert as his wife, with the reason "...she a bad influence on my other girls." This, obviously being a lie, shows that Alphonso really just fel...