Celie's character highlights the detrimental effect of silence on black women.
            
             Individuals are silenced when they are denied agency in shaping their own experiences.
            
             Agency is the concept that individuals make choices that shape their own lives and that
            
             they are solely the product of their environment. The character of Celie emphasizes the
            
             silencing of African American woman as experienced through male family members, in
            
             particularly fathers and husbands. Surprisingly enough, woman within the African
            
             American community also serve as vehicles that perpetuate silencing. Celie's stepfather
            
             is able to silence Celie through abuse and isolation. The beginning of the novel offers the
            
             reader an intimate view of Celie's oppression by her stepfather. The many obstacles that
            
             Celie must overcome in her life are, the abuse and silencing from her stepfather, the
            
             further abuse and silencing from her husband, and Celie's breaking of silence.
            
             The reader quickly discovers that Celie's stepfather has impregnated her
            
             twice. "First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grap
            
             hold my titties. Then he push his thing up inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He
            
             start to choke me, saying You better shut up and git used to it."(Walker 1) Rape, as a
            
             form of abuse, has conquered Celie's desires under her stepfather's authority, thereby
            
             psychologically training her mind to accept submission and silence. Celie's stepfather
            
             continues to silence her by exploiting the notion of love. By denying Celie the love that a
            
             father and daughter should share, the stepfather trains her mind to accept herself as an
            
             expandable being. An instance of such deprivation occurred when Albert came to ask
            
             permission to marry Nettie but convinces him to take Celie. "She ugly. He say. But she
            
             ain't n...