Contrast and Comparisons between The Colour Purple and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, important aspects of the African American women’s experience in America in the early/mid. 1900’s are discussed such as the physical abuse and emotional abuse they endured and their social standing in society. In both novels you are able to witness the anguish and persecution that these women had to undergo. Maya from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Celie from The Color Purple are the main characters and we see that they are both differentiated against during their journeys of life. Men in their lives take advantage of both women and they are used for sexual pleasure, and as slaves. They are not treated fairly as they should be and people in their civilization do not think that there is any harm in what is happening to them. These two strong women are looked down upon throughout the course of these books and people believe that it is all right to do so because of the colour of their skin.
The physical and sexual abuse that African American women had to endure in the early/mid. 1900’s was quite appalling. These women were not just abused by Caucasian men; African American men also abused them as well. In Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens it says, “They stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope.” (232) African American women were brutally assaulted, to the point where they did not have a value even for themselves. It was basically them against the world and they had no one else to help them fight back, just each other. These women went through so much. They were abused and mutilated meaning that men would take advantage of them without thinking twice. These African American women were so strong, and yet the abuse they were getting was so terrible, they considered themselves unworthy even of hope. They did not even bother to think that they

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