Personal response to the opening letters of the color purple.
I found the opening letters of the Color Purple very shocking. The first letter in my opinion was the most awful and disturbing piece of writing I have ever read.
Celie is writing to God telling him how she has just been raped by her father. The letter is extremely disturbing as we are not introduced at all to Celie, we are just told by some strange 14 year old child that her dad has just raped her while her mother has gone to the doctors.
The bluntness of the way that Celie describes the rape adds to the impact of shock. The words she uses are simerlar to the words used on the school playground (e.g "titties".) this also emphasizes her youth and innocence. Her lack of education is also shown here, not only by her poor spelling but through the fact that she does not seem to fully understand what has just happened to her, as she asks God "give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me." Her naivety is also demonstrated here as she believes she is being punished for doing something wrong and she does not appriciate that it is just the cruelness of men.
I thought this letter was sickening, it caused me to feel cholostrophobic and gave me a "knotted" feeling deep in the pit of my stomach. The line "you gonna do what your mammy wouldn't" caused me to anticipate what was about to happen, and I could have quite happily closed the book never to read a page of it again as I really did not want to read about the rape.
However due to the realism of the letters, created by the use of vocabulary language, I felt I had to read on for the sake of this poor girl who had obviously not been able to fortell what was about to happen. I therefore felt that by reading on I was allowing her pain and suffering to be avenged, and they do say "things can only get better".
Not in Celies case as the second letter, discusses even more dreadful events.