Conflicts-The color purple 2

Internal conflict:

The internal conflict in this novel takes place inside of Celie. She has lived through an abusive childhood just to move into a household where the violence continues, but now by the man that is her husband. Furthermore, so far in Celie’s life men have controlled her and because of that she has an inner anger towards them that she has not dealt with yet, therefore she has a hard time freeing herself from her inner demons that she is struggling with.  The anger and fear she has towards men is clearly shown in these sentences of the book:

(He beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church. I may have got something in my eye but I didn’t wink. I don’t even look at mens. That’s the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I’m not scared of them.)

This made it very clear for me that Celie has been scarred so deeply that she now has an inner fear that is linked to all men, and also that she feels more comfortable being around women because the only person that she has loved and been loved by is a women, her sister Nettie. Additionally she finds out that Albert, her husband has been keeping her sister’s letters from her and she becomes furious, this is the first time I felt that she directed her anger towards someone that has wronged her. I believe that Celie has repressed a lot of the hurt and pain that she has been through and instead of dealing with it she kept it all within herself, however even if she felt angry about the fact that Albert kept the letters from her she did not confront him but continued to hold it inside of her. All of the above leads to her having multiply internal conflicts and I genuinely hope that she gathers a lot of strenght and decides to confront the men in her life.

External conflict:

The external conflict in this novel takes place between Nettie and Corrine, the adoptive mother of Celie’s two children. In the beginning they had a great relationship and were very close to each other, however when they arrived to Africa Corrine started to distance herself more and more from Nettie, she did not want her husband Samuel to be alone with her and she did not want Nettie to borrow her clothes etc. This resulted in that they drifted apart even more and a Conflict was created between the two characters, Nettie was however unaware of why it was there. It turned out that Corrine had thought about one specific thing the Africans had said when they arrived and it was that the children looked like Nettie. Based on that fact Corrine started assuming that Nettie and her husband had known each other longer than what they both said and that they have had an affair in the past. This assumption made the relationship between the characters worse and it took a long time convincing Corrine of the truth.