Fantasia discloses this in her reference to Oprah Winfrey who, despite being told she could never make it on television because her face was not pretty enough, is now one of the most powerful people in the world, owning the most successful and sustained daytime talk show in American history, coupled with her other successes as producer, actress, and magazine editor.
It is also important for my colleagues to recognize this struggle for young African-American girls.
My perusal of both books and The Color Purple film have revealed some critical similarities that I believe my male and female students will have a vested interest in exploring.
I will explore these similarities, categorizing them under one of three motifs: Self-Esteem, Generational Curses, and The Illumination of the Gift.
This low self-esteem was instilled and self-perpetuated at a very early age: "When I was a child, I was always so skinny and had big lips. I used to go home to my mother and cry and tell her that everyone thought I was ugly.
It's lonely when you feel you're not good enough (Fantasia, 30)." Fantasia's early revelation of her distinctive features reminds me of the famous literary legend, Maya Angelou, who also had a life-long battle with her body image, its inception being in early childhood.
With this as my inspiration, I want to use my twenty-five year old relationship with Alice Walker's The Color Purple from its original literary inception to its adaptation from movie to musical to facilitate an in-depth understanding of the themes that run through the story, while illustrating how adaptations keep the work alive and timeless.
This curriculum unit will increase my preparation for a literacy rich fifth-grade classroom environment with performance by enabling me to flesh out and structure my curriculum in a way that creates a concrete connection between the in multiple installations of The Color Purple and the real world in which my students live.
While not dismissing the fact that their white counterparts experience similar struggles, African-American females struggle with their inability to change their skin color to meet the iconographic image of what it means to be beautiful, which still essentially, in American society, means being white. When Celie describes intercourse with Mister to Shug as an impersonal event when Mister "do his business, get off, [and] go to sleep (Walker, 77)," the movie corroborates this and more, depicting Mister never looking at her while having sex with her, and then at the sight of young Celie grunting with disgusted disdain, "Jesus!
Since being white is impossibility, achieving the closest thing to it is more often than not the order of the day. " at which point he dismounts her, rolls over and goes to sleep.