Celie’s Lesbianism in Alice Walker The Color Purple

ABSTRACT

People have functioned literature as the way to experience the world around them through their imagination, because literature often presents a documentary picture of life. It describes the real life of another world. By reading literary work, especially novel, people can enrich their emotion and also enrich their experience about life reality, including women oppression reality that is often presented in the literary work.

This research is done to find the factor as the sufficient reason that leads a woman to enter the world of lesbianism and also to prove the existance of this phenomenon as a real phenomenon. In order to achieve those purposes, the first step taken to describe the being of lesbianism, then, it is followed by the elaboration of several happenings in Celie’s life before she becomes a lesbian.

Seeing this phenomenon, lesbianism, in the eye of feminism can gives us the possible reason. It is believed that the being of oppressor in the form of men can be the reason of the lesbianism. This idea is also supported by psychosexual development which says that a woman may enter the world of lesbianism if she fails to trust another sex, man, as the trustable partner in her life. Without any aim to judge whether lesbianism is wrong or right, the uttered idea of the cause of lesbianism is possible.

This study, also tried to give a brief elaboration of the main character’s characterization. It is done because of the spirit of achieving the same understanding about what Celie is like before she becomes a lesbian. And of course, it is also tried to elaborate the lesbianism between Celie and another woman in order to prove that this phenomenon does exist in this
novel.

Through the analysis in this study, it is found out that Celie is lesbian. There are several occasions happen in Celeie’s life during her relation with men which finnaly leads her to lesbianism. Her relation with men gives her a bad image of the man, Celie sees as a frightening creature, a living being, who does not know how to act nicely to her. Celie’s inability to accept men as a “good” partner who can be a friend to share, to talk, and to get a proper treatment. Celie can not have the intimate relation with men, but she can get it by having close relation with another woman. Those reasons prove the idea that the being of men’s oppression becomes the reason of the being of lesbianism.