CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of Analysis
Literature is a term used to describe a spoken or written material. This term is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or
scientific work. It includes work of poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction. Literature is also an expression of emotion, passion, feeling of the writer towards
the life, society, experience, and politic. in this case literature represents a language, people, culture, tradition, and historical.
Most of people always ask why we have to read a literature. Then now we are going to see the advantage of reading literature. There are so many advantages
we get by reading literature. The first is to appreciate the contributions literature has made to history, the second is to see the tragedy, then to explore other cultures
and beliefs, to appreciate why individuals are the way they are, to help us see ourselves as others do, to learn better ways to behave, and the last is to further our
mastery language. Edgar V. Roberts in Literature: An Introduction to Reading or Writing.
Fourth Edition 1995:1, “literature helps us grow, both personally and intellectually. It provides an objective base for knowledge and understanding. It
links us with the broader cultural, philosophic, and religious world of which we are a part. It enables us to recognize human dreams and struggles in different
places and times that we would never otherwise know. It helps us develop mature
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sensibility and compassion for the condition of all living things-human, animal, and vegetable. It gives us the knowledge and perception to appreciate the beuty of
order and arrangement, just a well-structured song or a beutifully painted canvas can. It provides the comparative basis from which we can see worthiness in the
aims of all people, and it therefore helps us see beuty in the world around us. It exercises our emotions through interest, concern, tension, excitement, hope, fear,
regret, laughter, and sympathy. Through our cumulative experience in reading, literature shapes our goals and values by clarifying our own identities-both
positively, through acceptance of the admirable in human beings, and negatively, through rejection of the sinister. It enables us to develop a perspective on events
occuring locally and globally, and thereby it gives us understanding and control. It encourages us to assist creative, tallented people who need recogition and support.
It is one of the shaping influences of life. Literature makes us human.” Holman 1980 : 209 “ Genre: A term used in literary criticism to
designate the distinct types or categories into which literary works are grouped according to form or technique or, sometimes, subject matter. The term comes
from French, where it means kind or type. In its customary application, it is used loosely, since the varieties of literary kinds and the principles on which
they are made are numerous. The traditional genres include such kinds as tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, pastoral. today a division of literature into genres
would also include novel, short story, essay and perhaps television play and motion picture scenario.” Literature can be divided into three genres, they are
prose, drama, and poetry. Prose derives from the latin word ‘prosa’, means ‘straightforward’. Prose includes novel, short stories, romances, essays, and so on.
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Drama derives from the Greek word ‘dran’ which means ‘to do’ or ‘to act’. Drama is performed on a stage. Poetry derives etymologically from the Greek word
‘poiesis’ which means ‘a making, forming, creating in words, or the art of poetry, or a poem’. As quoted from Lee A. Jacobus 1996 : 3 states that literature
can be grouped into three genres, namely poetry, drama, and prose. In this thesis, the writer uses novel entitled The Color Purple as a source
data. The transformation of Celie’s character is going to be analyzed in the novel. Characterization in the novel can be divided into 2 type, they are round character
and flat character. Round character is a character in a work of fiction who encounters conflict and is changed by it, while flat character is a character in a
work of fiction who doesn’t undergo substantial change or growth in the course of a story. Thus, Celie’s character is kind of round character. The author changes
Celie’s character influenced by other characters in her living. The color purple is written by a Black American woman Alice Walker and
published in 1983, but it is written in 1982. The novel focuses the female black life during 1930 in rural. The color purple tells story of Cellie, a black young
woman who writes a letter to God in which she tells about her life- her roles as daughter, wife, sister, and also
tells the story of her life ranging from the trauma of sexual abuse as a child to her true happiness and independence as an adult.
Throughout the book, Celie undergoes an inner transformation from a submissive, abused wife to an unabashedly confident and independent black woman and
businesswoman. The first chapter of The Color Purple introduces an uneducated, fourteen years old girl who is oppressed from freely expressing her thoughts. The
novel opens with a warning: You better not never tell nobody but God. Itd kill
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your mammy 1. This threatening statement introduces a long pain-stricken letters addressed to God about the sexual abuses from her stepfather. Celie is
afraid to tell anyone about her rape and is almost voiceless at this point of the novel. All of her sufferings make her to be silent, and invisible. Lack of self-
confidence, ugly, and poor girl are also her character before meeting other characters inspiring her.
Another example we can see from the style of writing in the color purple that use a diary style of main character. The words and stucture of sentence built
does not show an educated person. For example, Cellie writes in her diary, “I ast him to take me instead of Nettie while our new mammy sick. But he just ast me
that I’m talking bout.” Then another example is, “I say marry him, Nettie, and try to have one good year out your life. After that, i know she be big.” Later, we can
see the transformation of Celie, she writes better than before, We can see it from the letter she writes. “Mr. __ try to act like he don’t care I’m going. You’ll be
back, he say. Nothing up for nobody like you. Shug got talent, he say. She can sing...”
Andrews, 2001:414 says “ in 1982, she stepped across the line of a highly forbidden taboo with her portrayal of Cellie in the Color Purple. This
novel examines not only “black-on-black” ooppression but also incest, bisexual love, and lesbian love. Written in epistolary form, Walkers third novel exposses
the internal turmoil parenting the spiritual decay of African American woman who, like the novel’s protagonist, silently endure abusive male-dominated
relationships.” In this quotation Andrews shows Celie’s character in the first time, as a result from her suffering.
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The Color Purple is going to be very interesting topic to be analyzed, especially about the main character, Celie. Celie gets spirit to wake up and realize
herslef as a colorful, beautiful and proud human being. Seeing her transformation is a new spirit for other woman.
1.2 Statement of Problem
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