Compare/Contrast of The Color Purple and A Streetcar Named Desire Essay

Both Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire are great literary works. Both the novel and the play have controversial aspects. Analyzing the similarities and differences in The Color Purple and A Streetcar Named Desire reflects the fact that both authors, while dealing with different points-of-view, tones, and forms/structures, achieve similar purposes in emphasizing the theme of personal growth in the characters of Celie and Blanche, whether it be positive or negative, in the two respective male-dominated worlds of each literary work.
Both Alice Walker and Tennessee Williams utilize the literary device of character development to show the personal growth of Celie and Blanche throughout the works. Walker and Williams both use indirect characterization to show how Celie and Blanche grow as people throughout the works. For example, at the beginning of The Color Purple, Celie is an obedient girl who doesn’t know how to stand up for herself, especially when it comes to her husband, Albert. By the end of the novel, Celie stands up for herself by saying “’It’s time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body is just the welcome mat I need’”, when Celie announces that she is going to Memphis with Shug and is leaving her husband (199). The quote illustrates the point that Celie has finally come unto herself and has become her own independent person throughout the course of the novel. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche also begins to grow, but her growth is opposite that of Celie’s. Blanche evolves into a mentally disturbed person when she says that she is “…not accustomed to having more than one drink” to her beau, Mitch. This quote is one of the first indications that Blanche’s mental health is growing worse because it shows how in Blanche‘s mind, reality is distorted. While Williams’s Blanche DuBois grows in a