The Black Matriarch’s Quest for Love: Oprah Winfrey as Sofia in The Color Purple

Abstract

Winfrey’s confession that she is interested in matters related to love—love of the self and love of others—emerges long before she became The Oprah Winfrey. Her cinematic debut as Sofia in The Color Purple² thrust her into an arena of controversy when she played a woman who untraditionally challenged women to balance their desire for love with the need for respect. Disturbed by the various complicated relationships, some of the 1988 audience found that representations of love can be controversial. Film scholar Jacqueline Bobo identifies three issues at the heart of TCP criticism; two of them directly relate to relationships between men and women, and women and women where passion, desire, or just sexual lust exists:

Black men are portrayed unnecessarily as harsh and brutal; the consequences of this will be to further the split between the Black female and the Black male; Black people as a whole are depicted as perverse, sexually wanton, and irresponsible.³