Black women have been undergoing class, race, social oppression and found voiceless against the odds of the society. This paper aims at bringing out the trials and troubles faced by women characters in the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Women urge to own a self identity. This search for self is not an easy task especially when it comes to a Black Women. It axiomatically becomes a great matter of struggle.
The racism and sexism have diminished African-America women’s role in the society and have influenced their self-understanding. When struggling against these, African-American women writers consider it imperative to change the implications of negative images attributed to black women during the times of slavery and beyond. These represent an obstacle in their way towards equality and many African-American and women have considered the creation of more adequate images of black womanhood crucial. The way to start the fight is to pay attention to the issues that make African-American and women’s life experience different from the rest of the society. Authors have contributed to notion of self-esteem by looking for their character’s identity and by elevating the blackness and femaleness as the very basis of their existence, and most importantly by loving and respecting themselves.
In her novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she uncovered the gloom, pain, loneliness and the sufferings of her life in specifically and her race in general as she belonged to African base . Her child exploitation has been well explored in this novel. Racial discrimination that she faced in USA has been particularly mentioned. Marguerite, the main character and childhood reflection of Angelou, has been called a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America. She experienced racial prejudices and discrimination in Arkansas.
After years of suffering from persecution, discrimination, and institutionalized racism due to Jim Crow laws, black people all around America engaged in a social and cultural movement entitled ‘The Harlem Renaissance.’ Author Zora Neale Hurston wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about the Harlem Renaissance while promoting feminist ideas. Although the Harlem Renaissance was a social and cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance still promoted traditional gender roles for women, which is reflected by Nanny’s wishes for Janie and departs with Janie’s want of freedom. In the Harlem Renaissance, women were not as respected as men, especially in the arts. Looking in retrospect, many critics highly value women of color’s writing during the Harlem Renaissance because most modern critics are not phased by race or sex. Cheryl A.
They say don’t judge a book by its cover, yet everyday people are judged just based on skin color, gender or anything else that sets them apart. Walker’s pulitzer prize winning novel “The Color Purple” talks about the struggles of an African American woman, Celie, and the journey she goes through in order to overcome the barriers of sexism to become a stronger woman and discover her independence. Similarly, “In Love and Trouble: Everyday Use” - also written by Walker - goes into a story about an African American woman, Dee, and her struggles with sibling rivalry, racial identity, and racism during a chaotic period of history. Through narrator point of view, symbolism, setting, and imagery, Walker illustrates the prominence of discrimination
Imagine a life being dominated by others and being traded around like an object. Imagine a life having a constant fear of not being able to stand up for what is right. This was the case for Celie and many other black women during the early 1900s. America, for the most part, has grown out of these social injustices, but how much does one really know what events took place in these little southern towns? Alice Walker exposes real life examples of controversial topics to teach readers about what actually occurred during these one hundred years.
Feminism is a Powerful tool for voicing some of the basic concerns and aspirations of women. One of the Primal concerns of feminism is to declare that a woman is a being. A woman is not the other, she is not an appendage to man. She is an autonomous being capable of, through trial and error, finding her own way to salvation. The attempts to create female enclave are extremist reaction, but the recent trends in feminist literature are an indication that it is possible for women to live independently in the world where men also live.
Alice Walker, in fact, uses the imagery of the quilt to suggest what womanism is all about. Dee approaches culture by decontextualising it, while Maggie and Mama relate to it with a kind of ‘organic criticality’. The former stance is mere rhetoric and the later one is womanist. In one of her interviews, Alice Walker identifies three cycles of Black Woman she would explore in her woman’s writing: 1. First are those “who were cruelly exploited, spirits and bodies mutilated, relegated to the narrowest and confining lives, sometimes driven to madness”.
It allows one to the view the traditions, the moments and uncertainties that women have continued to endure over time. Intersectionality An African –American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “Intersectionality”. Intersectionality is deemed as “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”. There are loads of women nowadays that are still disregarded, women experiencing hardship, disease, and other issue that may allow women to feel as if they are not a part of the solution of the world’s problems. In the Article, am not I a Woman?
Often African American women’s struggles was overlooked by the woman’s movement (Davis 64). Truth and many other African American suffragist, provided the movement with a powerful tool which the white upper-middle class woman did not possess. Powerful and outspoken Truth provided a fighting spirit as well as some degree of solidarity between the white suffragist and the women of color. The 19th amendment is a milestone in American feminist history, and the suffragists at the time has helped shape feminist thought to