“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,” is what acclaimed slavery emancipator Abraham Lincoln once stated (Dorfman 1). However, before freedom was able to be obtained by all, many slaves had to endure traumatizing lives. Harriet Jacobs, a runaway slave, explains the sexual, emotional, and physical abuse that female slaves were forced to face in her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. With her writing, awareness for the burdens of female slaves and the fact that they do not ask for the difficulty they receive was brought to the reader’s attention. Women in both the southern and northern regions were able to sympathize with what Jacobs had to say about her own personal struggles throughout her girlhood.
‘The Colour Purple’, published in 1982, was written by Alice Walker and demonstrates the brutal treatment of black women within the early 20th century. During this time, there was much oppression, particularly for black women. They were mistreated purely because of their colour and gender. The form and content of the novel can be viewed as a slave narrative that reflects the struggle for one woman’s independence. Female independence and freedom from the patriarchal society are topics that many feminist literary theorists tend to explore, particularly those that belonged to the third wave of feminist writing.
women into consideration. It works in both the theoretical and activist ways to empower black women against the intersectionality of racism, sexism, gender and class oppression. It plays an active role in demystifying the various negative controlling images perpetrated against black women since slavery. The prominent images are mammy, matriarch, jezebel, sapphire and breeder woman. The paper is an attempt to analyse Margaret Walker’s neo-slave narrative Jubilee as presented from the perspective of slave women.
Alice walker created the splash in the literary world because of his womanist concept in her epistolary novel The Color Purple in 1982. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her fiction in 1982. And she was the first black woman to won this prize. Many women writers during 1970’s and 80’s like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Toni Code Bambara, Walker, Joyce Carol Thomas, Audre Lordes and Paul Marshal talk about how black women’s lives were affected by sexism and racism. Their writings were like bulwarks against social taboos.
Understanding how and why authors use certain quotes is key. Taking a look at Alice Walker’s use of Virginia Woolf’s writing in her, essay one can see what Walker is trying to do. Walker is using Woolf’s book to support her idea of legacy and deliberately providing an example of legacy. While not all of Woolf’s work goes unmolested, the core meaning is still present. Walker imposes terms for the suffering of slaves into the work of an upper class white British woman.
Gloria Naylor (1949-2016), a Profound African American woman writer depicted her vision about world through her writings. Her novels engraved by the portrayal of women who were confronting the adverse struggle for asserting women’s independence. In the plight of poverty, partiality and crushing hardship Naylor emphasize the strengths of women especially African American womanhood. She wants to shatter the infused stereotype on women by the society. So, her women characters are always despaired, self-assured, fortitude and determined.
Understanding the role the women played in the slave trade and community is important to offer a new dynamic to the study of slave culture in general. Not only were slave women subordinate because of race but they also shared the trials of the oppression of the female gender. Women slaves played a key role in the development of slave communities through the development of African Sexuality, Family Structure and Economic Productivity. It is therefore infinitely important that we must understand the slave trade from a female perspective to understand the development of these slave communities. A- African Sexuality The African female was ascribed not only economic responsibilities when purchased as a slave.
I think the author wrote this book to let the readers’ know more about Indigo and its origins. She shared us her personal journey, and throughout the book she faces many struggles to find the pure indigo which shows the reader that the indigo is not something that we can find in everyday basis, it proves that the indigo is one of the most important treasure in our textile world. Through her book, we can also learn more about Africans life such as how they live, and how they feel about the Indigo. We can find how precious the indigo is in African culture. I believe her most intended audience are the people who are involved with textile industry since the book shares the history and importance of indigo.
Toni Morrison is the most important contemporary women novelists and critics in African-American Literature.The descriptive-analytical method of study by analyzing the situations, the characters and themes, the status of women in Literature are revealed and represented. Morrison very well describes how different women characters react and respond differently to the injustice and the inhumanity imposed on them in African-American society. African American writers are concerned with the lack of literature fostering strong female models. These women are bonded by their journey to overcome the internalization of controlling patriarchal perceptions and images of women, like the repressive stereotypes that permeate literature. Toni Morrison use of binary oppositional characters, mirrors, inversions, and metafiction, to deconstruct the stereotypical roles of both men and women, underscoring the role that literature plays in creating self-identity problems when women try to imitate fictional characters.
Elaine Showalter writes, "The Awakening belongs to a historical movement in American women's writing, and Chopin could not have written without legacy of domestic fiction to work against..." (The Awakening, Norton Critical Edition, 311) As Chopin's popularity spread like wildfire, her novel also served as ammunition in the fight to bring insight and awareness to women's issues. The novel in this particular era could be read as an inspiration, a starting point to break free from patriarchy and to look at everything as art. "The Awakening's most radical awareness is that Edna inhabits a world of limited linguistic possibilities, of limited possibilities for interpreting, and re-organizing her feelings, and therefore of limited possibilities for action." (The Awakening, Norton Critical Edition,