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.
Speaker: Alice Walker writes in a first person point of view. The speaker is a single mother who “never had an education” (Walker 49). She is a minority, and accepts the lower status: “Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in in the eye?” (48). The mother refuses to challenge the people society deem as better than her. Occasion: Alice Walker writes the story to draw attention to the mindset of the minorities.
Another scene where the power relation between silence (inferiority) and voice (superiority) is involved can be found in the final chapter of The Woman Warrior. When Kingston finds her schoolmate’s sister who hardly talks standing alone in front of the school, she lures the silent girl to the lavatory and tortures her until she would break the silence. Kingston told her: “You’re going to talk, […] I am going to make you talk, you sissy-girl [emphasis added]” (Kingston 175). Here, Kingston chooses the role as the person in power, whereas her schoolmate is chosen to be the weaker one. It is important to note that Kingston becomes the one who makes choices for her and the girl in terms of power relations, while the other girl is being chosen to
Alice walker in her novels portrays the world view of women and their worthy roles, as mother, sister, daughter, wife and beloved. She leaves the message that the valuable bond between men and women is possible only through the choice of freedom, desire and respect for each other’s individuality. She also believes the dominance of male is not good for any society. The present paper shows this view of the Alice Walker with a focus on the novel ‘The Color Purple.’ Key words: victimization, male
Celie succeeds in her quest for identity and history by developing an understanding of her roots and heritage and acquiring the awareness that she has a right to happiness, passion, creativity and emotional fulfilment. To exercise her rights as an individual, Celie learns to resist the advances of black men who hinder her self- fulfilment. Alice Walker has been vehemently criticized within the African- American community for her portrayal of black men as abusers and rapists. Like her literary predecessor, Zora Neale Hurston, who was criticized during the Harlem Renaissance for her feminist writing, Alice Walker has withstood the criticism. She has held on her convictions and continued to be a spokesman for the cause of the oppressed black woman.
Family according to Alice Walker is many things, one of which is the person or people who stick with an individual through the good times and the bad times. For Celie in the beginning she had none of these people, but towards the end these people for her were Shug Avery, her friend and lover, and Albert, her husband who she did not want to marry. When introducing Nettie to Shug Avery and Albert, Celie refers to them as “My peoples. This is Shug and Albert” (Walker, 287). Another example would be Albert and Shug Avery, they are not related but Albert goes and picks up Shug and cares for her when she is sick (Walker, 45).
The two literary texts (novels) that the researcher is going to work on are The Color Purple and The Handmaid’s Tale. The African- American novelist Alice Walker is always concerned with presenting the problems of females especially black women because they are doubly oppressed due to their gender and their color. In order to portray their struggle, she wrote one of the marvelous novels The Color Purple which was published in 1982. As for the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who shares the same interest with Alice Walker, she depicted the struggle of women and how they are victimized by the patriarchal society in her brilliant novel The Handmaid’s Tale that was published in 1985. As a result of the existence of
How is religion presented in the novel The Color Purple and how does it change? In the novel the color purple, the first words were written by Celie, the novel 's protagonist, are "Dear God," and the novel ends with a letter, the nod of which reads, "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God."
By using quotes from Woolf, Alice Walker is able to contrast her own experiences, and those of other black women, with Virginia Woolf’s ideas about feminism. Virginia Woolf was British and white and not poor; she had a prominent voice among peers and was held in high regard. Walker takes Woolf’s quotes and inserts blackness into them. Not only does she add black perspective into the quotes, but she also adds the horror of being black into them. She states, “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert ‘eighteenth century’ insert ‘black woman’ insert ‘born or made a slave’]” (Walker 166).
Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution. Walker began publishing her fiction during the latter years of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. Walker six novels place more emphasis on the inner workings of African American life than on the relationships between Blacks and Whites. The Color Purple has generated the most public attention as a book and as a major motion picture, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985. The Color Purple is an epistolary novel- a work structured through a series of letters.