Category: Alice Walker

Feminism is mostly considered as a Movement. It helps to recover women’s rights in the society. In the eighteenth century, women had a lot of rules in society. According to the black people, men are always one step ahead of women and believe that they have various privileges. The main theme of feminism is based on women’s equality. Mainly, the feminist critic is often focused on gender, race, and sexuality in literature and other aspects of life.

Feminism is a term, derived from the Latin word Femina. Femina means ‘woman’. It was first used in WRM (Women’s Right Movement). Half of the women are fighting to free themselves from male oppression. They protests against the legal, social and economic restrictions. The Black people want their equal rights and basic rights. It depends upon their mind. It differs from each and every one. Simone de Behavior said:

One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.(Behavior, P.301)

Feministic Movement is influenced by a lot of thinkers and authors like Alice Walker, Judith Faltered, Michele Wallace, Kate Millett, and others. It is the platform of everywoman because she raises her voice against the male domination in the society.

Feminism is an aim of understanding women’s oppression like mind race, gender, class, and sexual preference. God shaped human beings and separated them into men and women. They have a basic difference in their body and mind. It is the drawback of every society.

Feminism explains the women’s oppression. In the Fifteenth Century, the famous poet, Vidyapati sang,

Let no one is born.

But if one must

Let no one be a girl.

If one must be a girl

Then may she never fall in love,

If she must fall in love,

Free her from her family.

They are protected by their father, husband. But the reality is not true. They are suppressed by their relationship. As a result, they want their rights. Feminism is an umbrella term. It is overview of the injustice against women. Feminists are primarily focused on women’s rights, liberation. Susan James said, Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political program.(REP, 76)

The concept of gender has become a questionable problem in our society. Nowadays, the development is not only considered to be the welfare but also a different dimension. Elizabeth Bumiller said, …no woman is subject to any form of oppression simply because she is a woman; which forms of oppression she is subject to depend on what ‘kind’ of woman she is. (Bumiller, 19)

In a world in which a woman might be subject to racism, classism, homophobia, anti-Semitism if she is not so subject it is because of her race, class, religion, sexual orientation. So it can never be the case that the treatment of a woman has only to do with her gender and nothing to do with her class or race.

Feminist theory has emerged from Feminist Movement. It aims to realize the nature of sexual characteristics disparity by examining women’s social rules and lives experience. This theory gains a reputation for gender and race. Feminist writers battle for women’s rights such as in contract law, property and voting. It has to be changed the societies by achieving women’s suffrage, gender, reproduction of women’s right. Feminist have a great goal. They have to work to protect women and girls from violence and sexual oppression. They have also advocated for office rights, motherliness leave etc.. This theory gives a promotion of women’s rights and interests.Many people feel that feminism has not quite ended. It has nearly won the war the majority of the face by achieving for women equality with men like political, social and economical. Simone de Beauvoir writes,

The situation of woman is that she is a free and autonomous being like all human creatures nevertheless finds her living in a the world where men compel her to assume the status of the other.(T.S.S, 151)

Feminism is thought of women’s movement. Some men also accepted this movement. But the Feminist absolutely reject that because they are strongly suppressed the women before the movement. This movement explains that women are valuable one in society rather than men. They want their equal human value and reputation. The Post Modern feminist Alice Jardine said, word…poses some serious problems. Not that we would want to end up demanding a definition of what feminism is, and therefore, of what one must do, say, and be, if one is to acquire the epithet; dictionary meanings are suffocating, to say the least.(Jardine, 20)

The feminist theory reflects the power of women in those times. In the 1630s and ’50s, the influential English sects supported religion equality for women. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it focused on basic political rights and liberation. In 1920-60, they know the history of the women’s rights when a sense of superiority prevailed. The Feminist writer follows some main characteristics such as:

Intersectionality: Intersectionality in feminism refers to the liberty of socially unlike women. Intersectionality is to recognize the struggle and oppression of women from social, political, financial and cultural backgrounds and conditions. It includes men’s rights like the idea of toxic masculinity is the major one in every culture.

Recognizing Patriarchy: The first step is to recognize that they live in a society that discriminates against women. Although they live in a society dominated by men, this system is called patriarchy. When they talk about men, they are talking about the idea that men should take care of managing the home and maintaining positions, being strong, emotional and angry and being afraid of being vulnerable. When they have a discussion about recognizing patriarchy, they have a discussion about recognizing gender roles, the violence women face in the hands of men: verbal, mental, sexual, emotional, and physical. Patriarchy is a social system that places men in a powerful position where they have social, legal, political, religious and economic authority.

Violence against Women: Violence against women is practiced in different ways in different cultures with different patriarchal connotations for them. They are present in the form of domestic violence, rape, sexual slavery, child marriage, forced marriage, murder on the grounds of honor, mutilation of women, mafia violence, female infanticide, violence as a dowry, prenatal selection of sex, etc. Feminists unite to fight all kinds of violence against women. The idea behind this is that gender is the main reason for abuse and violence.

Challenge status quo: One of the main characteristics of feminism challenges the status quo. It challenges the current social structure and values in a society that asserts gender roles, and the social, political, cultural, sexual and economic discrimination against women with gender is the main reason behind this. The status quo can be challenged in different ways in different cultures depending on the basis of sexism practiced in that respective culture. Every culture has a base on which male domination and discrimination against women are founded. The idea of challenging the status quo depends on this. In other words, challenging the status quo means challenging the patriarchal norms and fighting a war against male dominance.

Recognizing Men’s Rights: While there is a general consensus that women are the main victims of patriarchy and sexism in society, a new way of thinking is emerging that recognizes that men are also influenced by the patriarchal norms that lead them to face a trauma. emotional and mental. According to one study, it was said that middle-aged men are more likely to commit suicide because of the pressure to earn money for the family. Men and women grow up believing they are family heads of family, which leads many to discourage their wives from working, leading to problems at work and their interpersonal relationships. Feminism recognizes this pressure on men from society, the family, the social structure and values. Feminism recognizes the idea that men should be able to free themselves from toxic masculinity and the idea of ​​being strong, aggressive and dominant. Feminism believes that men and women should be free from social prejudices, use what they want to use and feel good if they are vulnerable, kind and educated.

Religion: Feminism speaks of the role of religion in the imposition of misogyny and misogynist practices on women, and what role it has played in maintaining the status quo. Feminism sees religion very negatively when it comes to gender equality. To be a feminist, you should be able to recognize the sexism and misogyny that exist in your religion and in others and analyze them logically. Religious practices such as dowry, sati, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, polygamy, anti-abortion, etc. They helped keep male domination alive. These religious practices must be criticized and you must be able to put an end to these misogynistic religious practices to be feminist. Feminism wants men and women to be free from patriarchal norms that disturb their mental and emotional peace. And feminism has a lot of types. Liberal Feminism, Cultural Feminism, Radical Feminism and Black Feminism.

Liberal Feminism: It concentrates on the individual person. It focuses on women’s position to maintain their equality through their own action. It is a legal one to improve their rights. Liberal feminism argues against the societies thoughts like women’s are physically, mentally weaker than men. Liberal Feminist believes that ‘Female subordination is deep-rooted in a set of routine and legal constraints that block women’s entrance and success in the so-called public world’.

Radical Feminism: It is a perspective within feminism. Radical means eliminate the male supremacy in all social and economic contexts. It challenges the social and political process and also abolishes the patriarchy. It is a model for other feminism. Latterly cultural feminism derived from Racial Feminism.

Cultural Feminism: It developed from radical feminism. It is an ideology of ‘female nature’. This theory commands the difference of women from men. And also command the women nature. Its particularly command the positive aspects of female attitude or feminine personality. But contemporary feminist does not believe that idea. Men and women are never biologically different. They are equal in the world.

Black Feminism: It focuses on the Black people. It has the aim of understanding black women’s struggles women is a black feminist theory. It was coined by Alice Walker. She is the first person to use the word ‘Womenism’ in 1979. This thesis also focuses on the ‘Black Feminism’ in the great Black Feminist writer Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Alice Walker is one of the most famous African-American writers in the twentieth century. She writes a lot of feministic work in her career. In her third novel ‘The Color Purple’ a considered as a great achievement of her lifetime. ‘The Color Purple’ clearly explore the feministic approach and the suffering of women in 19th and 20th century. In 1980s lot of women suffered from white people. It is not a different one, mainly explained the traditional women’s suffering, struggles etc..

M. Dubey states, Black women’s novel in the 70s does not simply oppose to contemporary nationalist talk on black identity. They imagine black feminist as an absence and draw attention to the textual effect of their absence.

The critics are considered as ‘Black Feminism is an innovative one. It is a new idea of women’s awareness. Basically, writings as a great awareness. In India, they had a lot of rules in ancient time. But writing gave a great awareness of every woman. Bharathi was one of the most famous writers to involve women rights as such as Alice Walker gives an important of women’s rights. Her works are mainly concentrated as Humanity. Humanity is a central theme of her novel. It is also an autobiographical one.

Alice Walker says, Indeed the magic of the color purple is that is so much a book of our time, imaginatively evoking the promise of a world in which one can have it all; a world in which sexual exploitation can be easily overcome a world of unlimited access to material well being; a world where evils of racism are tempered by the positive gestures of concerned and caring white folks; a world where sexual boundaries can be transgressed at will without negative consequences; a world where spiritual salvation is a lot of elect. This illusory magic is sustained by Walker and the literary technique and autobiographical narrative.(291)

It is written in epistolary form. At the beginning of the novel, Celie tells her own native tone. It is formed as suffering, struggle especially in Black people. In that century, they are suffering from physically and mentally. They are tortured by their husband, brother, father etc.. It is also called a Black century of all the African-American women. But they have tolerated them. Georgia is a favorite country of Alice Walker. It gives the traditional background of black people and how they are neglected by the white people. The color purple is written in many concepts. But Black Feminism is a major theme in her novel. It is particularly written to promote political and social changes. It deals with the sexuality, race gender and class. This is a platform of African writing in 1982.

Hazel Carby is one of the most familiar black feminist writers. She argues that novel written by black women should not be read as ‘passive representations of history: but rather as ‘active influence within history’ (carby, 958). She said that her novels are not merely a product of social and political conditions, but it shapes the social and cultural conditions. And also said, her narratives never reflect the mirror of society. It just gives the attempt awareness of society. Her novels clearly point out the African-American culture, political struggles and also social changes. Even though, her best novel The Color Purple also points out the society and then the ‘Black Feministic Theory’. It carries a lot of meaning in the ‘Black Feminism’.

Every scholar mostly points out the theory, because the late 20th century, the women want their rights and argued society. So, everyone has to take this theory. It gives not only awareness of the society but also the self-awareness of each and every woman. It has not only a theory but also a historical background of African-American society in the 19th and 20th century. This thesis not performs the theory of Black people but explain the situation of Black women like sexuality, oppression, and gender etc. The Black Feminist writers used some strategies in their writing. First, they concentrate the society. Second, they define the class, Third, they define race as an opportunity for dialogue.’Since race has contributed a discursive tool for both oppression and liberation.’ (Higginbotham, 252).

African-American writer Alice Walker explains the vision of Black feminism in her work The Color Purple. She always points out herself as a womanist. She also declared that she is not a feminist. She is the first person to coin the word Womanism in 1979. Womanism is also called the ‘Black Feminist Theory’. It is such a type of Feminism which can be defined as a school of thought that states sexism, class oppression, gender identity, and racism are inextricably bound together. Black Feminist theory address the Feminist Movement simultaneously given the experience of the middle white class woman. Black women have been oppressed by the white people and their society also. They are easily portal the women like ‘as such about sexuality as it did about class’.

This Thesis also explains the detail about the oppression of women in African-American society. In an Interview, Walker said that ‘as young men middle-aged men, they were… brutal. Once grandfather knocked my grandmother out of the window. He beats one of his children so severely that the child had epilepsy. Just a horrible horrible man.’ Walker explains the male characters and then how the black families were affected in society. In The Color Purple, Celie, the protagonist of the novel, her father always dominate his wife and children. They were suppressed in every second because of the male-dominated society. Walker belongs to the 18th and 19th and 20th-century women’s life. And their characters are different from other characters, everyone has a history of black women domination. Black women are always called ‘suspended women’ by Walker because they were ill-treated every minute. They were poor in economically, politically, ideologically. First, they are economically backward people. They are working as labor like housekeeping, cleaner etc… In The Color Purple clearly explain the Economical Oppression. Sophia is the main character of the novel. She is forced to work for the Mayor. The Mayor’s wife asked to work as a maid, but she rejected to working as a maiden. Finally, the Mayor is torturing to working as a maiden. So, she deals with her life as maiden for ten years. After that only she overcome their oppression whatever she wants to do at that time.

Celie is the protagonist of the novel. She is an economically poor girl. In her childhood, she depends upon her stepfather. After the marriage, she depends on her husband. So they had a lot of depression oppression in their lives. It just an example character of this society. But Shug Avery is never ill-treated by the white people because she is rejected by the rules of the 19th century. And also she looked like white people.

The second one is called Political Oppression. Political Oppression points out the level of women in society. Celie is a young black girl. But she rejects to study in the school. She does not receive a school level education. This is the first and basic one for every men and woman. So the important factor of a school level education is rejected by society. At the same time, every young child is treated like an animal after the long years Nettie gives the education level of the reading and writing to her sister Celie.

Celie’s father plans to rape her but the society also accepted the child violence. They do not act violently against the children. Because it is not a common one. Every family in society, every young girl children have this problem. But they do not get any solution. And then the marriage also a depressed one because they marry a man, it is a male-dominated society. So, the husband and father are not different. Both of them are the same. Celie married violent men, she always calls him as a Mr.___. He is also a married man after the death of his wife he married Celie. So everyman wants to marry a lot of women in their lives. They do not have any restriction. Because they are ‘Men’.

The third one is called ideological oppression. It is an essential one and also called an image of black women in African society. They are like a doll. A key is a man. They do not act whatever they like. they are ideologically suppressed by their husbands, father brother, and their society. For example, in this novel, Sophia and Hope are married but Hope is a man so he treats her like a servant. He always says, it is women’s work. But she is a courageous person. So she rejected his ideas, but it clearly explains what society needs them. And then Celie also does not have to act whatever she likes. First, her father tortured her and then her husband also tortured her. She does not do anything against her husband and father. So she never thinks about her lives.

First, the Black people are oppressed by physically, finally, they are oppressed by mentally. They struggle against the oppression that American women have lived in their homes, at work, and in their communities. Contemporary black American feminists have identified the central issues in black feminism, as evidenced in more than a century of struggle in the United States of America. These include the presentation of an alternative social construct for the present and the future based on the life experiences of African-American women, a commitment to combat race and gender inequalities through differences in class, age, sexual orientation, and gender. ethnicity, recognition of the legacy of black women fighting, promoting the empowerment of black women through the voice, visibility, and self-definition, and the belief in the interdependence between thought and action. The black feminist movement grows in response to the black liberation movement and the feminist movement; because African women feel they are racially oppressed in the Women’s Movement and sexually oppressed in the Black Liberation Movement.

The aim of African feminism is to address the way in which ethnicity, gender, and class influence their lives and act to stop racist, sexist and class discrimination. African women have faced sexism in the black liberation movement, such as the civil rights movement, black nationalism, the black panthers, the non-violent student coordination committee and others. Black women were an invisible group and their existence and necessity were ignored. There was contempt for humanity and the equality of black women. Black women became prey to perpetuate patriarchy within the black community. Black women who participated in the feminist movement during the 1960s met racism. Even well-known black women were often treated as chips and, as their writings represented the experience of black, they were never criticized or ignored. The white feminists did not want to admit their racism. Black feminist writings have developed a theory that addresses the simultaneity of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism in their lives. For Black authors, identity is very important and they use the theme ‘I’ in most of their works. Black feminist membership included Black women of all class levels; Well-educated and middle-class women have worked together with women with little education in social care to address issues that affect them all.

Gender and race are essential ones in America because Africans are working as slaves. They are totally different from race, sex, and class. They are described as a ‘master statuses’ (Rosenblum and Travis, 1). These ‘statuses’ point out the individual’s life and one’s identity. Double discrimination is catalyzed through the dissimilar categories that have been existed in society. As Rosenblum and Travis say that individuals are not pigeonholed only one to socially constructed status, but can instead occupy multiple (1). An individual cannot separate their social status; If they combined, the gender and race create a specific type of label, inequity, and domination. Kimberle Crenshaw analyses double discrimination in terms of women of colour. She explains the gender, race, and another identity. They are treated as ‘intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different’. In other words, identity categories do have a profound impact on the individuals occupying them: ‘the concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas’.

African-American literature has some formal and routine characteristics. Their languages are rhythmic, dramatic, and evocative. Mostly, the African-American writers used to refer the color in their writings. It represents racism and also represents the images, vocabularies, and metaphors. This Thesis The Color Purple also classifies the importance of family and how the black people ill-treated their society. Walker describes the protagonist ‘Celie as a girl, but she ill-treated by her father. And then only she identifies her spiritual identity and takes over her journey. This incidents do not happen in Celie’s lives but also happens in every black women’s lives. Walker explains the impact of gender and race in African-American society. It is full of representing violence. This violence determines black women’s society. They can do anything but cannot do. Juliet Mitchell said that, “Patriarchy is a universal feature of human societies through which women are oppressed in their very psychologies of feminists (Jackson, 9.11)”.

Celie’s step-father Pa, as a patriarch, so, he oppressed his daughter. And he determines the man’s expectation of women in very clearly. He is a great example of this novel. He gives more importance into gender, race, and sex. She is raped by her father. Celie said, ‘He beat me for looking trampy but he does it to me anyways’. This line represents how she lost her identity. Simultaneously, Celie’s father offering her up to any man that comes asking for a wife. And then she pushed to marry an ugly person Mr.___. Mr.__ came and talk to her father about taking one of his daughters, he says, Mr.____ want another look at you.’

In that time every African-American woman treated as an object. Celie said, ‘Mr. _ marry me to take care of his children. I marry him care my deadly made me. I don’t love Mr._ and he doesn’t love me’. She is abused by her relations. She does not talk about anything in society. The society said, ‘A girl is nothing to herself, only her husband can she become something’

Particularly, women’s took care of their house and their children. It represents the oppression and sufferings of African women. Sofia says, ‘A girl child ain’t safe in a family of a man’. Sofia who acts as one of the strongest characters in the novel. She clearly knows how to fight with others and society. Because she has experience in her childhood days. But Celie does not fight anyone. She does not have any strength physically and mentally. She said, ‘But I don’t cry. I lay there thinking about Nettie, While he lay on top of me, wondering if she safe W.12)and then she explains: ‘I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do it stay alive'(17). The other important character of the novel Sofia. She is working as a maidservant in the mayor’s wife. She has five year old children but she does not allow to meet him. Once she meets her child she said, ‘I am slaving away cleaning that big post they got down at the bottom of the stair(Walker 102).’ Sofia son says, ‘Don’t say slaving, Moma'(103). She harshly exposes her oppression in the source of her gender and race.

The Color Purple speaks about the issue of gender and race. Walker gives more importance to these issues and particularly how the African-women oppressed by the white people in their society. The women do not express their rights in society. They are separated. This epistolary format directly express the African-American women’s oppression.

Alice Walker uses a recurring theme in the short story, ‘Everyday Use,’ to portray harmony amidst difficulties and conflicts within the African-American culture. She relies on the experiences of people in Mrs. Johnson’s household. The encounter happens when the educated member of the family, Dee, visits her mother, Mama and her younger sister Maggie in the company of her Muslim boyfriend Hakim. Walker utilizes characterization to show the difference between the perceptions of African-American culture and ultimately upholds them to show that history and culture are a component of everyday existence as the story’s name indicates. Alice Walker uses Dee to question individuals, including separatists and activists, who dismiss and disregard their heritage. Therefore, this paper will analyze the character of Dee in “Everyday Use”.

Dee is characterized by great looks, education, and aspirations as her mom receives funds from her local church to finance Dee’s education. Her education is important in bringing out her character; however, it has divided her from the individuals who are supposed to be her priority, her family. According to Mama, ‘She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice.'(Walker, 6). In addition, Dee has embraced various customs that conflict with her family’s heritage and traditions: she is on a mission to get connected to her African roots and she has even changed her name to Wangero. In trying to recover her ‘ancient’ roots, she has also rejected, or possibly refused to acknowledge, her firsthand heritage that is the heritage that Maggie and their mother share.

Among her family, Dee is the object of astonishment, disconcert, and envy, while individually she struggles to find personal significance and a more profound self-feeling. She’s affected Mama and Maggie and they both long for Dee’s approval. This is obvious in the fantasies of Mama about how she would be reunited in a television show with her eldest daughter. In any case, Dee seems not to highly value the support and approval of Maggie and Mama concerning her decisions. Unthreatened and full of confidence, Dee appears to be insensitive and arrogant, and Mama even perceives her praiseworthy characteristics as irritating and excessive. Mama sees Dee’s hunger for understanding essentially as an instigation, an audacious behavior by which she asserts superiority over her sibling and mother. Additionally, Dee is portrayed as condescending, professing how devoted she is to even visit Mama and Maggie in spite of what shelter they choose to occupy, “She wrote me once that no matter where we ‘choose’ to live, she will manage to come see us” (Walker, 7). Far from flagging a fresh and brand-new Dee or genuinely being an act of resistance, the new persona, Wangero, appears to be seeking attention for ploy with regards to the typical self-centeredness of Dee. Apparently, Dee says she is regaining her heritage, yet she has disregarded it.

With the characterization of Dee, Walker challenges people who dismiss and disregard their heritage including separatists and activists. Notably, these people like to connect with an idealized Africa rather than with the rough truths and classes that define the African American experience. Both Dee and Hakim are adjusted to the dynamic belief system, which clearly distinguishes itself from the labor-intensive, physical, and earthy Mama and Maggie’s way of life. Dee is captivated by their rustic authenticity, taking photos like they are subjects of a narrative or a documentary, and in so doing viably withdraws herself from her family. ‘She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me.”(Walker, 7). Instead of honoring and adopting her origins entirely, Dee despises her people and heritage, regarding herself to be above them. Dee imagines herself a journalist with a strong understanding of her life, yet this knowledge is sanitized as opposed to edified by education and her personal hypocrisy.

During dinner, the shift of attitude of Dee is revealed. Her boyfriend, Hakim refuses to consume pork and collards, calling them ‘unclean.’ Dee eats her food like a tourist who has just realized their favorite ethnic meal. She gets excited about butter churn, the benches, and different articles around the house. She finds them commendable and quaint showpieces for her loft. Dee then focuses on a few quilts that were assembled by her grandmother, Big Dee, and Mama. In the past, she had rejected the quilts but now needed them since they represented the historical significance of oppressed and persecuted individuals. Her education taught her the value of quilts however just as things of the past, stripped of their familial connection.

To sum up, any reader’s conclusion about Dee may, for the most part, be negative which is conceived out of her immaturity towards her family and heritage. Walker subtly weaves a subtext of Dee throughout the story, where she would have beat numerous obstacles to get to the point of her garish and loud arrival to her mother’s house.

“Mommy, there’s a world in your eye” (Walker, “When the Other Dancer Is the Self” 45). Seven words penetrated the hardened heart of a woman who knew nothing but cruelty concerning her battered eye. As a woman of color, physical deformity, and unique naturalistic ideals, Alice Walker rose to great heights as a black “Womanist” essayist, novelist and poet in the late 1900s. She lived during a time of a war and great racism and oppression. Her career took flight in the later years of the Black Arts Movement (the 1960s) with creating stories about black oppression, slavery, and societal opinions on the role of women. Walker’s works of the 1940s- Present & Postmodernism literary age reflect her heritage alongside the challenges of race and class. Although not enjoying an easy childhood, she continuously revisits experiences that drastically changed her life as sources of inspiration for her literature. Alive to this day, Alice Walker remembers her mother and how nature guided their lives. Segregation in Georgia, her birth state, “was a real blow [to me]. It was a real shock to see that people would actually spend their time making horrible laws and killing people and tearing down our school when, instead, they could be admiring what was all around them” (Seaman). Mother Nature and how humans treat her embodies the core of Walker’s values. She even returned to earlier communion with nature later in life as a gardener and farmer. Spiritual writing influenced the many controversial yet heartfelt stories that later came from her hand. Alice Walker’s works impacted America’s Civil Rights Movement and Feminist Movement, advocating a life of activism for African American women in the US.

Where there is greatness comes a variety of influences. Alice Malsenior Walker was “born in Eatonton on February 9, 1944, the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, who were sharecroppers” (Whitted). Much of her childhood molded her into the writer she aspired to be. The drive to tackle controversial topics made her a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. Walker’s parents were fortunate enough to value education and enroll her in school from an early age despite “the family living south under the Jim Crow Laws” (Alice Walker Biography). Seven Jim Crow Laws prevented the mixing of blacks and whites in public and places of business. The Jim Crow persona directly attacked black culture. Racial segregation in the United States forced blacks to “sit at the back of public buses, on the balcony in movie theaters, and in a separate section at restaurants, if they were allowed inside at al” (“Kindred Spirits”). The government at the time enforced laws to prevent interactions between the two races. Such “terrible” intermixing poisoned the minds of Americans and molded itself into racism nationwide. Unlike her outside difficulties, at 8 years old, “Walker was accidentally shot in the eye by a brother playing with his BB gun” (“Alice Walker”). Her family was too poor to take her to a doctor, so eventually, the wound worsened and she lost sight in her right eye. For several years, she displayed a disfiguring scar. Nevertheless unfortunate, this event actually inspired her writer’s voice, because of her withdrawal from society and sudden observations of human relationships.

She showcased a bright mind at her segregated schools, graduating from high school as class valedictorian which led her down the road to being “awarded a scholarship to Spelman College in 1961. She decided to continue her education at Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1963” (“Alice Walker”). The radically divided South made it especially difficult to break on -going societal views. Passion for justice fueled her determination. With a bright, unique philosophical mind driven by a spiritual progressive spirit, Walker stated “we’ve been laboring under a very poor system devised, basically, to keep us separated and easily managed as a workforce” (Seamen). Characters in her novels, essays, and short stories tell of injustice towards women and those of color. Her literary influences included Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, South African novelist Bessie Head, and many more.

One of her most famous works, a prose collection called In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker transcends gender and heritage while implying Walker’s viewpoints. According to Thadious M. Davis, “Walker writes best of social and personal drama in the lives of familiar people who struggle for survival…” (“Alice Walker”). Elements of the civil rights movement and basic humanity connect Walker to the readers. References to her life also create a bond between the words and the reader, alongside making the story more realistic. Due to her own challenges she faced when the civil rights movement failed to increase women’s equality awareness, some of the central characters in the collection “mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent—try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives” (Roselily). Walker actively participated in the civil rights movement as a social worker, teacher, and lecturer. A fresh mind shed light into the even more oppressed minority group: women of color. The 1960s’ Black Arts Movement stands as one of the most controversial times in American literature. Creators challenged taboo topics such as sexual awakenings, abuse, inequality, literary realism, etc. Walker even fought to end the practice of female genital mutilation and helped get Zora Neale Hurston, of the Harlem Renaissance, rediscovered. As a result of the Harlem Renaissance, African Americans across the US contained self-determination and pride for social reform and political activism, which later provided the foundation to the civil rights movement.

Moved by author Flannery O’Connor, Walker wrote and dedicated a story titled “Convergence”. O’Connor’s stories comforted Walker in the familiarity of a depiction of the South. Walker’s story answers the unfinished section of his “The Lame Shall Enter First”. She covers “the integration of public buses, but pre-full civil and human rights in the South” (Warren). His philosophy traces back to Plato, which when tied to Walker’s story, truth emerges. Wise words not only came from her mother, but also from other influential black authors. As a result, her writing embodies “an abundant cultural landscape of its own” (Whitted). She was a guiding spiritual presence in the eyes of many activists. A beacon of hope shined in the hard times.

Another one of her most famous works, The Color Purple, transcends gender and heritage while implying Walker’s viewpoints. Growing up with a leading mother figure, Walker Walker stressed feminism. The novel tackling gender stereotypes and deep racism gave her the opportunity to become the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Known for making readers all over the world cry, tears, for example, implies “a feminine thing to do. Walker’s epistolary novel functions to invoke a ‘good cry’ that is identical to the impact of the classics of the feminine ‘good-cry’ genre…” (Warhol). Moments such as when the adolescent Celie mourns her two babies taken away or when she separates from Nettie evokes such readerly tears with movements of intense grief. Celie’s words of “Dear God” shows how much isolation plagues her heart against the constant incestuous rapes by her father, supposedly. The progressive spiritual presence in her inspires an innovative way of a sentimental culture through plot, characters, and dialogue. Alice Walker encourages her readers to grow courage, spirit, and strength day by day.

Walker’s role as a leading feminist and civil rights activist in the late 1900s gave her a stepping stool to climb more and more fame. All of her novels aised awareness for stopping discrimination and sexism. People of all races, shapes, and sizes identify with the themes in her literature. The American “norm” of viewing backs and whites in the 1960s came to a complete change with the help of her pen. The Color Purple, one of her most famous novels, was adapted into a film and later opened on Broadway in 2005. Walker “coined the term ‘womanist’” (“Everyday Use”). Americans read and watch Alice Walker’s material to this day in the year 2020.

Alice Walker once said, “the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any”. The main character in The Colour Purple is made to believe by men that she has no power, so she feels as if she has none. She gives up her power because she believes she has none, but the women around her help her to reclaim that power. Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple implies that females empower each other when they are made small by others. To be made small is to be made to feel “humiliated or inferior”. The Colour Purple implies that when women are oppressed, other oppressed women will stand up for them. It also implies that when men degrade women, the women that surround them show them their worth. In addition to this, the novel displays how once fellow women empower women, they believe they have power themselves.

Representation. One word that sums up what feminism is all about. It is about how females are represented in novels. On the other hand, it discusses their misrepresentation and underrepresentation. Are their roles determined by the male characters in the novel? Do they have a voice, or do they only have a voice when it relates to male characters? The main focus of feminism is to give women the voice they are denied in society. Females should be represented equally to males in texts, and not only in relation to them. Females should be properly represented; the people who represent them best are individuals of the same gender. Female authorship helps represent women properly, rather than misrepresenting them. Power relationships are very essential to feminism and are greatly represented in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. Alice demonstrates how relationships can hurt women when the power is not equal and the relationships are male-dominated. In the novel, Celie, an oppressed woman, experiences various power relationships with men. The first is her father, who feels as though he has so much power that he can bring her down and make her feel like she is insignificant. It is instilled by the voices around her that she is nothing and will never be worth anything. This inequality continues into her second relationship with her husband. She is treated just as dreadfully as she was in her former male relationship. This all changes when another woman shows her the worth she has inside, sharing the power with her instead of stealing it from her. Once she regains her power it enables her to stand up for herself and remedy the injustices she has endured in the past.

The Colour Purple demonstrates how when women are oppressed, other oppressed women will stand up for them. Celie is the main character, a young woman whose mother has died. Due to the death of her mother, she is left with the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. Her father takes advantage of her and rapes her during and after her mother’s passing. In addition, Celie’s only remaining parent figure physically abuses her. He remarries after her mother’s death, and her younger sister, Nettie, gets involved with a man that has also lost his wife. There is a lot of controversy surrounding this because the man has children already and Nettie is young, but the man, Albert, who Celie calls Mr.____, was also involved with Shug Avery, a very eccentric woman. Shug is a singer who tours around and does not stay in one place for a long time, she is very much judged by others. When Celie looks further into this she gets hold of a picture of Shug Avery and falls in love with the idea of her. Their father will not let Nettie marry Albert, and offers up Celie instead. Her father says to him “[Celie is] ugly… [and he has] to get rid of her” (Walker 8). Celie is made to feel worthless by her father and is married off, along with a cow, without her consent so he can get rid of her. When she goes to her new husband’s house, he mistreats and abuses her just like all the other men in her life have. Her sister comes soon after to her new house. She has run away from home because of their new stepmother. Celie’s new husband is very fond of Nettie and is always complimenting her because he would rather be with her than Celie. Nettie “tell[s her], Your skin. Your hair, Your [teeth]. He tr[ies] to give her a compliment, she pass[es] it on to [Celie]. After a while [Celie starts] to [feel] pretty cute” (Walker 17). Every time Celie’s husband compliments Nettie, she passes on the compliment to Celie. Her sister knows she has been oppressed and made small by her husband and father, but there is an immense “strength of the relationship between women: their friendships, love, their shared oppression” (Smith 69). Nettie has also been oppressed by her and Celie’s father, she feels Celie’s pain. So, she makes her feel beautiful and loved by passing on the compliments she is getting. She empowers Celie by complimenting her and making her feel more confident after her father and husband belittle and diminish her. Overall, it is shown that women who are maltreated will bring up other women who experience the same conflicts.

Additionally, when men degrade women the women that surround them show them their worth. Celie is abused at Albert’s house and her sister is sent away because she won’t accept Celie’s husband’s advances and he does not like that. Shug Avery comes to town to perform and Albert leaves Celie all alone with his children for days on end while he sleeps with Shug. One of Albert’s children, Harpo, marries and has children with a strong independent woman, Sofia. Not too long after this, an ailing Shug Avery arrives at Celie’s house. At first, Shug doesn’t like Celie because she is with Shug’s love interest, but when Celie takes care of her she warms up to her. The couple tends to Shug until she is back in good health. Just after Shug is better, she performs at Harpo’s juke joint, which he built after his wife left him. She left because Harpo tried to beat her so that she would submit to him. Albert doesn’t want Celie to go watch Shug, but Shug makes him let Celie come to her show. After this encounter Albert says under his breath “my wife can’t do this. My wife can’t do that. No wife of mines” (Walker 72). Albert devalues Celie, saying she can’t do what she wants and that she has to listen to what he will let her do, not what she wants to do. He tells her she can’t make her own choices and she has to listen to him, degrading and discrediting her. Shug will not have it and makes Albert let Celie come see her because she has something special in store for her. During Shug’s performance, Celie perks up because she hears her name, ‘[Shug] say this song [she is about] to sing is [called] Miss Celie’s song… [this is the] first time somebody made something and name[d] it after[Celie]” (Walker 73). She wrote a song for Celie; this song makes Celie feel empowered. Shug “dedicates her new song to her, show[ing] her that she is important” (Averbach 61). After Albert makes Celie feel degraded and worthless, Shug dedicates a song to her which makes her feel important and shows Celie her own worth. She has been made small by her husband, so Shug dedicates her new song to her making her feel important and empowered. Ultimately, it is implied that men can degrade women, and when other women notice it, they may help out and raise these women up.

Furthermore, The Colour Purple implies that once women are empowered by other women, they believe they have power themselves. The woman who has shown Celie she is significant already, Shug, discovers a large number of letters from Celie’s sister Nettie, who Celie thought was dead since she promised she would write to her but she never received any letters from her. This was because Celie’s husband hid all the letters from her. Celie finds out that her sister is living in Africa as a missionary with a priest named Samuel and his wife, Corrine. These are the people who adopted the two children that Celie had from her father forcibly violating her. After finding all this out she stops believing in God, but Shug convinces her to believe again. Shug explains to Celie what she believes, that “God is inside you and inside everybody else… [she] believe[s] God is everything… and when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (Walker 195). Believing in God again makes Celie feel empowered because when Shug tells her God is in everything it seems like Celie believes God is in Shug and Nettie. These are the people who have empowered her and made her feel strong, so she feels even more empowered knowing that it could be God coming to help her through these women. She doesn’t believe God is a man anymore; she believes he is everything and nothing. She feels as if “[her]eyes [are now open]… [and Albert’s] evil sort of shrink[s]” (Walker 197). She can now see God in things around her, his goodness is shrinking the evil in her surroundings. After coming to this conclusion, she feels strongly about Shug and chooses to go and live with her. When she goes to tell her husband this he gets upset and starts to yell at her about what people will think. She will not have it and tells him off, vocalizing her new confidence and telling him “why any woman give[s] a s**t what people think is a mystery to me” (Walker 200). Now that Shug has empowered her she feels she has the power to finally speak up for herself. When she does this it shows that she believes she has power. She finally has the power to stand up for herself because “[she] is discovering something seen in the groups women formed around her” (Averbach 61). She sees power in the women around her, in Shug, Sophia, Nettie, and Harpo’s new wife, Mary Agnes. These women encourage her and let her know that she has power too. Celie no longer cares what others think of her and feels empowered enough because of the women around her, to stand up for herself when others try to put her down.

Overall, The Colour Purple demonstrates how when women are oppressed, other women that have been mistreated will stand up for them. The novel also implies that when women are degraded by men, the women surrounding them show them their worth. It is also inferred that once women are empowered by other women, they believe they have power themselves. Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple implies that females empower each other when they are made small by others. The unequal power relationships between men and women in the novel form Celie into a woman who listens to the voices around her and diminishes herself because of other’s opinions. After other women enter her life and show Celie her true worth, she becomes empowered by it and finally stands up for herself. Celie grows to have power.

Introduction

This chapter describes the methodology that was used in the research, the literary, and textual or discourse analysis. It includes the Language used in the novel, the Oppression in the novel, the Setting, the themes, Symbolism and Authorship in the novel of Walker. The chapter lays down how women of color particularly African American women are not given the same type of humanity or treatment on literature.

This chapter will focus on how women are represented in The Color Purple by Alice as addressed in accordance with feminist notions of African American women’s marginalization in Literature. To research how The Color Purple is situated in black feminism, it is applied the black feminist theory to the novel in order to see how they complement each other, particularly using Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, the author of Black Feminist Thought. This Chapter will focus on the female characters as portrayed in the novel: Celie the Protagonist, Nettie Celie’s sister, Shug Avery the singer, Sofia Celie’s friend, Squeak, Corrine, Olivia the daughter of Celie, Tashi an Olinka village girl, Miss Millie the racist, Eleanor Jane and Kate.

A Brief summary on the Author “Alice Walker

Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, an African American novelist and poet most famous for having written the epistolary novel ‘The Color Purple. She was born to sharecropper parents in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, and she grew up to become a highly acclaimed novelist, essayist and poet. Alice Walker’s career as a writer took flight with the publication of the novel, The Color Purple, in 1982. Set in the early 1900s, the novel explores the female African-American experience through the life and struggles of its narrator and protagonist Celie. The Color Purple is regarded as a feminist narrative by exposing the brutal treatment of the uneducated women in the South by men in an environment where the men are also victims of white racism and segregation.

Celie suffers terrible abuse from her father, and later from her husband. In 1985, Alice Walker’s story was made to be a movie. And just like the novel, the movie was a critical success and received 11 Academy Award nominations. She explored her own feelings about the film in her 1996 work named, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult. And later in 2005, The Color Purple became a Broadway musical.

Authorship by Alice Walker in relation to the Color purple

The fact that the author of the novel Alice Walker is female and African American influences the way black women are portrayed in her novel the Color Purple. To write the novel, Alice Walker was influenced by the period she grew up, where there was so much oppression and racism and domination of women by men. Alice Walker does not only represent the black women but all the African American people and the oppression from blacks to another black. She was only eight years old when she had a childhood accident that damaged her eye and that changed the way she interpreted the world and her own self. When she had the accident, her parents did not have a car at the moment, and a white motorist refused to pick up her and the parents to the hospital and she was treated home with folk medicine. That made Walker realise the differences and the segregations that surrounded her. When Walker was at college, after going through surgery to recover her eye, she was offended when asked to move to the back sits of the bus to Atlanta by being a black girl (White, 64-65). After that episode, Alice Walker gained the sense of continuing her education and take part in the civil rights movement and stop the segregation from whites to blacks.

Alice Walker in her novel attempts to bring hope and strength to the African Americans and give voice to the voiceless which are the poor and rural black women. As a female writer Alice Walker trough Celie’s voice tries to encourage the other women to develop abilities to stand up for themselves in acts of resistance. The author was also inspired from women like Rosa Parks, “A woman who was once arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a bus” to represent black women in her in her book. The representation of Celie in the Color Purple brings out Alice walker’s theme as a black women and encourages resistance of black women in to achieve freedom. The Color Purple fulfils African American Women’s need for a female hero and it demonstrates how true love can literally be capable to heal physical abuse and undo all the previous oppression and segregation, and she is one of the examples to change and she even got married to a white man the father of her children.

The Oppression

In the feminism, theory sexuality is regarded as the centre of oppression as stated in the Color Purple. “In feminist contexts, sexuality represents a central site of the oppression of women, the rape and the rape trial are its dominant narrative trope” (Hammonds, 134).

Patricia Hill Collins, a scholar on black feminism, identifies three approaches to conceptualize sexuality. She states that sexuality it can be at first examined as an independent system of oppression, similar to race, gender and class. The second approach stated by Collins analyses the way in which sexuality is manipulated within systems of oppression such as race, gender and class. And the third, the concept of sexuality can be approached as the junction or centre where intersecting oppressions meet (Collins, 128).

Celie in the novel represents the oppressed black women by man. Many women are violated, oppressed and assaulted by men and told to be quiet. The fact that Celie had no voice, she was obliged to keep quiet and never tell anyone else about the assault by the father. “You better not never tell nobody but God” “It would kill your mom” (The Color Purple-letter1) said the father after raping when she was only 14. This passage calls to the oppression faced by women in the color purple. The only one Celie trusted is God, the one she told her story through several letters.

The way which the letters are addressed to God by Celie instead of to a human being, underlines the issue that Celie is completely alone and confined by the conditions of her life as well as by the blame that she feels. This is intensified by the way that she believes that the man who has assaulted her is actually her own dad. From the starting point Celie shows up as an absolutely innocent victim, who feels that what has happened to her is on one point her own fault.

The manner in which she describes the assault makes the critic or the reader aware not just of her physical affliction or suffering and her mental shock, but of her weakness and vulnerability as woman. The fact that she is a woman and due to physical power she was not able to fight against the rapist.

‘You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can’t do it for you.

You got to fight them for yourself.

‘I don’t say anything. I think bout Nettie, dead.

She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don’t fight, I stay where I’m told. But I’m alive.’ From the color purple (P 22)

In the novel, males look at females as objects to be controlled and it implies how women can gain confidence and empowerment by turning to other women. This is another passage from the novel which calls to oppression. And it also shows how women stand together and support each other in difficult moments. In this passage, Celie’s friend “Shug Avery” advised Celie to fight against her husband who treated her like maid. Shug advices Celie to take an action and fight for self-independence and never subjects herself to husband, father or son.

Celie says: “Pa beat me today cause he say I winked at a boy in church. I may have got something in my eye but I didn’t wink. I don’t even look at men.

That’s the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I’m not scared of them.

Maybe cause my mama cuss me” (letter 5 to God “The Color purple”)

Women are represented as powerless and they are supposed to totally obey their men and the men take control over them.

“Harpo ast his daddy why he beat me. Mr… say, Cause she my wife. Plus, she stubborn. All women good fo…he don’t finish. He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do. Remind me of Pa.” (letter 13 The Color Purple)

Celie hated her husband Alphonso for forcing her to have sex whenever he wanted and without never asking her how she feels. Celie wished her life with the husband was a dream and she prayed that one day she could wake up and disappear from his eyes. The passage bellow from the text shows.

“Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep” (The Color purple p 81).

The hope and fight for freedom

Many people when experience struggles in life they tend to lose hope and give up on their dreams. Celie’s life begin to be active after she meets another woman, Shug who becomes her friend and tells her to stand up and fight for herself. Shug agrees to stay with Celie and their husband to keep him from hitting Celie. So though she has lost contact with her sister for a while, she forms this new relationship that serves as a kind of refuge from her home life for a while. Shug also helps Celie to find Nettie’s letters, so that she now knows that her sister is alive and trying to contact her. At first just like any other women who are abused, Celie feels that she is not confident enough to do that and she cannot risk her life too much. Still, there are very terrible moments that made Celie stand up and start fighting for her own self.

Celie’s letters writes three main types of letters: the first letters are written to God. The second letter are shared between her and Nettie the sister to exchange their experiences as young and black girls. The third letter are addressed to everything in nature were she states the hope she has to one day overcome the horrible situations she is going through. Celie finds her hope in God as illustrated in the passage below as Celie writes:

Dear God,

I am only fourteen years old.

I am I have always been a good girl.

Maybe you can give a sign letting me know what is happening to me (The Color Purple letter 1)

“Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (The Color Purple 292). That makes the reader understand her deepest relation with God, God is everything, the central element to all her answers and the one who she most trusts to tell her story and she has hope that one day she will find the answers in him.

The Language in The Color Purple

In The Color purple the author creates a certain expressive style for the main character, the one who tells the story and writes letters to God. Alice Walker’s use of special language in the Color Purple creates narrative strategies, it brings out the unheard stories of women, and transforms traditional concepts of gender roles. In the novel, the readers can easily learn about the difficult life of Celie through her words and the direct experiences she has faced. That expressive style calls attention into a type of English for blacks or simply African American English (AAE). Alice Walker employs Black English as a way of manifesting her concern on the black cultural heritage and her challenge to the superiority of white people’s language.

Celie does not follow the English grammatical rules when she writes her letters. According to MUFWENE, Salikoko etall (African-American English 1998 p29), African English refers to a nonstandard form of American English characteristically spoken by African Americans in the United States.

Within the text, there is the domination of the so-called literary dialects. According to Sternglass, (1975) literary dialect refers to a specific local or social variety chosen by an author as the language of his text for the purpose of reproducing certain forms of speech. Alice Walker in her novel The Color Purple intends to inform the style and violence characterizing the language of the males’ protagonists. The author uses this type of language to make the reader feel more engaged in the drama lived by the Protagonist Celie in her story and most of the used vocabulary belongs to the rural South which was considered the black area. At the beginning of the novel it is shown the trial and errors made by Celie in the spelling of her very expressive letters. The language used by Celie is raw direct speech of language related to the blacks and uneducated Americans and it calls the reader’s attention on the fact that Celie was still young and did not go to school.

According to Coulmas Florian, (Trends in linguistics 1986), direct language is referred to the written or spoken language that communicates meaning as clearly, concisely and candidly as possible. It is used to as one of the most dramatic ways to convey a certain characters’ points of view or idea. Celie uses direct language to express her feelings and give meaning to her dramatic life. She uses brave language with the intent to communicate what she is going through without impressing anyone. For example:

Just say you gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t.

First, he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around.

Then he grab hold my tities. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. (From The Color Purple p1)

The character also uses the so-called ordinary language. Ordinary language refers to the words and phrases that are used in our everyday lives and it does not follow the complex vocabulary to be easily understood. In some of her written letters, she uses also the so-called ordinary language. Some of the words in plural have irregular forms of ending for example men become mens in plural. “I may have got something in my eye but I didn’t wink. I don’t even look at mens.” (P1)

Themes

Within the Color Purple we can find some of the themes stated by Alice Walker to convey the meaning and significance of the novel.

The Power of Narrative and Voice

The author of the Color Purple, highlights within the novel the capacity to express one’s thoughts and emotions as crucial to developing a sense of self. By creating this theme, Alice Walker in her novel clearly desires to show the importance and significance of the power of narrative and speech to resist oppression.

At the beginning of the novel, Celie is completely unable to resist those who abuse her. Paying close attention to Alphonso’s warning that she “better not never tell nobody but God” about his abuse of her, Celie feels that the only way to persevere is to remain silent and invisible. Remembering Alphonso’s warning that she “better not never tell nobody however God” concerning his abuse of her, Celie feels that the only manner to carry on is to stay silent and invisible. Celie is actually associated with an object to Alphonso, as an passive party who has no strengths to advocate herself through action or words. By meeting Shug and Sofia, Celie finds on them friendly ears and she is thought lessons that enable her to find her voice and fight for her freedom. Celie starts to continue to expand her story by informing Shug and later on to Sophia. Celie gains voice when she discovers the letter from her sister Nettie which was hidden from her by her Husband. She finally expresses her anger to him and humbles him causing him to change his abusive life.

The Power of Strong Female Relationships

Alice Walker shows how female friendships and relationships can serve as inspiration and encourage another woman to open up, fight against abusive behaviors and overcome horrible situations. The novel sets out how relationships among women can form a refuge and provide reciprocal love in an environment surrounded by male violence. Just like a relationship from mother to daughter or from one sister to another, Celie found in female relationships the hope to believe in herself that she can be able to fight the oppression she was living.

The theme of Family

Celie finds in the love she feels about her sister Nettie the real significance of family. Even though the sister was separated from her for so long time, Celie maintained that strong affection and kept the love for her always in her heart. She later on discovers from Sophia and Albert that they can also be as part of her family and she refers to them as “my people”.

The theme of Religion and Spirituality

Celie writes a series of letters to God and she refers to him as “Dear God”. This shows the relationship between the novel and religion and spirituality and closely attending to a belief in a single God as a part of human happiness. That shows the transition of the old White men referred before as God to a God that exists everywhere and all around. Celie related God to the nature’s beauty and she believes He is more than white people say. Also Nettie has a strong relationship with church, she served as a missionary to the Olinka people and helped to spread Christianity. After the return of Nettie, Celie realized the manifestation of God’s power to her life.

The theme of Race and Racism

In the novel there is racism from whites to blacks and from blacks to another black. Celie believes she is ugly just because of her dark skin and she believes the whites are more beautiful and prettier than her. “Us both be hitting Nettie’s schoolbooks pretty hard, cause us know we got to be smart to git away. I know I’m not as pretty or as smart as Nettie, but she say I ain’t dumb” (From the Color Purple letter 8)

Celie is aware that the only manner to achieve freedom, get a job and be independent is by being educated and intelligent. Although Celie considers the sister to be prettier than her, Nettie gives her emotional support so that she can have belief in herself and gain her self-esteem. On the other hand, the people from Olinka in the novel, see the African American people as inferiors and poor to them because of being blacks.

Setting

The main setting regarded as primary in the Color Purple novel is among poor blacks in rural areas of the South in rural Georgia where Celie the main protagonist lives the majority of her life. As a poor black woman in the rural South, Celie is treated badly but people did not pay attention to what she was going through. Celie then had a moment of travel to Tennessee in Shug’s home where Celie had a brief sojourn. The other Setting of the story is Nettie’s place Western Africa. As the novel is epistolary the letters written from one character to another can contribute to many settings in the story.

Summary

This chapter comprised the textual analysis of the novel. It described the methodology that was used in the research, the literary, and textual or discourse analysis. It includes the Language used in the novel, the Oppression in the novel, the Setting, the themes, Authorship in the novel of Walker. The chapter layed down how women of color particularly African American women are not given the same type of humanity or treatment on literature.

Alice Work’s works contain a “Latent Eurocentricism” perpetuating the colonist vision of the African subcontinent as primitive. Examine with particular reference to the portrayal of the Olinka community in The Color Purple

The Color Purple is novel by the Afro-American author Alice walker. It is in epistolary form of narration where Celie, the protagonist writes letters to God reciting her sufferings as an Afro –American woman, living in the Southern part of the United States during the 1930s. The latter part of the novel contains a set of letters from Nettie who talks about the Olinka community and their life.

According to an article from Shodhganga: “Every American writer of African descent works within and against the dual tradition — oral and literary, African and European, male and female — that he or she inherits as part of his or her North American cultural legacy and in which, however marginally, he or she participates in the elusive quest for status, power, and identity.”(1) Alice Walker has tried to bring out the colonial impositions on the African community, through racist portrayal of the second class status of the African Americans. Although the American Civil War fortified the abolishment of Slavery, the Africans continued to be looked down upon by the Americans whose ideologies became to be known as the “White Supremacy”. This is evident through the character of Sofia who is sentences to twelve years in prison for attacking the mayor of the town, who is a white. However, Walkers portrayal of these racist inadequacies is limited to those Afro-Americans, while it takes a Eurocentric turn when it comes to the Olinka community.

The distinctive history of the Black Americans had an impact on their adaptation to a particular culture. They are, “Africa, slavery, the Middle Passage, the Southern plantation, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Post-Reconstruction, Northern migration, and urbanization, and most importantly racism.”(1) This led to the state of double consciousness in the minds where the “creative dynamics of African-American ethnic culture and Character” (1) . According to an Article from Shodhganga, “Du Bois defines the African-American experience of double consciousness as a complex socio-cultural and socio-psychological duality of Americans of African descent whose humanity and culture were institutionally devalued and marginalised by people of European descent.”(2)

Therefore, the African-American novels falls back on the oral and literary traditions of African-American culture which is a hybrid of the traditions, to which their ancestors belong to and to which they are exposed themselves. This form of literary discourse of the Afro- Americans is symbolically borrowed from the Western culture and adapted in such a way that it suits their “quest for status, power, and identity in a racist white, patriarchal North American social arena.” (Shodhganga, 2)

Alice Walker is one such novelist of the twentieth century, who uses novels as a medium to explore the inconsistency between colonial impositions and African- American reality. The Color Purple is a novel that examines the varied effects to colonial dominance on cultures. They include the mixing or separation of culture, the transformation from one culture to another or the creation of new identity of one’s own. These are portrayed through the various characters in the novels such as the people belonging to the South who are still discriminated and oppressed against those in the North who lead a normal life. The Blacks from America who go to Africa to realize their alienated nature to the African Culture is conflicted against the Olinkas whose peace among the community is jeopardised due to the colonial powers.

Alice Walker is a victim of double oppression, by being a victim of colonialism and also by being a woman. Therefore her explorations are in turn on the Black women and, through her novels, Walker takes an effort to get rid of the prejudice about the Afro American Women community. For Instance, Walker in her In Search of Our Mothers ’ Gardens looks into the autobiographies of Black women, referring them to be the crucial sources in the field of Black literature. Thus, “The African-American novel, in other words, is not a solipsistic, self-referential linguistic system, but a symbolic socio-cultural act.” (Shodhganga , 1)

Walker’s novels include those struggles of the Afro American women who silenced voices are evoked through, say, Celie’s speech with God in first person. Likewise, Walker instils new methods to highlight the racial reality of the black women, such as the new structure of language and narration in her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland ,the emphasize on the inner reality of her novel Meridian is emphasized through her unexplanatory form of narrative . “In her collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble, Walker creates an encoded language-structure introducing different signs of objects, metaphors, and images to emphasize the inner struggle of black women against their subjectivity and subjugation.” (4)

However, Walker’s focus on the Black women of Africa becomes a single dimensional affair which it comes to her take on those still living in her home country. Although, Walker apprises on the exaltation of the Black community, the latent Eurocentricism is evident through her vision of the African subcontinent as primitive. One of the eminent novels of Walker, which portrays this ideology is Possessing the Secret of Joy which shows a woman, torn between two culture, Olinka and the Western. Tashi, inorder to honor her Olinka roots wants to perform the female genital operation following which she undergoes a trauma, emphazizing on the main idea of Walker ,” Torture is not culture”. According to the article , Alice Walker’s Africa: Globalization and the Province of Fiction, “ For Walker, the practice of genital mutilation serves to contain women sexually and socially; above all, it is a violation of each woman’s right to the integrity of her body. Consequently, the practice should, in its various forms and cultural contexts, be held as a human rights violation, one that can be repudiated on the grounds of a universal ethical standard. In a climate where the world has, as they say, become a village, Walker’s position is bound to be controversial.”( Olakunle George, 355). In the novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, Walker speaks more about the “subjectivity and female agency than Walker appears to intend.” (George,359) According to George’s observation, although the novel represents a fictional Africa, it tends to question Walker’s understanding of the culture according to her inner logic. Therefore, it reflects the attitude of Walker who regards the cultural practice of the Olinka community as hard and misogynistic.

The major figure in the process of Tashi’s cure is the European father-figure Car. “On the strength of this aspect of the issue of the enlightened foreigner saving benighted Africans from themselves clearly rears its head. Carl and Pierre is the pre-eminent cerebral figures novel.” (George, 358). Tashi’s reference to Carl as Mzee, ‘teacher”, her recurring dream of being trapped in the tower is interpreted by Pierre as symbolic of the women’s state of being put in a cage by the patriarchal structures. Tashi gains her stability by realising the source of her suffering, through the help of Carl, Pierre, and her international circle of friends. It is through the help of Carl that Tashi realizes that the ‘boulder blocking [her] throat’ (Walker , 81) is her recollection of Dura’s death as a result of the female circumcision. “The novel relies on a legacy of the silent documentary, emblem of colonial anthropology, and simultaneously mounts an attack on male-centred representations of so-called African culture by colonial-educated Africans. If the urge to present a ‘positive’ image of African culture is accepted as a good thing, Walker forces us to ask just what a positive representation entails.” (George, 364) After undergoing the therapy, Tashi goes on to reject the naïve admiration for the nationalist was the leader of the decolonization movement in fictional Olinka. Therefore the novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, reflects a case of an open-minded , and educated Westerner saving poor black women from their husbands and fathers , who are primitive in their ways.

Walker’s approach to the native Africans is also evident through her novel The Color Purple for where the Tashi in Possessing the Secret of Joy actually originated. Her documentation of the Olinka Community through Nettie’s letter is a exotisiation of the community’s tradition and customs. From an article in Shodhganga, the views of Walker on Black suppression is very clear from her discussion with Claudia Tate, Walker comments thus:

“Twentieth-century black women writers all seem to be much more interested in the black community, in intimate relationships, with the white world as a backdrop, which is certainly the appropriate perspective, in my view.” (12)

The preservation of the black heritage is often looked through the lens of white domination. A frequent theme in most of Walker’s work is her “insistent probing of the relationship between struggle and change, a probing that encompasses the pain of Black people’s lives against which the writer protests.

Paradoxically such pain sometimes results in growth precisely because of the nature of the struggle.” (24) the “black people” here refers only to the Afro-Americans while the natives of African are exoticised.

Quilt-making represents the ancient black community and African tradition of folk art and the legacy of pictorial representations in African culture. According to the article, Extolling Blackness: The African Culture in The Color Purple, “Walker incorporated the image of quilts and quilt-making to associate with the symbolic meaning of sisterhood, family history and self-creation.” (Lei Sun,1) . The use of clothing as representations is central to the works of Black women. However, In The Color Purple, Celie exhibits her liberated and independent mind by wearing pants. This contradiction in the attitude of Walker , ironically points out at the inbuilt necessity to be like the whites inorder to be recognised.

Corrine and Samuel who are the missionaries of the American and African society, believe to have “born for, missionary work in Africa” (Walker, 116) This is in direct connection to the missionaries who had gone to Umofia in Things fall apart . The traditions and the customs of the Olinka community are jeopardised by their so called brothers and sisters who were sold to another country. What lies unnoticed is that, even though their body belongs to Africa, their thought already began to favour the Eurocentric ideologies. This becomes clearer in Nettie’s conversation with Olivia:

“You will grow up to be a strong Christian Woma, I tell her. Someone who helps her people to advance. You will be a teacher or a nurse. You will travel. You will know many people greater than the Chief” (Walker, 142)

The Olinka themselves had a differentiation towards the Afro-Americans which is evident from Tashi’s fathers conversation with Netties regarding her education and also their presumption that missionaries cannot be black. Walkers approach towards the natives of Africa is evident through the conversation between Nettie and Samuel :

“There’s something in all of us that wants a medal for what what we have done. That wants to be appreciated.And Africans certainly don’t deal in medals. They hardly seem to care whether missionaries exist.

Don’t be bitter, I said How can I not? He said The Africans never asked us to come, you know. There’s no use blaming them if we feel unwelcome. It’s worse than unwelcome, said Samuel. The Africans don’t even see us. They don’t even recognise us as the brothers and sisters they sold. Oh, Samuel, I said .Don’t.

But you know, he had started to cry. Oh Nettie, he said that’s the heart of it, don’t you see. We love them. We try every way we can to show that love. But they reject us. They never listen to how we’ve suffered….”( Walker, 214)

This tendency of “othering” the Olinka community itself reflects the Eurocentric ideologies in the Afro-Americans. The Olinkas are addressed as “the Africans” which is highly sarcastic where readers tend to question their authenticity. Walker has given an exotic essence for the tribe’s practices and traditions which is evident through the indirect way of narration. Nettie’s excitement to go back to America and her view about the African Society leads to the question of who the “Real Black” is:

“I will not find American society such a shock, except for the hatred of Black people, which is also very clear in all the news. But I worry about their very African independence of opinion and outspokenness, also extreme self-centeredness. …. When I think of them in America I see them as much younger as they appear here. Much more naïve…”(Walker, 234)

The esteemed regard for the Eurocentric powers is evident through the need for the Afro American couples to go back to America for an improved life and proper education for their Children. The African traditions especially the face scarring of the female is look disrespectfully by them notwithstanding its importance among the natives. Tashi is displaced from her native to a hybrid culture on the prospects to having a new and improved life.

Gerald Early criticised Walker with regard to the novel The Color Purple, where he suggested that Walker is guilty of a ‘fairly dim- witted pantheistic acknowledgment of the wonders of human potential that begins to sound quite suspiciously like a cross between the New Age movement and Dale Carnegie’ . He suggests that “the book lacks any real intellectual or theological rigor or coherence, and the fusing of social protest and utopia is really. In essence, the book attempts to be revisionist salvation history, and fails because of its inability to use or really understand history. Walker has made no claim as an historian; her self-identification as ‘medium’ suggests that The Color Purple is clearly meant to be outside of the historical realm.”(Hall, 96). In addition to this the release of Spielberg’s film have added to the eurocentricism in the novel because “Walker was accused of having ‘sold out’ to white patriarchy, thereby effecting the kind of cultural imperialism novel was attempting to resist (Terry, 59)

WORKS CITED

1. “Chapter I Introduction.” Shodhganga , https:// shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/chapter1/
2. Hall, James C. “Towards a Map of Mis(Sed) Reading: The Presence of Absence in the Color Purple.” African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Women Writers Issue (Spring, 1992), pp.89-97. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3042079
3. George, Olakunle . “Alice Walker’s Africa: Globalization and the Province of Fiction.”
4. Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 354-372.JSTOR,
5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3593524
6. Sun, Lei. “Extolling Blackness: The African Culture in The Color Purple” English Language and Literature Studies; Vol. 7, No. 1; 2017.ResearchGate, http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v7n1p13
7. Terry, Jill. “’The Same River Twice’: Signifying ‘The Color Purple.’” Critical Survey, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2000), pp. 59-76. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41557063

The protagonist of the novel is Meridian. Her dreams are about the releasing of her mother from the burden that motherhood has been.as a result brings out of the initiatory experiences that Meridian undergoes in an effort to find her identity and her own moral center where she tries to develop completeness of being. Meridian, The title character, is a college-educated woman who confronts in her life with aiding southern blacks in gaining political and social equality. For the process of the social changes, Meridian goes backward in time to move forward to seek the connection between her personal history and communal history.

Meridian is as a female protagonist, awakens from her dependent status as a black female, daughter, wife and mother to her own self and tries to become the maternal provider of the larger black community. Meridian is like an artist in the sense she wants to expand her mind with action. Meridian resorts to into a bloodless revolution with an idea of loving the enemy and a non-violent approach to confrontation. Meridian commits herself to the empowerment of women. Meridian after giving birth to Eddie Jr, she understands and learns what it is to be a woman and mother and more importantly to be a poor black woman. While do so, Meridian regards her mother as a ‘willing know nothing, a woman of ignorance’ (p.17), who blindly holds to tradition in its most sacrosanct form. Her mother has been critically victimized by the European gift of Christianity as a narcotic to the black slave, a comforting myth that dimmed the brutalities of oppression. She has relinquished all responsibilities for her own welfare to God and she wants Meridian to do so as well. Meridian refuses to submit herself to the Christian beliefs of her mother and she challenges her mother’s blind devotion to religion, also she challenges her blind and passive acceptance of the overlapping constraints of marriage and motherhood. Meridian sees sex as a “sanctuary” (p.57), and in this Meridian ‘look out at the male world with something approaching equanimity, even charity; even friendship’ (p.57). She, after experiencing motherhood in the initial stages of her life, decides to seek admission in a college to find out her own path and identity. This new way of continuing life for finding identity enables her to achieve, the highest point of power, prosperity, health, etc. Deborah E. McDowell in “The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian” says that as a result, she develops ‘a completeness of being’ (McDowell 262). Hers is a journey from the most ordinary position as a high school dropout to a self-illuminated person who has achieved her selfhood and she knows what is the purpose and mission of one’s own life. She wants to begin as an ordinary black female and to end as a self-assured person while is not an easy development. To understand herself, she has had to undergo innumerable trials and tests to find the answers of the questions in her mind. As a result, she is evolved ‘from a woman raped by racial and sexual oppression to a revolutionary figure affecting action and strategy to bring freedom to herself and other poor disenfranchised blacks in the south’ (Washington 148).

In fact Christian Barbara in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition says: ‘Meridian’s quest for wholeness and her involvement in the civil rights movement is initiated by her feelings of inadequacy in living up to the standards of black motherhood’ (Christian 47-48). Meridian wants to give some meaning to her life as an individual. She is awakened to her true self, the moment she knows about the Civil Rights Movement.The moment her marriage to Eddie has dissolved and Meridian has joined Civil Rights Movement. Meridian’s mother detests her radical political activities. To Meridian’s involvement in the civil rights movement, her mother responds: ‘As far as I’m concerned…you’ve wasted a year of your life fooling around with those people (Civil rights movements). The papers say they’re crazy. God separated the sheep from the goats and the black folks from the white’ (p. 83). Meridian commits herself to the civil rights struggle, earns a scholarship to Saxon college. In the early days of the movement, Meridian, as a volunteer in the Civil Rights Movement, confronts with the feeling of union and absolute commitment. She protests with the other volunteers against the town’s divided hospital facilities and she participates in the freedom march to the church. She joins the Civil Rights Movement finds her power to raise her voice against segregation. Deborah. E. McDowell in “The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists” says ‘Meridian challenges her mother’s unquestioning acceptance of her secondary citizenship’ (Mc Dowell 267). In turmoil, the police knock her down and she is trampled by people running back and forth. The sheriff grabs her by the hair and begins to punch her and kick her in the back. She does not even scream except in her own mind. She is untainted by contradictory claims: as she is being arrested and beaten and she realizes that ‘they were at a time and place in History that forced the trivial to fall away and they were absolutely together’ (p. 81). Along with Meridian, Truman and Lynne have also paid high prices for their roles and their activities in the movement and they have lost what people consider the focus of private life: children, parents, personal love. Meridian by her involvement in the movement, forgets the events in her personal past that once kept her from the larger historical context of her life. Walker In an interview with Claudia C. Tate discusses the structure and significance of Meridian and she speaks of her fears about ‘how much of the past, especially of our past, get forgotten’ (p.185). Meridian becomes a model of a resilient woman by her college education. She begins to explore the possibilities for her own growth through the beginning of her education which Wade Gaylein The Black Women in the Novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison observes:

‘Without the Movement and without the education, Meridian could have become like Mrs. Hill, a woman who knows suffocation is all deliberate, but who lives nonetheless a life of blind sacrifice’ (Ophr 58).

She understands the power of education which makes the woman confident, self-supporting, and understands that nothing can stop her from achieving her goal. The exercises in the College have a great influence on her life. Meridian always confronts with the question, “Is there a community which can support them?” The struggle of Meridian in her personal transformation and in finding her identity echoes June Jordan’s definition of her duties as a feminist:

I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect…and… I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most certainly transform the experience of all peoples of the earth, as no other movement can,…because the movement in to self-love, self-respect, and self-determination is…now galvanizing…the unarguable majority of human beings everywhere. ( Hernton 58)

Meridian, in her development, depends on her movement for going backward in order to move forward, and backward is the South. Deborah E. McDowell in “The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian” observes:

It is significant that much of the novel is set in coastal Georgia, where the `survival of Africanism particularly of the oral, religious, and musical traditions is said to be most salient. Echoing Jean Toomer, Walker sees the South, despite it’s the history of racism and oppression, as regenerative, for it is the South that is the cradle of the black man’s experience in the New World, and the South that has continued to shape his experience in this country. (p.272)

Meridian notices that the black girls who did leave home and come back are successful secretaries, schoolteachers, and all of them had one thing in common:

‘They all had altered their appearance so that they might look more like white women. They straightened and bleached their hair, wore make-up, and made other things, all under the guise of self-improvement (p.111).

Meridian too becomes aware of herself as an adventurer and she thinks that she belongs to the people who had led troops in battle like Harriet Tubman, Thus, Meridian starts to claim the black woman’s history and tries to reconnect herself with that positive and inspiring history of black women.

Meridian’s commitment to justice embraces her own people and her oppressors. By choosing the female community Meridian not only underscores her commitment to justice but also affirms the feminist credo in which she realizes that the personal is the political. Finally, she reveals a “ neo-feminist consciousness” that enables her to recognize that the ‘dignity and value of a person are to be found in the degree of inner growth achieved, in compassion, in the affirmation and acting out of humanistic values over and against the in Specifics of one’s condition’ (Koppelman Cornillon 186).

Meridian’s quest is for personal space where she can define herself as she chooses to. Meridian’s task would essentially be to borrow a term from feminist epistemology, one of “consciousness-raising”. Through the Meridian, Walker wants to bring out who seeks identity and the right to become an independent person. Throughout American history, Blacks were struggling to gain the Civil Rights: ‘The Civil Rights Movement in the South was considered one of America’s most important movements of political and social readjustment in the 20th century’ (Bulton 3). The movement was the due to the major efforts of the Blacks since Reconstruction. Walker in this novel tries to describe Meridian’s development through some points such as the possibility of vision, the emptiness of a premature marriage. McDowell in The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, the Civic Culture says that Meridian’s character is ‘a prototype for psychic wholeness and individual autonomy’ (McDowell 102). In the tradition of Bildungsroman, the book is a series of initiatory experiences that Meridian undergoes to find her identity and develops completeness of being. At the beginning of the novel, Meridian is in a state of decay. At the end of the novel, she flourishes and strengthened.

The novel depicts decay and growth through Meridian. For Meridian it becomes clear that political and economic and social empowerment is necessary for the development of women. Throughout the African Cultural tradition, Meridian moves towards her emancipation and progress and gains her identity through the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian completes her journey of knowing herself and she creates herself in her own image and not as a preconceived one because in spite of Meridian’s painful private experiences, she comes to know a new self. Meridian realizes that she must overcome the idea of “a woman’s place” and for fulfilling this mission, she must go away from two institutions that have traditionally sheltered women: the family and church. They have offered comfort but they have contributed to a restrictive belief in the proper role of women. Walker in her novel Meridian over-signifies black feminine identity to an extreme. Walker uses the novel as a contemplative and analytical tool in our own individual search, and Walker gives flesh to the novel because of the questions, and questions are rooted in this country’s past, and persist in the present.

Meridian completes her journey of knowing herself to the extent that she creates herself in her own image, and she succeeds in evolving a new self. She realizes that she must overcome the idea of “a woman’s place” and to fulfill this mission she must go away from the church and her family which have traditionally sheltered women. Meridian propelled on a search for spiritual and political health. She has sinned against biological motherhood. She becomes a mother who expands her mind in which she is directed towards the preservation of all life.

In the novel Meridian, the main character grows up through the eyes of the reader.Her emotional, physical and psychological stages of resistance were fully depicted. Meridian is bold enough to reject religion at a very early stage despite the fact that her mother is a devout Christian. In school Meridian is unable to finish a speech because she knows that there is no truth in the words she speaks (p. 121). Her defiance is also seen in how she becomes a non-conformist when she gives up family life and motherhood to attend college (p.91). Her decision to work as a volunteer for voter registration foreshadows further her individuality. Her determination to give the wild child a chance and, later after his tragic death, a proper funeral despite being denied by the authorities further shows Meridian’s prowess: Meridian leading “the students sang through tears that slipped like melting pellets of sleet down their grieved and angered checks: we shall overcome…’ (p. 37).She actively gets involved in the Civil Rights Movement but conceals it from the university. She encourages others to join the movement, and they go from door to door trying to convince others to have the courage to vote.

Despite the disappointing relationship with Truman Held, Meridian is strong enough to carry on having lost a child, lover and her friend Anne-Marion, Meridian moves into her next stage of life after overcoming a severe illness at the college. She becomes a mediator between her people and the mayor when Black people are not allowed to swim in the public swimming pool, and the mayor refuses to build them theirs. Meridian leads the Blacks in a peaceful demonstration to the mayor’s office bearing the corpse of a dead five-year-old boy who had been struck in the sewer for two days:

“It was Meridian who had led them to the mayor’s office, bearing in her arms the bloated figure of the five-year-old boy who had been struck in the sewer for two days before he was rake out with a graphing hook” (p. 93).

That is after several children were drowned in floods while swimming in ditches that serves as make-shift pools. The women sit with the mother of the lost child, recall their own lost children, stare at their cursing husbands who could not look back at them and shake their heads.

Throughout the novel, Meridian is depicted as having a positive sense of herself as a Black woman: strong, independent, and adventurous. She lives among the poorest Blacks in the rural South, becoming like them, leading them in non-violent protest marches to improve conditions in their communities:

While other students dreaded confrontation with police she welcomed it, and was capable of an inner gaiety, a sense of freedom, as she saw the clubs slashing down on her from above only once was she beaten into unconsciousness, and it was not the damage done to her body that she remembered.(p.230).

Walker celebrates her as a Black woman for these qualities. The Writer also makes an array of powerful black mothers to show her identification with Black motherhood. Walker traces Meridian’s foremothers back several generations. One was a slave who slowly starved to death to keep her children and to feed them; another a slave artist who buys her family’s freedom with her earning from the paintings decorating people’s bans. Walker brings alive the slaves’ past in the story of the slave woman Louvinie a storyteller. The slave artist and the storyteller represent Walker’s concern with the creativity of the African-American women.

Walker’s The Temple of My Familiarvenerates mothers, grandmothers and their own women. She asserts in her novel, The Temple of My Familiar Martikke observes this“ that only by looking towards their ancestors as role models as well as remembering their kinship to all creation, can they become whole” (Martikke 175).

The aim of Alice walker is to pass on their cultural traditions to future generations and reflect and reform their culture. Walker explains the new age quality in her writings and her ideas in the following manners:

What I’m doing is literarily trying to reconnect us to our ancestors, all of us. I m really to do that because I see that ancient past as the future, t6hat the connection that was original is a connection if we can affirm it in the present, it will make a different future. Because it is really fatal to see yourself as separate. You have to feed. I think, more or less equal and valid in order for the whole organism to fell healthy.(p.31).

Walker’s fiction is about the recovery of women, family, community, spirituality, stressing balance and aiming for collective and personal transformation. As a writer, activist and womanist, Walker has directed her energies to the exposure the richness in the Black community, particularly in relation to its women; moreover, she has emphasized the necessity of understanding one’s past so as to be able to pass it on to future generations. All her beliefs about memory and one’s relationship to the past seem to converge in The Temple of My Familiar. Memory is a means which allows every individual to turn towards his or her own past in order to reevaluate it. As Susanne Martikke states:

Templepostulates a comprehensive concept of memory that sets out to alter giving in to the desire of forgetting historical or personal catastrophes. In real life, as in the protagonists’ lives, the decision between wanting to forget and the duty to remember should always favour the latter in order to guarantee that all versions of historical experience can become parts of the discourse. (p.183).

Walker in Meridian shows how parenthood is ‘a holy messenger of seeing life,’ of regarding all life, of contradicting all that may smash it. It underscores that parenthood isn’t just natural state anyway a frame of mind towards life. Walker revolves around the wide racial experiences of African-Americans and as a ‘ boss of the Womanist world’ she is concerned of dark ladies who have been significantly removed by the white culture. As Karen Stein composes:

the novel calls attention to that the Civil Rights Movement frequently mirrored the abusiveness of man-centric private enterprise. Activists just turned the political talk to their own finishes while proceeding to subdue unconstrained uniqueness. To defeat this damaging tendency, Walker goes after another meaning of unrest. Her expectation for another general public in heres political change, just as close to home change. (Stein 66)

The hero of the novel is Meridian. Her dreams are about the discharging of her mom from the weight that parenthood has been.as a result brings out of the initiatory experiences which Meridian encounters with a push to find her personality and her own special good center where she endeavors to develop a zenith of being. Meridian, The title personality, is a school-taught lady who goes up against in her reality with supporting southern blacks in increasing political and social fairness. For the methodology of the social changes, Meridian moves in forward in order to push ahead to search for the association between her very own history and public history. Meridian is as a lady hero, stirs from her reliant status as a dark lady, little girl, spouse and mother to her very own self and tries to wind up the maternal supplier of the greater dark network. Meridian looks like a craftsman in the sense she needs to broaden her mind with activity. Meridian has included herself into bloodless upheaval with her idea of adoring foe and quiet approach to manage showdown. Meridian focuses on the reinforcing of ladies. Meridian ensuing to delivering Eddie Jr, she understands and acknowledges what it is to be a lady and mother and even more vitally to be a poor dark lady. While do all things considered, Meridian sees her mom as a ‘willing ignoramus, a lady of numbness’ (p.17), who indiscriminately holds to tradition in its most sacred shape. Her mom has been fundamentally defrauded by the European endowment of Christianity as a sedative to the dark slave, a comforting fantasy who darkened the brutalities of abuse. She has surrendered all commitments with respect to her very own welfare to God and she needs Meridian to do too.

Meridian decays to submit herself to the Christian feelings of her mom and she moves her mom’s outwardly weakened responsibility to religion, moreover, she challenges mother’s visually impaired commitment to religion and latent affirmation of the covering urges of marriage and parenthood. Meridian views sex as an ‘asylum’ (p.57), and in this Meridian ‘watch out at the male world with something moving toward serenity, even philanthropy; even kinship’ (p.57). She, in the wake of experiencing parenthood in the underlying periods of her life, searches for confirmation in a school to find her own one-of-a-kind way and character. This better methodology for continuing with the life for finding identity enables her to achieve, the most amazing motivation behind power, thriving, prosperity, etc. Deborah E. McDowell in ‘The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian’ says that subsequently, she builds up ‘a fulfillment of being’ (McDowell 262). Hers is an experience from the most convenient position as a secondary school dropout to a self-illuminated person who has achieved her selfhood and she perceives what is the reason and mission of one’s own life. She needs to begin as a customary dark lady and to finish as a sure person. To appreciate herself, she has expected to encounter innumerable preliminaries and tests to find the appropriate responses of her inquiries in her psyche. Along these lines, she is progressed ‘from a lady assaulted by racial and sexual mistreatment to a progressive figure affecting activity and system to convey opportunity to herself and other poor disappointed blacks in the south’ (Washington 148).

As a matter of fact Christian Barbara in Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition says: ‘Meridian’s mission for wholeness and her contribution in the social liberties development is started by her sentiments of insufficiency in satisfying the models of dark parenthood’ (Christian 47-48).

Meridian needs to give some hugeness to her life as a person. She is blended to her real self, the moment she ponders the Civil Rights Movement. The moment her marriage to Eddie has separated, and Meridian has joined Civil Rights Movement. Meridian’s mom disdains her radical political exercises. To Meridian’s incorporation in the social liberties development, her mom responds: ‘The extent that I’m concerned… you’ve squandered a time of your life wasting time with those individuals (Civil rights developments). The papers state they’re insane. God isolated the sheeps from the goats and the dark people from the white’ (p. 83). Meridian invests in social fight, procures an allow to Saxon school. In the start of development, Meridian, as a volunteer in the Civil Rights Movement, stands up to with the estimation of association and inside and out duty. She disagrees with exchange volunteers against the town’s separated healing facility offices and she appreciates the opportunity walk to the congregation. She joins the Civil Rights Movement and finds her ability to raise her voice against isolation. Deborah. E. McDowell in ‘The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists’ says ‘Meridian difficulties her mom’s unquestioning acknowledgment of her auxiliary citizenship’ (Mc Dowell 267). In disturbance, the police pound her down and she is trampled by individuals running forward and in reverse. The sheriff gets her by the hair and begins to punch her and kick her in the back. She doesn’t yell with the aside from as far as she could tell. She is untainted by contradicting cases: as she being caught and beaten and she comprehends that ‘they were at once and put in History that constrained the insignificant to fall away and they were totally together’ (p. 81). Alongside Meridian, Truman and Lynne have in like manner paid staggering expenses for their jobs and their exercises in the development and they have lost what people consider the point of convergence of private life: kids, guardians, individual love. Meridian, by her commitment in the development, disregards the events in her own past that once kept her from the greater authentic setting of her life. Walker In a meeting with Claudia C. Tate discusses the structure and criticalness of Meridian and she examines her sentiments of anxiety about ‘the amount of the past, particularly of our past, gets overlooked’ (p.185). Meridian transforms into a model of tough lady by her school training. She begins to investigate the potential results for her very own improvement through the start of her guidance which Wade Gaylein The Black Women in the Novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison watches: ‘Without the Movement and without the preparation, Meridian could have ended up resembling Mrs. Slant, a lady who acknowledges suffocation is all intentional, yet who lives regardless a genuine presence of outwardly hindered relinquish’ (Ophr 58).

She understands the power of training which makes the ladies sure, self-supporting, and appreciates that nothing can keep her from accomplishing her goal. The exercises in the College have incredible impact on her life. Meridian reliably runs up against with the inquiry. The skirmish of Meridian in her own change and in finding her character echoes June Jordan’s importance of her commitments as a ladies’ women’s activist:

I should attempt to adore myself and to regard myself just as my very life relies on self-esteem and dignity… and… I am entering my spirit into a battle that will unquestionably change the experience of all people groups of the earth, as no other development can,… in light of the fact that the development in to self-esteem, sense of pride, and self-assurance is… presently electrifying… the unarguable greater part of individuals all over the place. ( Hernton 58)

Meridian, in her enhancement, depends upon her improvement for moving in reverse in order to push ahead, and in reverse is the South. Deborah E. McDowell in ‘The Self in Bloom; Alice Walker’s Meridian’ watches:

It is huge that a significant part of the novel is set in beachfront Georgia, where the ‘survival of Africanism especially of the oral, religious, and melodic customs is said to be generally notable. Reverberating Jean Toomer, Walker sees the South, regardless of it’s history of prejudice and mistreatment, as regenerative, for the South is the support of the dark man’s involvement in the New World, and the South that has kept on molding his involvement in this nation. (p.272)

Meridian notice that the dark young ladies who left home and return are powerful secretaries, instructors, and all of them made them thing in like way: ‘They all had changed their appearance with the objective that they may look progressively like white ladies. They settled and colored their hair, wore make-up, and made diverse things, all under the presence of move upgrade’ (p.111). Meridian is additionally aware of herself as a globe-trotter and she feels that she has a place with the general individuals who have driven troops in battle like Harriet Tubman, Thus, Meridian, starts to ensure the dark lady’s history and endeavors to reconnect herself with that positive and animating history of dark ladies. Meridian’s obligation to equity gets a handle on her own one-of-a-kind people and her oppressors. By picking the female network Meridian underscores her obligation to value just as affirms the ladies’ dissident theory in which she comprehends that the individual is the political. Finally, she reveals a ‘ neo-women’s activist awareness’ that enables her to see that the ‘pride and estimation of an individual are to be found in the level of internal development accomplished, in sympathy, in the insistence and carrying on of humanistic qualities over and against the in Specifics of one’s condition’ (Koppelman Cornillon 186).

Meridian’s voyage is for individual space where she can identity herself as she chooses to. Meridian’s task would fundamentally be to acquire a term from women’s activist epistemology, one of ‘awareness raising ‘. Through the Meridian, Walker needs to bring out who searches for character and the benefit to finish up a free person. All through American history, Blacks were endeavoring to get the Civil Rights: ‘The Civil Rights Movement in the South was viewed as a standout amongst America’s most imperative developments of political and social correction in the twentieth century’ (Bulton 3). The development was the in view of the critical undertakings of the Blacks since Reconstruction. Walker in this novel undertakings to depict Meridian’s advancement through an a few, for example, the probability of vision, the void of an untimely marriage. McDowell in The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, the Civic Culture says that Meridian’s character is ‘a decay type for mystic wholeness and individual self-sufficiency’ (McDowell 102). In the tradition of Bildungsroman, the book is a movement of initiatory experiences that Meridian encounters to find her identity and develops a satisfaction of being. Toward the start of the novel, Meridian is in a state of rot. At the finish of the novel, she thrives and is strengthened.

The tale outlines rot and improvement through Meridian. For Meridian, it ends up being clear that the political and budgetary and social reinforcing is basic for the advancement of ladies. All through the African Cultural custom, Meridian moves towards her freedom and headway, and builds her identity through the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian completes her voyage of knowing herself and she makes herself in her very own picture and not as a one-sided one in light of the way that paying little mind to Meridian’s painful private experiences, she comes to know another self. Meridian comprehends that she ought to defeat the likelihood of ‘a lady’s place’ and for fulfilling this mission, she should leave from two foundations which have usually shielded ladies: the family and church. They have offered comfort anyway they have added to a prohibitive confidence in the most ideal activity of ladies. Walker in her novel Meridian over-implies dark lady like character to an outrageous. Walker uses the novel as an attentive and demonstrative instrument in our own one of a kind individual interest, and Walker offers tissue to the novel because of the request, and questions are established in this present country’s past, and hang on in the present. Meridian completes her adventure of knowing herself to the extent that she makes herself in her own one of a kind picture, and she prevails with regards to developing another self. She comprehends that she ought to vanquish the likelihood of ‘a lady’s place’ and to fulfill this mission she should leave from the congregation and her family which have commonly shielded ladies. Meridian actuated on an output for profoundly and political prosperity. She has trespassed against natural parenthood. She transforms into a mother who broadens her mind in which she is facilitated towards the protection of all life. In the novel Meridian, the principle character grows up through the eyes of the peruser. Her passionate, physical and mental phases of block have been totally depicted. Meridian is adequately solid to expel religion at a beginning time regardless of how her mom is a committed Christian. In school, Meridian can’t total a talk since ‘ she realizes that there is no fact in the words she expresses (p. 121).

Her obstruction is furthermore found by they way she turns into a non-conventionalist when she surrenders family life and parenthood to go to the school’ (p.91). Her decision to fill in as a volunteer for voter enlistment predicts further her distinction. Her affirmation to give the wild youngster a probability and, later after his grievous passing, a fitting commemoration benefit paying little respect to being denied by the experts further exhibits Meridian’s capacity: Meridian driving ‘the understudies sang through tears that slipped like liquefying pellets of slush down their lamented and enraged checks: we will overcome…’ (p. 37). She successfully gets related with the Civil Rights Movement, yet concealing it from the school. She asks others to join the development, and they go from way to entryway attempting to convince others to have the intensity to cast a ticket. Despite the disappointing relationship with Truman Held, Meridian is adequately ready to keep having lost a youngster, sweetheart and her companion Anne-Marion, Meridian moves into her next period of life in the wake of crushing a genuine sickness at the school. She transforms into a judge between her kin and the city hall leader when Black individuals are not allowed to swim in broad daylight swimming pool, and the civic chairman decreases to fabricate them theirs. Meridian leads the Blacks in a tranquil show to the city lobby pioneer’s office bearing the body of a dead five-year old child who had been struck in the sewer for two days:’It was Meridian who had driven them to the city hall leader’s office, bearing in her arms the enlarged figure of the five-year-old kid who had been struck in the sewer for two days before he was rake out with a charting snare’ (p. 93). That is after a couple of kids were choked in surges while swimming in trench that fills in as make move pools. The ladies sit with the mother of the lost kid, survey their own lost kids, look at their castigating spouse who couldn’t look back at them and shake their heads. All through the novel, Meridian is depicted as having a positive sentiment of herself as a Black lady: solid, free, and brave. She lives among the poorest Blacks in the nation South, getting to resemble them, driving them in quiet test strolls to improve conditions in their networks:

While different understudies feared encounter with police she invited it, and was equipped for an internal jollity, a feeling of opportunity, as she saw the clubs slicing down on her from above just used to be she beaten into obviousness, and it was not the harm done to her body that she remembered.(p.230).

Walker adulates her as a Black lady for these characteristics. The Writer moreover makes an assortment of earth-shattering dark moms to show her association with Black parenthood. Walker pursues Meridian’s foremothers back a couple of ages. One was a slave who progressively starved to death to keep her youngsters and to continue them; another a slave craftsman who gets her family’s opportunity with her procuring from the imaginative works of art brightening individuals’ bans. Walker brings alive the slaves’ past in the account of the slave lady Louvinie a storyteller. The slave craftsman and the storyteller address Walker’s stress with the creative energy of the African-American ladies.

Throughout Alice Walker’s novel ‘The Color Purple’, she successfully communicates the importance and power of strong female relationships in several forms, so much so that it quickly becomes the main foundation of the plot. She frequently reminds the reader of the arduous battle that women living in a patriarchal society have to fight daily to gain some form of personal identity, and the liberating improvements that come as a result of women uniting against the oppressive and phallocentric behaviour of men throughout the novel. The narrative of the novel highlights the struggles and brutalities of everyday life for a young African American woman in the early 20th century. The protagonist, Celie, has been subjected to constant abuse from a very young age by the men in her life, and this means that all of the loving relationships she has in the novel, both romantic and platonic, are with women.

The structure of ‘The Color Purple’ as an epistolary novel makes the tone very confessional, allowing Celie to express her feelings to the people she trusts through the privacy of a letter. The ambiguity of Celie’s sexuality, provoked by the seemingly romantic relationship between herself and Shug Avery, emphasises her toxic preconceptions of men and the level of hatred she feels for them. “I don’t even look at mens. That’s the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I’m not scared of them.” What Celie says here could refer to both her friendships and sexual relationships with women. Her whole life she has been so severely oppressed by men that even the qualities one searches for in a sexual partner can only be found in women. In Celie’s head, women don’t possess the same harshness as men, and the female friendships that develop throughout the novel affirm the idea that Celie finds comfort and optimism through these relationships. Celie’s questionable relationship with the sultry blues singer, Shug Avery, becomes the starting point in the evolution of Celie’s character into a more independent and assertive woman. The singer, who falls ill and is taken in by Mr. ____, is initially blunt and impolite towards Celie. It is only when Celie takes on the role of nursing Avery and aiding her recovery that the two women become close companions and, eventually, intimate lovers.

The development of this friendship is extremely significant in the protagonist’s journey to a life free from male oppression as Shug begins to teach Celie about her body and about other ways of living beyond the control of men. Even before the reader meets Shug, she is idealized by Celie as the woman she longs to be, self-reliant and unrestricted. In the sixth letter of the novel, Celie is shown a picture of Shug by her mother. “Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw.”. Later on in her life, Avery comes to town and Mr. ____ goes to see her perform. “ Lord, I wants to go so bad. Not to dance. Not to drink. Not to play card. Not even to hear Shug Avery sing. I just be thankful to lay eyes on her.” The longing and desperation that Celie expresses here in letter 14 is reflective of the lack of strong female characters in her life, and the yearning she feels for the company of another woman, as well as possibly foreshadowing the sexual relationship that forms between the two later in the novel. At various low points in Celie’s life, Shug is a figure of moral support. For instance, when Shug reveals to Celie that Mr. ____ has been hiding letters from her beloved sister, Nettie, whom up until this point was believed to be dead, she is overcome with emotion and has to contain herself for fear of killing her husband out of anger. On top of this, shortly before Celie, Shug and Harpo’s new woman, Squeak, leave to go to Tennessee, Celie finally releases her built up rage, cursing Mr. ____ for his many years of abuse. “I curse you, I say.” “I say, Until you do right by me, everything you touch will crumble.” These surprising bursts of outrage show a growing sense of bravery in Celie’s previously passive personality. While in Tennessee, Shug becomes the encouragement Celie needs to establish her own business of designing and sewing pants, thus providing her with her own source of income. Furthermore, when Celie discovers that Alphonso is not her biological father, she is deeply affected and begins to lose some of her faith in God, but Shug helps her to reimagine God in her own way, rather than the traditional image of the old, bearded, white man. Now much more independent financially, spiritually and emotionally, Celie finds herself able to fend for herself in situations she previously couldn’t.

All of these events demonstrate the impact Shug Avery has on the shaping of Celie’s character, and the importance of her presence in allowing Celie to resist oppression and dominance. There is a secure family bond between the characters of Celie and her sister Nettie. This loving bond is further strengthened by the horrific life experiences the two women have shared. Their childhood spent together was far from favorable, the pair being emotionally and sexually abused by their father. Despite this, Celie remains protective of her younger sister throughout. “I see him looking at my little sister. She scared. But I say I’ll take care of you. With God help.” This special relationship is extremely significant in regards to the uprising of females against their male oppressors, and in my opinion, it is made ever stronger by the separation of the two women from each other. “But God, I miss you, Celie. I think about the time you laid yourself down for me. I love you with all my heart.”. When they are reunited at the end of the novel, both characters have developed immensely, yet what remains the same is their immeasurable love for one another.

One of the female friendships which is perhaps more unusual, yet still contributes considerably to the progress of the protagonist’s character is that of Harpo’s wife, Sofia, and Celie. Near the beginning of the novel, it becomes apparent that Celie feels jealousy towards Sofia because she is a more strong and independent character. Eventually, this jealousy results in Celie advising Harpo to beat his wife, and consequently she is challenged to be a stronger individual when Sofia accuses her of being weak and submissive. From this point onwards, these negative feelings evolve into a valuable companionship that is characterized by female empowerment. Sofia can very much be seen as a role model for Celie throughout the novel due to her strong-willed nature and individualism. Her character is the epitome of independence and self-reliance, which is unusual considering the context of the story at a time where women, especially those of colour, were expected to depend on men for their survival. Feminist criticism comments on this idea. “The context in which the novel was written was the increasing importance of the feminist and Civil Rights movements, yet black western women found themselves marginalized in both narratives. (The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Women’s Press, 1982, Review by Harriet Elizabeth)” Sofia does not fall victim to this stereotyping, as she breaks conventions, refuses to be dominated by either her husband or her father-in-law, and demands that Harpo helps with such things as the housework. When Celie and Mr. ____ encourage him to beat his wife, his attempts typically result in more injury to himself than Sofia, due to her unusual physical strength. “Sofia look half her size. But she still a big strong girl.”.

The atypical features of Sofia’s character are largely influential in the evolution of Celie into a more self-sufficient female, demonstrating the idea that women don’t always have to be inferior to men, and that a reversal of roles is possible. It could be argued that Walker does not intend to portray female relationships as a means of resisting male oppression. Instead, one might say that women are friends with other women simply due to circumstances. The sufferings of life in a phallocentric society, resulting in male dominance and abuse, is something all of these women have in common, and therefore it becomes a source of comfort for them to confide in each other as there is nobody else who can relate to their situation. In other words, the women feel obliged to form these bonds with other women as a way of temporarily escaping the male oppression they face. This implies the idea that these relations don’t necessarily strengthen their character or significantly improve their quality of life, and that men have absolute control over even the friendships women experience, and females are not ultimately free to live the lives they desire. In conclusion, it is evident that the connections we see being made between female characters throughout Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’ are fundamental for the growth and development of women searching for a more liberated way of life. We are able to witness, particularly through the eyes of our protagonist, Celie, the vast impact one female figure can have on another. At the very end of the novel, when Celie is reunited with her sister, we can see the final outcome of her treacherous journey, from being a submissive, defenseless product of abuse to becoming a respectable, capable and uncontrolled female who no longer feels she has to endure the ruthless restraints of male oppression and dominance. “I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. Amen.”

Women throughout the ages have always been a part of literature. Unfortunately, they often portrayed themselves as a weaker, inferior, were unable to survive on their own, and were unable to do their work on their own. Women are beautiful and obedient, they couldn’t think on their own, according to the guy.According to the novel of Alice Walker, most ladies were inherently indifferent to love, having never been allowed to share their feelings. In addition, they don’t know how to celebrate the self value that was violated. In many ways, black women are suppressed; black community women are misrepresented even in their community. Black women who have been socially, physically and sexually oppressed and dominated try to free themselves from the dominance.Most black women are treated as slaves who want their womanhood to be redefined. The black women’s main parts were given as slaves to emancipate their adulthood. This paper is an attempt to subjugate and hide black women, suppress, enslave, discriminate against gender, and how they differ. It explores the study of subjugation, self-realization, awakening, and self-emancipation of black women. Alice Walker, an Afro-American writer, is meeting for the liberation of black women. She urges black women to recognize their connection with women who with their indomitable and independent spirit have historically built bridges for them. This paper’s main argument is to overcome black women’s sufferings.

INTRODUCTION

Feminism is a women’s equality theory that says women should have equal social, political, financial and property share. The rights of women accelerated the fight for women’s equality which began in the late 18th century. These set forward the idea that women should have the same rights as men. Feminist claims all women have been oppressed irrespective of their individual race, gender, religion, caste, and sexual inclination experiences. This claims that women’s basic dignity and self-confidence are not artifacts, but individuals.Feminism also states that a woman’s right to know herself as an autonomous and authentic individual, not as a man’s shadow. Feminism includes various movements such as the Movement for Civil Rights; social, political, artistic and sexual equality.This serves as a shield for women’s equality in civil, economic, sexuality and prevents women from patriarchy. The dark ladies ‘ brave voice and free picture gets smothered in a society that relied for its existence on her chivalry.The creation of convention fiction requires influence, and for the most part white yet some dark power has been consistently in the hands of men.Women saw an image of brutality and they saw it as the property of men’s joy. They even depicted as weaker and inferior sex; passive object that was unable to think on their own, and that they always depend on men for their needs.According to men’s assumption; women were unable to live on their own. Because of the social force, they always said they were weaker sex or second sex. They are wrongly represented. Feminism has argued that it is not necessary for the male hierarchy to be responsible for injustice.The female writers, through their fictional woman characters in their book, try to sort out the situation faced by women in society.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF WALKER’S NOVELS

Alice Walker novels portray African women fighting an oppressive society, a topic that Walker often discussed throughout her lifetime in public. She expressed concern about such issues as the education of women, the legal right of women in marriage.She is a contemporary writer capturing the very ideals that spring from today’s African women’s hearts and soul. She admired the black people’s sense of Hurston as complete, complex, undiminished beings, her pride in black people, and how she followed her path. A few women, however, dare to identify their beliefs and then act on them instead of capitulating to the threats of those in power. Everyday Use is an important story that highlights many of Walker’s ideas and concerns. It defines her ‘heritage’ definition as a specific part of black culture, particularly the quilting art.

It is a fundamental work in that it characterizes the focal idea of Womanism by walker, the possibility that women have to concede to each other and make their personality. It pays tribute to their creativity’s indomitable spirit of black women.Her images of her mother tending flowers in the shacks of the sharecropper in which she was forced to live and make art out of that effort, become symbolic of the black woman’s search for empowerment and control over her destiny.Africa is a developing country that tends to reign in women’s respective cultures, ideologies and conventional norms. Black feminism becomes popular during the period of the 1960s. It is a combination which indicates sexism, class oppression, gender identity, and racial discrimination. The term ‘ women ‘ is mostly attached to African American women. In Alice Walker’s essay, In Search of Mother Land, the word first appeared. Generally speaking, women and motherhood are used mainly by women from Afro-America. In her novel, Mariama Ba says so long a letter, ‘A black African, she should have been able to fit without difficulty into a black African society, with both Senegal and the Ivory Coast experiencing the same colonial power. Africa, however, is complex, divided. Walker says that this novel is not, in the strict sense, a sequel to either The Color Purple or The Temple of My Familiar; she used poetic licenses to deviate from earlier novels to tell Tashi’s story as she saw fit, selecting only what she needed to write about ‘ female genital mutilation ‘ as Walker insists. Through Grange’s Meridian and The Third Life, Copeland Walker describes the problems facing black women by taking the reader back to the Civil Rights Movement and the active involvement of the female community through the characters Meridian Hill, Margaret, Mem and Ruth. The protagonist achieves a psychological change that paved the way for her character to be seen. The Civil Rights movement for African American women is the ensuing problem. The reality of their discrimination — sexism racism and classism — was forgotten by it. With her tears rolling down on her cheeks, she does everything in utmost dedication and involvement. She devoted herself to black women’s upliftment. Here walkers try to say that work must be done from the grass root level to elevate the black community and the contradictions between traditional African American ideals mediated by slavery and the radical polemics raised by them. Meridian is instructed to consider the racist and misogynist status of the 1950s as a prior point. On sexist customs or her sexual oblivion, she is not urged to address. While examining the circumstances beforehand and in the midst of the common right, she conveys to the perusers numerous connections between bigotry and sexism and their ramifications for the individual and the individual. Walker puts forward the civil rights movement in these novels. Many of the early movement’s young activists became disillusioned and fell out of the public arena.Television played an essential role in focusing young people bravely facing the antagonists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with rioters destroying the entire section of American cities being replaced. With the support of her parents, Ruth, who develops by watching the civil rights movement on television, gains self-realization. The last words of Grange to Ruth: ‘ he has no chance, but she does ‘ have some influence in the book. The consummation of the novel spotlights on Ruth’s eventual fate as well as an old man who has changed his own life and showed that change is feasible for individuals. The writer, through the characters, gives the depth of generations. Ruth and Meridian are the result of the past, but Walker has decided not to define the future. She gains a self-realization and self-definition. In My Family’s House, mind the characters in The Purple Color. The study novel has a strong connection to the awardwinning novel The Color Purple by the writer. The reader can also remember their ancestors by reading this book, as does the protagonist in the novels.This says of the memory or the revision of their parents, wife, aunt, and women of their family.Recalling their history, they also recall their ancestor’s struggle, misery, injustice, defeat, achievement, emancipation, women’s enlistment, which made them continue in today’s society. Walker insists that African American women should know the life of their past ancestor, she also says that if black women fail or ignore and fear knowledge of their past lives, they won’t be fighting or overcoming their suppression. As a slave to the white-dominated society, they may be continuously. By reading her novels; Walker makes readers find their individuality. To the author, it is their (writer) primary duty to bring in their works the history of the past, so that black people can remember or recall how those people fought for their rights, discrimination against individuals and gender. The writer must focus on the past’s religious and cultural life that can change the present life. The experience of ancestors gives the present black people wisdom in establishing individual spirituality and wholeness.Walker’s fiction serves as a revival of African culture history, spiritual life and the position of women and their transformation and upliftment. He claims that Temple of my Family brings out the memory of the past and one’s historical relationship. . In addition, any other character in My Family Carlotta’s Temple still needs to remember her history. Walker tries to show the prominence of the bond between the relationship, interdependence, and self-realization. Arveyda helps Carlotta build a mother-to-daughter bond. MissLissie, tells her past stories, she can recall, and she’s bringing back memories. Through different bodies, she can sense her manifestation. She understands she can review the past life of Africa, she saw chimps as her cousins in the wilderness. Walker here tries to say that in the past human beings interact with animals while in the present there are gaps and disparities among humans. There is a disparity in race, sex, poverty, and even people in the human network have been gathered and isolated. This remembrance of the past can make an individual feel their self that, with its racial discrimination, gender inequality, sexual discrimination, and patriarchy system, can change the present society.

CONCLUSION

This paper is a critical attempt at black feminism and oppression of women. The author’s female characters had suffered from a patriarchal society in various ways.This paper winds up Alice Walker’s books, describing a woman’s poverty and falseheartedness in coping with male oppression and disloyalty. This deals with family and society infidelity.As an activist and poet, Alice Walker is trying through her writings to create awareness among the organization. Although she is an African-American woman, she knows all the black community’s sufferings. She seeks to remember the past so that people realize their mistake and create equality between them. The role of black middle-class women in the contemporary world is not equal. Not just a counter history to the dominated one, Walker argues, but a whole different kind of history. She tries to say that you don’t try to suppress or remove memory, but integrate it consciously and infuse it with creativity. It also talks of the woman’s social partnership and cultural well-being. The memory of Miss Lisse’s past lives gives advantageous if fake methods of epitomizing the historical backdrop of dark womanhood in a solitary character century. She knows that when she feels a sense of contentment she will revisit a few times. My Family Temple provides one more chance for Alice Walker to complete a momentary fusion of her being with the souls of others that gave a mystical bond of artistic intellect.