Resisting Oppression in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple | Original Article

ABSTRACT:

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Taking place mostly in Georgia, the story focuses on the life of African-American women in the Southern United states in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The Color purple unfolds the panorama of black female reality of the neo-slavery period that takes shape in the smithy of black male brutality towards black females, recialpatriarchal oppression and misogynist assumptions. The novel focuses on the process of the self-discovery of an unlettered black southern woman. It traces the gradual growth of her radicalization and empowerment through female bonding, education and self-employment. The black feminist analysis reveals how black female radicalism, embracing of womanhood, exploration of black heritage and resultant self-determination bring to fruition Celie’s quest for identity and history. Celie succeeds in her quest for identity and history by developing an understanding of her roots and heritage and acquiring the awareness that she has a right to happiness, passion, creativity and emotional fulfillment. To exercise her rights as an individual, Celie learns to resist the advances of black men who hinder her self-fulfillment. Alice Walker has been vehemently criticized within the African-American community for her portrayal of black men as abusers and rapists. In The Color Purple, Walker establishes a “feminist culture” by focusing attention on the under privileged and inconspicuous southern black women, who suffers not only at the hands of the white society but also due also black male oppression. The adverse criticism of the theme of black male brutality in the color purple seeks legitimacy from the belief that the patriarchal practice of sexist politics symbolizes black opposition to racial oppression. Thus the black male aggression against black woman is camouflaged as reaction to social victimization Bell Hooks regards this perspective on black male brutality as an expression of the pedagogy of patriarchy and rhetoric of Black Nationalism which collaborate in oppressing the black woman. Albert, Celie’s malevolent husband, embodies the black male chauvinism and the patriarchal assumptions and tendencies, analyzed by Bell Hooks. In the absence of another benevolent black male character, he seems to represent the majority of black American manhood. Alice Walker has refuted the allegation that she has presented Albert in order to tarnish the image of black men in general and create a schism between black men and women. Besides establishing the interlink ages of race and gender in The Color Purple Alice Walker reinforces her position as a “womanish” writer. Despite being labelled a womanish text, The Color Purple does not fall into a specific genre category. It represents the “blurring of genre conventions”. Alice Walker reinterprets the genres and uses them in a post-modernist sense, diverse from the traditional practice. It strikes us as an epistolary novel, a Bildungsromane and a historical novel all in one.