Reversal of Stereotypes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple: God, Gender, Narrative and Sexuality

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Morshedul Arifin ◽  
◽  
Shah Ahmed ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Color Purple ◽  
American Authors

Unlike most African-American authors, who constantly mirror the repressive effects of racism, classicism and gender discrimination, Alice Walker (1944–) in her The Color Purple (1982) compulsively deals with sexism that was still pervasive within African American communities during the early twentieth century. She argues that just as black groups are relegated to an underclass due to the colour of their skin in a wider milieu of white society, in the same way the black women are reduced to a more inferior class due to their sex in their own community. For women’s self-emancipation from such an inhibitory patriarchy, the novel gives an overarching emphasis on the formation of language, execution of voice, review of sexual preference and redefinition of identity of her female characters, the protagonist Celie in particular. This paper examines how, by a fusion of the bildungsroman and epistolary conventions, the novelist melds a unique way for her women creating a God for their own and carving out a niche in social and economic concerns. It assesses the strategic reversal of gender stereotype as well as sexual orientation in order to establish the independence and equality of women on a par with men. The paper ends up with the claim that the novel is predicated upon the theoretical prism of womanism, previously premised by Walker herself, which puts extensive emphasis on a deeper, empathetic relationship and camaraderie of women.

scholarly journals A Discourse Stylistics Analysis on the Regularities in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mardliya Pratiwi Zamruddin ◽  
Burhanuddin Arafah
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
National Language ◽  
African American Vernacular English ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Color Purple

The purpose of this study was to describe the regularities of the American Postmodern Novelist: Alice Walker with a focus on a character’s and/or narrator’s mind style in a stylistic and narratological approach. This study aimed to attain the regularities from the American novelist’s literary work and how the regularities/irregularities occur in the novel to frame the style of the novelist in producing her literary work. This study was a descriptive qualitative by taken into account of stylistics categories and mind style which were applied to the Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The data of this study were taken from Alice Walker’s novel entitled The Color Purple. The result of the study showed the occurrences and the forms of regularities in the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker which represented the style of the novelist in creating her literary work. The bold character of African-American Vernacular English that were found in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple showed that the novelist poured their mind style in their literary works by showing their stylistic options in producing the novel. By showing their writing style the novelists were contributed to the development of national language in America.

scholarly journals CELIE: A PORTRAYAL OF AN AFRO-AMERICAN WOMAN'S REJECTION OF TRADITIONAL VALUES

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut ◽  
Nuki Dhamayanti
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
The World ◽  
Color Purple

The world of literature can be a medium of expressing the writer's expressions and ideas. Universal topics such as, love, death, and war often become subject mailers in the world of literature. In the novel, of The Color Purple. Alice Walker describes the oppression experienced by Afro American women in the female characters of Celie, Nellie, Shug Avery, Sofia, and Mary Agnes who faced sexual discrimina!ions in a patriarchal society. Womanhood, education, and lesbianism are factors that help the Afro American women to free themselves from traditional values. The Color Purple puts into words the process of its main character, Celie, who tries to reject and escape from the male domination of her world. The other Afro American women characters that help Celie to find her selfidentity represent the manifestation of the rejection of the traditional values. This article. which uses the socio-historical alld feminism approach. is intended to analyse the Afro-American women's rejection of traditional values by focusing on the major character of' Walker's The Color Purple. Celie. as she develops from being a victim of traditional values to the rejoiceful discovery of her selfidentity.

scholarly journals Rebellious and Strong Black Women in Paradise

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 122-132
Author(s):  
Zadmehr Torabi ◽  
Parvin Ghasemi
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
Strong Black Women ◽  
And Gender

The main aim of this paper is to apply black feminist tenets especially those of Bell Hooks and Alice Walker to demonstrate that unlike the passive black female characters of The Bluest Eye, and the resisting but finally victimized black women of Beloved, the wise and strong black women of Paradise who live in the Convent, are strong enough to recreate themselves as subjects, and to cultivate their own unique identity in a hegemonic environment which is replete with racial and gender discrimination. Black feminist actions and womanistic rituals help them accomplish this improvement. Consolata, and Mavis are two of such strong women of the Convent who not only succeed in healing themselves, but also in healing other black women as well. Black feminists claim in order to place black women at the center of stories about the American past, they must be depicted as subjects, that is, as creative change-agents, rather than as objects, or victims of hegemonic agency. In Paradise black women are depicted thus, have their own voices, and completely reject the patriarchal ideology.

scholarly journals Achiever of Higher Self: A Humanistic Study of Celie’s Character in the Novel, Color Purple

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Qurratulain Sardar ◽  
Rafique A. Memon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hierarchy Model ◽  
Humanistic Study ◽  
The One ◽  
Color Purple

A. Maslow in his book Motivation and Personality (1954) presents the five-stage hierarchy Model, emphasizes on the fulfilment of needs to achieving higher self. Based on textual analysis, the study demonstrates how the protagonist Celie, from the novel Color Purple written by Alice Walker, follows the gratification of needs in edict to connect the higher self. The evolution of character’s personality has been appraised thoroughly at each level, gives an equal attentive of new visions into her conduct and relationships with other characters. The Colloquial African-American dialect of the text is taken metaphorically, formulates the scarcity of needs created by external milieu. It is inimitably distinguished to identify the one of the major forces after her unusual, capricious and incoherent behaviors are usual social human drives.

The Color Purple and the Wine-Dark Kiss of Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Current Model ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Political Understanding ◽  
Color Purple

Alice Walker's 1982 novel The Color Purple was published six months after AIDS was first described in medical literature. This chapter reads The Color Purple as an AIDS narrative by looking into the surrounding details of its publication to uncover what may have been an accidental narrative for Walker as she wrote her masterpiece but that proves nonetheless as important for our current moment as the novel was, in the moment of its publication, for second-wave feminism. A close consideration of the details of the novel reveals a subnarrative with devastating relevance to the lives of black women living in the Southeastern United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. By considering the sexual economy, the emphasis on illness and sexual contact, the postcolonial interests (which is to say, considering Africa), and the time and place of its writing, it is argued that The Color Purple should be read as the first AIDS narrative in American literature. Such a reading is a profound revision of our current model of AIDS literature and bears implications for our current political understanding of HIV/AIDS, a disease long associated with forgotten and unwanted populations.

scholarly journals Domestic Violence and Psychological Oppression in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4S4) ◽  
pp. 66-67
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Color Purple

African-American literature is otherwise known as slave narratives. The popular African-American writers are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker etc. The Color Purple is a well-known epistolary novel written by Alice Walker in 1983. The novel brought her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983. This is a novel about a young fourteen year old black girl. She is tortured physically, emotionally, sexually by her step father and her husband. Later on she develops an intimate relationship with Shug. It has changed her life topsy-turvy. The poor, ugly, innocent, oppressed, inferior woman tremendously changed as a woman of self confident, beautiful and proud human being.

scholarly journals GOD IN ALICE WALKER�S THE COLOR PURPLE; A PARADOX OF THE DIVINE

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Nailil Muna Yusak
Keyword(s):  
Alice Walker ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Color Purple

Over time, as secularization took root in Black churches during the CivilRights era, the prevalent framework in understanding African Americanspirituality discourse has shifted from theology to sociology. This paper triesto discern this major shift from the black literature perspective. It aims todiscuss the main charachers� paradoxical state of mind in understandingGod in the novel The Color Purple. The 1982 Pulitzer Prize for fiction winneris organized around an intimate conversation between two femalecharacters, Celie and Shug Avery, whose understanding of God werechallanged by complexity of sexism and racism in the black family.Sociological approach is adopted to understand the characters� dynamicconcept of God. Discussion in this paper suggested that Alice Walker�snaturalist theology is embodied in Celie and Shug Avery�s conceptualizationof God in the novel.Keywords: Black Theology, The Color Purple, God in Black Literature.

scholarly journals Palimpasestic Images of Landscape, Gender, and Ethnicity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Hayat Ali Marwan
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Separate Layer ◽  
American Landscape ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender ◽  
The Way

This study explores Morrison’s A Mercy as a palimpsest, both in terms of its adoption of multiple narrators and in the way, landscape is layered with vestiges of history, myths, and most importantly, with traces of black women creativity. Reading landscape in Morrison’s novel as a multi-textured palimpsest entails an assessment of the interplay of ethnicity and gender in the novel. This study finds in Alice Walker’s employment of the symbolic connotations of the “garden” to depict the creativity of black women discussed in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Garden (1984) a theoretical framework for interpreting Florens’s creativity in reading the land and the development of her identity in relation to the natural realm. This study also explores the palimpsestic aspects in Morrison’s text both synchronically and diachronically. The diachronic aspect examines the way Morrison’s A Mercy delves into history towards earlier representations of the American landscape and shows how her text reads and overwrites others. As a model of intertextuality, the palimpsest enables Morrison to overwrite the writings of American Transcendental figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, who have gained precedence in writing and visualizing the American landscape. Conversely, the synchronic angle addresses the implications of Morrison’s adoption of multiple voices, which are laid over each other and either rival or endorse each other in the form of a palimpsest. Reading each experience as a separate layer reveals other minor embedded layers that surface through Morrison’s stylistic language and evocation of smells and colours.

scholarly journals In Search of Self : Analysis of the Character Celie in the Color Purple

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12S) ◽  
pp. 485-487
Keyword(s):  
Alice Walker ◽  
The Novel ◽  
True Self ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Color Purple ◽  
Real Self

This article focuses on the theme of alienation in the novel Color Purple by Alice Walker. The main protagonist of the novel is Celie. Celie has been alienated from her family, husband, step children, society and also from herself. It is understandable of the colored people’s situation in a white dominated society. Celie was not only ostracized in the society because of her race but because of her gender and physical appearances. The trauma that she had to undergone from her childhood causes her to change radically. Though she is alienated from everyone and did not receive love until she met with Shrug Avery, she never did lose her real self and at the end she finds her true self

scholarly journals Extolling Blackness: The African Culture in The Color Purple

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Lei Sun
Keyword(s):  
Alice Walker ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Color Purple

Alice Walker, advocates African cultures in her epistolary novel The Color Purple. Underscoring the fact that quilt-making has an ancient history in the black community and presents the African tradition of folk art and the rich legacy of visual images in African culture, Walker employs the image of quilts and quilt-making to associate with the symbolic meaning of sisterhood, family history and self-creation. Also, she depicts Shug as the most popular character as a blues singer in the novel, to indicate that she acknowledges her mode of thinking that blues as one secular African tradition can deliver its spiritual power to African Americans.

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