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Compare racial and cultural struggles in Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple as well as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
In African-American texts, blacks are seen as struggling with the
patriarchal worlds they live in order to achieve a sense of Self and
Identity. The texts I have chosen illustrate the hazards of Western
religion, Rape, Patriarchal Dominance and Colonial notions of white
supremacy; an intend to show how the protagonists of Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple as well as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, cope with
or crumble due to these issues in their struggle to find their
identities. The search for self-identity and self-knowledge is not an
easy task, even more so when you are a black woman and considered a
mule and a piece of property. Providing an in depth analysis of these
texts, this essay attempts to illustrate how both of these
Afro-American writers depict and resolve their respective
protagonists’ struggles.
Religion is believed by many to serve as a means to achieving or
finding self or identity. However, in the Euro-influenced Christian
religion especially, directly after ‘finding one’s self’, one is
called to deny one’s self in the name of a white ‘God’. ‘Humble
yourself and cast your burdens to God’ they say, for ‘He will make all
wrongs right’. Logically however, one must ask…what interest does the
white God (who is especially portrayed in Afro-American writings such
as The Color Purple and The Bluest Eye as a further extension of
Patriarchal values) have in black people? Moreso, if the Christian
bible is so heavily influenced by white man, what interest does the
God it portrays have in black women?
In The Color Purple, Celie’s original intended audience is a white,
male God w...
... middle of paper ...
... the voiceless, to overcome the patriarchal
oppression and gradually find her ‘Self’.
Bibliography
Cutter, Martha. Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker's Revisioning of Rape
Archetypes in The Color Purple - Critical Essay. MELUS, Fall – Winter,
2000.
Davis, Thadious M. Walker’s Celebration of Self in Southern
Generations.
Hooks, Bell, ‘Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple’, in
Bloom, H., ed. Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker, New York, 1989.
Katz, Tamar. “Show Me How to Do Like You.” Didacticism and Epistolary
Form in The Color Purple. 1988.
Morrison, Toni The Bluest Eye, London: Picador, 1990.
Peach, Linden Toni Morrison London: MacMillan, 1995.
Shakhovtseva, Elena. «The Heart of Darkness» in a Multicolored World:
The Color Purple by Alice Walker as a womanist text.
Walker, Alice The Color Purple London: The Women’s Press, 1986.
Womanist biblical hermeneutics centers Black women’s experience and identity, social location, historical memory, a hermeneutics of suspicion, and a hermeneutics of affirmation. In addition, womanist biblical hermeneutics are radical and subversive forms of biblical interpretation that provide multi-dimensional systemic analysis and critique, acknowledge and affirm a multiplicity of voices and identities. Womanist biblical hermeneutics provide a means for Black women to critique unjust forms of oppression, discourse, and practices, especially in relation to the use of scripture in order to facilitate social transformation. This bibliographic essay will map the various conceptual frameworks and methods of religious scholars engaging in womanist’s
Summary: how it feels to be colored me In ‘How it feels to be colored me’ Neale Hurston opens up to her pride and identity as an African-American. Hurston uses a wide variety of imagery, diction using figurative language freely with metaphors. Her tone is bordering controversial using local lingo. Hurston begins the essay in her birth town: Eatonville, Florida; an exclusively Negro town where whites were a rarity, only occasionally passing by as a tourist.
?The Third Life of Grange Copeland?, the debut novel of Alice Walker, was published during a pivotal time in literature. Along with Walker, women writers such as Toni Morrison, Germaine Greer, and Kate Millet, were offering their unfiltered views on femininity to a literary world that had long held narrow-minded standards in regard to women discussing subjects such as gender, race, and sexuality; Alice Walker?s aforementioned 1970 novel touched on all of these topics. Walker, like writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, wrote of the struggles African Americans experienced as the endured
Du Bois opening of his first chapter with 'Of our spiritual striving ' 'in his literature The Soul Of Black Folks illustrate the soul of a black young boy who saw his life in two different world, the world of a black and white person; the life of been a black and a problem in the hill of New England where he grew up and faced racial discrimination. He was a sociologist,writer and educator; he was a controversial leader of the negro thought. Alice Walker wrote about how creative and artistic our mothers and grandmother were in the 1920s in her essay 'In Search Of Our Mother 's Garden ' Alice Walker grew up in the 1960s in south Georgia where her mother worked as a maid to help support the family 's eight children. She grew up seeing the
A common human behavior due to illusory superiority is to overestimate skill, capability or perception of oneself in comparison to others or underestimate it. Alice Walker, a black woman herself, a partaker of feminist and anti-racist activism has created a scenario that nearly every person from any cultural background can identify with. Miss Millie in the Color Purple has, in fact, internalized racism and refuses to acknowledge it, maintaining that she is “less racist” than the “other white people”. While viewing herself as superior among blacks and whites, Miss Millie remains in denial about her subtle racism and is unaware of the fact that her comments are insults rather than the compliments she assumes them to be. This disconnect fuels Sofia’s response, “Hell no”, as an offended person of color. With the use of imagery, language, and the character’s unconscious and conscious motives, Walker accurately depicts a scene bursting with themes of racism, sexism, and cultural stereotypes.
In the preface to ‘the Colour Purple’ Walker identifies her religious development as the inspiration for her novel and labels religion and spirituality as the principle themes in the book. There are a number of principle characters who complete this journey however in many instances the religious element of the novel is overshadowed by other prominent themes such as personal development, female relationships and racial issues. These must be taken into consideration when assessing Walker’s success in delivering her theological message to her readers.
Thesis Statement: Alice Walker, a twentieth and twenty- first century novelist is known for her politically and emotionally charged works, which exposes the black culture through various narrative techniques.
Wade-Gayler, Gloria. Black, Southern, Womanist: The Genius of Alice Walker // Southern Women Writers. The New Generation. Ed. By Tonette Bond Inge. The University of Alabama Press, Touscaloosa & London, 1990
My reaction to this article was quiet agreeing. I agreed with many things stated in this article, the article explained the story exactly right. For example when it states the relationship between Shug and Celie because Shug was always there for Celie. The article did a really good job explaining the novel and gave a really good report. (The New York Times).
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “ Toni Morrison.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.508-510.
Briefly introducing the background of this book, the time period of this book is in the early 20 century after abolition of slavery. But even slavery was abolished, the issue of slavery had remained in this era. This paper describes the evidence of slavery in The Color Purple after abolishing legacy of slavery.
Walker brought most of the horrific and even sickening scenes of the book to life, with the help and influence of society in history. One of the greatest influences to have an effect on Walker's style of writing and especially The Color Purple, were instances from slavery and prejudice. The whites owned and empowered America during the time of slavery. They had no respect for any other race, which they thought of as substandard. As Lean'tin Bracks stated, blacks were considered to be racially inferior, and they were used for the exploitation of the white culture. The whites used the black people as animals, and made them do their every bidding. Blacks and whites were separated form each other and this segregation of the two races barred blacks from legal and economic access, and they were put to punishment by the white culture. Interaction between the two races rarely occurred other than specific affairs or whites intruding on blacks. There were no penalties to pay by whites, therefore intrusions were common, and they took advantage of the African-Americans. The intrusions varied from breaking and entering to rape and murder for no apparent reason (84). Walker used this basis of racism to grip the reader and take them through a story of a women, who survives physical, verbal, and emotional abuse, everyday.
Both males and females have influences that help decide the ways in which they think, dress, speak, and act within the situation of society. Cultural and personal gender roles are a big influence on the way people live. Learning plays a role in this process of shaping gender roles. Peers, parents, movies, teachers, television, books, and movies could all teach and reinforce gender roles throughout the lifespan.
Patriarchal silencing can be enforced in three different ways; physical abuse, emotional abuse, and social demands and/or expectations. Although both books have opposite cultural and racial factors that influence the way in which the women in the books are treated, we can still see that these three ways of silencing women are present. In Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”, the form of patriarchal silencing that is most prominent is the viole...
Alice Walker, "The Color Purple." ENGL 3060 Modern and Contemporary Literature, a book of 2003. Web. The Web. The Web.