Feminine Narrative in The Color Purple

Such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, sentimental novels are developed on the readers’ ability to sympathize and grieve with the characters. Emphasizing on this matter, the author of “Narration Produces Gender: Femininity as Affect and Effect in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple” – Robyn R. Warhol analyzes the novel’s narrative techniques of producing a “good-cry”. The author proposes that the novel has effective handling of “internal focalization”, which allows the sufferer’s perceptions to stand out. She also intends to use the novel to exploring further on the culture’s feminine mythologies and the idea of sentimentalism. With the lack of exclusive examples, Warhol’s approach displays several weaknesses: the heavy emphasis of “good-cry” novel as having “feminine narrative” and the culture’s ideas of femininity, and the absence of discussions about characters’ developments and its contribution to the sentimental level of the novel. In order to improve Warhol’s concept of “feminine narrative”, the factors of characters’ developments, of foreshadowing and the weight of culture’s femininity on the novel’s sentimentality should be evaluated thoughtfully.

In her essay, Robyn R. Warhol first explains the ideals of sentimental culture that it contains “the affirmation of community, the persistence of hopefulness and of willingness, the belief that every one matters, [and] the sense that life has a purpose that can be traced to the links of affection between and among persons” (186). These cultural patterns takes part in creating the idea of femininity, that The Color Purple was established using narrative techniques. She claims that this idea “gets produced and reproduced” frequently; therefore, these patterns has been absorbed...

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...God, […] stars, […] trees, […] sky, […] peoples” (185, 186, Walker ). The worthiness of this ending lays at its anticipation to surprise the readers’ usual expectation of a brutal ending from a sentimental novel. The “good-cry” factors include Celie’s unite with her loves and the impression of promising future for all the characters. The address to readers as “Dear peoples” reattaches the emotional connection between the narrator and the novel’s audience. After the long journey, no one was left out in this celebration of happiness.

Work Cited

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2003. Print.

Warhol, Robyn R. “How Narration Produces Gender: Femininity as Affect and Effect in Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’.” Narrative 9.2 (May 2001): 182-187. JSTOR. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. .