Alice Walker's In Love and Trouble

Alice Walker's In Love and Trouble

Stories from In Love and Trouble, like other Alice Walker’s works, are

the portrayal of black women. I would interpret the term “black women”

as women who have gone through all sorts of hardship and struggles,

but not all women in the world or only those with black skin. I

strongly argue that Walker’s characters are better represented as

women who suffer the way African American women do, than as women with

black skin. I will justify my argument by referring to specific

examples from two short stories in the book, namely Roselily and

Everyday Use.

The characters in In Love and Trouble are not represented by all women

because not all women carry as many burdens as the characters in the

book. One group of women excluded is the white. As Clenora points out

African-American women suffer from “a tripartite form of oppression-

racism, classism, and sexism” (192). All black women in the book have

to bear the triple burden. Living in a white-dominant society, they

are oppressed by the white. Their race also leads to their poverty.

Being in a male-dominant society, they are abused by their husbands

who are themselves abused by the white. “These women [are] simply

defeated in one way or another by the external circumstances of their

lives” (Washington 89-90).

In Roselily, Roselily is also a victim of the triple burden. Although

there is no direct description of how she is oppressed by the white,

it is implied: “She can imagine God, a small black boy [my emphasis],

timidly pulling the preacher’s coattail” (4). In Roseliliy’s

imagination, God has black skin, which is a sharp contrast to the

traditional white God image in the Western world. The black God image

shows her ques...

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...tudies.” Phylon 49.1 (Spring-Summer 1992):

33-41.

Christian, Barbara T. Introduction. Everyday Use. By Walker Alice. New

Jersey: Rutgers U, 1994. 3-17.

Clenora, Hudson Weems. “The Tripartite Plight of African-American

Women as Reflected in the Novels of Hurston and Walker.” Journal of

Black Studies 20.2 (December 1989): 192-207.

Hui, Fung-mei, Sandra. “Race and Gender in the Works of Maxine Hong

Kingston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.” Diss. U of Hong Kong, 2004.

Walker Alice. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Florida:

Harcourt, 1995.

Washington, Mary Helen. “An Essay on Alice Walker.” Everyday Use. Ed.

Christian, Barbara T. New Jersey: Rutgers U, 1994. 85-103.

Weston, Ruth D. “Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in

Alice Walker.” Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. Dieke, Ikenna.

London: Greenwood, 1999. 153-61.